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…