By Stuart Kinsella Strongbow, or Richard fitz Gilbert de Clare, was buried in 1176 in Christ Church Cathedral in Dublin ‘within sight of the hallowed cross’. So said Gerald of Wales, yet nothing is known of Strongbow’s tomb before it was damaged by the collapse of the cathedral’s south wall in 1562. A nearby mural … Read more
Exhibition, 9 May–30 August 2019, RIA, Dawson Street, Dublin. Amidst the catastrophic horrors of Ireland’s Great Famine of 1845–50 a few bright examples of selfless humanitarianism shine through. One of these, little remembered in Ireland, was the Polish émigré Paul Edmund Strzelecki, known to many of his contemporaries simply as ‘the Count’. Arriving in Ireland … Read more
Sir,—With reference to the excellent article by Leanne Blaney, ‘Motors wanted!’ (HI 26.6, Nov./Dec. 2018), on the use of the motor car in canvassing during the 1918 general election, in a February 1908 cartoon that was part of Sinn Féin’s North Leitrim by-election campaign on behalf of its candidate Charles Dolan, the former Irish Parliamentary … Read more
An on-line exhibition plotting Irish women’s road to the vote, 1918. By Jane Maxwell The Library of Trinity College, Dublin, has taken a robust approach to the centenary of female suffrage with its collaborative on-line exhibition. As a repository for the kinds of unique original artefacts that allow history to be written, emphasis is placed … Read more
‘The head of a landlord in one hand and the tail of a cow in the other—these are the arguments to use when you argue with an Englishman.’ By Phelim Brady Given Michael Collins’s reputation as the ‘Irish Pimpernel’, it might surprise some to learn that he was once arrested in broad daylight in the … Read more