Niamh Gallagher

In​ 2015 Channel 4 commissioned a script for a comedy series called Hungry, set during the Great Famine. There were protests outside its offices and more than 42,000 people signed a petition calling for the show to be dropped. At a heated debate on comedy and censorship at the London Irish Comedy Festival, members of the audience made their views on the matter clear. ‘Humour is an...

The​ 1996 film Michael Collins shows a badly wounded James Connolly being carried on a stretcher to a chair in Kilmainham Gaol, to which he is tied before being shot by a British firing squad. Connolly was one of the fifteen rebel leaders executed in May 1916 for their part in the Easter Rising, when at least 1200 rebels battled the British forces in Dublin for six days with the aim of...

On 22 June​ 1922, the doors of Liverpool Street Station were closed for an hour to all but invited guests. Flags on the roof were set at half-mast while a ceremony took place to commemorate the men from the Great Eastern Railway Company who had died in the First World War. The guest of honour was Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson, who unveiled a memorial in the station’s booking hall. It...

Younger generations have no direct memory of the conflict and tend not to share the social conservatism of their elders. It is sometimes said that the South jumped straight from the 19th to the 21st century in a few decades: there has been a decline in religious observance, a growth in wealth, the incorporation of people of different ethnicities, and the passage of legislation allowing gay marriage and abortion. So why are we back to talking about the border?