In a short poem composed near the end of his life, W.B. Yeats wrote: ‘Out of Ireland we have come. /Great hatred, little room, /Maimed us from the start’. Over sixty years later, Yeats’s despair (or statement of fact), has maintained its relevance for understanding Ireland, and will continue to do so for years to … Read more
Over the past three decades historians have documented fully the rise and successful mobilisation of Irish national consciousness during the nineteenth century and the subsequent establishment of the Irish Free State in 1922. What is not so well known is that by an evolving, if often haphazard, process of reform in county and municipal administration … Read more
‘Power’, as Mao Zse-tung observed, ‘comes from the barrel of a gun’. His aphorism is true in the most literal sense of early modern Europe where the introduction of gunpowder and artillery precipitated a military revolution, which so overthrew traditional medieval security arrangements as to beget an entirely new military system, whose organisational needs triggered … Read more
We live in an age of media gurus, spin doctors and soundbites, when advertising agencies have been invested with almost divine powers to sell policies, transform images and win elections. The now familiar relationship between the mass media and politics first made an impact in the United Kingdom and elsewhere in Europe in the closing … Read more
A tower house is a fortified medieval residence of stone, usually four or more stories in height. Like most of the surviving monuments of our medieval past, the majority of Irish tower houses are in poor condition, with collapsed walls and ivy shrouded exteriors reflecting centuries of neglect. Yet these ruins, the remnants of a … Read more