Do we need another book on the Easter Rising? There can be no harm in a good one. And Fearghal McGarry has written a very good one indeed. What makes The Rising stand out from its competitors (at least according to the blurb) is that it uses the vast corpus of testimonies collected by the … Read more
One hundred years ago, on the night of Saturday 13 August 1910, three passengers travelling from New York disembarked from the White Star Line’s steamer Baltic at what was then called Queenstown, now Cobh, with a device that was revolutionising how people viewed the world: the cinematograph or cine-camera. This device had existed for fifteen … Read more
Following the outbreak of the Great War in August 1914, the UK government interned ‘all Germans, Hungarians and Austrians of military age’ throughout Britain and Ireland, and 300 civilians were briefly interned at Richmond. When the first batch of 400 military prisoners arrived on 10 September 1914, the civilian internees were moved to camps at … Read more
Whatever one’s point of view, Patrick Pearse has always engendered strong emotions. Shortly after the Easter Rising he became widely revered, some even suggesting that he should be made a saint. In the decades surrounding the outbreak of the troubles in Northern Ireland, however, he was frequently described as a ‘fascist’. In 1978 Xavier Carty made a … Read more
John Horne (ed.) (Royal Irish Academy, €30/£25) ISBN 9781904890508 Thomas Davis Lectures, RTÉ Radio 1, 10 Nov. 2008–12 Jan. 2009 www.rte.ie/radio1/ourwar The combined authority of the Royal Irish Academy (RIA) and the Thomas Davis Lecture series is considerable. If one could only nominate two institutions that have sustained cultural values in Ireland through thick and … Read more