When Éamon de Valera gave his followers the order to dump arms at the end of the Civil War in May 1923 the fighting ended, but not the arguments about weapons. The Republican troops, still loyal to an increasingly phantasmagorical concept of the State, were told to conceal these weapons rather than surrender them, on … Read more
DS: How do you come to have such an interesting name as de Courcy Ireland? JDCI: I don’t actually know the full story. The de Courcys were, of course, a historic crowd who came here in 1172 from a place in Normandy called Courcy. The name Courcy is very common in Normandy, and now in … Read more
Memories of the Great Famine one hundred years previously was one reason why Irish humanitarian aid for Germany immediately after World War II was given in astonishing amounts and with great speed. At the same time, these contributions were the cause of considerable controversy, since the suspicion arose that in some cases Irish animosity for … Read more
Being up for the Germans in the war had stirring consolations and triumphalisms until the debacle at Stalingrad. Being up for the British at the same time meant a steady diet of humiliation from Dunkirk to Singapore, via Tobruck. The school yards were divided. Taunts of uncovered German atrocities, experiments, concentration camps, persecution and cruelties … Read more
A terse paragraph in the Irish national dailies on 3 May 1945 started the avalanche of international protest. Under the heading ‘People and Places’, the Fianna Fáil-backed Irish Press reported laconically that the Taoiseach and Minister for External Affairs, Éamon de Valera, accompanied by the Secretary of External Affairs, Joseph Walshe, ‘called on Dr Hempel, … Read more