TV eye: JFK

FK: A homecoming RTÉ1, 25 October 2010 JFK: The making of modern politics BBC2, 21 November 2010 In June 1963 John F. Kennedy became the first US president to pay […]

The Mauser model 71 rifle

On 26 July 1914 the Asgard, the yacht of Erskine Childers, then a famous writer, sailed into Howth with 900 Mauser rifles, which were quickly unloaded and distributed to waiting […]

‘Plato’s cave’?Ireland’s wartime neutrality reassessed

F.S.L. Lyons argued in Ireland since the Famine (1971) that wartime neutrality led to Ireland’s ‘almost total isolation from the rest of mankind’. Philosophically, his ‘Plato’s cave’ metaphor captured a […]

‘The first casualty of the sea’: the Athenia survivors and the Galway relief effort, September 1939

The passenger liner Athenia sailed from Glasgow on 1 September 1939, picked up more passengers off Belfast later that day, and departed from Liverpool at about 4am the next morning […]

‘Workers to the rescue’:Workers’ International Relief in Ireland, 1925

In the early years of independence, the new Irish Free State was faced with soaring poverty rates along the western seaboard. The post-war economic slump hit the cottage industries hard […]