Sir,—I refer to Seán Kelleher’s letter (HI, Sept./Oct. 2012) about my chapter on Kilmichael in David Fitzpatrick’s (ed.) Terror in Ireland. Mr Kelleher argues that Jack Hennessy’s Bureau of Military History (BMH) statement contains an account of a false surrender by the Auxiliaries, while simultaneously asserting that such surrender caused the ‘fatal wounding of three … Read more
Sir,—May I point out an error in the article on counties, palatinates, boroughs and ridings in the last issue (HI 20.5, Sept./Oct. 2012)? County Clare (now Clarecastle), which was briefly named as the county town by Elizabethan administrators in the 1570s. This is attested to in the Annals of the Four Masters (James Frost, The history … Read more
Sir,—In view of its special attention to the Irish role in the American Civil War, there’s a curious omission in Kevin Haddick Flynn’s article (HI 20.5, Sept./Oct. 2012). It makes no mention of General Philip Sheridan, easily the most important Irish figure in the conflict, certainly a much bigger player than Thomas Francis Meagher, Michael … Read more
Who owns history? Well, the Carlyle Group has just bought an impressive chunk of it by taking over Getty Images, the world’s largest distributor of stock photographs and videos. The Getty collection contains millions of images from the twentieth century, including all the major historical events such as wars and political upheavals but also many … Read more
Medieval buildings dominate many parts of the Irish landscape. Castles are the largest surviving structures from medieval Ireland, and monastic buildings and their inhabitants dominate many chapters of Irish history. Accounts of the lives and fortunes of these people and the landscapes they inhabited are found across a wide range of sources—annals, letters, manuscripts—but these … Read more