By Dave Alvey In the course of delivering a lecture on Roger Casement in February 2026 in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), I discovered that the story of the Congolese empire of Belgium’s King Leopold II from the 1880s to 1908 is not well understood or known about in that country. This gave … Read more
By Nicky Rossiter In a small town in the south-east corner of this small island in 1951 a seed was sown. That musical seed took root and grew and blossomed into an arts event of international fame and importance. This year in that same town the Wexford Festival Opera will celebrate its 75th year. Today, … Read more
By Billy Shortall The Dublin Civic Weeks (DCWs) of 1927 and 1929 were public events managed by Dublin Corporation aimed at boosting civic engagement across the city, involving business, tourism and the local population. Goals included ‘educating the public, [to] instil [national] pride in citizens and stage a public history that celebrated a community heritage’. … Read more
By Robin Fuller Are Irish people descended from the inhabitants of the sunken continent of Atlantis? It seems unlikely, and yet for many poets and artists in Ireland at the turn of the twentieth century this was a legitimate area of inquiry. In the final decades of the nineteenth century, a cohort of Anglo-Irish writers … Read more
By Simon Briercliffe In 1936 the Irish Independent reported that a new memorial had been erected in Glasnevin Cemetery to James Francis Egan, a ‘Fenian who played a prominent part in the Anglo-Irish War’. Egan was misremembered even then: he had died in 1909, a decade before the War of Independence. He had been a … Read more