When Éamon de Valera gave his followers the order to dump arms at the end of the Civil War in May 1923 the fighting ended, but not the arguments about weapons. The Republican troops, still loyal to an increasingly phantasmagorical concept of the State, were told to conceal these weapons rather than surrender them, on … Read more
Monuments were to the nineteenth-century city what corporate identity is to the modern business; they projected an image that spoke of specific character, unity and confidence. Is this just the impression gained in retrospect by the image-conscious late twentieth-century or is this what they were intended to do? Once erected, monuments take on a life … Read more
Monuments were to the nineteenth-century city what corporate identity is to the modern business; they projected an image that spoke of specific character, unity and confidence. Is this just the impression gained in retrospect by the image-conscious late twentieth-century or is this what they were intended to do? Once erected, monuments take on a life … Read more
In 1845, the Irish Constabulary, which was organized in its permanent form in 1836, was deployed countrywide to control agrarian crime. Even though fears of violence were high in provincial landlord and merchant circles during the Great Famine, the police mostly found themselves witnesses to human tragedy. The desperation of the famine produced some violent … Read more
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