Last month it was reported that US President Trump had “with varying degrees of seriousness” spoken about the idea of the US buying Greenland [i] – an idea which did not fare well, but which briefly placed the island centre stage. There followed a very large increase in searches for flights to Greenland, and such […]
Senator Ivana Bacik has recently argued in a piece she called “The Catholic Church hasn’t gone away, you know” that what she calls a “secularist” approach to separation of Church and State would help to remedy a situation in which the Catholic Church in Ireland “influence(s) public policy” through its religious teachings, runs a “shadow […]
Robert Emmett was an Irish Republican and patriot, orator and rebel leader. After leading an abortive rebellion in Dublin against British rule in 1803 he was captured then tried and executed for high treason against the British king George III of Great Britain. When asked if he had any thing to say in response to […]
Anne Devlin was born in County Wicklow around the end of the 1770s and in 1800 met Robert Emmet and assisted him in his plans for an uprising in Dublin. On the evening of the 23rd July 1803 the rising went ahead in Dublin, but despite taking the British authorities by surprise, the rebellion collapsed. […]
Dutch scientist Antonie van Leeuwenhoek is the first to report the existence of bacteria A largely self-taught man in science, he is commonly known as “the Father of Microbiology”, and one of the first microscopists and microbiologists. Van Leeuwenhoek is best known for his pioneering work in microscopy and for his contributions toward the establishment […]
Father Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla urged Mexicans to rise up against the Spanish-born ruling class. He made the first cry for independence. After a moving speech in the Mexican town of Dolores, Hidalgo took up the banner of the Virgin of Guadalupe, a Roman Catholic image of the Virgin Mary as she appears to Juan […]
Thomas Davis was an Irish writer who was the chief organiser of the Young Ireland movement, who was born in Mallow to a Welsh father and an Irish mother. Through his mother he was descended from the Gaelic noble family of O’Sullivan Beare. His father died one month after his birth and his family moved […]
America’s opioid epidemic is not going away. It is affecting men, women, children and even new-born babies and the health of the next generation of Americans. Its demographic is non-Hispanic white Americans, Native Americans and the working class, and it is shortening life expectancy for the first time in a century. As Nicholas Eberstadt wrote back […]
Scottish biologist and bacteriologist Alexander Fleming discovers penicillin while studying influenza. At the time, Fleming was experimenting with the influenza virus in the Laboratory of the Inoculation Department at St. Mary’s Hospital in London. Fleming returned from a two-week vacation to find that a mold had developed on an accidentally contaminated staphylococcus culture plate. Upon […]
William Huang describes how politicians in India are backing a bill which orders civil servants to stop at two children.
ON THIS DAY: 12TH SEPTEMBER 1919 Dáil Éireann was declared illegal by the British Parliament when Sinn Féin TDs refused to sit in Westminister and set up their own parliament in Dublin, Dáil Éireann The British authorities called it a ‘dangerous assembly, because of this the first Dáil had to meet in secret at different […]
The Battle of Stirling Bridge was a battle of the First War of Scottish Independence, Scottish rebel William Wallace and others defeated the English at Stirling Bridge. The Scots had some 300 cavalry, 10,000 infantry and the English had far greater numbers of 1,000 to 3,000 cavalry, 15,000-50,000 infantry but the Scots were victorious. The […]