Earlier this month, I overcame the Moscow archival bureaucracy and received scans of a Personnel File belonging to an Irish Communist whose life I have been tracing for the past year. I knew exactly what would be contained within the folder - a 41 question anketa, a formalised questionnaire that all activists who worked for the Communist…

National Poetry Day seems a good time to introduce a great poem by a remarkable Irish poet, Leslie H. Daiken. Born in Dublin in 1912, Daiken (originally Yodaiken) was an Irish author, poet, and radical political activist. He graduated with an M.Litt from Trinity College Dublin in 1933 and immersed himself in communist politics, first…

On Sunday, Kevin Myers, a columnist beloved of Irish editors in search of "controversy", was fired from the Sunday Times due to anti-Semitic comments. That very same day, Myers spoke at the Cork History Festival. These events and the social media conversation surrounding them got me thinking about the roster of speakers and topics we find at history festivals.…

    Tracing a life lived across several continents can be tricky – especially when the person you are tracing regularly changed her name. I have found the woman known variously as Emmy de Jager, Elisa Kaemmerer, Alida de Jäger, Alida Leonhard and Alida von Leonhard Kämmerer in some unusual places; flirting with soldiers in…

Amidst the commemorations of the Easter Rising in March of 2016, no mention was made of a Russian connection to the seismic events that took place in Dublin one hundred years previously. Remarkably, however, a small delegation of Bolsheviks was in fact dispatched to the capital shortly after the republican insurrection took place. The precise…