‘ONE SMALL SCRATCH FOR A MAN, ONE GIANT LEAP FOR MATHEMATICS’ On a bright Monday morning, on 16 October 1843, the world of mathematics was changed forever. William Rowan Hamilton was walking along the banks of the Royal Canal in Dublin with his wife, Helen. As he passed Broombridge in Cabra, he had a flash … Read more
At eleven sharp on the morning of 12 March 1798, a force of thirteen sergeants and a servant, under the command of Justice of the Peace William Swan, descended on the house of Oliver Bond, a wealthy cloth merchant, on Bridge Street in Dublin. Disguised in their street clothes and supplied with the secret password, … Read more
Since the middle of the nineteenth century there have been two universities in Dublin—Trinity College and the Catholic (later, from 1908, National) University—and so it is not surprising that a rivalry developed between them. In Dublin on 11 November 1919 the first anniversary of the Armistice was widely commemorated. Trinity students gathered outside the gates … Read more
A life devoted to the cause of Irish freedom, and a most opportune death. In 1856 Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa began a revolutionary career that would span nearly 60 years when he became a founding member of the Phoenix Society in West Cork. The founders of the Phoenix Society were concerned at the state of Ireland … Read more
Godwin’s letters have left us an eyewitness account of aspects of Irish social and political life at a critical moment in the country’s history. In June 1800 the Irish ‘patriot’ MP and barrister John Philpot Curran invited an English friend, the radical political philosopher and novelist William Godwin, to visit Ireland in the weeks before … Read more