The Irish are violent—official (secret)

Aspiring writers are taught that it is always good to start in a way that grabs a reader’s attention, such as: ‘The history of Northern Ireland in the last four […]

‘I have no intention of dying for Air France’: ‘Brandon’ Behan’s MI5 File

A garrulous, lightning-witted, talent-squandering, hard-drinking ‘character’, Brendan Behan embodied a certain Anglo-American stereotype of an ‘Irish writer’ to the hilt. Dead at the age of 41, his drinking was, as […]

The Citizen Army’s ‘Starry Plough’ flag

The Starry Plough flag has been in the possession of the National Museum (NMI) since 1956 and has recently been conserved in commemoration of the centenaries of the foundation of […]

A young woman’s life in Edwardian Dublin

Christina Jessop was born in Dublin in 1878 and lived there until 1908, when she married Jack Wilson and moved with him to Cobh (then Queenstown), Co. Cork. From 1903 […]

‘The brutes’: Mrs Metge and the Lisburn Cathedral bomb, 1914

The first decade of the twentieth century saw the establishment of women’s suffrage societies in nearly every major town and city in the British Isles. These organisations shared the same […]