Pope John Paul II visited Ireland from Saturday, 29 September to Monday, 1 October 1979, the first trip to Ireland by a pope. Over 2.5 million people attended events in Dublin, Drogheda, Clonmacnoise, Galway, Knock, Limerick, and Maynooth. It was one of John Paul’s first foreign visits as Pope, who had been elected in […]
“Their conclusion will seem ominous for the refuseniks – opposition must be crushed”
John Devoy was an Irish nationalist leader and exile.
Father of, well, many of us.
In 1066 the course of British history changed forever when William, the Duke of Normandy, landed on the southern coast of England and seized the country from its Anglo-Saxon king Harold Godwinson. The French had a long history of claims in England, and in 1002 the English king Aethelred the Unready married the sister […]
Even if you can find a zero-emission truck that will do the job, it will cost three or four times what a diesel vehicle costs.
Mayo agent, Captain Charles Boycott, was sent to a ‘moral Coventry.’ He described his plight in a letter to The Times: “…people collect in crowds upon my farm and order off all my workmen. The shopkeepers have been warned to stop all supplies to my house. My farm is public property, I can get no […]
It is fascinating to observe a species that is conscious of its impending extinction but also trying to prevent it. Are human beings the only ones capable of self-consciousness? Are radical individualism, hubris and egomania found in other creatures of kingdom Animalia? That is a delightful topic for a long-winded, well-lubricated after-hours discourse. Knock yourself […]
Manuel I Komnemos of the Byzantine Empire, also known as “Manuel the Great”, breathed his last on this day, September 24th, 1180. He was the last of the great Byzantine Emperors, and with his death, the Empire began to fall into ruin and decay. Manuel was the third son of his father, John II. On […]
As the Biden administration and governments worldwide make massive commitments to rapidly decarbonise the global economy, the persistent effort to silence climate change sceptics is intensifying – and the critics keep pushing back. This summer, the International Monetary Fund summarily cancelled a presentation by John Clauser, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who publicly disavows the existence of a climate […]
On the night of September 23rd, 1846, the German Astronomer Johann Gottfried Galle confirmed the discovery of the planet Neptune, which had been predicted by the French Mathematician Urban le Verrier, based on nothing but numbers. It was one of the great triumphs of 19th century science. Le Verrier discovered Neptune – which cannot be […]
At 4 o clock on the night of the 22nd of September 1917 an explosion occurred at the Kynoch Cordite (a smokeless explosive) factory in Arklow which claimed the lives of 28 people and injured many more. The factory was established by a British industrialist and engineer in the 1890’s in Arklow’s North Beach area […]