Sir, —In one of the earliest published works on the subject of fireprotection in these islands—Fires, fire engines, and fire brigades(London, 1866)—C.F.T. Young CE attributes the first steam fire engineever made in Ireland to one James Shekleton, engineer, of Dundalk, Co.Louth. Young gives a lengthy description of the engine, which weighed22cwt and was built ‘on … Read more
Sir, —With reference to the review of David Lynch’s Radical politics inmodern Ireland: the Irish Socialist Republican Party, 1896–1904 byFintan Lane in the May/June issue of HI, the ISRP did not come to anend in 1904. George Spain of Manchester was a member of the IrishRepublican Brotherhood. He fought in the 1916 Rising and the … Read more
Sir, —With regard to my article in the last issue (HI 13.5, Sept./Oct.2005) on revising the history of Europe, a small correction lest I leftany reader puzzled. Where I am discussing the beginnings of Europe,instead of ‘three centuries earlier under the declining Roman power’please read ‘six centuries earlier’.—Yours etc., Desmond Fennell Sir, —I would like … Read more
The end of an era? When do politics become history? At what point do historians take over from journalists and propagandists in telling the human story? This is not a purely subjective or arbitrary point. For example, there is a broad consensus that the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989) and the subsequent collapse of … Read more
Sir, —Kevin Whelan’s list of errors in the Irish material in the new Oxford DNB (HI 13.3, May/June 2005) misses two in the entry on Edmund Dwyer Gray (1845–88), MP and proprietor of Dublin’s Freeman’s Journal. Both errors—which had originally appeared in the old Dictionary of National Biography—relate to the loss of a schooner, the … Read more