Imperial pipedream—Joseph Walshe’s 1938 trip to the Sudan

During Ireland’s ‘golden years’ at the United Nations in the late 1950s Dublin firmly supported decolonisation and the newly independent African states then joining the UN. Ireland prided itself upon […]

Bob Collis: ‘the Irish Schindler’

Bob Collis was the son of William, a lawyer who had been born without property, despite coming from a line of landed Anglo-Irish gentry and medical professionals, but who by […]

Taming ‘the new monster’

The sky did not fall. Following more than five years of planning and two years of teaching, the new Leaving Certificate history syllabus faced its first practical test in the […]

Keeping an eye on the usual suspects: Dublin Castle’s ‘Personalities Files’, 1899–1921

Beginning in the late nineteenth century, Dublin Castle’s ‘Personalities Files’ span the emergence of Sinn Féin, the Easter Rising and the War of Independence, with the largest number relating to […]

Waiting for Home Rule in County Kildare

The December election of 1910, which gave John Redmond’s Irish Parliamentary Party the balance of power, and the subsequent passing of the Parliament Act in 1911, which removed the House […]