By Angus Mitchell On 24 November 1922, Erskine Childers—the renowned author and anti-Treaty republican—was executed by a military firing squad of the Irish Free State in Beggar’s Bush barracks. During the century since his tragic dénouement, various efforts have been made to explain Childers and ‘the metamorphosis of a stiff-upper-lip Boy’s Own novelist into a … Read more
By Séan Ó Duibhir On 6 May 1970, Irish citizens were shocked to learn that Taoiseach Jack Lynch had dismissed two of his most energetic and powerful cabinet colleagues, Minister for Finance Charles Haughey and Minister for Agriculture Neil Blaney, because they failed ‘to subscribe fully to government policy’ on Northern Ireland. Moreover, it was … Read more
By Patricia Byrne On 1 April 1851 Edward Nangle, who had founded the Achill Mission colony in the early 1830s, publicly announced that the Mission had purchased the major part of the island from the Encumbered Estates Commissioner for £17,500. This put the Mission on a new trajectory as the major Achill landlord. The University … Read more
The misericords of St Mary’s Cathedral, Limerick. By Charlotte Murphy St Mary’s Church of Ireland cathedral in Limerick possesses the only set of medieval choir-stalls to survive Ireland’s troubled past. Attached to the underside of these stalls—or misericords, as they are more usually known—are fascinating carvings. There are also bosses of a grotesque nature at … Read more
How doubts about his identity led to an Irishman’s internment in France and his deportation to one of the Nazis’ most notorious concentration camps. By Isadore Ryan On 28 July 1941, the Irish legation to Vichy France received a two-page handwritten letter from an internment camp at Le Vernet, 55km south of Toulouse. The letter … Read more