Following translations into Spanish and Portuguese, the Irish History Compressed e-book history of Ireland is now available in Italian. You can buy it directly from Amazon using this link and it will also be available at all the other important…
Author: Bruce Gaston
Onwards towards world domination:
For all those getting a bit fed up with commemoration
Have you looked at this photo?
The photo reproduced here shows Patrick Pearse surrendering to Brigadier-General William Lowe on Saturday, 29th April 1916: the effective end of the Easter Rising. The location was Moore Street. If you look closely, it becomes apparent that there is a…
The Proclamation: Promise or Rhetoric?
Over a year and a half ago I wrote a post which posed the question “Was Patrick Pearse bad at maths, or at history, or at both (or at neither)???” You can read the full post here, but in brief…
Irish History Compressed’s Most Popular Posts Of 2015
Here they are, the most read blog posts of the past year: Loyalist paramilitaries The Red Hand of Ulster by George A. Birmingham A Beginner’s Guide to the Gallipoli Campaign A Short History of Ireland in Spanish and Portuguese The…
A Beginner’s Guide to the Anglo-Irish Agreement
What? The Anglo-Irish Agreement. Not to be confused with The Anglo-Irish Treaty (1921). When? Signed on 15th November 1985. Where? Hillsborough, Northern Ireland. Why? Both the UK government and the Irish government had been alarmed by the electoral and PR…
The Irish and Latin America
This post was inspired by, and is in honour of, my translators into Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese (neither of whom, as far as I know, have Irish ancestry). [Edit 7/9/2015: I stand corrected. “Dowling” is an anglicised version of a…
A Beginner’s Guide to the Gallipoli Campaign
What? The Battle of Gallipoli. Also known as? The Dardanelles Campaign Where? I suppose you’re going to say “Gallipoli” aren’t you? Yes — the Gallipoli Peninsula in what is now Turkey, which forms the nothern bank of the Dardanelles Strait,…
Loyalist paramilitaries:
An overview
In the Troubles loyalists killed 990 people; 708 simply because they were Catholics.1 The question is “Why?” Main Groupings The two most important and longest-established loyalist terrorist groups are: Ulster Volunteer Force founded in 1966, the fiftieth anniversary of the…
The Red Hand of Ulster by George A. Birmingham:
A Review
My attention was first called to Ulster-born writer George A. Birmingham by a review of his novel The Major’s Candlesticks on the Reading 1900–1950 blog. That novel is a comedy set in the aftermath of the Irish War of Independence…