In May 2022, Irish social and mainstream media were alive with heated discussion of the terms of proposed agreements between three corporate entities: the National Maternity Hospital (NMH), St. Vincent’s Healthcare Group (SVHG), and the Health Service Executive (HSE), the statutory body that runs Ireland’s public health service. The central question, picked over in a… Read more →
Tag: Ireland
Irish Keens, Modern Grief, and the Digital Landscape of Mourning
In January 1833, an author known only as O’G published their musings on the Irish funeral cry, or caoine, in the Dublin Penny Journal. O’G described the cry as “the most singularly plaintive and mournful expression of excessive grief that could well be imagined.” In the article, O’G describes traveling the Irish countryside on horseback… Read more →
Becoming a Scot and Cross-Cultural Marriages in Outlander and the Early Modern British Isles
If you’ve heard about any historical romance, then you’ve probably heard of Outlander. The popular series by Diana Gabaldon follows Claire Beauchamp Randall, an English nurse who falls through time when visiting standing stones in the Scottish highlands in 1946. Transported to 1743, she is picked up by a band of Scots highlanders and falls… Read more →
Death, Danger, and Decadence in 1920s Dublin: The Murder of Honor Bright
After the body of twenty-five-year-old Dublin woman Lizzie O’Neill, also known as “Honor Bright,” was found in June 1925, Irish newspapers jumped on the sensational story. The case had everything that readers sought at the time: a who-dunnit featuring the murder of a young, glamorous woman, a pair of unlikely well-off and respectable suspects (a… Read more →
Shame and Shearing: The Politics of Women’s Hair in Independence-Era Ireland
The shearing of women’s hair has a long history as a tactic for dehumanizing, humiliating, and setting women apart from the rest of the population.2 Hair often holds great symbolic value for women. Long hair can be a mark of femininity, and many women take great pride in their hair. The act of shaving a… Read more →
Murder and Motherhood in 1950s Ireland: The Trial of Abortionist Mamie Cadden
On the evening of April 17, 1956, thirty-three-year-old Helen O. visited nurse Mamie Cadden at 17 Hume Street, Dublin, for what she likely thought would be a routine, if illegal, abortion.1 Helen O.’s death after the attempted abortion provoked a national controversy that complicated dominant constructions of motherhood and domesticity in mid-twentieth-century Ireland. In the… Read more →
“What Must That Sound Like?”: The Trauma of Family Separation
On June 22, 2018, US Representative Ted Lieu, a Democrat from California’s 33rd District, stood on the floor of the House of Representatives to demand action regarding the children in “Tender Age” detention shelters as a result of the Trump Administration’s new immigration policy of separating children from their parents at the US/Mexican border. In… Read more →
A Referendum – and A Path Toward Reproductive Justice for Ireland?
Citizens of the Republic of Ireland will vote on a referendum on May 25, 2018 to potentially overturn the state’s notoriously harsh anti-abortion laws.1 This moment is being characterized as a defining one, a watershed moment for a state that Amnesty International and the United Nations have chastised for its misogynistic, anti-feminist policies. Indeed, for… Read more →
Explicit: Censorship, Sexology, and Sexuality in Independent Ireland
When the Irish Free State created the Censorship of Publications Board in 1929, they were arguably asserting their independence.1 By taking control of information, and defining standards of morality and decency through banned literature, censorship was in fact a rejection of colonial rule. Much of the independent Irish identity hinged on a sense of moral… Read more →
Women, Prayer, and Household Authority in Irish History
Traveling through Ireland in 1909, writer Robert Lynd described “a strange crying—almost a lamentation” that one might hear “on some evenings, if you are in a Catholic house in the most Irish parts of the country.” This strange sound, he elaborated, “was the hour of family prayer.”1 In almost all Irish households, nightly prayers were… Read more →