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 […]
In a recent blog, the head of Atheist Ireland, Michael Nugent writes: “I believe we should treat every individual person with the same respect and dignity and love.” Well, yes, and an atheist is perfectly entitled to believe this if they want, just as I am perfectly entitled to believe in God, but both beliefs need […]
Portugal has had an exceptional experience with emigration and immigration for several hundred years. As skilled mariners they set sail to open up world markets over 500 years ago. Portuguese settled in all continents from Brazil in the Americas all the way to East Timor in Asia including large parts of Africa in between. In […]
New data on the mental health of American college students shows a sombre trend. Rates of depression, anxiety, low flourishing, suicidal thinking and suicidal attempts have all worsened over the years 2007 to 2018, according to research by Jean Twenge and colleagues, published in the Journal of Adolescent Health. And it’s not all down to more reporting. […]
Newspapers report a potato blight has hit Ireland. High rents imposed by absentee landlords meant that most people could only afford to live on small tenant farms with inferior soil that only potatoes could grow on; but the potato crop was prone to disease and the farmers did not have extra land to rotate crops. […]
Pádraig Mac Piarais founded St. Enda’s (Scoil Éanna) in Rathfarnham. St. Enda’s was to have an “Irish standpoint and ‘atmosphere’” and be based on what Pearse saw as the two key characteristics of the ancient Irish system of education: freedom for the individual student and inspirational teaching. He wrote later in his essay on education […]