At the second Burren Law School in Ballyvaughan, County Clare (31March-2 April 1995), on the theme Crime and punishment, Muireann NíBhrolcháin gave background information on the judicial system in theBrehon law period from the eighth to the twelfth centuries where theoffences common today also existed. She claimed the system was morevictim-orientated as monetary compensation was … 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 the journal … 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 sinister … Read more
David Officer 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 through which the transmission of a historical consciousness is effected. It is inadaquate to describe such complex processes as … 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 wars. … Read more