History Ireland

To renew a subscription please login first

Counterfactual Parnell

Content is protected. Please sign up or login to view content. If you would like to take out a subscription to the magazine, you can do that by clicking here

Listening to grasshoppers: field notes on democracy

These essays initially appeared as ‘urgent public interventions at critical moments’ between 2001 and 2008. Collected together at the conclusion of India’s blockbuster 2009 general election, they present ‘a detailed […]

From a Clear Blue Sky : surviving the Mountbatten bomb

From a clear blue sky takes the form of a three-part drama: before the bomb, after the bomb and learning to live with the bomb. But it opens with the […]

Full tilt: Ireland to India with a bicycle

The best travel books always have a back story: the line that goes back through time, tethering the writer to the reason why they wanted to write this particular book, […]

That field of glory. The story of Clontarf, from battleground to garden suburb
Read More

Darkest Dublin: The story of the Church Street disaster and a pictorial account of the slums of Dublin in 1913
Read More

On this Day

December 04

1971 Fifteen people, including the owner’s wife and fourteen-year-old daughter and a number of pensioners, were killed when a UVF bomb exploded at McGurk’s public house in North Queen Street, Belfast.
1971 In the first major atrocity of the Northern Ireland Troubles, fifteen people, including two children and three women, were killed when a no-warning bomb, planted by the UVF, exploded in the doorway of McGurk’s public house in north Belfast.
1865 Francis Fowke (42), Belfast-born soldier, engineer and architect whose projects included the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin and the Royal Albert Hall in London, died.