Richard Whately was possibly the strangest archbishop Ireland has ever known. An eccentric Oxford professor of political economy, he was appointed Church of Ireland archbishop of Dublin in 1831 and remained in office until 1863. A new biography by Bryan MacMahon, Eccentric archbishop: Richard Whately of Redesdale, has just been published by the Kilmacud–Stillorgan Local … Read more
Mollie Gill, often known as Maire, was born on 24 March 1891, one of four girls in a family of seven. Her father was a shoemaker and the family lived in a cottage in Murphystown, Co. Dublin, but from the age of 11 Mollie had been exposed to a different world when her older sister … Read more
Anyone who has seen Brian Friel’s new play The Home Place should be interested in the descriptions of life in Donegal at the period of the play in the accounts of the Congested Districts Board. The board was set up by the British government in 1891 to improve conditions in the overcrowded western area. A … Read more
For many people the works of Jack B. Yeats, Paul Henry and their contemporaries are evocative of a simple, uncomplicated lifestyle associated with the west of Ireland. While Yeats developed as the major artist of the early twentieth century, Henry emerged as Ireland’s leading landscape painter. It was largely Henry’s vision of the west that … Read more
On 16–19 January 1841, as the Whig government of Lord Melbourne tottered towards collapse, Daniel O’Connell visited Belfast to address a Repeal meeting. He was accompanied by the Protestant Repealers Robert Dillon Browne (MP for Mayo) and Thomas Steele (the ‘Head Pacificator’), and by his son-in-law Charles O’Connell (formerly MP for Kerry). O’Connell came at … Read more