By John Dorney Brendan O’Regan is an under-recognised figure in twentieth-century Irish economic history. He helped to pioneer the strategy of attracting foreign industry, which remains the most important element in the Republic’s economic strategy today. At Shannon he founded a ‘free industrial zone’ beside the airport where companies could be free for a specified … Read more
By Brenda Moore-McCann Years after his death in Genoa, Italy, in 1847, the heart of Daniel O’Connell (b. 1775), the internationally renowned politician of Catholic Emancipation, lawyer and former lord mayor of Dublin, went missing in Rome. The heart of ‘the Liberator’ has not been seen since. It is a story that brings us from … Read more
Genocide is a concept that has been applied from time to time to Irish history, most notably to the Great Hunger (An Gorta Mór) of the 1840s. In general, academic historians have shied away from such a discourse, arguing that it is anachronistic. The word wasn’t coined until 1944 by Raphael Lemkin in relation to … Read more