The Good Friday Agreement transformed Northern Ireland, but it did not freeze history in place. BBC's Blue Lights offers one of the most compelling portraits yet of a society still negotiating the long aftermath of conflict. For the Irish diaspora, it is essential viewing, not because it revisits the Troubles, but because it…

Nearly twenty-five years before the Good Friday Agreement transformed Northern Ireland, British and Irish leaders attempted a remarkably similar settlement. The Sunningdale Agreement introduced power-sharing and cross-border cooperation long before either concept gained widespread acceptance. It failed spectacularly, but many of its ideas…

Overshadowed by both Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair, John Major rarely features in Irish historical memory. Yet his patient diplomacy, partnership with Albert Reynolds, and willingness to challenge old assumptions helped create the conditions that made peace possible. The Good Friday Agreement may have been signed after he left office, but many of…

Che Guevara was born in Argentina, radicalised by Latin America and immortalised by the Cuban Revolution. Yet Ireland has spent decades claiming him as one of its own. The persistence of the "Galway Che" tells us less about Argentine history than it does about the Irish habit of discovering ourselves in other people's…

Standfirst

The execution of Major Nidal Hasan is highly unlikely to create the kind of martyrdom that emerged from the executions of 1916. Nor is Hasan remotely comparable to Patrick Pearse or the leaders of the Easter Rising. Yet the decision to televise his death raises an older question, one that W.B. Yeats understood better than…

Shane MacGowan is usually remembered as the musician who fused Irish traditional music with the energy of punk rock. Yet the deeper influence on his work was not punk at all, but the literary inheritance of Brendan Behan. Through songs of emigrants, outsiders and dreamers, MacGowan became one of the last great voices in a tradition…

For more than a century, popular culture has looked eastward to the mountains of Transylvania in search of the origins of modern horror. Count Dracula is routinely presented as a Romanian monster inhabiting a Victorian nightmare: a foreign aristocrat who invades England and threatens the certainties of the British Empire.

Yet the deeper one…

From the rain-soaked streets of Soho to the haunted dreamscapes of Irish history, Shane MacGowan's finest songs reveal a writer caught between intimate realism and mythic memory. Through the ghostly presence of James Clarence Mangan, The Snake with Eyes of Garnet suggests that MacGowan was not merely a songwriter, but a participant in…

By Tim Flynn

Poet, professor, parliamentarian and soldier, Tom Kettle believed Ireland's future lay in Home Rule and European cooperation. His death at the Somme in 1916 marked not only the loss of a remarkable individual but the eclipse of an entire political tradition.

In the crowded landscape of Irish history,…

By Tim Flynn

Soldier, revolutionary, general and film pioneer, Emmet Dalton lived several lives in one. From the trenches of the Somme to the death of Michael Collins at Béal na Bláth and the creation of Ardmore Studios, few figures better illustrate the complexities of modern Irish history.

In the crowded gallery of…

By Tim Flynn

In June 1985, as Barry McGuigan…

Few songs are as deeply woven into Ireland's musical and historical imagination as The Galtee Mountain Boy. Written by Patsy O'Halloran and later carried around the world by Christy Moore, the ballad tells the story of a young republican volunteer swept up in the turbulence of revolution, guerrilla war and civil conflict. Moving from Cork…

The Irish Land War is usually remembered as a struggle between landlords and tenants, led by Charles Stewart Parnell and fought in the fields and villages of rural Ireland. Yet its methods tell a different story. Michael Davitt, the son of evicted Mayo tenants who came of age in the cotton mills of Lancashire, brought the techniques of…

By T.S. Flynn

W.B. Yeats spent much of his life mistrusting constitutional nationalism and the men who practised it. Yet the poet who mocked shopkeepers, doubted parliamentarians and wrestled with the legacy of 1916 ultimately found himself helping to build the institutions of the Irish Free State.

For a man who spent much…