The issue of food exports during the Famine has fuelled an on-going debate in the historiography of the crisis. The traditional, popular view has considered the export of food to be a major contributory factor to excess mortality, symbolising a triumph of doctrine over humanitarian considerations. The opposing interpretation has argued that even if all … Read more
In Ireland today, as elsewhere, fosterage finds its place in society as a much altered carry-over from the past. Nowadays, it arises for a negative reason: the inability of biological parents to cope, for whatever reason. Fosterage in the past was the antithesis of this. It was a form of child-rearing chosen and upheld for … Read more
Patrick’s own writings, in the form of two documents, have survived the passage of time. One, the Confessio, is a defence against his critics. The other is an indignant letter to a man called Coroticus who had taken some of Patrick’s newly baptised followers into slavery. The problem with these writings, which amount to no … Read more
Before the Ordnance Survey undertook the mapping of the country from Malin to Mizzen in the 1830s, cartography, surveying and landscape map production in Ireland were essentially a private undertakings. There had been a seventeenth-century precedent for state involvement in mapping in the various plantation surveys, but after Sir William Petty’s Down Survey (Fig.1) and … Read more
GH: Did you always want to study history? EC: I used to read historical novels endlessly as a teenager and I went to UCD in the late ‘50s to study English and History. I switched off English within weeks, I’m afraid, whereas I found History tremendously exciting. In the History Department people like Maureen Wall, … Read more