It was the Stuarts who introduced the Irish to the slave trade. Charles II returned to the throne in 1660 at a time when it was becoming clear that sugar plantations were as valuable as gold-mines. The Royal Africa Company (RAC) was established to supply slaves to the British West Indies in order to extend … Read more
Grace Sweeney is getting ready to celebrate her 100th birthday on 15 December in her bungalow at Annagry in the Rosses in west Donegal. Born in 1909, she had a varied life. She went into service or, as they called it in Donegal, went ‘on hire’, working for neighbours until she was sixteen. Then she … Read more
The institutional brutality, neglect and sexual abuse of children catalogued in the Murphy report, and its predessessors, Ryan and Ferns, concentrated on the later twentieth century. But did the Irish not already know of such behaviour in their midst? The truth, as is often the case, has been evident in the works of some of … Read more
In 1957 David Gray, the US wartime minister to Ireland, wrote publicly that Taoiseach Eamon de Valera ‘maintained a neutrality, which served only Hitler’s objectives’. Ian Wood quotes Gray’s comment but never seeks to get behind it. Gray played an integral part in a conspiracy involving both Winston Churchill and President Franklin Roosevelt to distort … Read more
In the early years of independence, the new Irish Free State was faced with soaring poverty rates along the western seaboard. The post-war economic slump hit the cottage industries hard and forced most of those who relied on the linen trade to make a living off the land. A wet summer in 1924 caused widespread … Read more