This summer Gorey, County Wexford, will host the first Byrne-PerrySummer School from Friday 30 June to Sunday 2 July. The school, namedafter the United Irishmen Myles Byrne and Anthony Perry, will focus itsattention on the dynamic events of the 1790s which culminated in therebellion of 1798. The school will be addressed by an impressive team … Read more
Trinity College Library, Dublin, yesterday acquired the first book printed in Irish. This book, Abidil gaoidheilge & caiticiosma (ABC &catechism), printed in 1571, is only the sixth item known to have beenprinted in Ireland and was purchased for £48,000. Only four copies ofthe book are recorded and that purchased by TCD was the only one … Read more
A new edition of the Dictionary of National Biography is in preparationat the University of Oxford with general support from the BritishAcademy and Oxford University Press. All entries in the old DNB will berevised or rewritten and 12,000 new articles will be added. It is aparticular priority to improve the coverage of groups who wererelatively … Read more
In the early summer of 1795 Russell, Neilson, Simms, McCracken and one or two more of us, on thesummit of McArt’s Fort, took a solemn obligation—never to desist in ourefforts until we had subverted the authority of England over ourcountry. Tone, Autobiography. The Society of United Irishmen Commemoration Committee is organising aguided walk to McArt’s … Read more
The letters of Irish emigrants in Australia (featured in the ‘sources’section of HI Winter 1994), steeped in local idiom and nuance, deserveto be heard as well as seen. A ninety-minute cassette, based on aseries of radio programmes produced by Cathal Póirtéir, has beenreleased in conjunction with David Fitzpatrick’s Oceans of Consolation:Personal Accounts of Irish Migration … Read more