One of the most carefully fostered aspects of the image of the Catholic priest is that he is without a wife. Indeed, this image has been built up by the church administration as an essential part of its own esprit de corps. In recent centuries, certainly since clerical problems in mid-eighteenth-century France, church authorities have … Read more
The 1889 Light Railway (Ireland) Act was the first to provide government grants for the construction of railways, which had previously been the domain of private enterprise. This and subsequent acts of 1890 and 1896 brought the railway to remote, thinly populated districts which were considered commercially non-viable by the railway companies. £1,553,967 was spent … Read more
1995 marks the 150th anniversary of the first appearance of a new and deadly strain of potato blight in Ireland; a blight that reappeared in varying degrees over the next six years. As a consequence of the resultant food shortage and the more general disruption to economic life, by 1852 at least one million Irish … Read more
When Jonathan Swift died 250 years ago, his publisher George Faulkner eulogised him as ‘a great and eminent Patriot’, whose ‘Genius, Works, Learning and Charity’ evoked universal admiration (Dublin Journal 19-22 October 1745). The sequence of Faulkner’s phrasing deserves notice, since even as Swift’s ‘Genius, Works [and] Learning’, represented by A Tale of a Tub, … Read more
Archaeological Inventory of County Cork, Vol.1 (West Cork), Vol.2 (East and South Cork) Denis Power (comp.) (Stationary Office, £20 each) Guide to the Archives of the Office of Public Works, Rena Lohan (Stationary Office) Irish Archives Journal (Spring 1995) (Irish Society of Archives, £4.95) In recent years, there has been a massive splurge of spending … Read more