Recent scholarly interest in Confederate Ireland has created a vastly clearer picture of a traditionally murky period in Irish history. Admittedly, some five decades passed before Micheál Ó Siochrú built upon the pioneering research of Donál Cregan in the 1940s, but both historians acknowledged that the destruction of official records prevented an exhaustive study of … Read more
As is the case for other early Irish laws, detailed penalties are laid down for various severities of injury: ‘If it be a life-wound any one inflicts on a woman or a cleric or an innocent, seven half-cumals are due from him . . . Three séts for every white blow, five séts for every … Read more
The text of the law is found in two manuscripts, one from the fifteenth and one from the seventeenth century, both based on a no-longer-extant manuscript referred to as ‘the Old Book of Raphoe’. One of the manuscripts is a Michéal Ó Cléirigh text of 1627, itself based on a manuscript written by his cousin … Read more
The flag known as the Starry Plough was created as the visible manifestation of the hopes and aspirations of the Dublin workingman. It is the flag of the Irish Citizen Army (ICA), which was founded in 1913 by James Larkin in response to police brutality during the Lockout. It was carried into the GPO in … Read more
One of the main social functions of picture postcards was to facilitate communication, a sort of Edwardian Facebook or Twitter. We tend to think of postcards now as mainly sent by holidaymakers, but in the early twentieth century they were also used to send birthday, congratulatory, Christmas and other greetings. The importance of postcards as … Read more