Ireland’s experience of nation-building, which in reality was a far from adventurous one, was first driven by Catholicism and cultural nationalism and then by economic development and human capital.

A classic study of the figures who made independent Ireland has been reprised after more than fifty years. Taken together, the books illustrate the main currents in Irish historiography, while the new volume corrects the earlier one’s hagiographic tone and…

In the early years of the state, the poor, widowed, orphaned and illegitimate were seen as problem groups that were a drain on scarce resources, a threat to the social order and a disgrace to the nation. They needed policing…

Archibald Hamilton Rowan was viewed by both the authorities and his fellow members of the United Irishman as its leading light but his name has faded from memory compared with those of Tone or Emmet as he spent the most…

Roger Casement wanted a free Ireland restored to the nations of Europe but he passionately wanted something else, something which he was unusually placed to understand, the dismemberment of the British empire. Captured and tried, he was unlikely to be…

A journal kept during April and May 1916 reflects the experience of the Easter Rising of a professional family who lived in Dublin’s Merrion Square, a comfortable part of south Dublin but one which was in close proximity to some…

James Connolly’s participation in the 1916 Rising was part of a calculated gamble. Glorifying him as an exponent of physical force politics, however, is a corruption of his beliefs and hopes, a travesty of his analysis, a grotesque and impermissible…