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Ireland’s favourite painting:The meeting on the turret stairs

The inspiration for the painting was a ballad or poem ‘Hellalyle and Hildebrand’ that appeared in ‘A second batch of Danish ballads’ translated by Whitley Stokes from Danske Viser, vol. […]

The artist

Frederic William Burton was born in 1816 in Corofin, Co. Clare, the third son of an amateur landscape painter. The family moved to Dublin, where in 1826 Burton attended the […]

The story behind the painting

Whitley Stokes’s translation into English of the Danish ballad describes the heroine Hellelil, who is actively involved in her downfall, the loss of her chastity, and the death of both […]

‘Hang up half a dozen bankers’:attitudes to bankers in mid-eighteenth-century Ireland

The late 1720s and early 1730s were a period of economic despair in Ireland, as trade stagnated and a succession of poor harvests brought famine and disease. Against this background, […]

Pamphleteering in mid-eighteenth-century Ireland

The pamphlet was the most important vehicle for public debate in mid-eighteenth-century Ireland. Pamphlets published in the period between the mid-1720s and the Lucas affair of 1749 were notable for […]

April 18

1952 Edmund O’Brien (71), County Limerick-born author and yachtsman who in 1923 circumnavigated the globe in his ketch Saoirse, died.
1870 Robert Noonan, house-painter, sign-writer and author, notably of The ragged-trousered philanthropists (1914), born Robert Croker, the illegitimate son of an RIC officer, at 37 Wexford Street, Dublin.
1949 Under the terms of the Republic of Ireland Act (December 1948), designed by John A. Costello’s coalition government to ‘take the gun out of Irish politics’, Ireland formally left the Commonwealth and became a republic.
1918 The Mansion House conference, called by the lord mayor of Dublin, Laurence O’Neill, on the day the Military Service Bill became law, was attended by all shades of nationalist opinion. An anti-conscription pledge, drafted by Éamon de Valera, was issued.
1870 Robert Tressell, nom de plume of Robert Croker, latterly Robert Noonan, author of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists (first unabridged edition published in 1955), was born in Dublin, the illegitimate son of RIC inspector and later magistrate Sir Samuel Croker.
2019 The journalist Lyra McKee (29) was shot dead by a New IRA gunman who opened fire on PSNI officers monitoring disturbances in Derry’s Creggan area. President Michael D. Higgins and Taoiseach Leo Varadkar attended her funeral.

Ireland’s favourite painting:The meeting on the turret stairs

The artist

The story behind the painting

‘Hang up half a dozen bankers’:attitudes to bankers in mid-eighteenth-century Ireland

Pamphleteering in mid-eighteenth-century Ireland

Personal Histories

On this Day

April 18