The fresco of St Patrick’s Purgatory and ‘St Patrick’s Well’ in Umbria By Brenda Moore-McCann “It is probably the first, the largest and the most complex artistic representation of Purgatory and the St Patrick legend in existence.” In 1998, while on an art history research trip to Italy, I came across a spectacular sixteenth-century well … Read more
The search for truth and the revision of Irish history By Patrick Maume In the July/August 2020 issue of History Ireland Dr Fergal Mac Bloscaidh, whose research on Tyrone politics in the early twentieth century is well respected, offers thoughts on revisionist history. This might have been a welcome intervention, because the debate on ‘revisionism’ … Read more
Sir,—Ten years ago History Ireland was in the unusual position of breaking a news story (my ‘Church and State bear responsibility for the Bethany Home’, HI 18.5, Sept./Oct. 2010). It revealed 219 deaths, from 1922 to 1949, of Bethany Home children. They were buried in unmarked graves in Dublin’s Mount Jerome Cemetery. Bethany Home functioned … Read more
Sir,—Cormac Moore, in the opening sentence of his ‘The Government of Ireland Act 1920’ (HI 28.6, Nov./Dec. 2020), supposes that it was this act that ‘led to the partition of Ireland’. But the Government of Ireland (Amendment) Act of 1914, to which he also refers, contained a similar sort of provision, albeit temporary and, because … Read more
Sir,—As the Decade of Commemorations continues, the largely forgotten stories of Irishmen who served in the British Army, and their British comrades stationed in the town, have a place in our history. Readers who have family connections with, or are aware of any interesting or unique stories about, the British Army in Nenagh, Co. Tipperary, … Read more