By Stephen Kelly Ownership of the Falkland Islands, an archipelago of an estimated 200 islands scattered in the South Atlantic, 300 miles off the coast of Argentina and approximately 8,000 miles south of the United Kingdom, was bitterly disputed between the two states. At the time approximately 1,900 people lived there. Most of these inhabitants … Read more
By Jack Hepworth In April 1972 it was estimated that there were some 32,000 living veterans of the ‘Old IRA’, Cumann na mBan and Na Fianna Éireann. Through the 1970s and 1980s, these veterans of Ireland’s revolutionary decade entered old age. When they died, local newspapers published reverential obituaries. These heroic narratives sat uneasily with … Read more
By Simon Topping The sign in Bessbrook, Co. Armagh, was clear—‘Dance for the Blackmen’—yet when some African-American troops arrived they were refused entry, to their dismay. This seeming importation of American ‘Jim Crow’ racial segregation was, in fact, an encounter with Northern Ireland’s particular idiosyncrasies, as, unknown to the soldiers, the Blackmen were a Protestant … Read more
By Conor Heffernan In 1928 strongwoman Katie Brumbach or ‘Katie Sandwina’ (born in Austria in 1884) spent roughly a month touring Ireland with Carmo’s Circus. Billed in some quarters as ‘Catherine the Great’, Sandwina entered theatres on a Roman chariot and spent the next 20–30 minutes flexing her muscles, lifting heavy weights and responding to … Read more
By Derville Murphy Margaret Allen, the first female honorary member of the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA), was an artist whose paintings were concerned with the social conditions of the time. What is less well known about her is that she was one of Dublin’s earliest female commercial photographers, whose work as an artist was enabled … Read more