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Features

Cover Story

St Patrick: the legend and the bishop

In the light of the city’s fractured sense of identity, Belfast City Council has announced plans for ‘politically correct’ St Patrick’s Day celebrations in 2006. But is there a ‘historically correct’ Patrick? Thomas O’Loughlin investigates.
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Featured Articles

Louisa O'Murphy: Louis XV's Irish mistress
Louisa O'Murphy: Louis XV's Irish mistress Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Irish émigrés (‘Wild Geese’) were noted for their military service to France. Linda Kiernan outlines the career of an Irishwoman who rendered a different type of service to the king of France. Read More >>

Charles Edward Burton: the first Irishman on Mars
Charles Edward Burton: the first Irishman on Mars The keen observations of a clergyman’s son in nineteenth-century Dublin played an important part in our understanding of the planet Mars. Although his dedication to astronomy would cause an early death, it would ultimately earn him a permanent place on the surface of the ‘red planet’, writes Dominic Phelan. Read More >>

Arklow's explosive history: Kynoch, 1895-1918

Arklow's explosive history: Kynoch, 1895-1918

Ireland (apart from the north-east) is not noted for its early industrial development. Yet between 1895 and 1918 the small coastal town of Arklow, Co. Wicklow, became home to the Kynoch chemical factory, which produced the then-revolutionary new explosive, cordite, and became a major supplier of munitions to the British military. At its peak, during the First World War, it employed between 4,500 and 5,000. Anthony Cannon outlines its troubled history.

John Francis O'Reilly: the "flighty boy"
John Francis O'Reilly: the "flighty boy" Dubbed the ‘flighty boy from Clare’ in a Garda report, John Francis O’Reilly was one of several Irish spies sent to Ireland by Nazi Germany during the Emergency. Anthony Kinsella relates the strange tale. Read More >>

Recycling the dustbin of Irish history: the radical challenge of ‘folk memory’
Recycling the dustbin of Irish history: the radical challenge of ‘folk memory’ Even though Ireland is renowned for its rich oral culture, historians of modern Ireland have largely overlooked oral traditions. Guy Beiner offers a reappraisal of Irish folk history by looking at the memory of the French invasion of 1798. Read More >>