Ida Milne

This book looks at the impact of the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic, the greatest flu the world has ever known, on Irish society and politics, at a time when that society was going through the trauma of the war and the rapid move towards independence. The book also looks at contemporary medical understanding of the disease, and how it punctured the new-found confidence of the medical profession in bacteriology, as how they failed  to find an effective treatment.  Most poignantly, it looks at the patient experience of disease, through a series of oral history interviews,  seeing how families sometimes lost several members, and economic circumstances were often changed by the loss of one or both parents. It tells the story of small children who survived against the odds, and lived well into their nineties or hundreds to tell the tale.  The story of the pandemic in Ireland interweaves with the other contemporary significant events in Irish society, and its impact on these events has curiously been largely ignored. Throughout, the work sets the Irish experience of the pandemic in an international context. Review of Stacking the Coffins here: http://www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/9781526122698/

One hundred years after the influenza pandemic of 1918, scholars continue to assess the medical history, public health response, and social impact of the disease. Milne (Maynooth Univ., Belfast), however, is the first to publish a full-length treatise of the 1918 influenza in Ireland, examining the ways the illness politically affected Ireland's move toward independence; influenced public health decisions and delivery; and radically altered the lives of individual Irish people, still reeling under the trauma of the First World War. Based on Milne's 2009 doctoral dissertation, this text demonstrates an admirable and comprehensive understanding of previous work on the epidemic, including Alfred Crosby's benchmark study America's Forgotten Pandemic (2nd. ed., 2003); Niall Johnson's Britain and the 1918-19 Influenza Pandemic (2006); and Jeffery Taubenberger's genetic research of the virus (included in the anthology The Spanish Influenza Pandemic of 1918-19, edited by Howard Phillips and David Killingray, 2003). Milne also adeptly handles novel primary research, including a close study of contemporary Irish newspapers and oral history interviews with survivors and family members of victims.'
D. A. Henningfeld, emerita, Adrian College, Choice
Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readers

'Milne brilliantly reports on interviews she has done with survivors or with the families of people who died in the pandemic. Her material, collected in 2006 is unique, and gives an understanding of the contemporary suffering and long-lasting pain associated with bereavement that cold statistics cannot give.'
Professor Svenn-Erik Mamelund, Oslo Metropolitan University

'Stacking the coffins is a superb new book on how this influenza affected Ireland. [.] I cannot recommend it enough.'
Dr Maurice Gueret, Editor of the Irish Medical Directory

'The Irish part of the disease's global history has long been overlooked, as have the experiences of the families and communities it afflicted. By telling their stories, Milne's thorough book makes an important contribution to our social and medical history.'
Christopher Kissane, The Irish Times

'Stacking the Coffins is an excellent and very accessible study of a crisis that can be over­shadowed in hindsight by the drama of war and political upheaval, but which had a profound impact on those who lived through it. By taking a genuinely holistic approach, it illuminates much besides its subject matter. It is a study of a society in the grip of a crisis and, as such, offers a significant and distinctive contribution co an understanding of Irish life in a period usually defined by its revolution.'
John Gibney, Books Ireland, November 2018
'Long in the making, this is the definitive study of a major but largely neglected disaster that ravaged Ireland a century ago. Milne tells the story with empathy, objectivity, and flair. She is thorough and convincing on the Great Flu's peculiar demography and on its chronology and geography, and excellent also on how officialdom tried to cope with the crisis and on how the politics of the day influenced the discourse around it. A real highlight is the chapter on the oral history of the Flu, which includes interviews with a few centenarians! A very fine book on an important topic.'
Cormac Ó Gráda, author of Ireland: A New Economic History and Famine: A Short History

'"Take regular meals to keep the body in peak condition, and if you get home wet or late take a hot glass of lemonade immediately. Inhale eucalyptus from a piece of cotton wool several times a day. Go to bed immediately if you get the flu." Such was the medical advice in the midst of the 1918 influenza epidemic, Ida Milne reports, which would have provided little solace in the face of the worst holocaust of disease in modern times. Milne has produced a fascinating account, based on meticulous and wide-ranging research, including oral histories, of responses to this epidemic in Ireland. The chapter dealing with oral histories is particularly poignant and priceless. In this book, Milne explores the ways in which the epidemic penetrated and impacted on all aspects of Irish society, at a time when the country was going through rapid and sometimes traumatic societal and political changes. The book makes an important contribution to the modern social history of health and medicine and to the history of Ireland in the twentieth century. Throughout she ponders: "why was a disease that dominated the columns of newspapers, was so immersed in the popular psyche, connected to the growing nationalism, a disease which was part of a big international story, left out of Irish historiography for almost 100 years?" Milne admirably remedies that omission.'
Professor Linda Bryder, University of Auckland

'Stacking the Coffins is an important new addition to the social history of the 1918 influenza pandemic. Milne carefully uncovers the ways in which influenza heated a bubbling stew of war, politics, and a failing medical system in Ireland. Stories of suffering told by survivors bring human voices and experiences to the cold count of 20,000 Irish dead. The survivors' vivid memories, and Milne's meticulous mining of archival sources, reveal a forgotten crisis that ruptured families and played a role in reconfiguring twentieth-century Irish society.'
Ann Herring, Professor Emerita, McMaster University

'The first-hand memories of over 25 people who lived through Ireland's "Black Flu" alone make this book moving, dramatic and engrossing reading.'
Howard Phillips, University of Cape Town, author of 'Black October': The Impact of the Spanish Flu Epidemic on South Africa

Edited by Mary Muldowney with Ida Milne.
The 1913 Dublin Strike and Lockout directly affected more than 20,000 people, and their families, as well as the two who have come to be viewed as the main protagonists, James Larkin and William Martin Murphy.  This book explores the post memory of the seminal event in Dublin history, in a series of essays based on interviews with family of some of those involved.  For many, the legacy of the Lockout has been their own active interest in trade unionism, as well as the stories handed down through generations. The book is the work of members of the 1913 Alternative Visions Oral History Group, trade unionists and community activists who were trained in the professional and ethical collection of oral history by Muldowney and Milne.

In recent weeks, outbreaks of measles in Europe have caused concern for health authorities and set the alarm bells ringing here too. Ireland saw its first measles death in several years this week. This follows four measles cases reported in 2023, two in 2022, none in 2021 and five in 2020. No deaths were reported in any of those years...

While medical doctors could not agree on a useful medicine to treat flu patients in the 1918-19 pandemic, it was generally agreed that the best chance of survival was offered by good nursing. with nutritious food and plenty of liquids - including whiskey and brandy.

Sometimes, in the tedium of trawling through dry-as-dust official reports, we historians have a find that initially seems little more than an amusing distraction, but later turns into a way of casting light on our topic. One such moment for me came when I found that the legendary Dublin medical officer of health, Sir Charles Cameron,  had offered a bounty on paper bags of flies, to encourage people to collect flies during an epidemic of diarrhoea. The scheme and its execution raise all sorts of issues about contemporary ideas about disease and sanitation.

Past pupils from the Jesuit-run Clongowes Wood College in Co Kildare, Ireland, paid an extraordinary contribution to World War One, with over 600 Old Clongownians serving with various armies in the war. Some 95  OCs died in the war, among their number  Irish nationalist politicians Willie Redmond and Tom Kettle. In September, 2014, a group from the school community visited Flanders and the Somme to remember their contribution.  This is my account of the trip. http://www.clongowes.eu/wwi-battlefields-trip/

The 1918-19 influenza pandemic was ignored by Irish historians until the twenty-first century; this lacuna meant that there was no national narrative of the Irish experience which would have enabled those who lived through the flu to situate their personal experience within the larger picture. As a result, memory of the pandemic was obscured, remaining an isolated experience rather than part of a larger story. As work began to be published, the story became more widely known, and people got curious about their familial association with it. The 2018 centenary offered an opportunity for the author, as an historian of influenza memory, to give public talks where audiences could share the family memory of the pandemic. Sometimes these memories showed clear evidence of incorporating the author's own and other influenza historians' research into the new narrative. This chapter traces the changing narrative of 1918-19 influenza memory at the time of the centenary in an Irish context.

In the late summer of 1911, Sir Charles Cameron, the veteran Medical Officer of Health for Dublin, offered a bounty of three pence on paper bags filled with dead flies, hoping that boys in the tenements might be tempted to the hunt. The immediate impetus for this creative scheme was an outbreak of infant diarrhoea during a heatwave in August and September. Infant mortality rates from diarrhoea rose significantly in Irish urban areas especially Dublin and also across Britain, Europe and North America,  as the mercury reached higher than average temperatures.  The diarrhoea epidemic among Dublin’s poor children was exacerbated by the appalling conditions of tenement living: one third of the city’s population lived in dilapidated tenements, some 21,133 families lived in just one room dwellings, often sharing a bed, with a bucket or chamber pot for a toilet, running water only available from an outside tap and sharing an outside privy with other families living in the house. Cameron, who was a frequent and empathic visitor to the homes of Dublin’s poor as he tried to ameliorate their conditions  had noticed that flies seemed to be plentiful in those homes where children were suffering from diarrhoea. He described a scene from a one room tenement in Foley Street, where he saw an unusually large number of flies: ‘The table and bed were literally covered with them.  The room and all in it were very dirty, and the remains of the morning repast were scattered about on the table and bed.’ From his contemporary understanding of medical science, Cameron thought flies were the root cause of the epidemic: ‘These insects cause much of the diarrhoea now prevalent in Dublin'.

The 1911 infant diarrhoea epidemic was part of a bigger picture, a syndemic of infectious disease which still posed a constant threat to the Dublin children and their families in the 1910s. While the lower socio-economic classes were most affected, the better off did not escape: Cameron himself had lost an eight-year-old son  to scarlet fever, and two grown sons to tuberculosis. This chapter gives an overview of  the infant diarrhoea epidemic and other infectious diseases among Dublin children  in the 1910s.

In 1918-19, with Ireland in transition from British rule towards independence, the Local Government Board for Ireland, the body responsible for the supervision of Poor Law dispensary system and sanitation, faced what turned out to be the last great crisis before its abolition.  The 1918-19 influenza pandemic, which killed at least 20,057 people and infected an estimated 800,000 on the island, placed an enormous stress on the under-funded, over-stretched and awkwardly structured health system. This chapter will explore how the influenza crisis was handled in Ireland, and will suggest that during the influenza epidemic, the Local Government Board for Ireland was widely perceived as being either unwilling or incapable of devising a plan of action to deal with the epidemic. The LGB was portrayed, through reports from Boards of Guardians’ meetings in the newspapers, as being quite obstructive to Boards of Guardians as they tried to cope with increased demands on medical staff and resources during the crisis. In the absence of a centralised crisis management strategy emerging from the LGB, local authorities fulfilled their statutory obligations in relation to sanitation, while a range of voluntary healthcare providers, from hospitals and charitable societies to landlords and neighbours, devised localised strategies to feed and nurse the ill.

The 1918-19 influenza pandemic is officially accredited with killing  20,057 people on the island of Ireland, and  probably made more than 800,000 people ill here.  This chapter draws on a collection of interviews with child survivors of the pandemic. These interviews show that the epidemic made a lasting impact on the memories of  children, even though the event was puzzling as they did not have enough information to make sense of what was happening. Some became curious listeners, trying to glean scraps of information about it from newspapers and from hushed adult conversations. For those who actually suffered from the disease, the event was frequently recalled as snapshots or scenes between the initial illness and the recovery as they drifted in and out of consciousness in a febrile state. Most recovered, but for some, life or their health changed.

The home of Independent Newspapers from 1925 to 2004 was Independent House, a labyrinthine block of linked buildings stretching from Middle Abbey Street back to Prince’s Street, where the vans queued to collect the newspapers for distribution. On the west side, it was bordered by Prince’s Lane. The Middle Abbey Street facade was four stories high above street level, with the fourth floor housing senior management who were known as just that, the Fourth Floor, appropriately enough for heads of the main Fourth Estate institution in the country; behind that facade the buildings ranged in height and style, built and altered as function demanded.  At the centre of the structure was a small courtyard, the mishmash of exterior walls towering high overhead.  Here too was the library, a long narrow building with an apex roof of glass, and a crudely carved wooden statue of the Virgin Mary at the end.  Independent House’s own moving statue, it whirled around on its base to face into the room, a relic of an earlier era when the staff would congregate to say the rosary. Behind the Abbey Street facade, the ground floor housed the machine hall, location of the printing presses; when each edition went to press, the building shook as the machinery clanked into action.  The familiar rumble meant that all was well within the business; failure to start on time, a change in the noise, or a sudden stop caused a general alarm and a flurry of anxious discussion.

The labyrinthine and varied style of the buildings was mirrored in the composition of the staff, with new groups added on and removed or expanded as need required.    Three groups of employees - journalists, clerks and printers - dominated trade and social relationships within the company. Each group zealously guarded their own areas of expertise, wary of encroachment on tasks under their control by another group and from changes planned by management. They shared, however, the thrill of working for a newspaper group: the smell of the ink, the roar of the presses, the mad dash of the distribution vans, the feeling that your work was a small part of history, no matter what function you performed within the building. Rita Doyle, who started working in Independent House at the age of 16 in 1959, and stayed for the rest of her working life  - moving from advertising to accounts, and finally personnel - was not untypical. “I loved going into that building, going up the steps every day with the Nation sign on the wall, the sense of history when you would go up the steps, that you were part of history.” 

This chapter focuses on the employment profile of the Independent staff while also examining the terms and conditions of those whose combined efforts produced three national titles.

Historians of health often find themselves bridging the gap between the past and the present, introducing research about past findings of health management to present day crises. Part of my work trying to explain the changing landscape of childhood disease in 20th century Ireland becomes entangled in 21st century controversies on the internet about measles vaccination. The publication of an article linking MMR vaccination and a small group of children with autistic-spectrum behavioural problems by Andrew Wakefield and others in The Lancet in February 1998, had quite a dramatic effect. Fears about the links escalated through the internet. News and social media and academic studies alike describe vaccination rates as ‘plummeting’ in many countries as a result. Even though Wakefield et al’s article has since been retracted, and his evidence discredited, the antivaccination lobby has gained credence to the extent that there were 600 cases of measles in the United States in 2014, a country where the disease had previously been declared eradicated. Over 22,000 measles cases have been reported from 7 countries in Europe in 2014 and 2015, again an escalation in case numbers.1 ‘How do we get worried new mothers to listen to us? How can we convince them of our expertise, when they have spent hours researching vaccination on the internet, trying to find the best thing for their precious baby?’ A vaccination manager voices the difficulties of persuading new mothers to let their babies have the MMR. For some new parents, the digital world carries an authority they don’t necessarily understand medical workers they encounter in real life to have. The internet provides an opportunity for parallel worlds of information, with alternative authorities, alternative sources and alternative facts, which are cleverly designed to look authoritative to parents. So how can that be countered? This paper explores the parallel ‘facts’ of vaccination conundrum, and looks at how I want to use my research with statistics and oral histories to tell the story of the relative success of measles vaccination, pointing to the numbers who used to die before vaccination was possible, and to the lasting damage caused to many survivors

The 1918–19 influenza pandemic was ignored by Irish historians until the twenty-first century; this lacuna meant that there was no national narrative of the Irish experience which would have enabled those who lived through the flu to situate their personal experience within the larger picture. As a result, memory of the pandemic was obscured, remaining an isolated experience rather than part of a larger story. As work began to be published, the story became more widely known, and people got curious about their familial association with it. The 2018 centenary offered an opportunity for the author, as an historian of influenza memory, to give public talks where audiences could share the family memory of the pandemic. Sometimes these memories showed clear evidence of incorporating the author’s own and other influenza historians’ research into the new narrative. This chapter traces the changing narrative of 1918–19 influenza memory at the time of the centenary in an Irish context.

The'Spanish'Influenza pandemic killed 40 to 100 million people during 1918 and 1919, and probably infected about one fifth of the world's population. It disrupted society and economies, debilitated all the armed forces involved in WWI, forced international health ...

The 1918–19 influenza pandemic was ignored by Irish historians until the twenty-first century; this lacuna meant that there was no national narrative of the Irish experience which would have enabled those who lived through the flu to situate their personal experience within the larger picture. As a result, memory of the pandemic was obscured, remaining an isolated experience rather than part of a larger story. As work began to be published, the story became more widely known, and people got curious about their familial association with it. The 2018 centenary offered an opportunity for the author, as an historian of influenza memory, to give public talks where audiences could share the family memory of the pandemic. Sometimes these memories showed clear evidence of incorporating the author’s own and other influenza historians’ research into the new narrative. This chapter traces the changing narrative of 1918–19 influenza memory at the time of the centenary in an Irish context.

The global spread of the coronavirus pandemic has prompted inevitable comparisons with the flu pandemic of 1918–1920. However, in order for such comparisons to be fruitful, it is necessary to acknowledge the similarities between the two outbreaks and their differences. This paper compares different aspects of the "Spanish" flu and coronavirus pandemics in Ireland and the UK during the two periods. The first part of the paper provides a general overview, taking account of the nature of the two diseases and the contexts in which they occurred. The following two sections explore the extent to which both outbreaks exposed underlying social and economic inequalities and the measures taken by central and local government, as well as civil society, to combat the spread of disease. The final section examines the extent to which both pandemics highlighted existing failures and sparked demands to "build back better."

The ‘Spanish’ influenza pandemic killed between 40 million and 100 million people during 1918 and 1919, infecting an estimated one fifth or more of the world’s population. It disrupted societies and economies, debilitated the armed forces involved in World War 1, persuaded international health authorities to set up a global influenza monitoring system and left a lasting legacy of health problems for the survivors and of tragic loss and altered family circumstances for the bereaved. It remains one of the largest epidemic disease events in world history, ranked alongside the plagues of Justinian and the Black Death. Spanish flu occurred at the tail end of the first world war; the expectation that some kind of terrible disease would emerge from such a large war was so great that many of the countries involved had made plans to deal with post war disease; newspapers, even the regional newspapers here in Ireland, constantly referred to the expectation that some kind of extreme disease incident would accompany the end of the war and the return of the soldiers from the horrors of the trenches of Europe. The leader writer of Wexford’s People echoed the sentiments of many: “A plague of some kind follows all great wars.” Ironically, the disease that did emerge was initially believed to have come from Spain, a country not involved in the war. The illness of King Alfonso XIII and several thousand of his courtiers was widely reported, although by then the French, US, British and German armies were decimated by influenza. Wartime censorship prevented these stories making it into newsprint – neither side wanted to alert the other to its weakness. So ‘Spanish’ is actually a misnomer. While the exact origin of this influenza is hotly debated, there is little doubt that it emerged and spread swiftly as a result of the conditions of war. Soldiers and the food to maintain the armies –poultry and pigs also happen to be vectors of influenza – were often housed close to each other in cramped conditions. Ships carrying soldiers to and from the arenas of war are also understood to have played a major role in the global distribution of the disease. What is not in doubt is that it spread quickly and efficiently, passing through most of the world’s populations, with only some remote populations escaping. That was what made its death toll so enormous, as in a way, it was not a particularly lethal disease. Experts on the 1918-19 influenza generalize that it killed in the region of 2.5 per cent of those who actually caught it, whereas the current H5N1 or avian influenza kills in excess of 50 per cent of its victims. There were three discernible waves of the disease in Ireland, between June 1918 and April 1919. Using statistical evidence to make a very broad generalization, the epidemic first hit the north east in June of 1918, and moved downwards. It was a relatively mild wave, most dramatic in Belfast and other industrial towns in Ulster. Although there were many ill, the number of deaths was not to prove as high as those in the second wave and third waves. The second wave, in the autumn and winter, mainly affected Leinster and again, but to a lesser extent, Ulster, starting at the eastern seaboard counties (it came in though the ports) and then moving inland. The epidemic seemed to move through the midlands towards the western seaboard in the third wave in the spring of 1919. There are, of course, exceptions to this rule, usually created by an unusual movement of people. Donegal and Dublin and its hinterland were exceptions to this rule, badly affected in waves two and three. At its height here in the autumn of 1918, it effectively silenced communities as it passed through them. People were falling ill in the streets, many schools libraries and other public buildings were closed, church services and public meetings cancelled, court sittings abandoned, matches postponed, streets in Dublin and other towns in Leinster and Ulster were being disinfected. Hospitals, already facing acute financial difficulties caused by perennial problem of inadequate funding, the pressure of accommodating sick or wounded soldiers and substantial increases in the price of many commodities – including medicine, coal, bread, grain, potatoes, sugar and alcohol, found themselves overflowing with influenza patients, and were forced to convert surgical wards into medical wards to treat sufferers. Most of the vast numbers of ill were cared for – or not, in the case of the less fortunate – at home. Doctors, the mainstay of the Poor Law health system, worked around the clock to treat their patients, getting little thanks for their diligence from their employer, the increasingly out of touch and apparently uncaring Local Government Board for Ireland, based in the Custom House. Morgues, undertakers and cemeteries were queueing up the dead for burial, and it was not unusual to have several dead from the same family. People who lived through it sometimes noted that the…

The'Spanish'Influenza pandemic killed 40 to 100 million people during 1918 and 1919, and probably infected about one fifth of the world's population. It disrupted society and economies, debilitated all the armed forces involved in WWI, forced international health ...

This article explores employment in Ireland's leading newspaper group, Independent Newspapers, from 1960 to the early 21st century, through oral history interviews with members of the clerical, print and journalist staffs.  It examines internal hierarchies, gender issues, and changes wrought by the introduction of technologies, as management made mass redundancies to slash wage bills.  While the newspapers produced by the newspaper industry are a major source for historians, and the journalists who write them are sometimes written about by historians, little work has been done on the operation of the newspaper as an industry.  This article aims to foster some discussion on the newspaper industry as a workplace.

The ‘Spanish’ influenza pandemic killed between 40 million and 100 million people during 1918 and 1919, infecting an estimated one fifth or more of the world’s population.  It disrupted societies and economies, debilitated the armed forces involved in World War 1, persuaded international health authorities to set up a global influenza monitoring system and left a lasting legacy of health problems for the survivors and of tragic loss and altered family circumstances for the bereaved. It remains one of the largest epidemic disease events in world history, ranked alongside the plagues of Justinian and the Black Death.

Spanish flu occurred at the tail end of the first world war; the expectation that some kind of terrible disease would emerge from such a large war was so great that many of the countries involved had made plans to deal with post war disease; newspapers, even the regional newspapers here in Ireland, constantly referred to the expectation that some kind of extreme disease incident would accompany the end of the war and the return of the soldiers from the horrors of the trenches of Europe. The leader writer of Wexford’s People  echoed the sentiments of many: “A plague of some kind follows all great wars.”

Ironically, the disease that  did emerge was initially believed to have come from Spain, a country not involved in the war.  The illness of King Alfonso XIII and several thousand of his courtiers was widely reported, although by then the French, US, British and German armies were decimated by influenza. Wartime censorship prevented these stories making it into newsprint – neither side wanted to alert the other to its weakness. So ‘Spanish’ is actually a misnomer. While the exact origin of this influenza is hotly debated, there is little doubt that it emerged and spread swiftly as a result of the conditions of war. Soldiers and the food to maintain the armies –poultry and pigs also happen to be vectors of influenza – were often housed close to each other in cramped conditions. Ships carrying soldiers to and from the arenas of war are also understood to have played a major role in the global distribution of the disease.  What is not in doubt is that it spread quickly and efficiently, passing through most of the world’s populations, with only some remote populations escaping.  That was what made its death toll so enormous, as in a way, it was not a particularly lethal disease. Experts on the 1918-19 influenza generalize that it killed in the region of 2.5 per cent of those who actually caught it, whereas the current H5N1 or avian influenza kills in excess of 50 per cent of its victims.

There were three discernible waves of the disease in Ireland, between June 1918 and April 1919.  Using statistical evidence to make a very broad generalization, the epidemic first hit the north east in June of 1918, and moved downwards. It was a relatively mild wave, most dramatic in Belfast and other industrial towns in Ulster. Although there were many ill, the number of deaths was not to prove as high as those in the second wave and third waves. The second wave, in the autumn and winter, mainly affected Leinster and again, but to a lesser extent, Ulster, starting at the eastern seaboard counties (it came in though the ports) and then moving inland.  The epidemic seemed to move through the midlands towards the western seaboard in the third wave in the spring of 1919.  There are, of course, exceptions to this rule, usually created by an unusual movement of people. Donegal and Dublin and its hinterland were exceptions to this rule, badly affected in waves two and three.

At its height here in the autumn of 1918, it effectively silenced communities as it passed through them.  People were falling ill in the streets, many schools libraries and other public buildings were closed, church services and public meetings cancelled, court sittings abandoned, matches postponed, streets in Dublin and other towns in Leinster and Ulster were being disinfected. Hospitals, already facing acute financial difficulties caused by perennial problem of inadequate funding, the pressure of accommodating sick or wounded soldiers and substantial increases in the price of many commodities – including medicine, coal, bread, grain, potatoes, sugar and alcohol, found themselves overflowing with influenza patients, and were forced to convert  surgical wards into medical wards to treat sufferers. Most of the vast numbers of ill were cared for – or not, in the case of the less fortunate – at home. Doctors, the mainstay of the Poor Law health system, worked around the clock to treat their patients, getting little thanks for their diligence from their employer, the increasingly out of touch and apparently uncaring Local Government Board for Ireland, based in the Custom House. Morgues, undertakers and cemeteries were queueing up the dead for burial, and it was not unusual to have several dead from the same family. People who lived through it sometimes noted that the church bells never seemed to stop ringing.
This article, published in the Journal of the Kildare Archaelogical society, explores how the influenza affected Irish society, with a particular focus on the position in county Kildare, which, for local reasons, experienced the highest death rate per head of population in 1918.

Canadian Association for Irish Studies, London/Derry, 28 June, 2017.
In the late summer of 1911, Sir Charles Cameron, medical officer of health for Dublin, offered a bounty of three pence on paper bags filled with dead flies, hoping that boys in the tenements which housed most of the city’s poor might be tempted to the hunt.  The immediate impetus for this creative scheme was an outbreak of infant ‘summer’ diarrhoea during a heatwave in August and September. Infant mortality rates from diarrhoea had risen significantly in Dublin, but also in other Irish urban areas and across Britain, Europe and North America, an expected problem when the mercury reached higher than average temperatures. 
This paper uses the 1911 infant diarrhoea epidemic to explore how the relatively new bacteriological understanding of disease had filtered into thinking about public health management in Dublin.  It casts a wider lens looking at the management of the diarrhoea crisis in Canada, the USA, Great Britain, and Europe, to argue that while, on the one hand, the epidemic was seen as a local problem, a spike in the burden of disease resulting from the oft-heralded  atrocious living conditions of Dublin’s poor, on the other hand it was part of a wider problem associated with contemporary city living.

At the beginning of the 20th century,  Ireland’s child mortality rate compared unfavourably with other parts of Britain and Europe. Alongside the expected diseases of childhood – measles, mumps, scarlet fever – tuberculosis and respiratory diseases (including  bronchitis and pneumonia) contributed to the appalling child death statistics.  Towards the end of the century, new medicine, vaccination campaigns and the rehousing of the urban poor, particularly in Dublin, had contributed to a turnaround.  But chest illnesses lingered as a key contributor to child death rate.  Reformers who wanted to remove smog from urban areas faced a difficult battle to overcome vested interests who tried to prevent the status quo being changed.  This paper tracks the politics of removing smog from Ireland’s towns and cities, and looks at the subsequent impact on the child death statistics, with a focus on Dublin and Belfast.

In Ireland in 1911, one fifth of all deaths were of children under the age of 5.  The problem was essentially an urban one, as poor housing and sanitation exacerbated the issue.  An extra 900 infants died in Belfast and Dublin because, the authorities said, it was a hot summer.  With one third of Dublin's population living in squalid tenements, often without a proper toilet and with perhaps only one shared tap between several families, it is easy to see how the temperature going up a few degrees could have had such an effect. Dublin Corporation set up one innovative solution: offering a bounty for bags of flies, in the belief that flies helped to spread disease.

The Protestant population of Northern Ireland may feel somewhat alienated from the Gaelic Athletic Association, which regulates hurling and Gaelic football, because of its overt nationalism and Catholicism.  But what of the attitudes of Republic of Ireland Protestants to the traditional Irish games?  This paper explores the interest of some rural Irish Protestants in the GAA, and concludes, from evidence provided by a series of interviews, that in contrast to what some historians have taken to be the case, there has always been interest in, and interaction with the GAA, particularly by rural Irish Protestants.  This cohort views playing Gaelic sports as a way of identifying with their local community, of blending in.  As their participation has tended to be discreet, sports historians may not have been aware of the level of participation.

The participation of Protestants within the Gaelic Athletic Association (Ireland's national games of gaelic football, hurling and handball) at all levels throughout its history has tended to be underplayed.

Participation in the GAA was and continues to be seen as identification not only with Gaelic games but with Gaelic culture, nationalism and Catholicism. Some historians have taken the view that these links tended to alienate Protestants from participating, while others stress those Protestants who played significant roles in the organization, including Sam Maguire and Jack Boothman.  This paper argues that discreet Protestant participation in the GAA tends not to be documented. This participation is represented by the metaphorical Quiet Corner Back of the title. It examines the ways in which rural Protestants in the 26 counties involved themselves with the GAA – an involvement that has tended to be unostentatious but pervasive -- using interviews with officials, players and other sources.

In doing so it discusses the concept that involvement with the organization was a way in which some Protestants chose to delineate their Irishness and also to be part of their local community, an involvement that was sometimes rendered difficult by the ‘othering’ of Protestants within some communities.

The decade of commemoration intends to focus on the world war, the Ulster Solemn League and Covenant,  the  1913 Lockout,  and  the Irish revolutionary period.  So far, no mention has been made of commemorating the 1918-19 influenza pandemic.  Here, in their own words, survivors of the pandemic talk of the illness, and also of other events in their early lives from this significant period of Irish history –  bringing cups of tea to weary troops brought in to quell the 1916 rebellion, a father’s terrible sadness to identify a friend who had died on the torpedoed MV Leinster, stories of shootings in revolutionary Dublin  or of families daring to break a self-imposed social distancing during the flu to go out to celebrate the end of the war. Collectively, they bring to life the complexities of the decade,  the divided loyalties and complicated allegiances, the worry and losses,  the difficulty and excitement of survival.

The 1913 Lockout occupies an important place in the collective memory of many areas of Dublin as well as in the wider consciousness of past events that shaped Ireland’s history. A group of trade unionists have come together under the banner of the 1913 Alternative Visions Oral History Group to collect memories of the Lockout and stories of its influence on families, communities and trade unionists. This paper presents extracts from some of the oral history interviews that the group conducted, illustrating how postmemory can still provide new insights into our understanding of seminal events in history. Topics covered by the interviews include:
• The role of individual activists in the Lockout, including some of the protagonists, who are remembered by their families
• Divisions in families and communities, particularly related to the role of strike breakers
• The impact of the Lockout on anti-union individuals and families and relationships within working class communities
• The role of women – in paid work and in supporting their families through the hardship of the Lockout
• The influence of the Lockout on politicising individuals and groups and to what extent memories of the Lockout shape present day trade union activism
• The evolution from labour activism to involvement in militant nationalism and the struggle for independence.
The 1913 Lockout was the most bitter and destructive industrial dispute in this country and the families and communities that were most directly affected by the experience often remember the trauma as if they had participated themselves.

From the 1970s to the early 1990s, Dublin’s Independent Newspapers became the largest news organization in Ireland, and extended its foreign holdings, buying into media businesses in the UK, South Africa and Australia, under the control of Anthony O’Reilly. In the core Irish business, workers enjoyed some of the best terms and conditions of any Irish employees, with high salaries, a four day week and six weeks’ annual leave. But as the
economic climate changed, so too did the working lives of the ‘Indo’ people. Radical changes in work practices, the introduction of new technologies and the outsourcing of many functions traditionally performed inhouse decimated the workforce, and damaged the strong sense of collegiality with the business, which had typically employed family and friends of employees. This paper explored, through interviews with employees, including some from management, the growth and decline of this, once Ireland’s most
successful newspaper industry. It looked at editorial, clerical, print and other staffs within the business, to see how their functions and powerbases shifted over the time period 1970-2004.

A presentation of oral histories collected from Irish doctors for the Living Medical History project, organised by The Royal Academy of Medicine in Ireland section on history of medicine.  The doctors interviewed began their training in the 1940s. During their working lives they saw tuberculosis reduced from a major epidemic to  a much lesser problem. Deaths from diphtheria, whooping cough and scarlet fever became a  thing of the past. Some of them remember the first doses of antibiotics being used.  Psychiatry was revolutionised during their lifetimes, as antidepressants and antipsychotic drugs enabled long stay patients to move back into the community. Heart disease and cancer took over as the chief medical concerns.  The doctors, from different specialties, spoke about the changes in their disciplines during their working lives, and also of how the practice of medicine affected their domestic lives.

Turtle Bunbury, Easter Dawn, The 1916 Rising, ISBN:9781781172582. Mercier Press, 2015, hardback, €29.99 euro, 320 pages including bibliography and index.

Keith Jeffrey, 1916, A  global history ISBN Bloomsbury, 2015,  hardback, £25, 436 pages including bibliography and index.