Leon Uris’s ‘Trinity’ at 50

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I am traveling and working on several projects this summer. New posts will be infrequent. The piece linked below appears in the July/August issue of the Dublin-based History Ireland magazine. MH

American author Leon Uris released his eighth novel, Trinity, shortly before St Patrick’s Day 1976 and the deadliest years of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. In promotional interviews Uris emphasized that readers would ‘better understand the headlines coming out of Ireland today, because the past of Ireland is being constantly repeated’. This was a paraphrase of his novel’s soon-to-be-famous last sentence, that ‘in Ireland there is no future, only the past happening over and over’, which modified a line from Eugene O’Neill’s A Moon for the Misbegotten.

Read ‘When Irish History, And News, Became Best-Selling Fiction’ at History Ireland.

 

Three postcards from Ireland, summer 2026

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I am traveling and working on several projects. New posts will be infrequent through the summer. I’m happy to be in Ireland at the moment. Three postcards below. MH

Looking northeast from the 10th floor of the Central Plaza building in Temple Bar, Dublin: construction cranes at left; the Ha’penny pedestrain bridge over the tree-lined north side of the River Liffey, center left; the Spire of Dublin on O’Connell Street, near the historic General Post Office, and top portion of Croke Park, center horizon; and the 17-story Liberty Hall, once the tallest building in Ireland, at far right. View through glass panel.Round towers at the Glendalough monastic ruins in County Wicklow.The Waterford Greenway, right, looking southwest about 6K outside Dungarvan, County Waterford. Not a drop of rain fell during my cycle.

TCD offers Davitt exhibit onsite & online through June

Davitt

“Michael Davitt was a prolific writer, keeping diaries of his ideas and impressions while working as a freelance journalist for most of his career. Many of his articles took the form of letters to the press, which were later published as pamphlets. Through his journalism, Davitt practiced a form of activism, using his writing to highlight the struggles of society’s most marginalised and advocate for reforms and support.”

The quote is from the Character is better than wealth: The enduring legacy of Michael Davitt exhibition at Trinity College Dublin. It was curated by Ciara Daly, a project archivist at TCD, which holds some 7,000 items from Davitt’s lifetime, 1846-1906. He visited the United States six times between 1878 and 1901.

I spent a few days in February 2018 reviewing a portion of the Davitt archive, and visiting the Michael Davitt Musuem in Straide, County Mayo, where he was born and buried. The research related to my “Ireland Under Coercion, Revisited” project, mentioned in the previous post. See the posts Meeting Davitt and More Davitt. My piece “1888: An American Journalist In Ireland Meets Michael Davitt & Arthur Balfour” also published on The Irish Story later that year.

Davitt’s grave, Straide, County Mayo, February 2018.

HIATIUS: I am traveling and working on other projects. New posts will be infrequent through the spring and summer. I can be reached via contact form on the “About Me” page. Thanks, MH

An American journalist’s connection to Ireland and Egypt

HIATIUS: I am traveling and working on other projects. New posts will be infrequent through the spring and summer. I can be reached via contact form on the “About Me” page. Thanks, MH

What does a 3,500-year-old Egyptian red granite obelisk in New York City’s Central Park have to do with Ireland or Irish America? Nothing. But there are indirect connections.

Hurlbert

William Henry Hurlbert, a late-nineteenth century editor of the New York World, determined the city should match London’s acquisition of a similar object. His campaign resulted in the June 1880 arrival of the seven-story (69 feet) obelisk, seen below. It was raised in February 1881 on a small hill behind the Metrololitian Museum of Art, which opened about the same time. The MET holds one of the world’s largest Egyptian collections under its roof, in addition to the so-called “Cleopatra’s Needle” in the park.

The link to Ireland comes through Hurlbert, who traveled throughout the island in early 1888. Later that year he published the book, Ireland Under Coercion: The Diary of an American. The conservative Hurlbert was pro-landlord and anti-home rule. Read about his work in my 2018 blog series: “Ireland Under Coercion, Revisited.”

I have visited numerous places in Ireland that Hurlbert described in his book. I was pleased to remember his connection to the obelisk as I walked through Central Park on my way to the American Irish Historical Society. Founded in Boston in 1897 (Hurlbert died two years earlier), the Society since 1940 has been located at 991 Fifth Avenue, directly across from the MET, barely a five-minute walk from the granite tower.

American journalist William Henry Hurlbert led an 1880 campaign to bring this Egyptian obelisk to Central Park in New York City. Eight years later he wrote a book about Ireland.

Car bombs raise terrorist threats in Northern Ireland

UPDATE:

“No matter ‘how scaled down’ the New IRA is, there will always be dissidents married to the idea of the ‘long war’ and prepared to ‘carry the flame’ of violent republicanism from one generation to the next, regardless of the contrary views of the overwhelming mass of the population.” Nice roundup piece by Gerry Moriarty at the Irish Times. … A 66-year-old man has charged with several crimes in the Dunmurry episode.

ORIGINAL POST:

An April 25 car bomb explosion outside the Dunmurry, Northern Ireland, police station appears similar to an attempted attack on the Lurgan police station in March. The bomb did not explode in the earlier episode.  No one has been killed or injured.

Nationalist and unionist political leaders have condemed both episodes, which are being blamed on dissident Irish republicans. Whether the attacks signal a new upsurge in paramilitary violence remains to be seen. The annual tensions of the unionist community’s marching season and bonfires begin in two months.

HIATIUS: I am traveling and working on other projects. New posts will be infrequent through the spring and summer. Reach me from the contact form on the “About Me” page. Thanks, MH

Ireland’s 1926 census released to the public

HIATIUS: I am traveling and working on other projects. New posts will be infrequent through the spring and summer. Reach me from contact form on the “About Me” page. Thanks, MH

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More than 700,000 digitized pages of 1926 Irish Free State census return sheets have been released by the National Archives of Ireland. The sheets show names and individualized details such as religion, education, and occupation. They are a gold mine for historians and genealogists.

I located my relations in less than a minute. Begin your search here.

January 1926 US newspaper headline over Hearst story about census on both sides of the Irish border.

The 1926 census was the first headcount in Ireland since 1911. The 15-year stretch included the First World War (1914-1918), Irish War of Independence (1919-1921), and Irish Civil War (1922-1923).

“Matters were too disturbed in the country from one end to the other in 1921–the date of the last British census–for such an operation to be possible at all in Ireland,” Hearst’s International News Service explained to American newspaper readers in a January 1926 story. The return of the census signaled “another hopeful sign of the better relations between the long divided sections of Ireland, growing out of the amicable settlement of the boundary dispute, that they can agree to take their censuses on the same day, that is engage in the peaceful pursuit of counting heads instead of breaking them.”[1]”Irish Census To Be Completed Soon”, New Castle (Pa.) News, Jan. 20, 1926, and other papers.

Continue reading →

References

References
↑1 ”Irish Census To Be Completed Soon”, New Castle (Pa.) News, Jan. 20, 1926, and other papers.

Elegy for an Irish American Catholic Family

I wrote the piece linked below for Pittsburgh Quarterly. It’s personal and poignant.

HIATIUS: I am traveling and working on other projects. New content will be posted infrequently through the spring and summer months. Contact form on the “About Me” page. Thanks, MH

 

Fact-checking St. Patrick’s desnaking of Ireland

Those dang fact-checkers; always deflating a good political talking point or ruining a cherished legend. And so with St. Patrick driving the snakes out of Ireland. An online search of “St. Patrick” and “snakes” today returns this AI overview:

The legend of St. Patrick driving snakes out of Ireland is a popular myth symbolizing his eradication of paganism, not a factual event. Scientifically, snakes never inhabited post-glacial Ireland due to cold temperatures and surrounding oceans. The story first appeared in literature centuries after his life.

But the popular press of a century ago also fact-checked the legend. The clipping below is from the March 17, 1926, edition of the Washington Evening Star. William Montana Mann (1886-1960) was director of the National Zoo from 1925 until 1956. As an entemologist, he specialized in ants, not snakes. William Shepard Walsh (1854–1919) was an American folklorist and author. Walsh died seven years before the Evening Star quoted from his 1897 book, Curiosities of Popular Customs and of rites, ceremonies, observations, and miscellaneous antiquities. See page 790.

Washington Evening Star, March 17, 1926.

The Washington Post of a century ago gave a softer, cartoon treatment to the legend of St. Patrick, sans snakes, in addition to news coverage of the day’s festivities in the US capital. The graphic says Patrick baptized “over 12,000 people.” AI says “over 100,000, up to 130,000.”

Who really knows about such things?

Capital Irish Film Festival screens today’s Ireland

The 20th annual Capital Irish Film Festival (CIFF) runs February 26-March 1. The event is presented and produced by Solas Nua, a Washington, D.C.-based contemporary Irish arts organization, in partnership with the American Film Institute’s Silver Theatre & Cultural Center in Silver Spring, Maryland. See the full program, several individual films are linked below. Last year, a record €544 million was invested in the Irish economy across film, television, documentary, and animation projects, a 26 percent increase from 2024, according to Screen Ireland.

Maedhbh McCullagh became director of CIFF in 2022. The County Cavan native has worked as a multidisciplinary cultural producer, arts programmer, and creative consultant on both sides of the Atlantic. The transcript below is edited from our Feb. 18 Zoom call and email exchanges. MH

Maedhbh McCullagh

MH: Tell us a little about the history of the film festival and how it serves the mission of Solas Nua.

M. McCullagh: Solas Nua means new light in Irish. It’s a multidisciplinary arts organization that is dedicated to bringing the best of contemporary Irish arts to the Washington, D.C. area. It’s a nomadic organization presenting work in different parts of the city and is renowned for its innovative programming; commissioning, producing and presenting thought-provoking work throughout the year. And so, I suppose one could say that it’s an ambassador for Irish arts in D.C. and beyond.

The organization was founded in 2005 by Linda Murray who wanted to see work directly from Ireland being presented in D.C. She wanted to make people aware of Ireland as it is now. That was the seed of Solas Nua and the first film program was presented in 2006. The work reflects contemporary Ireland, not a nostalgic view of  Ireland of a bygone era that maybe wasn’t necessarily making its way to DC at that time. And so I think that set it apart. And that’s where the mission of Solas Nua grew from.

MH: Are audiences really still clinging to nostalgic views of Ireland?

M. McCullagh: Nostalgia is something we all feel but I’ve never heard of any CIFF patron complaining about a lack of films that depict Ireland in a traditional “Quiet Man” kind of way. Solas Nua is a presenter of contemporary Irish arts and this program is on a mission in that regard. But the thing about these films is they are neither one thing or another, they are a reflection of a diverse, pluralist, modern Irish society that is multilayered and complex, with an ever-evolving set of identities. This is what the Irish people do. We hold a multitude of things at once. We are the essence of contrasts, darkness and light, contemporary and yet steeped in tradition with these deep ties to the land, to our history, to our understanding of what our history is, and it’s continuously changing.

And in saying this, one of the through lines of this year’s program is the fact that several films use rare archival footage to great effect, evoking nostalgia for historical moments and events. Our opening night film, the East premiere gala screening of Lisa Barros D’sa and Glenn Leyburn’s “Saipan,” is a nail-biting, darkly comic drama recount​ing one of the most fractious falling-outs in the history of sport! The film explores the explosive clash between international soccer star Roy Keane (Éanna Hardwicke) and manager Mick McCarthy (Steve Coogan) on the island of Saipan just days before the Irish national football team competed in the 2002 FIFA World Cup. The directors use some historic footage, including news reports of the time, which roots the film in the period, and brings the viewer right back to that time.

MH: This year’s festival includes films by 15 women directors and 17 women writers. Tell us about how women’s contributions to Irish film have evolved over the last 20 years?

M. McCullagh: Over the last 20 years, the contribution of Irish women in film has gone from being quietly overlooked to being recognized and openly celebrated and getting the recognition it deserves. Back in the mid‑2000s, women were doing the work — writing, producing, shooting documentaries, keeping indie film alive — but rarely getting the credit, funding, or visibility. Over the past ten years, thanks to women-centered social movements, the determined work of academics and journalists, and the ongoing activism and advocacy of women professionals across the AV sector, critical focus and attention have illuminated and reflected the truth of women’s experiences and the lack of parity in pay and opportunities in the industry. Studies from groups such as Women in Film and Television Ireland and the National Women’s Council and publications such as Dr. Susan Liddy’s Women in Irish Film: Stories and Storytellers showed that women have driven innovation in screenwriting, documentary filmmaking, editing, and producing, often pushing Irish cinema toward more socially conscious and community‑rooted storytelling.  They’re driving some of the most exciting writing, directing, and documentary work, despite pervasive systemic barriers and an ongoing lack of representation.

Some of the 42 films being shown at the 20th Capital Irish Film Festival in DC.

MH: What else do you want people to know about this year’s festival?

M. McCullagh: First-off, with 42 films across 22 screenings, the program has something to offer everyone! Expect gripping dramas, Irish-language thrillers (BÁITE,AONTAS), music documentaries (CELTIC UTOPIA, BP FALLON ROCK’N’ROLL WIZARD VOL. 1, IN TIME: DONAL LUNNY), profiles of political leaders who lead with peace (GERRY ADAMS: A BALLYMUPRHY MAN, DANIEL O’CONNELL: THE EMANCIPATOR), and women fighting for justice (TESTIMONY).

Our program lifts up marginalized voices, with stories featuring trans relationships (GIRLS & BOYS, PUREBRED), the deaf community (A QUIET LOVE), and Ireland’s Traveller community (TRAVELLING BACK).

CIFF presents two 2026 Oscar entries, SANATORIUM (Ireland’s official entry for Best International Feature Film) and RETIREMENT PLAN (Nominee, Best Animated Short), and BAFTA-nominated A WANT IN HER (Outstanding Debut By A British Writer, Director Or Producer)

The festival opens with the East Coast premiere of SAIPAN, described above. The 5th annual Norman Houston Award will be presented as part of a double-billing of THREE KEENINGS and the third-ever screening of NO ORDINARY HEIST, with a reception sponsored by the Northern Ireland Bureau. The festival closes with Brandan Canty’s phenomenal feature directorial debut, the internationally renowned CHRISTY, a powerful, big-hearted coming-of-age story that won the Grand Prix at the 2025 Berlinale and just this week won Best Film and Best Director at the Irish IFTA Academy Awards.

It’s a fantastic four-day celebration of creativity and community, where you will see a rich and diverse program of world-class Irish films about Ireland or by Irish filmmakers. It’s an incredibly sociable and welcoming environment where you’ll meet like minded people who also love film, love Iearning about Ireland and discovering Irish talent, all in one space. There’s plenty of opportunity to meet up in between the screenings and in the evenings at our receptions and parties and our partner venue McGinty’s next door to the venue. I hope these films will inspire, uplift, spark dialogue, and cultivate an appreciation for the amazing craft of filmmaking and the value of seeing these artists’ work on the big screen.  Right now, more than ever before we need these diverse stories and perspectives to help foster a more inclusive, united, and engaged society. Pease join us February 26 – March 1.

From the archives: ‘Mrs. Brophy’s late husband’

James Brophy. Of Dublin? Or New York?

James Brophy died in Dublin on Feb. 12, 1921, the civilian casualty of a stray bullet in Ireland’s War of Independence. About the same time, an Irish immigrant of the same name disappeared from his family in New York City.

When newspapers America reported the death of Mr. Brophy in Dublin, Mrs. Brophy of New York urged U.S. diplomats and Irish police to investigate the case of her missing husband. The coincidence offers a glimpse of early 20th century Irish lives on both sides of the Atlantic, when handwritten letters crossed each other at sea and personal identification was more vague than today.

I wrote “Mrs. Brophy’s Late Husband” for The Irish Story in December 2016. It offers a unique view of Ireland’s revolutionary period and Irish America from the perspective of people at the edges of history. Such stories “humanize and enrich history by reminding us that the study of the past should include the study of the lives of ordinary people, their attitudes, beliefs, motives, experiences and actions,” Bill McDowell wrote in Historical Research: A Guide for Writers of Dissertations, Theses, Articles and Books.

This story has been a reader favorite in the past. I hope new audiences might enjoy it, too. MH