By Matin Modarressi To commemorate the semi-centenary of Northern Ireland, the UK government launched a four-month festival in Belfast’s Botanic Gardens known as ‘Ulster ’71’ and issued a set of postage stamps featuring colourful landscape paintings of Northern Ireland. The government was seeking to convey a message of pride and progress against a backdrop of … Read more
A brief history of the Irish Naval Service. By Daire Brunicardi The naval provisions were an important part of the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921. The British Admiralty was forceful in its recommendation to government to prohibit the Irish Free State from having a navy. This was modified in the finally agreed Treaty under Article 6, … Read more
Doctus in se semper divitas habet. (School motto: ‘The learned man always has riches within himself’.) By Michael Quinn Charles Desmond Greaves, the historian, poet, scientist, philosophical thinker and political activist who dedicated the greater part of his life to Irish affairs, was born in 1913 in Birkenhead on the Wirral Peninsula, across the … Read more
By Chris Colvin and Eoin McLaughlin The year 2020 witnessed the first major global pandemic in over a century. Policy-makers and analysts around the world scrambled to find meaningful historical analogies to comprehend the scale of devastation unleashed by Covid-19. Spurred by the freshness of a wide array of centenary studies published in both popular … Read more
By Cian Manning On 14 February 1875 the wealthy couple Francis and Mary Shortis, of 31 The Mall, Waterford, became the parents of Francis Valentine Cuthbert Shortis, known as Valentine to distinguish him from his father. The elder Shortis was a native of Clonmel and had become a prominent figure in Waterford city as a … Read more