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Protestant fears & Civil Rights: self-fulfilling conspiracies?

In the early 1960s I began to attend Ian Paisley’s Free Presbyterian Church, which seemed obsessed with ‘Romanism’ and Romish conspiracies. It was claimed that the Catholic Church wanted an […]

Mythologising a movement: Northern Ireland’s ’68

Is not the pastness of the past,’ asks Thomas Mann in The Magic Mountain, ‘that much more profound, more complete, more legendary, the more immediately it falls before the present?’ […]

Tuned out: traditional music and identity in Northern Ireland

Tuned out: traditional music and identity in Northern Ireland Fintan Vallely (Cork University Press €39) ISBN 9781859184431 This book considers the attitudes of Protestant performers and of the broad Protestant […]

The Northern Ireland Question. The peace process and the Belfast Agreement

The Northern Ireland Question. The peace process and the Belfast Agreement Brian Barton and Patrick J. Roche (eds) (Palgrave MacMillan, £55) ISBN 9780230203808 On 23 May 1998 at the King’s […]

Film Eye

Five minutes of heaven 5 April 2009, BBC2 Directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel by John Gibney On 29 October 1975 James Griffin, a twenty-year-old Catholic stonecutter from Lurgan, was shot dead […]

April 23

1931 Chuck Feeney, businessman and philanthropist who gave away his fortune of $8 billion over a 38-year period, including $1.3b to projects in the Republic of Ireland and $570m to projects in Northern Ireland, born to Irish-American parents in New Jersey.
1971 C.B. (Cyril Bentham) Falls, military correspondent of The Times (1939–53), historian and author notably of The history of the 36th (Ulster) Division (1922), based on his own experiences, died.
1970 St Enda’s, Rathfarnham, the bilingual school founded by Patrick Pearse in 1908, was presented to the nation as a Patrick Pearse Museum.
1918 A general strike against conscription, organised by the Labour movement and supported by Sinn Féin, the IPP and the Catholic hierarchy, paralysed the country.
1616 William Shakespeare (52), dramatist and poet, died.
1014 The Battle of Clontarf, near Dublin. Brian Boru, claimant to the high kingship of Ireland, and his Munster forces defeated an army of Leinster Norse, supported by their kinsmen from Northumbria, the Isle of Man and the Orkneys.

Protestant fears & Civil Rights: self-fulfilling conspiracies?

Mythologising a movement: Northern Ireland’s ’68

Tuned out: traditional music and identity in Northern Ireland

The Northern Ireland Question. The peace process and the Belfast Agreement

Film Eye

Personal Histories

On this Day

April 23