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Epic and often violent hurling tussles of the pre-famine era have been lost to popular memory

Violence, protest and melees: hurling in pre-famine Ireland

History • 23 Oct

Carrig mheannáin (kids rock) tells us nothing of about how awesome local children may be, but it does say something about goat husbandry. Photo: Getty Images

The secrets hidden in Irish townland names

Ireland • 21 Oct

Joe Biden meets the people in Ballina, Co Mayo in June 2016

How Joe Biden's Irish ancestor saved thousands during the Famine

History • 21 Oct

There is a sense that Halloween was a time when Oweynagat could open the gates of hell or become an entrance to a magical world." Photo: Gary Dempsey

'Ireland's gate to hell': a Co Roscommon cave and the Otherworld

Halloween • 20 Oct

Terence MacSwiney: "his physical weakness came to represent strength and moral conviction against corporeal colonialism"

Death of a lord mayor: Terence MacSwiney's 1920 hunger strike

History • 19 Oct

The plaque commemorating flash of inspiration at Broom Bridge in Cabra. Photo: William Murphy https://www.flickr.com/photos/infomatique/

The most famous graffiti in the history of maths

Maths • 16 Oct

"The Minister for Finance has the weight of the past, and not just expectations of the future, on his shoulders"

A history of Irish budgets

budget 2021 • 12 Oct

"Casting directors across the world must have held their breath in shock at the thoughts of re-casting all their TV Vikings with black hair."

Did Ireland's first Vikings really have black hair?

History • 08 Oct

Charles Haughey's 1982 government lost power after just 8 months in office

A short history of Ireland's GUBU government

History • 05 Oct

"Undoubtedly, Mrs Doyle from Father Ted spoke for vast swathes of Irish people when, disgusted by the TeaMaster salesman who assured her that his contraption took the misery out of making tea, she retorted, 'Maybe I like the misery.'"

What's behind the Irish obsession with death and misery?

History • 05 Oct

Edvard Munch's The Scream on display at Sotheby's auction house in 2012 before it was sold for $120 million. Photo: Oli Scarff/Getty Images

Why Edvard Munch is a painter for this time of great anxiety

William Petty: "it is clear from Petty's work that not all lives 'count' the same" Image: Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

How Oliver Cromwell's doctor pioneered the use of statistics

History • 25 Sep

"Collins told the bishop that the 'Provisional Government would.finance salaries in the Six Counties'." Photo: Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS via Getty Images)

Why did Michael Collins fund teachers in Northern Ireland?

History • 24 Sep

Military Maneuvers by Richard Thomas Moylan: a trooper from the 4th (Royal Irish) Dragoon Guards in Leixlip, Co. Kildare and his female companion, followed by a group of children. Image courtesy of National Gallery of Ireland

What has the British army ever done for us?

History • 23 Sep

Looking out from one of the most successful hideouts of the Civil War, a cave high in the mountains overlooking Glencar Lake in Co Sligo. Photo: Marion Dowd

How Ireland's revolutionaries used caves to hide people and arms

History • 22 Sep

ISDL demonstrators gather at Liverpool's Pier Head in August 1920 for the arrival of Archbishop Daniel Mannix. Photo: Firmin/Topical Press Agency/Getty Images

What were Irish nationalists up to in UK during the war years?

History • 02 Sep

A selection of Frank Murray's wartime diary entries

The Belfast doctor who used Gaeilge to outwit Japanese captors

History • 03 Sep

If those walls could talk...

A short history of unparliamentary behaviour in Dáil Eireann

History • 02 Sep

Ahmad Tawfiq Al-Madani in 1950. Photo: Photo12/UIG/Getty Images

How the War of Independence inspired an Algerian nationalist

History • 21 Aug

Meeting the British by Paul Muldoon with artwork by Mary Farl Powers. Photo: Great Book Of Ireland/UCC

How did they make Ireland's modern day Book of Kells?

History • 19 Aug

Marty Cooper: "We knew that this was going to be a big deal, but we weren't certain it was going to happen in our lifetime"

The man who invented the mobile phone

History • 19 Aug

A cross-inscribed ogham stone in Dromkeare, Co.Kerry. Photo: CM Dixon/Print Collector/Getty Images

The 360 stones which show off the earliest writing in Ireland

History • 18 Aug

Charles Browne measures Tom Connelly on Inis Mór in 1892 while Alfred Haddon notes the data. Photo: courtesy of the Board of Trinity College Dublin

The head-hunter who measured Irishmen's skulls

History • 15 Oct

La mort de Cèsar (The Death of Julius Caesar) by Vincenzo Camuccini (1806). Photo: Wikipedia/Creative Commons

Did climate change in Alaska help end the ancient Roman republic?

History • 04 Aug

John Hume addresses a meeting in Derry following violence at the Apprentice Boy Parade, August 1969. Photo: Mirrorpix via Getty Images

John Hume: the Derry boy who went global

John Hume • 03 Aug

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