One of the most popular posts on this website – for whatever reason – is Significant Commas in Irish History. While looking for something completely different, I came across an article in The Irish Jurist about the second of the…
Tag: Free State
Review of Unapproved Routes by Peter Leary
I saw this advertised somewhere recently and as it seemed relevant to my teaching about Northern Ireland at the minute I ordered it and read it. It’s an attractively produced little volume with elegant typesetting and a number of well…
Why the most northern part of Ireland is in the south
“British Isles Euler diagram 15” by TWCarlson – Own work. Licensed under CC0 via Wikimedia Commons. Some years ago I created the following guide to the minefield of names for the constituent parts of the, err, am I allowed…
Book Review: Fatal Path by Ronan Fanning
This book was published last year to much acclaim. There were lots of complimentary reviews, and I’m not going to dissent here from the majority view. Ronan Fanning is Professor Emeritus of Modern History at University College Dublin and this…
Book Review: Vanished Kingdoms, by Norman Davies
I bought this book on a whim, partly because I guessed (correctly) that it would have something in it about the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which is a casual interest of mine. Judging by what I’ve found on the internet, the book…
Book review: Acts of Union and Disunion, by Linda Colley
I bought this on a whim last week and have now almost finished reading it. It’s based on the BBC Radio 4 radio series of the same name, which dealt with the various acts and processes that have either bound…
My top books on Irish history
There are a lot of books on Irish history, and the current Decade of Commemoration has prompted a flood of new ones. Here’s my choice of a few of those that have been around for a while but are still…
The Rathmines Church Fire, 1920 – Come here to me!
In one of those funny coincidences, I had only reposted this picture on Pinterest yesterday, to then find an entry on the same subject on the Come here to me Dublin blog, quoting from and apparently questioning the Sunday Times…
Ireland’s Decade of Commemoration: A List of Anniversaries
For my own reference as much as anyone else’s I’ve drawn up a list of dates within the much-discussed ‘Decade of Commemorations’, aka ‘Decade of Centenaries’ (which seems to last more than ten years, but never mind): 1912 Introduction of…
Reposted: Éamon de Valera: a short biography
Éamon De Valera was born 14 October 1882 in New York to a Cuban father and an Irish mother, but returned to live with relatives in Bruree, County Limerick, as a small child. He studied mathematics and worked as a…