Broadsides – A collection of bits and pieces
"Unprovided with original learning, uninformed in the habits of thinking, unskilled in the arts of composition, I resolved to write a blog”
Four lawyers from the Roger Casement prosecution team. In 1916 Sir Roger Casement, for his role in the Easter Rising, was prosecuted for High Treason and was found guilty and sentenced to death. This portrait of the four lawyers is taken from the great canvas by Sir John Lavery depicting the appeal hearing of Casement... Continue Reading →
This is my first attempt at making a YouTube video. It is on a subject I know well and ofter lecture upon, but embarking on the making of a video was quite a challenge. First I had to master Powerpoint. I would be pretending if I was to say that I have done that. Then... Continue Reading →
The Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin, holds a series of coffee morning talks on the paintings on exhibition in the gallery. Such talks are for about 40 minutes, followed by questions and then to coffee for a continuing discussion. This was my talk, on the 22nd June 2016, given before the great canvas (10' x... Continue Reading →
The Road to the Rising was an RTE History Festival held on O'Connell Street in Dublin on Easter Monday the 6th April. Over 50,000 people attended, dipping into and out of exhibits, street theatre, lectures, music, re-enactments and the screening of historical films. The Big Personalities series of lectures were limited to 20 minutes for each... Continue Reading →
None of the leaders of 1916 have touched the Irish as much as has Casement. He dreamed of the destiny of Ireland. And he was hung for his dreams. When his body, or the remains and traces of his body, came home to a free Ireland, a sovereign Ireland, then the Irish for whom he... Continue Reading →
In 1914, with war raging in Europe, Sir Roger Casement, a retired Irish born diplomat of the British Consular Service, with a distinguished record of service in Africa and South America, traveled to Germany, on behalf of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, with an audacious plan to persuade captured British soldiers of the Irish Regiments, to... Continue Reading →
I bought this book out of curiosity about the role of the British consular service in the emerging colonial development of Africa. I had just finished reading Mario Vargas Llosa’s fictionalised account of another British consular official, namely Sir Roger Casement who was consul to Congo Free State port of Boma in the African Congo... Continue Reading →
Not all the late nineteenth century white men who cut their way into the wealth of untamed Africa were touched by dreams of colonial conquest, territorial gain or massive religious conversion of the native tribes. Sir Roger Casement, it is true, was in deepest Africa, in the Congo, as Consul for Her Majesty's Imperial Government... Continue Reading →
John LAVERY (1856-1941): High Treason 1916. Oil on canvas, 214 x 322 cms . The canvas is huge: ten feet by seven feet and it hangs at the foot of the great marble staircase within the King's Inns,Dublin where it dominates the descent of the Benchers as they process on their way to dine. It... Continue Reading →
One of the great purposes of this book, all eight hundred and ninety six pages of its slightly smaller than breeze block size, is to fall, with all its ponderous weight, upon the poorly sourced, idiosyncratic 64 page pamphlet of John de Courcy Ireland's The Sea and the Easter Rising. It does so with a... Continue Reading →
Broadsides - A collection of bits and pieces 