History & Folklore

There was a tiny little townland in County Clare called Ballykilty. In the middle of the 18th century when the landed aristocracy was in the ascendency, a man, who had never set foot in Ireland, bought extensive lands in the area. He duly renamed his lands in that townland as […]

The ‘Cailleach Bhéara’ (Hag of Beara) is a mythical old woman in Irish literature and folklore, associated with west Munster, but especially with the Beara Peninsula in West Cork.  Originally her name was ‘Boí’, a variant of the word for a cow, ‘bó’,  At the tip of the Beara Peninsula […]

“From about the middle of the 18th century it began to be realized that you could learn from a dead body; and that’s when some families were starting to be persuaded that they should allow post mortems.”– Wendy Moore In the 18th and 19th centuries medical and surgical students needed […]

This month marks the centenary of a dangerous raid by the West Cork IRA on Fastnight Lighthouse, which the British authorities used to store arms and explosives. Eugene Daly shares the details of the famous deed. The War of Independence, or Anglo Irish War, lasted from early 1919 to July […]

The history of Israel is long, complicated and far too complex to cover it in a single article (even in a book some would say). The spotlight was on the region once again when the Israeli military killed 230 civilian Palestinians in a series of air attacks. Israel suffered 20 […]