History teaching in Northern Ireland recent second-level school texts Peter Collins As we saw in the last issue of History Ireland (Winter 1994) Irish history has constituted a major area in the curriculum in the South since the formation of the state. In the North the situation has been more problematic, with schools divided essentially … Read more
Janet K. TeBrake Among the many resources available for historical study and research on nineteenth-century Ireland are the numerous personal narratives by women, the most common form of writing women have traditionally produced. One of the earliest and best known of the genre is the diary of Mary Leadbetter. Another noteworthy example is … Read more
Gabriel Doherty It is a dry, frosty January night in Dublin. Suddenly the silence of a suburban street is shattered by the sound of automatic gunfire: it appears that an IRA man has been shot dead while attempting to assassinate a police detective as he returns home from work. However, the situation turns more … Read more
David Officer A ration party of the Royal Irish Rifles resting in a communications trench at the Somme, 1 July 1916. Historians of Ireland regularly harp on about the often blunt and crude forms in which the past is mobilised by contemporary interests. However, historians themselves pay scant attention to the forms, methods and media … Read more
John S. Powell It was a sure sign that the Huguenot plantation of Portarlington in County Laois was dead when a historian turned it into an article (Sir Erasmus Borrowes in the Ulster Journal of Archaeology in 1855). Previously the town had seemed a curiosity of the Irish midlands, a hangover from seventeenth-century religious … Read more