I am very pleased to have been invited to mark here in the Reform Club the 150th anniversary of the death of Daniel O’Connell. It is an institution, after all, that was not only founded at the time of O’Connell’s greatest prominence by men who were colleagues in his endeavours, but which in its name … Read more
De Valera’s Ireland has been held up to criticism and even ridicule, depicted as an unrealistic over-romanticised vision of comely maidens and dancing at the cross roads. Yet de Valera was an astute politician with a specific political, cultural and national agenda. If his head appeared in the clouds, his feet were firmly on the … Read more
When Peadar O’Donnell was asked on one occasion why he did not bequeath his papers to posterity for historical research, he replied, half in jest, that he had no desire to start the Civil War all over again. If the intensity of the debates provoked by Neil Jordan’s film Michael Collins is anything to go … Read more
Seventy-eight years ago on a quiet Tipperary roadway the first nationalist revolt against the British Empire this century was started by a small band of armed men from townlands and villages—Donohill, Solohead and Hollyford—in the vicinity of Tipperary Town. The Soloheadbeg ambush shook British rule in Ireland and sparked a controversy which can be heard … Read more
The Easter Rising—in which a twelve-hundred strong force took over the centre of Dublin, proclaimed the right of Irish citizens to the ownership of Ireland, fought, surrendered, and were either executed or jailed—is an event which has exercised the minds and pens of Irish historians for generations. Indeed, eighty-one years on, the interpretation of that … Read more