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Artefacts: Vickers helmet

During the 1920s the newly formed Irish Defence Forces began looking for a steel helmet. At first the French Adrian model, named after its inventor, August-Louis Adrian, was tested on […]

The search for ‘statutory Ulster

It is unlikely that the Buckingham Palace conference of July 1914 would feature prominently on a list of momentous events punctuating the discourse of Ireland’s partition. Indeed, its brevity and […]

Charles O’Shaughnessy’s rebuttal of Darwin

professional and educated classes Charles O’Shaughnessy (1826/7–1911?) was a Kilfinane (Co. Limerick) draper with a taste for the polemical, as this stanza from one of his advertising jingles suggests. He […]

The Lord mayor’s state carriage, 1791

In eighteenth-century Ireland wealth and success were embodied in the carriage, and, unlike present-day totems of conspicuous consumption, these could be unique to the owner in style and pageantry. Like […]

Penal days in Clogher

In the aftermath of the Williamite revolution religious persecution intensified. In 1697 the Irish parliament, an exclusively Protestant assembly since 1691, enacted a law to banish all Catholic bishops and […]

April 18

1952 Edmund O’Brien (71), County Limerick-born author and yachtsman who in 1923 circumnavigated the globe in his ketch Saoirse, died.
1870 Robert Noonan, house-painter, sign-writer and author, notably of The ragged-trousered philanthropists (1914), born Robert Croker, the illegitimate son of an RIC officer, at 37 Wexford Street, Dublin.
1949 Under the terms of the Republic of Ireland Act (December 1948), designed by John A. Costello’s coalition government to ‘take the gun out of Irish politics’, Ireland formally left the Commonwealth and became a republic.
1918 The Mansion House conference, called by the lord mayor of Dublin, Laurence O’Neill, on the day the Military Service Bill became law, was attended by all shades of nationalist opinion. An anti-conscription pledge, drafted by Éamon de Valera, was issued.
1870 Robert Tressell, nom de plume of Robert Croker, latterly Robert Noonan, author of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists (first unabridged edition published in 1955), was born in Dublin, the illegitimate son of RIC inspector and later magistrate Sir Samuel Croker.
2019 The journalist Lyra McKee (29) was shot dead by a New IRA gunman who opened fire on PSNI officers monitoring disturbances in Derry’s Creggan area. President Michael D. Higgins and Taoiseach Leo Varadkar attended her funeral.

Artefacts: Vickers helmet

The search for ‘statutory Ulster

Charles O’Shaughnessy’s rebuttal of Darwin

The Lord mayor’s state carriage, 1791

Penal days in Clogher

Personal Histories

On this Day

April 18