RTÉ has made a documentary, The Battle of Kinsale, as its contribution of this year’s 400th commemoration of that event. History Ireland solicited the views of the programme makers. Peter Mulryan, producer/director Of course I’d heard of the battle of Kinsale, but exactly what happened at Kinsale was a mystery to me. Seventeenth-century Irish history … Read more
The historic links between Spain and Ireland are intellectual, economic, political, religious and especially military. However there are no racial or genetic links. The Gaelic Irish we can categorically state do not have Spanish origins. When the Lebor Gabála Érenn—the Book of Invasions—was composed as an integrative myth for the peoples of Ireland with the … Read more
AB: What early influences contributed to your interest in history? JAM: Growing up in a strongly nationalist household in the 1930s, my first introduction to history was history as nationalism. Quite separately, however, there was a particularly inspiring teacher at primary school named Paddy Desmond who made the history of the locality come alive, for … Read more
HM: Was your upbringing distinctively Irish? TK: Yes, an Irish Catholic one. It began roughly three hundred miles up the coast from Sydney in a town called Kempsey. Kempsey was marked by distinction between white and Aboriginal but there were also religious distinctions within the white community. The Catholics were not exclusively Irish as there … Read more
Foras Feasa ar Éirinn is a history of the kingdom of Ireland, written by Geoffrey Keating, an Old English Catholic priest from south County Tipperary, and completed in about 1634. It tells the story of Ireland from the creation of the world to the coming of the Normans. The original version was written in Irish, … Read more