Shaping ‘Nature’

The problem for many of the ‘improvers’ of 19th century Ireland was that they saw too much ‘nature’ – wild, uncivilised, uncouth. An unwillingness to…

Our Language, Their Babble

German concentration and extermination camps were run by the speakers of one language but inhabited by speakers of many others. Interpretation became necessary to both…

World Art / Culture

Your language or mine?

A language, it has been said, is a dialect with an army, or at the least one with a regional assembly. A new study, which…

World Politics

Ireland’s Disappeared

In ‘the new entrepreneurialism’, workers are expected to be their own timekeepers (automated flexi-time systems), secretaries (word processing tools), accountants (automated payroll systems, online banking,…

World Art / Culture

The Scruple of Detail

Shifted whole from one language to another, philosophical terms leave behind a rich history of usage, interpretation, and interaction with other terms. To understand them…

Irish Literature

The Gaelic Hit Factory

In what might be called the cartoon version of our modern history, the Irish language is corralled in with land and religion as a shibboleth…

World Art / Culture

The Last Post

Animals have been divided into those we watch TV with, those we eat and those we’re scared of. If ‘becoming animal’ is understood in Hiberno-English…

World History

All in the Mix

Inspired by atomistic science, thinkers in early modern England, including John Locke, developed a conceptual framework whereby it is the mixture of parts, unregulated by…

The Meaning of Ryanair

Orwell got it wrong. It is not governments but banks, insurance companies, pension funds and low-cost airlines, the raucous cheerleaders of deregulation, that oppress and…

Half the Picture

Historians who cannot engage with Irish-language sources risk fundamentally misunderstanding the nature of the public sphere, which in Ireland was long associated with orality and…