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TV eye:The story of Ireland BBC/RTÉ, February/March 2011 by John Gibney

The story of Ireland arrived on British and Irish television screens with considerable fanfare, the first comprehensive TV history of Ireland since Robert Kee’s Ireland: a history in 1981. Now, […]

Atlas of the Irish rural landscape (2nd edn)

The first edition of the Atlas of the Irish rural landscape (1997) was immediately hailed as a classic. For its time it was a ground-breaking publication, featuring a previously unsurpassed […]

What is Hy Brasil?

Legend tells that somewhere off the coast of Ireland there was an island, always covered by intense fog and only seen on very rare occasions. Every seven years the fog […]

An island called Brazil

What is the origin of the word ‘brasil’? In my homeland, Brazil, it seems that everyone knows the answer. Following the definition of the German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, it […]

The first potatoes

So unpalatable and poisonous is the original potato that anthropologists continue to puzzle over why anyone considered it a possible food in the first place. But over 8,000 years ago […]

September 11

1968 Denis McCullough (85), co-founder of the Dungannon Clubs (1905) with Bulmer Hobson and director of the IRB in Ulster at the time of the Easter Rising, died.
1954 Robert Smyllie, influential editor of the Irish Times, died.
1922 The Local Government Act (NI) abolished PR for local elections and required a declaration of allegiance from persons elected to or working for local authorities.
1910 Robert Loraine, British actor and Boer War veteran, in his Henry Farman biplane became the first man to fly across the Irish Sea.
1741 Arthur Young, English agricultural theorist and traveller, and author of the acclaimed A Tour of Ireland (1780), born.
1922 The Local Government Act (NI) abolished PR, introduced by Westminster three years earlier as a ‘minority safeguard’, for local elections and required a declaration of allegiance from persons elected to or working for local authorities.
1954 Robert ‘Bertie’ Smylie (61), editor of the Irish Times since 1934, who transformed the paper from an Ascendancy viewpoint to one with a non-partisan profile, died.

TV eye:The story of Ireland BBC/RTÉ, February/March 2011 by John Gibney

Atlas of the Irish rural landscape (2nd edn)

What is Hy Brasil?

An island called Brazil

The first potatoes

Personal Histories

On this Day

September 11