By Penny McGovern For this winter issue we present a couple of cheery Christmas crackers from the IFI Archive Player. See festive crowds gathering in 1960s Dublin city centre and South Wall to cheer as brave swimmers take a chilly dip and Santa water-skis up the Liffey. DUBLIN CHRISTMAS LIGHTS Gael Linn / 1962 / … Read more
By Gabriela Lojewska and Philip McEvansoneya The exhibition of Polish art that took place in Dublin in 1937 was a doubly significant event. First, it was an episode in the wider campaign of the new Polish state, the Second Republic, founded in 1918, to mark its arrival on the international stage as an independent nation … Read more
By Gerry Finnegan Membership of the League of Nations was the first major foreign policy objective of the new Irish Free State, achieved 100 years ago on 10 September 1923. With it came membership of the International Labour Organisation (ILO). An important yet unheralded figure in this achievement was Waterford-born Edward Joseph Phelan (1888–1967), head … Read more
By Daniel Mulhall When the Swedish Academy announced its 1923 Nobel Prize for Literature, it opted for a writer who had produced what it described as ‘always inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation’. The poet’s name was William Butler Yeats and his nation had … Read more
By Charles Lysaght The Kildare Street Club was well described by nationalist leader John Dillon as ‘the sacred ark of the covenant of Toryism; of the most benighted Toryism in Ireland’. Its members were drawn from the landed aristocracy and gentry, as well as from judges and leading figures in the pre-independence administration. Although the … Read more