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 Lar Joye The Irish War of Independence was the first time that guerrilla fighters attacked trucks and cars, which were becoming more common on Irish roads. After an initial campaign against RIC barracks in 1920, more and more IRA attacks occurred on roads. In this they were greatly helped by the Irish munitions strike … 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
By William Ward In considering its historical effects, the original nature of a text is at times immaterial. That the Navigatio sancti Brendani abbatis, the early medieval tale of St Brendan’s voyage, ‘is not an AAA triptik to the New World’, as the Connecticut schoolteacher and scholar John D. Anderson put it in 1988, has … Read more
An analysis of the 1833 tithe records of Derrygrath, Co. Tipperary. By John Keating The tithe records for the civil parish of Derrygrath, South Tipperary, account for 3,713 of the 3,777-acre map area (cottages on under one acre are not recorded). The records were compiled in 1833 and include details on the size and cropping … Read more