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9Nov

‘Render Unto Caesar…’ The Christian Bible is clear – citizens must pay their taxes, just or unjust. Dogma is one thing, in practice, evading punitive taxes has been with us since the earliest success of both. Free-trading, free of taxes, comes in many guises today and is constantly responding to market […]
20Aug

A Tale of Shipwreck and Lost Treasure The Banks Many will be aware, and unfortunately for some, they will also remember only too well, how Banks can ‘fail’. The term is of course not an honest assessment of events when due governance and propriety are recklessly abandoned in favour of greed. Terms like ‘maximising […]
12Apr

THE SLAUGHTERHOUSE OF THE EAST COAST An account of the harrowing loss of the emigrant ship, Pomona, 1859 ‘Arranged side by side, they lay locked in the sleep of death, and the lifeless, which a few hours past were lighted up with life and animation, had become sickening objects, from which the heart […]
8Aug

When is a Wreck not a Wreck? An answer seems easy, but not always obvious. A ship that has been wrecked might be raised and then float again. It might sink again, immediately, or soon after – and declared a wreck once more. It may be repaired, and live out many more years afloat. Alternatively, […]
8Aug

After all those years. We followed up on every bar-room story, endless tales by fishermen, and all of the mucky folklore that was ever recounted about this wreck – that of a submarine lying on the Arklow Bank. Probably known to many now, a much abbreviated version of the tale goes as follows. In 1917 […]
1Oct

‘West Britain’ It was Tuesday, the 31 day of August, 1785, and just a few miles south of Dublin city, the inhabitants of the grand harbor town of Kingston were sleeping soundly in their beds. A number HM ships of the line had arrived earlier in the week for naval exercises and shore leave had […]
27Sep

It is often said that there is too much ‘rubbish’ information on the web. To be sure, there is rubbish but there’s rubbish everywhere. There is certainly not so much that the internet should not be used for research. This would of course be foolish. Like all vaults of information, one must discriminate and discard […]