Latest Blogs
Tread Softly
Is Thomas Davis on the way to becoming a forgotten hero, yet another of those monumental figures from the past which say to us ‘who is it now, who exactly was he?’
Statue-breaking
When an empire ends and a country becomes independent the imperial soldiers leave – but the visible heritage they have left behind is sometimes found to be disturbing or unacceptable.
Please Mister Postman
The British knew quite a bit in advance about the intentions of the IRB before 1916. One of their most valuable informants was a man called ‘Redmond’.
Fighting over the flag
Some sections of unionist opinion fought a rearguard action after Irish independence, though harassed by Sinn Fein in particular. God Save The Queen was sung at the horse show at the RDS even in the late 1940s.
Monkey Business
Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu met the divil on the bus. Very freaky.
Le Fanu’s dark imagination
Less well known, but probably a better writer than Bram Stoker, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu was born two hundred years ago today.
The birth of Irish democracy
Did Irish democracy develop in the 1920s in the early years of the new state or were it seeds sown a long time before?
Cruel, cruel Margaret Stackpoole
James Clarence Mangan, a lad from the Liberties, went courting a posh girl up in Ranelagh. At first things seemed to be going well …
Ireland’s Huguenots
Ireland’s Huguenot community – originally Calvinist refugees from persecution in France, produced many notable Irishmen, including Tom Lefroy, the man Jane Austen had hoped to marry, and the Gothic novelist Charles Maturin, author of Melmoth the Wanderer.
Pater Improvidus
The life courses of two great Dublin writers of the nineteenth century, both born into the city’s grocery trade, show the vastly differing outcomes that the quality of parental care may lay out for children.
A Perfect Idyll
Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, whose bicentenary occurs this year, spent much of his childhood in the idyllic setting of the Phoenix Park, where his father was rector of the military school.
A massacre averted
Sometimes it can be advisable to ignore the orders of one’s superiors if one wishes to avoid a pointless massacre.