The value of Irish exports more than doubled between 1995 and 2000. Unemployment halved in the course of the decade, while Gross Domestic Product per head of population rose from three-quarters of the European Union average to 111 per cent. Mass emigration was replaced by a remarkable wave of inward migration from central and eastern Europe, Africa and elsewhere. Ireland became the great success story of economic globalisation.
In reality, the real Irish boom had ended by 2003 and was replaced by a frenzy of investment in property. Ireland’s membership of Europe’s new currency, the euro, which came into circulation on 1 January 2002, made credit cheap and easily available. This credit, most of which came ultimately from banks in Germany, France and Britain, was mainly spent on property: bank lending for construction increased between 1999 and 2007 from €5.5 billion to €96.2 billion. When the house of cards collapsed in 2008, Anglo was nationalised and eventually wound up, leaving Irish citizens with a bill of around €29 billion and an expensive lesson in the need to remember history.
100. Decommissioned AK47, 2005
It is a mass-manufactured, international commodity, as iconic in its own dark way as a Coca Cola bottle or an iPhone. Designed by self-taught Russian inventor Mikhail Kalashnikov, the Avtomat Kalashnikova-47, AK47 for short, went into production in 1947. Durable, reliable, adaptable and light, it was exported in huge numbers, initially to the armies of states friendly to the Soviet Union. Its low cost and ease of use, however, gradually made it the weapon of choice for guerrillas, militias and indeed criminal gangs.
The Provisional IRA made extensive use of AK47s, many of them supplied by Libyan leader Muammar Gadaffi in the 1980s, during the conflict in Northern Ireland. So-called Republican paramilitaries caused the majority (58 per cent) of the more than 3,600 deaths in the conflict, including those of 713 innocent civilians. The largest single category of victims, however, was innocent Catholic civilians killed by Loyalist paramilitaries.
By the 1980s, the point of all of this suffering was increasingly unclear. The IRA could not be defeated by military means, but neither could it gain a united Ireland by force. The conflict settled down into an apparently endless series of tit-for-tat killings, punctuated by larger atrocities. As British prime minister Tony Blair put it in 2006, ‘No one was ever going to win’.
There were large shifts in the wider context of the Troubles: the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, the increasingly pluralist nature of Southern Ireland, the effects of Ireland and Britain’s common membership of the European Union. Nevertheless, for a long time, the conflict seemed impervious even to these momentous changes. Slowly, however, new possibilities opened up. The IRA’s ally Sinn Féin, under the leadership of Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, began to see the potential for democratic political organisation. The British government made it clear in 1990 that it had no selfish ‘strategic or economic interest’ in retaining control of Northern Ireland. Irish governments, largely driven on by the Northern nationalist leader John Hume, stepped up their engagement in the search for a settlement. United States president Bill Clinton took a benign and active interest in the problem.
The tortuous peace process that led to IRA ceasefires in 1994 and 1996 and culminated in the historic Belfast Agreement of 1998, was bedevilled by the issue of IRA arms. Both governments insisted that the IRA should surrender its arsenal. When this proved impossible, a new word gained currency—decommissioning, the putting of weapons ‘beyond use’. In September 2005 the IRA finally decommissioned its weapons, laying the ground for a deal that had seemed utterly impossible—the sharing of power between Sinn Féin and the previously hardline Democratic Unionist Party. Most observers accepted that the decommissioning of mutually hostile mindsets would take a great deal longer, but, for once at least, courage, ingenuity and a refusal to accept the apparently inevitable seemed to be on the winning side of Irish history.
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Acknowledgments
In some ways, I have my father Samuel to thank for this book. He often brought me and my brothers and sisters to the National Museum in Kildare Street, giving me a great fondness for that wonderful national institution. That esteem has been enormously enhanced in the course of working on this project.
From the beginning, the idea of ‘A History of Ireland in 100 Objects’ was a collaboration between The Irish Times and the National Museum. It would not have even begun without the enthusiastic support and sound advice of the museum’s then director, Dr Pat Wallace. His commitment to the principle that the museum’s treasures are the common possession of the Irish people, and indeed of humanity as a whole, has been a guiding spirit of this whole enterprise. I am deeply grateful for his generosity and for the practical help and courtesy of Aoife McBride, secretary to the museum’s board.
Even that would have been insufficient, however, without the equally open and helpful attitude of the museum’s curators, who gave freely of their time and knowledge. Raghnall Ó Floinn and Lar Joye have had a particularly significant involvement in bringing the project to a conclusion. The luminous photographs by Valerie Dowling, Bryan Rutledge and Peter Moloney, with assistance from Anne Keenan, constitute at least half of the value of this whole project. Directors and curators of other museums and institutions were also immediately willing to help, showing a spirit of public service that should be acknowledged more often than it is.
I should stress, however, that the ultimate selection of the objects for the project is my own, as are any errors of fact or eccentricities of interpretation.
I would like in particular to thank the following people for direct assistance with specific objects or other aspects of the project:
Anita Barrett, Cataloguer, County Museum Dundalk
William Blair, Head of Human History, National Museums Northern Ireland
Mary Broderick, Curator, Ephemera Collection, National Library of Ireland
Mary Cahill, Assistant Keeper, Irish Antiquities Division, National Museum of Ireland
Brendan J. Cannon, Corporate Affairs Manager, Intel Ireland
Adrian Corcoran, Office of Public Works Manager, Derrynane House
Catriona Crowe, Head of Special Projects, National Archives of Ireland
Pauric Dempsey, Head of Communications and Public Affairs, Royal Irish Academy
Valerie Dowling, Senior Photographer, National Museum of Ireland
Clodagh Doyle, Assistant Keeper, Irish Folklife Division, National Museum of Ireland
Franz Fisher, Principal Researcher, St Patrick’s Confessio Hypertext Stack Project, Royal Irish Academy
Jennifer Goff, Assistant Keeper, Art and Industrial Division, National Museum of Ireland
Andy Halpin, Assistant Keeper, Irish Antiquities Division, National Museum of Ireland
Sandra Heise, Assistant Keeper, Art and Industrial Division, National Museum of Ireland
Lar Joye, Assistant Keeper, Art and Industrial Division, National Museum of Ireland
Anne Keenan, Digital Image Technician, National Museum of Ireland
Éamonn Kelly, Keeper of Irish Antiquities, National Museum of Ireland
Andrea Kennedy, Account Manager, JPR Belfast
Christina Kennedy, Senior Curator: Head of Collections, Irish Museum of Modern Art
Michael Kenny, former Keeper of Art and Industry, National Museum of Ireland
Adrian Kerr, Manager, Museum of Free Derry
Brian Lacey, former Chief Executive, Discovery Programme
Séamas Mac Philib, Assistant Keeper, Irish Folklife Division, National Museum of Ireland
Eamonn McEneaney, Director, Waterford Museum of Treasures
Jim McGreevy, Director of Collections and Interpretation, National Museums Northern Ireland
Niall E. McKeith, Curator, National Science Museum at Maynooth
Bernard Meehan, Keeper of Manuscripts, Trinity College Dublin
Rosa Meehan, Assistant Keeper, Irish Folklife Division, National Museum of Ireland
Cameron M
offett, Curator (Collections), West Territory, English Heritage
Peter Moloney, Photographer
Dermot Mulligan, Curator, Carlow County Museum
Conor Newman, Senior Lecturer, Department of Archaeology, National University of Ireland, Galway
Raghnall Ó Floinn, Head of Collections, National Museum of Ireland
Jane Ohlmeyer, Erasmus Smith’s Professor of Modern History, Trinity College Dublin
Michael Ruane, Pre-media Manager, The Irish Times
Bryan Rutledge, Photographer
Petra Schnabel, Assistant Librarian, Royal Irish Academy
Damian Shiels, Director, Rubicon Heritage Archaeological Services
Ronán Swan, Head of Archaeology, National Roads Authority
John Waddell, Emeritus Professor of Archaeology, National University of Ireland, Galway
Patrick F. Wallace, Former Director, National Museum of Ireland
Brian Walsh, Curator, County Museum Dundalk
Alex Ward, Assistant Keeper, Art and Industrial Division, National Museum of Ireland
Matt Wheeler, Curator/Manager, Irish Agricultural Museum
Audrey Whitty, Assistant Keeper, Art and Industrial Division, National Museum of Ireland
Thanks are also due to the anonymous reviewers for the Royal Irish Academy, for their views and suggestions, many of which have been quietly incorporated.
The other institutions centrally involved in this project are The Irish Times and the Royal Irish Academy. At The Irish Times, I would especially like to thank Geraldine Kennedy, Kevin O’Sullivan, Liam Kavanagh, Gerry Smyth, Conor Goodman, Lynda O’Keeffe, Liam Stebbing and Joyce Hickey. With the RIA, I have been fortunate to have fallen among the superb production team of Ruth Hegarty, Helena King and Fidelma Slattery, who have shown patience, ingenuity and professionalism beyond the bounds of normal endurance.
Picture Credits
1. Mesolithic fish trap: National Roads Authority. Photography by John Sunderland
2. Ceremonial axehead, 3. Neolithic bowl, 4. Flint macehead, 5. Neolithic bag, 6. Basket earrings, 7. Pair of gold discs, 8.Coggalbeg gold hoard, 9. Bronze Age funerary pots, 10. Tara torcs, 11. Mooghaun hoard, 12. Gleninsheen gold gorget, 13.Castlederg bronze cauldron, 14. Iron spearhead, 15. Broighter boat, 16. Armlet, Old-croghan man, 17. Loughnashade trumpet,18. Keshcarrigan bowl, 19. Corleck head, 20. Petrie ‘Crown’, 23. Mullaghmast stone, 24. St Patrick’s bell, 25. Springmount wax tablets, 26. Ballinderry brooch, 27. Donore handle, 29. ‘Tara’ brooch, 30. Ardagh chalice, 31. Derrynaflan paten, 32. Moylough belt shrine, 33. Rinnagan crucifixion plaque, 36. Ballinderry sword, 37. Decorated lead weights, 38. Roscrea brooch, 39. Slave chain, 40. Silver cone, 41. Carved crook, 42. Breac Maodhóg, 43. Clonmacnoise crozier, 44. Cross of Cong, 47. Figure of a horseman, 48. Domhnach Airgid, 50. Two coins, 51. Processional cross, 53. De Burgo-O’Malley chalice, 54. Kavanagh charter horn, 58. Morion, 62. O’Queely chalice, 63. Fleetwood cabinet, 65. King William’s gauntlets, 66. Crucifixion stone, 68. Wood’s halfpence, 69. Dillon regimental flag, 70. Rococo silver candlestick, 72. Cotton panel with Volunteer review, 73. Pike, 75.Penrose glass decanter, 76. Robert Emmet’s ring, 77. Wicker cradle, 78. Daniel O’Connell’s ‘chariot’, 79. Stokes ‘tapestry’, 81.Six-gallon cooking pot, 82. Emigrant’s teapot, 83. William Smith O’Brien gold cup, 84. Parnell silver casket, 86. Youghal lace collar, 87. GAA medal, 88. Reclining Buddha, 90. Lamp from River Clyde, 91. James Connolly’s shirt, 92. Rejected coin design, 93. Boyne coracle, 94. Eileen Gray chair, 95. Emigrant’s suitcase, 100. Decommissioned AK47: National Museum of Ireland. Photography by Valerie Dowling, Peter Moloney, Bryan Rutledge; image optimisation by Anne Keenan.
21. Cunorix stone: English Heritage. Photograpy by Paul Highnam.
22. St. Patrick’s Confessio, Book of Armagh, TCD MS52_22r, 28. Book of Kells, TCD MS58_99v, 114v, 124r; 61. Deposition on Atrocities, 1641, TCD MS840_027r: Trinity College Dublin Library.
34. Tall cross, Monasterboice: National Monuments Service, Photographic Unit.
35. Oseberg Ship: Kulturhistorisk museum, Universitetet i Oslo (Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo, Norway). Photography by Eirik Irgens Johnsen.
45. ‘Strongbow’s tomb’: Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin. Photography by Cyril Byrne.
46. Giraldus Cambrensis Ms 700 f.75v – Laudabiliter (photography by Irish Script on Screen), 59. Site of Leac na Ríogh, Richard Bartlett map of Tullaghogue, Co. Tyrone, Ms2656, illustration reproduced from RIA copy of G.A. Hayes McCoy (ed.), 1964 Ulster and other Irish maps c.1600 Dublin, Stationery Office for the Irish Manuscripts Commission, p. 11, 74. Act of Union blacklist, Ms 5696, 80. Captain Rock threatening letter, Ms 7519: National Library of Ireland.
49. Waterford Charter Roll, 52. Magi Cope: Waterford Museum of Treasures. Photography by Simon Hill, Scirebröc/Gamma Photos (49) and Terry Murphy Media (52).
55. Gallowglass gravestone replica: GAA Museum, Croke Park. Photography by David Sleator.
56. Book of Common Prayer: Royal Irish Academy.
57. Salamander pendant, 60. Wassail bowl, 71. Engraving of linen-makers, Ulster Museum Collection.67. Conestoga WagonUlster American Folk Park Collection. 89.Titanic launch ticket. Ulster Folk and Transport Museum Collection:National Museums Northern Ireland
64. Book of Survey and Distribution, Co. Meath and Down Survey Baronial Map, Barony of Duleek, Co. Meath: National Archives of Ireland.
85. Carlow Cathedral pulpit (Pic.2: St Patrick meeting with King Laoghaire at Tara explaining his fire on the Hill of Slane, which is in the background of the panel. Pic.3: St Laserian, one of three carved figures who stand at the base of the pulpit, is the patron of the Diocese of Leighlin. In the middle is St Patrick’s Angel Victor and the third is St Conleth, the patron of the Diocese of Kildare): Carlow County Museum.
93. Sketch of ‘The curach’ reproduced from RIA copy of William F. Wakeman, 1891 Archaeologica Hibernica: a hand-book of Irish antiquities, pagan and Christian (2nd edn; originally published 1848), Dublin and London, p. 263.
96. Washing machine: Irish Agicultural Museum. Photography by Patrick Browne.
97. Bloody Sunday handkerchief: Mirrorpix.
98. Intel Microprocessor chip: Intel Ireland.
99. Anglo-Irish Bank sign: Getty Images.
Suggested Reading
Jonathan Bardon 1982 Belfast: an illustrated history. Belfast. Blackstaff Press.
Jonathan Bardon 1992 A history of Ulster. Chester Springs, PA. Dufour Editions.
T.C. Barnard 2005 A guide to the sources for the history of material culture in Ireland, 1500–2000. Dublin. Four Courts.
Jonah Barrington 1809 Historic anecdotes and secret memoirs of the legislative union between Great Britain and Ireland. London. G. Robinson.
Jonathan Bell and Mervyn Watson 2008 A history of Irish farming 1750–1950. Dublin. Four Courts.
Walter Benjamin 1968 Illuminations: essays and reflections. New York. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Eileen Black (ed.) 1991 Ulster Museum: catalogue of the permanent collection. Belfast. Ulster Museum.
William Carleton 1881 ‘Wildgoose Lodge’, in The works of William Carleton (3 vols, vol. 3), 936–44. New York.
Jude Collins 2012 Whose past is it anyway: the Easter Rising, the Ulster Covenant and the Battle of the Somme. Dublin. History Press.
Commissioners of Irish Poor Enquiry 1835 Poor inquiry—(Ireland): report on the state of the Irish poor in Great Britain. London. HMSO.
James Cranford 1642 The teares of Ireland. London. A.N. for John Rothwell.
Bernadette Cunningham and Siobhán Fitzpatrick (eds) 2009 Treasures of the Royal Irish Academy Library. Dublin. Royal Irish Academy.
Thomas D’Arcy McGee 1852 A history of the Irish settlers in North America: from the earliest period to the Census of 1850. Boston. Patrick Donahoe.
Gustave de Beaumont 1839 L’Irlande: sociale, politique e religeuse (Ireland: social, political and religious). Paris. Michel Lévy Frère.
Herbert Da
vis (ed.) 1935 The Drapier’s letters to the people of Ireland against receiving Wood’s Halfpence by Jonathan Swift. Oxford. Clarendon Press.
I. Delamere and C. O’Brien 2005 500 years of Irish silver. National Museum of Ireland Monograph Series, 1. Dublin. National Museum of Ireland.
Robert James Dickson 1966 Ulster emigration to Colonial America 1718–1775. Belfast. Ulster Historical Foundation.
C. Doyle et al. 2007 Guide to the National Museum of Ireland—Country Life. Dublin. National Museum of Ireland.
Mairead Dunlevy 1999 Dress in Ireland. Cork. Collins Press.
N.M. Dunlevy, Michael Kenny and S. McElroy 2007 Guide to the National Museum of Ireland—Collins Barracks. Dublin. National Museum of Ireland.
Robert Emmet 1922 Speech from the dock: Delivered at the Sessions House, Dublin, before Lord Norbury, on being found guilty of high treason as leader of the insurrection of 1803. Dublin. Free Press Printery.
Emyr Estyn Evans 1957 Irish folk ways. London. Routledge and Keegan Paul. (Reprinted 2000; London. Dover Publications.)
R.F. Foster 2011 Charles Stewart Parnell: the man and his family. London. Faber and Faber.
Peter Fox (ed.) 1986 Treasures of the Library, Trinity College, Dublin. Dublin. Royal Irish Academy for the Library of Trinity College Dublin.
Edward Augustus Freeman 2010 A short history of the Norman conquest of England. Charleston, SC. BiblioBazaar. (Reprint; first published 1880, Oxford, Clarendon Press.)
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