State within a state: the Nazis in neutral Ireland

They operated like a normal political party, collected subscriptions, kept membership files and reported regularly to party headquarters. The difference with the German Nazi Party (NSDAP) in 1930s Ireland, however, […]

“It’s a long way to Salonika”: Irish soldiers in the Balkans in World War I

Although the Western Front continues to dominate the popular memory of the First World War in Britain and Ireland, the conflict had its beginnings in eastern Europe, and it was […]

Bishop Robert Daly: Ireland’s “Protestant pope”

Robert Daly, Church of Ireland bishop of Cashel, Waterford and Lismore (1843–72), is now a largely forgotten figure. Yet for many years in the nineteenth century his was a household […]

A sexual revolution in the west of Ireland?

Few places suffered more severely from a combination of eviction and famine than Kilrush and its surrounding districts in the mid-nineteenth century. Only Skibbereen in south-west Cork and a few […]

A church ‘in decline’? The pre-Reformation Irish Church

Our understanding of the Church in Ireland before the Tudor reformations has long been distorted by a paradigm that insisted that it was ‘in decline’. Historians conventionally trawled through the […]