FK: A homecoming RTÉ1, 25 October 2010 JFK: The making of modern politics BBC2, 21 November 2010 In June 1963 John F. Kennedy became the first US president to pay an official state visit to the Republic of Ireland. Other presidents have done so since, but none to the same effect. Kennedy’s four-day visit was … Read more
On 26 July 1914 the Asgard, the yacht of Erskine Childers, then a famous writer, sailed into Howth with 900 Mauser rifles, which were quickly unloaded and distributed to waiting Volunteers and boys of Fianna Éireann. This followed the very successful landing in April by the Ulster Volunteer Force of 35,000 German, Italian and Austrian … Read more
F.S.L. Lyons argued in Ireland since the Famine (1971) that wartime neutrality led to Ireland’s ‘almost total isolation from the rest of mankind’. Philosophically, his ‘Plato’s cave’ metaphor captured a belief in Ireland’s moral failure by refusing to join a just war against Nazi Germany. Ireland, Lyons felt, instead looked inwards, absorbed by its own … Read more
The passenger liner Athenia sailed from Glasgow on 1 September 1939, picked up more passengers off Belfast later that day, and departed from Liverpool at about 4am the next morning (2 September), bound for Quebec City and Montreal in Canada. War was declared by the British government at 11am on Sunday 3 September, by which … Read more
In the early years of independence, the new Irish Free State was faced with soaring poverty rates along the western seaboard. The post-war economic slump hit the cottage industries hard and forced most of those who relied on the linen trade to make a living off the land. A wet summer in 1924 caused widespread … Read more