In The Current Issue
REGULARS
HISTORY IN THE NEWS:
Four Courts Press at 50
James Kelly
Grangegorman Histories: honouring the past
ON THIS DAY
Aodhán Crealey
Letters
Griffith in Longford (not Sligo)
Collins killed in action, not assassinated
A new mutation of revisionism
Repatriating the remains of Patrick Sarsfield
Maurin Mitchell, Storm over Spain (1937)
Correction
Platform
Clean hands? Ireland, slavery and the slave-trade
Laurence Fenton
KINDRED LINES:
Army discharge records
Fiona Fitzsimons
GEMS OF ARCHITECTURE:
SS Creteboom, Ballina, Co. Mayo
Damian Murphy
ARTEFACTS:
The Universal Carrier
Lar Joye
100 YEARS AGO:
Terence MacSwiney dies on hunger strike
Joseph E.A. Connell Jr.
Reviews
SEEN ON TV:
Hawks and Doves—the Crown and Ireland’s War of Independence
Donal Fallon
MUSEUM EYE:
Decade of Centenaries pop-up Women’s Museum
Tony Canavan
Bookworm
By Joe Culley
The Big Book
Nuttall, Different and the same: a folk history of Protestants in independent Ireland
By Ida Milne
Book Reviews
Kelleher, The alliance of pirates: Ireland and Atlantic piracy in the early seventeenth century
By Eamon Darcy
Urquhart, Irish divorce: a history
By Mary Kenny
O’Donoghue and O’Doherty, Irish speakers and schooling in the Gaeltacht, 1900 to the present
By Tony Lyons
Heney, The Arms Crisis of 1970: the plot that never was
By Thomas Leahy
Features
MILITARY:
The marquis de Boisseleau and the ‘Battle of the Breach’ at the first siege of Limerick, 1690
Pádraig Lenihan
LEGAL:
Abraham Brewster—from legal obscurity to lord chancellor
Rob Christie
FIRST WORLD WAR:
James Murray—a life less ordinary
John Murray
SOURCES
Facts and fallacies of the Belfast pogrom
Kieran Glennon
MUSIC:
Music for MacSwiney
Axel Klein
ADVERTISING:
Marketing the Free State in Britain
Billy Shortall
WAR OF INDEPENDENCE:
Gregory and the Swanzy riots, 1920
Ciaran Toal
PHILOSOPHY:
G.E.M. Anscombe—Irish-born philosopher
John Hayes
50 YEARS ON:
Charles J. Haughey and the Arms Crisis
Stephen Kelly
WHAT IF?:
The 1974 Ulster Workers’ Council strike and fears of British withdrawal
Ian Wood
Personal Histories
Editor’s Choice
On this Day
December 1
- 1919 Lady (Nancy) Astor became the first woman to take a seat in the Westminster House of Commons.
- 1956 Ronnie Delaney (21) won a gold medal for Ireland in the 1,500 metres at the Olympic Games in Melbourne, the first since Bob Tisdall in 1932.
- 1666 Sir James Ware (72), antiquary and historiographer, author notably of Ancient Irish histories (1633), died.
December 30
- 2006 Saddam Hussein was hanged in Baghdad, having been found guilty of crimes against humanity after a twelve-month trial.
- 1916 Grigori Rasputin (47), Russian peasant, faith healer and favourite of Czar Nicholas II and his family, was poisoned with wine and tea cakes, shot and drowned in the River Neva.
- 1691 Robert Boyle (64), chemist and religious philosopher, died. Born in Lismore Castle, Co. Waterford, the seventh son of Richard Boyle, first earl of Cork (1566–1643), Boyle was packed off to Eton at the tender age of seven and thereafter travelled extensively on the Continent. In Florence he visited Galileo Galilei and was present when that great man passed away, an experience that may well have triggered his lifetime preoccupation with all matters scientific. Reared at a time when people still believed in magic and on an educational diet of an earth-centred universe, he was in every sense a pioneer, writing extensively in lucid prose on physics, medicine, philosophy and theology. Best remembered for Boyle’s Law, a gas law linking pressure and volume and a cornerstone of physics, he also predicted many of our modern ideas and inventions. His ‘prophetic wish list’ included ‘potent druggs [sic] to alter or Exalt Imagination, Waking, Memory and other functions and appease pain, procure innocent sleep, harmless dreams etc.’—in other words, those sleeping tablets, artificial stimulants and antidepressants in your medicine cupboard. He might himself have benefited from some of the same. A committed celibate—his closest emotional support was his older sister, Katherine, with whom he lived in London over the last two decades of his life—he was a pious Anglican who would pause every time he mentioned the name of God. Contemporaries described him as a delicate, almost effeminate individual, ‘tall, slender and emaciated, brilliant in conversation, benevolent and tolerant but excessively abstemious and often oppressed with low spirits’. He died less than a week after his sister’s passing.
Above: Robert Boyle, chemist and religious philosopher.