Ireland
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I never got the whole Jane Austen hype. I find her stories boring and there is nothing I can identify with. However the fact that there is a Limerick connection to her I do find intriguing. And I believe if she had lived in Limerick her stories may have been a lot more exiting, but…
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World War II officially started on 3 September 1939. The Nazis wasted very little time in committing their first mass murder during the war. It was only hours after the war was declared. The S.S. Athenia was commanded by Captain James Cook. He left Glasgow for Montreal via Liverpool and Belfast. She carried 1,103 passengers,…
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Nowadays boarding a plane is nearly as common as get on a train. Come to think of it I have been probably more on a plane then in a train. However in 1954 flying was quite expensive and was only affordable for a few or after saving money for it for possibly year, especially for…
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I was reminiscing on TV shows I watched as a kid in the Netherlands. One of my favourite shows was a series called “Q&Q”. It was about 2 teenage detectives. The boys named Aristides Quarles and Wilbur Quant accidentally snap a photo of a dead body in the woods. After finding the place where the…
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(First published September 2, 2018) The position of Ireland during World War II was a bit of a tricky one. A lot of people actually were pro-German, not so much because they agreed with the German policies but more because they were at war with Britain, and there was still this feeling that Britain’s enemy…
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Because today is International Day of the Disappeared There are few things more unsettling than a person who simply disappears. When someone dies, however tragically, there is usually a funeral, a grave, a place where flowers can be laid, and eventually—however painful—some measure of acceptance. When a person vanishes without trace, none of those things…
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On the morning of 27 August 1979, Louis Francis Albert Victor Nicholas Mountbatten, 1st Earl Mountbatten of Burma, a member of the British royal family and one of the most prominent figures of the twentieth century, was assassinated by the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA). The bombing, carried out while Mountbatten was aboard his fishing…
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In the years 535 and 536, several remarkable aberrations in world climate took place. They were the most severe and protracted short-term episodes of cooling in the Northern Hemisphere in the last 2 Millennia. Including bizarrely low-temperatures, with snow fall during the summer months in some locations; widespread crop-failures and famine; greatly decreased levels of…
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In the spring of 1919, as the Irish War of Independence was beginning to spread across the island, an extraordinary and largely anomalous episode in revolutionary history unfolded in the mid-west of Ireland. For two weeks, from 14 to 27 April, Limerick was effectively governed not by the British authorities or the newly established Dáil…
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(Originally posted November 2016) On the morning of October 3rd, 1975, Dr. Tiede Herrema was driving from his home in Castletroy, County Limerick, to a meeting at the Ferenka steel plant in Annacotty when he was abducted by two Irish republicans, Marion Coyle and Eddie Gallagher. Herrema had been sent by the parent company in…
History of Sorts 