The seventh annual Norman Connection conference will be held, as usual, on the last weekend in September (25-27) in Fethard-on-sea, County Wexford. The conference examines aspects of Gaelic and Anglo-Norman society and settlement with particular reference to south Wexford. Fethard-on-sea, located in the area of initial Anglo-Norman activity in Ireland is the ideal venue in … Read more
The Parnell Summer School will take place from 9-16 August at Avondale House, Rathdrum, County Wicklow. To commemorate both the bicentenary of 1798 and the 150th anniversary of the Young Ireland rising of 1848 the theme will be ‘the republic’. The aim is to place the United Irish and Young Ireland movements in the wider … Read more
James (Mick) Magennis was born in West Belfast and served in the Royal Navy in World War II. He was the only person from Northern Ireland to win the Victoria Cross, and the only person in naval history to exit a submarine (a midget … Read more
Kilmainham Gaol opened in August 1796 as the new county gaol for Dublin. It was built for ordinary criminals and debtors but within a month it had received its first political prisoners, United Irishmen from Ulster, including Samuel Neilson, a founding member. Neilson was … Read more
popular imagination monuments appear to be timeless and unchanging. Once erected they quickly become a ‘natural’ fixture in the landscape. Highly visible and inhabiting a public space they encourage the viewer, as one writer has pointed out, ‘to mistake material presence and weight for immutable permanence’. Yet these silent, still, stone and bronze edifices have … Read more