Who was present at the founding of the GAA at Thurles in 1884?

A SUBJECT OF MUCH DEBATE AMONG HISTORIANS OF IRISH SPORT The inaugural meeting of the GAA, on Saturday 1 November 1884, at Lizzie J. Hayes’s Commercial Hotel on Main Street, […]

William Wilde (1815–76) as historian— a bicentenary appraisal

AMONG THE TEN PROFESSIONAL AND RECREATIONAL ACTIVITIES ASCRIBED TO WILLIAM WILDE ON HIS MEMORIAL PLAQUE AT 1 MERRION SQUARE, DUBLIN, IS ‘HISTORIAN’. William Wilde’s Celticism, his archaeological, antiquarian and topographic […]

William Rowan Hamilton— Ireland’s liberator of algebra

‘ONE SMALL SCRATCH FOR A MAN, ONE GIANT LEAP FOR MATHEMATICS’ On a bright Monday morning, on 16 October 1843, the world of mathematics was changed forever. William Rowan Hamilton […]

Trinity v. UCD

Since the middle of the nineteenth century there have been two universities in Dublin—Trinity College and the Catholic (later, from 1908, National) University—and so it is not surprising that a […]

‘A nation in its last moments’: William Godwin’s visit to Ireland, 1800

Godwin’s letters have left us an eyewitness account of aspects of Irish social and political life at a critical moment in the country’s history. In June 1800 the Irish ‘patriot’ […]