In 14 St Stephen’s Green is an unusual historical document. On one pane of a sash window in the rear hall-floor parlour are scratched the names of five soldiers: A.O. Pollock 21st Regiment, W. Rowland McKay 3rd Dragoon Guards, W.C. Forbes 92nd Highlanders, Mr M. McKay 3rd Dragoons, and Lenox MacFarlane 3rd Dragoons. Who were … 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
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