By Jacqui Hayes St Joseph’s Hospital was founded as Limerick District Lunatic Asylum in 1827 with accommodation for 150 patients, a number almost immediately exceeded. The minute books in the archives document that from the earliest days overcrowding was a constant problem. In 1874 the inspectors of lunatic asylums reported that ‘from the statistics before … Read more
By Siobhán Doyle According to legend, the Aonach Tailteann (Tailteann Games) was first staged in County Meath several centuries BC as a large gathering to celebrate the life of Queen Tailté, the foster-mother of Ireland’s mythical high king, Lugh of the Long Arm. There were religious, legal and matchmaking aspects to the festival, which reputedly … Read more
By Hiram Morgan It is not surprising that East–West relations are now convulsed by the war waged against Ukraine, as that country’s name means frontier or borderland. It is a different type of natural border from what we are used to in the West, not a channel, river, mountain range, marshland or forested terrain but … Read more
How doubts about his identity led to an Irishman’s internment in France and his deportation to one of the Nazis’ most notorious concentration camps. By Isadore Ryan On 28 July 1941, the Irish legation to Vichy France received a two-page handwritten letter from an internment camp at Le Vernet, 55km south of Toulouse. The letter … Read more
By Peter Crooks, Zoë Reid and Ciarán Wallace In this, the third of three articles counting down to the centenary of the Four Courts fire in June 2022, the authors examine the aftermath of the blaze and the work of Beyond 2022 as an all-island and international partnership to reconstruct what was lost 100 years … Read more