In this month’s blog, Patrick Maume explores a contemporary fantastical response to the Harvard Irish Mission’s questionable 1930s anthropological study of the Irish.
Blog image: Edward Plunkett,18th Baron Dunsany, from the George Grantham Bain collection at the Library of Congress. All rights reserved.
Long before Riverdance, pianist John Field and poet Thomas Moore brought Irish arts to global audiences. In this month’s blog, Angela Byrne looks at Irish literary and musical hits in imperial Russia.
In this month’s blog, Eoin Kinsella revisits the Irish army’s historic successes in international showjumping.
Image caption: The Army jumping team, McKee barracks, 17/9/1927. Capt. Cyril Harty, riding Cúchulainn; Capt. Dan Corry, riding Finghin; and Capt. Ged O’Dwyer, riding Craobh Rua. Though the Irish team placed last that year, Harty won the prize for best individual round.
Copyright: Courtesy of Military Archives (IE/MA/GPN/004/020)
In this month’s blog, Niav Gallagher remembers some of the Irish men and women who formed part of the resistance in the second world war.
Article image: ‘Resistance to the Germans – French Army Returns to France’, Normandy, France, circa 14 August 1944. Copyright: National Archives and Records Administration, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
In our April blog(link is external), Terry Clavin explores the heyday of McDaid’s, one of Dublin’s most (in)famous literary pubs.
Article image: McDaid’s Pub, Harry Street, Dublin
Copyright: DIB image
In this month’s blog with voters due at the polls on 8 March to vote on two proposed constitutional amendments, Eoin Kinsella looks at how the referendum one of the core elements of our democratic system was embedded in the constitution.
Article image: Committee members of the Constitution Commission, responsible for the drafting of the Constitution of the Irish Free State, 1922
Copyright: This image is reproduced courtesy of the National Library of Ireland, Hugh Kennedy archive (KEN2)
In our February blog, Turlough O’Riordan discusses the sequence of events that led to the resignation of attorney general Patrick Connolly in August 1982, and the origins of GUBU – a phrase that has become firmly embedded in our political and cultural lexicon.
Article image: Malcolm Macarthur leaving the Four Courts, Dublin, during his 1983 trial
Copyright: Courtesy of RTÉ Archives. All rights reserved
In our first Dictionary of Irish Biography blog of 2024, Patrick Maume highlights some examples of Irish ‘great detectives’, elusive figures who have nevertheless become prominent in our fiction, politics and popular culture.
Article image: A still image of John Barrymore in the film Sherlock Holmes (1922), Copyright: Public Domain; source Wikicommons
In our latest Dictionary of Irish Biography blog post, Terry Clavin explains how west Cork became a haven for pirates as they plundered maritime trade, and enjoyed the high life, during the early seventeenth-century