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Autumn Repeats Again

Posted in Education, History, Maynooth with tags , , , on August 6, 2026 by telescoper

The repeat examination period at Maynooth University has begun. In fact the first papers were sat yesterday (5th August); the period goes on for ten days or so, I will have four different papers to grade, though I’m expecting only one candidate each for three of them. My first is tomorrow (Friday 7th August).

A couple of years ago, Maynooth University produced this nice good luck message for those resitting so I’ll repeat it here:

Every year at this time I mention the difference between the system of repeats in Maynooth compared to other institutions with which I am familiar, especially in the UK. Elsewhere, students generally take resits when, because they have failed one or more examinations the previous May, they have not accumulated sufficient credits to proceed to the next year of their course. Passing the resit allows them to retrieve lost credit, but their mark is generally capped at a bare pass (usually 40%). That means the student gets the credit they need for their degree but their average (which determines whether they get 1st, 2nd or 3rd class Honours) is affected. This is the case unless a student has extenuating circumstances affecting the earlier examination, such as bad health or family emergency, in which case they take the resit as a `sit’, i.e. for the first time with an uncapped mark.

Here in Maynooth, however, the mark obtained in a repeat examination is usually not capped. Indeed, some students – though not many – elect to take the repeat examination even if they passed earlier in the summer, in order to increase their average mark.

Some people don’t like the idea of uncapped repeats because they feel that it would lead to many students playing games, i.e. deliberately not taking exams in May with the intention of spreading some of their examination  load into August. For this reason the Institute of Physics has decided to impose capped resits as part of its accreditation requirements. Some people here seem to think IOP accreditation is worth having so we’re being pushed into that requirement. I find it heavy-handed and unhelpful. I also think it imposes a dreary uniformity on physics courses in the UK. In any case, IOP accreditation is unimportant unless you want to do postgraduate study in physics in the UK (and often not even then). It doesn’t matter at all anywhere else.

If you think students have an unfair advantage if they don’t take a full diet of examinations in May, then the logical conclusion is that part-time students have an unfair advantage as do students taking micro-credentials consisting of just one or two modules. It’s the essence of the modular system that each module result should be considered on its own merit, not in relation to other modules a student may or may not have taken at the same time. One can of course argue whether the modular system is good or not, but if you have it then you should act consistently in accordance with it. You wouldn’t penalize students who have to work to support their study relative to those who don’t, would you?

And there’s no real evidence of students in Maynooth actually playing the system in the way the IOP thinks they do anyway. For one thing, the results from the repeat examination period are not confirmed until early September so that students that deploy this strategy do not know whether they are going to be able to resume their course until just a couple of weeks before term. That could cause lots of problems securing accommodation, etc, so it doesn’t seem to me to be a good ploy. Finalists adopting this strategy will not be able to graduate with the rest of their cohort and may miss several months of potential employment. I think most of our students are smart enough to realize that it’s a risky strategy.

Anyway, I’d welcome comments for or against whether resits/repeats should be capped/uncapped and on what practice is adopted in your institution.

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The Fallen, by Louise Brangan

Posted in History, Literature with tags , , on July 31, 2026 by telescoper

I’ve just finished reading The Fallen: The Magdalene Laundries & Ireland’s Legacy of Shame by Louise Brangan, which I bought a couple of months ago. This tells the shocking story of Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries, institutions run by a variety of religious orders designed to accommodate “fallen” women and girls. Also known as “Penitents”, the inmates of these institutions were a mixture of the poor and unwanted, orphans, disabled, those who had suffered familial abuse, and those who simply didn’t conform to Ireland’s self-image of a virtuous Roman Catholic state.

After Independence in 1922 these institutions, which had already been in existence for over a century, became a sort of dumping ground for inconvenient woman of all kinds. Once inside, the Penitents – most of whom hadn’t really done anything wrong – were stripped of what meagre possessions they had, had their hair shorn, their names were erased, and they were put to hard menial labour washing and drying clothes. They were fed and housed – after a fashion – but conditions were damp and unsanitary and they were forbidden to make friendships with their companions, or even talk to them. They were locked inside and forbidden to leave unless and until the nuns decided they could, which was often never. The Magdalene Laundries were prisons in which every inmate was serving an indefinite sentence of hard labour.

Not surprisingly, the result of this soul-destroying regime was that many of the Penitents became completely institutionalised, some living our their days in a man-made purgatory. Perhaps the most shocking thing of all is the last of these terrible places – which was on what is now Sean McDermott Street in North Dublin – didn’t close until 1996. This book was published to mark the 30th anniversary of this event.

The book is a scholarly work, woven around the oral testimonies of several women, measured in tone but with an unmistakeable undertone of righteous indignitation. It also sets the story of the Magdalene Laundries in the context of 20th Century Irish history, especially the rise of the Catholic theocracy under de Valera and it subsequent fall in the wake of major scandals, of which the Magdalene Laundries were one. As a relative newcomer to Ireland, I was unaware of the true nature of these places and found this book educational as well as deeply moving.

Some comments cut very much to the bone. Here is a paragraph concerning a woman known in the book as Carmel who had been taken to Sunday’s Well for reasons she was never told to find that many of the other women there were quite elderly and infirm:

Going to bed that first night, Carmel had thought that she had been sent to Sunday’s Well to care for the old women. Gradually, she had come to realise, like many others before her, that she had been sent to the Laundry not to look after these women but to become one of them.

Another passage that hit me hard was about the disinterment, in 1993, of 133 bodies from a mass grave when the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity decided to sell the land to a property developer. The graves of the women, who had died while incarcerated at a Magdalene Laundry, were unmarked; another 22 were found later. Shamefully, only 75 death certificates had ever been registered. It is against the law in Ireland to bury someone without registering their death so 80 crimes had been committed over the years. No action was ever taken.

In recent years there has been a redress scheme for the survivors of these institutions, but what financial compensation can possibly be adequate for a lifetime of penal servitude? The most important message of this book is that stories like this have to be told. Ireland must confront the dark side of its recent past. Silence can be the worst form of dishonesty.

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Flaming June – Frederic Leighton

Posted in Art, Biographical, History with tags , , , on June 28, 2026 by telescoper

Flaming June by Frederic Leighton (1895, Oil on Canvas, 120 ×120cm, Museo de Arte de Ponce, Puerto Rico)

Since this June has seen a heatwave across Europe and even here in Ireland, I was reminded of the expression “Flaming June” which I thought until relatively recently was some sort of folk expression or quotation from a poem, but it is instead the title of this Pre-Raphaelite painting by Frederic Leighton of a lady wearing what looks like a dress made out of old curtains. Apparently the oleander branch seen in the upper right symbolizes the fragile link between sleep and death. It looks to me like she must be attending a seminar. You can read more about this painting here.

As well as a hugely popular artist in his lifetime (though his reputation has not endured), Leighton holds the record for the shortest ever peerage: he was made Baron Leighton just the day before he died. The title he had been given was to be hereditary but as he had no offspring the title became extinct at his death.

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The Hottest Day

Posted in Biographical, History, Maynooth with tags , , , on June 25, 2026 by telescoper

So the heatwave continues. The forecast for Maynooth today has temperatures exceeding 30°C, and higher in the South.

This kind of heat is very unusual for Ireland; the highest temperature ever recorded on the island is 33.3°C, in Kilkenny, way back in 1887. That record may well be broken today…

Actually the temperature readings in 1887 were given to the nearest degree Fahrenheit; the reading on 26th June 1887 was 92°F, which means somewhere between 91.5°F and 92.5°F (which is 33.1–33.6°C), so the central value of 33.3°C is not unreasonable, though the number could have been as low as 33.1°C or as high as 33.6°C. For a discussion see here.

It’s worth also repeating the fact I mentioned a few days ago on the Solstice, that this evening we will have the latest sunset of 2026, at 9:59:38 pm.

Yesterday afternoon we had a Staff Barbecue, which was held in nice – but not quite so hot – weather. It was very well attended and a pleasant occasion all round with plentiful burgers, hotdogs and booze. I must say it was very generous of the President to pay for all that out of her own pocket. (Is This Right? Ed.)

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Summer Solstice 2026

Posted in History, The Universe and Stuff with tags on June 21, 2026 by telescoper

The Summer Solstice in the Northern hemisphere takes took place this morning, Sunday 21st June 2026, at 9.24am local Irish Time (08.24 UTC). Among other things, this means that tomorrow is the longest day of the year around these parts. According to this website, the interval between sunrise and sunset in Dublin today will be 17 hours 4 minutes and 52 seconds. which is 2 seconds longer than yesterday, while tomorrow will be two whole seconds shorter.

The Earth orbits the Sun once a year in a nearly circular orbit. The Earth’s axis of rotation (the straight line through the center of the Earth between the north and south poles) is not perpendicular to the plane of the Earth’s orbit. The Earth’s axis is tilted by about 23.4° from the the direction perpendiular to the orbital plane:

The orientation of the Earth’s axis in space remains nearly constant even as the Earth revolves around the Sun. It always points in the general direction of the star Polaris. The result is that when the Earth is on one side of its orbit, the South Pole is tilted toward the Sun (by as much as 23.4°) and the Southern Hemisphere experiences summer. Six months later, when the Earth is on the opposite side of its orbit, the North pole is tilted toward the Sun (by as much as 23.4°) and the Northern Hemisphere experiences summer. 

On the Summer Solstice, Earth’s maximum axial tilt toward the Sun is 23.4°. Likewise, the Sun’s declination from the celestial equator is 23.4°. In areas outside the tropics, the Sun reaches its highest elevation angle at solar noon on the summer solstice. At the North Pole the Sun doesn’t set at all on the Summer Solstice.

So in a sense it’s all downhill from today until the Winter Solstice in December, but the nights won’t start drawing in just yet. Days will indeed get shorter from tomorrow, although this does not mean that sunset will happen earlier tomorrow than it does today. In fact it is a little later; the latest sunset will be on 25th June. Nor does it mean that today sees the earliest sunrise. Sunrise this morning was a little later than yesterday; the earliest sunrise was actually on 17th June.

This arises because there is a difference between mean solar time (measured by clocks) and apparent solar time (defined by the position of the Sun in the sky), so that a solar day does not always last exactly 24 hours. A description of apparent and mean time was given by Nevil Maskelyne in the Nautical Almanac for 1767:

Apparent Time is that deduced immediately from the Sun, whether from the Observation of his passing the Meridian, or from his observed Rising or Setting. This Time is different from that shewn by Clocks and Watches well regulated at Land, which is called equated or mean Time.

The discrepancy between mean time and apparent time arises because of the Earth’s axial tilt and the fact that it travels around the Sun in an elliptical orbit in which its orbital speed varies with time of year (being faster at perihelion than at aphelion).

You can read a piece about the cultural importance of the solstice over the years here.

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Scéalta Grá na hÉireann – The Ladies of Llangollen

Posted in History, Irish Language, LGBTQ+, Poetry with tags , , , , , , on June 10, 2026 by telescoper

I just watched a nice documentary programme on the Irish language channel TG4 in the series Scéalta Grá na h’Éireann (Ireland’s Greatest Loves). This one was about Lady Eleanor Charlotte Butler and the Honourable Sarah Ponsonby, often called The Ladies of Llangollen. The programme is available on the TG4 Player, actually, and it is possible I think to watch the whole thing anywhere in the world for free here. There’s also a little trailer on Youtube:

There’s an entire wikipedia page devoted to the Ladies of Llangollen, so there’s no need to reproduce it all here. However, for the sake of you who haven’t heard of them, they were. They were of Anglo-Irish extraction, both born in Ireland, and had been brought up just a few miles away from each other. They met in 1768 and immediately hit it off. They ran off together to avoid being forced into unwanted marriages, and moved to Wales in order to set up home  at Plas Newydd, near Llangollen in Denbighshire, in 1780.

They lived together for the best part of 50 years in Plas Newydd, in relative seclusion, devoting their time to private studies of literature and languages and improving their estate, comprehensively redesigning the house in a Gothic style, and adding a superb garden. They did not actively socialise and town-dwellers of Llangollen seem to have regarded them as eccentrics, simply referring to them as “The Ladies”.

Gradually, their life attracted the interest of the outside world. Their house became a haven for all manner of visitors, mostly writers such as Wordsworth, Robert Southey, Shelley, Byron and Scott, but also the military leader Duke of Wellington and industrialist Josiah Wedgwood; aristocratic novelist Caroline Lamb, who was born a Ponsonby, came to visit too. Even travellers from continental Europe had heard of the couple and came to visit them, for instance Prince Hermann von Pückler-Muskau, the German nobleman and landscape designer who wrote admiringly about them.

The story of the “romantic friendship” between these two ladies is both charming and moving, but it’s also fascinating to learn how their lifestyle was accepted and even celebrated by wider society. One might have thought their relationship would have been regarded as scandalous by their contemporaries, rather than being widely admired as it turned out to be. One is tempted to assume that their  “marriage” had a sexual dimension, which it may well have done, but it could have been a platonic, yet still romantic, friendship. As far as I’m concerned, that doesn’t really matter;  what I find inspiring about them is that they dared to be different.

Anyway, here is the beautiful sonnet that William Wordsworth wrote after meeting the Ladies of Llangollen in 1824, although I believe the Ladies took exception to the description of their magnificent house as a “low-roofed cot”!

 A stream, to mingle with your favourite Dee,
 Along the vale of meditation flows;
 So styled by those fierce Britons, pleased to see
 In Nature's face the expression of repose;
 Or haply there some pious hermit chose
 To live and die, the peace of heaven his aim;
 To whom the wild sequestered region owes
 At this late day, its sanctifying name.
 Glyn Cafaillgaroch, in the Cambrian tongue,
 In ours, the Vale of Friendship, let 'this' spot
 Be named; where, faithful to a low-roofed Cot,
 On Deva's banks, ye have abode so long;
 Sisters in love, a love allowed to climb,
 Even on this earth, above the reach of Time!

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Estella Solomons

Posted in Art, History with tags , , , , on April 20, 2026 by telescoper

Following yesterday’s post about the 1926 Irish Census I fell down a metaphorical rabbit hole following a request from a former colleague (who happens to be Jewish) to help find a relative of his who lived in Dublin at the time of the census. I found the person, which was nice, but was then sent this article  about an unrelated lady called Estella Solomons who was on the rebel side in the Easter Rising and helped the cause by hiding weapons in her garden.  It turns out that there was a significant Jewish presence in Dublin back then. In the North Side, around Portobello, there was an area dubbed ‘Little Jerusalem’.

Estella Solomons, self-portrait

I hadn’t heard of Estella Solomons before yesterday but she was a significant artist whose work was featured in an exhibition at the National Gallery in Dublin in 2022 (which I did not see). There is also a Wikipedia page about her. I found the above self-portrait online. I find it very striking.

Estella Solomons was born in 1882 and died in 1968 at the age of 86. She was 34 at the time of the Easter Rising and would have been 44 at the time of the 1926 census. I did find her in the online census but her age is recorded as 40. She married the poet Seumas O’Sullivan in 1926 but she is listed as “single” on the census form, so presumably they married later in the year.

There are two other women at her 1926 address, both servants, so she was obviously quite well off, but no sign of her husband.

More surprisingly Estella’s sex is given in the 1926 census as Male. She is in the 1911 census too, but recorded there as Female. I did consider the possibility that she might have been living as a man, but that does not fit with other details of her life. I think it is just a mistake.  Such records are not entirely free from errors.

I think this an example of the sort of confusion historians have to contend with when looking at historical documents!

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The 1926 Census of Ireland

Posted in Biographical, History with tags , , , , , , on April 19, 2026 by telescoper

An interesting little booklet arrived in the post yesterday. It gives an overview of the 1926 census, which has just been made available online. This was the first census to be taken after the end of the War of Independence , the Irish Civil War, and the creation of the Irish Free State.

The census was taken on April 18th 1926 (i.e. 100 years ago yesterday) and the total population recorded was just 2,971, 992, a drop of 168,000 compared to the 1911 census (for the same 26 counties; this being after partition, the six counties of Northern Ireland are not included). The current population of the Republic is around 5.3 million.

This is indeed a full release of the census: not only names and numbers but also complete digital scans of all the returns can be downloaded. It’s fascinating to see the actually hand-written forms.

Out of curiosity I searched for the surname “Coles” in the 1926 census using the online platform and found only 25 entries, most of them in Wexford but also a small cluster in County Cork (in Cobh, actually). I know that “Coles” is not a common name in Ireland – it’s associated with England and Wales – but I hadn’t expected so few. There are a couple of entries in Dublin: one refers to a 32-year old woman called “Alfa Coles”. The latter record is completed in Irish – most of the others are in English. It seems people had much nicer handwriting in those days!

Some years ago I found that there is a Coles Coat of Arms and subsequently found that in Burkes General Armory (which details all the Coats of Arms registered in the UK and Ireland) the first entry under the surname Coles is indeed in Ireland, where it was confirmed in 1647. That date is during the Irish Confederate Wars, a couple of years before Oliver Cromwell arrived in Ireland with his army. One might surmise that this particular branch of the Coles lineage was somehow caught up in these hostilities, probably on the English side.

Anyway, as well as being a goldmine for historians, those of you out there with Irish lineage will no doubt find it interesting to search the 1926 census to find the records pertaining to your ancestors.

The next census of Ireland takes place on 9th May 2027.

P.S. If you do search the archive and find a record in Irish please remember that in Irish “man” is fear and “woman” is “bean” so “F” actually means “male” in Irish and “B” stands for “female” (unlike “M” and “F” in the English version).

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The Original Peaky Blinders Jazz Band

Posted in History, Jazz, Television with tags , , , , on April 15, 2026 by telescoper

I’ve been greatly enjoying the boxed set of six seasons of Peaky Blinders that I received as a gift recently. I may do a sort of review when I get to the end, but until then I thought I’d throw in a few tangential things. This post is an example. Here’s another one. This clip is from Episode 2 of Series 1, when the Shelby family are celebrating the reopening of the Garrison pub after it was destroyed by a firebomb earlier on. Listen to the background music at the start.

The music being played is Livery Stable Blues by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, a record I blogged about here. Released in 1917, it is no exaggeration to say that this was the first every commercial jazz record; I blogged about the 100th anniversary of its release.

The band was originally called the “Original Dixieland Jass Band“. A few months later they changed the “Jass” to “Jazz” – it is claimed because people kept defacing their posters by removing the letter “J” – and the new name stuck. The Original Dixieland Jazz Band is usually referred by Jazz buffs as the ODJB.

Led by cornettist Nick LaRocca and clarinettist Larry Shields, the ODJB was a group of white musicians from in and around New Orleans who had picked up their musical ideas from listening to musicians there, including playing for the pioneering mixed-race band led by Papa Laine, before moving to Chicago which is where they were spotted by representatives of the Victor label. Although the sound quality isn’t great, it gives a good insight to what ealy jazz drummers were like – thumping bass and tom-toms but little use of the cymbals – and shows Larry Shields was a dab hand at glissandi…

Series 1 of Peaky Blinders is set in 1919 (mainly in Birmingham but also with scenes in London). Not a lot of people know that the ODJB actually visited England in 1919. They performed in review at the Hammersmith Palais and then did a command performance in front of King George V, who (apparently) particularly enjoyed their version of Tiger Rag. There is no evidence that they visited Birmingham, but we get a glimpse before the above clip of a band decked out to look like them, playing live in the Garrison pub. I very much enjoy little details like that!

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An Cháisc versus Y Pasg

Posted in History, Irish Language with tags , , , , on April 5, 2026 by telescoper

Today is Easter Sunday and it says something about my poor grasp of the Irish language that it was only today that I learnt that the word for “Easter” in modern Irish is Cáisc. When following the definite article (as in the title of this blog), this becomes Cháisc. You can also find the possessive form Cásca, e.g. Easter Sunday is Domhnach Cásca.

Although it’s not immediately obvious, the word Cáisc is related linguistically to the Latin “Pascha” and Hebrew “Pesach,” and to the word for Easter in many other European languages  Pâques, Pascua, etc.), including the Welsh Pasg (the form Y Pasg with the definite article appears in the title of this post) as well as to the English adjective “paschal”. 

I haven’t succeeded in becoming at all fluent in Irish, but I have learnt that isn’t very much like Welsh.  Although Irish and Welsh are both Celtic languages they are from two distinct groups: the Goidelic group that comprises Irish, Manx and Scottish Gaelic; and the Brythonic group that comprises Welsh, Cornish and Breton. These are sometimes referred to as q-Celtic and p-Celtic, respectively, although not everyone agrees that is a useful categorization. Nevertheless it has stuck and does help with some aspects. The C at the start of Cáisc is a manifestation of the roots of modern Irish in a q-Celtic, as opposed to p-Celtic, language. Hence the difference between it and the Welsh Pasg. Irish, as a q-Celtic language, will generally tend to have a k/c/q sound at the start of words that start with a p-sound in Welsh (or others derived from Latin); the “q” is, of course, historic, since very few modern Irish words begin with “q”. Another example is the word for the number “four”: in Irish it is ceathair; in Welsh it is pedwar…

Incidentally, Scottish Gaelic is not the language spoken by the Celtic people who lived in Scotland at the time of the Romans, the Picts, which is lost. Scottish Gaelic is actually descended from Middle Irish. Also incidentally, Breton was taken to Brittany by a mass migration of people from South-West Britain fleeing the Anglo-Saxons which peaked somewhere around 500 AD. I guess that was the first Brexodus.

Although I speak neither with any proficiency, Welsh and Irish don’t sound at all similar to me. This is not surprising. It is thought that the Brythonic languages evolved from a language  brought to Britain by people from somewhere in Gaul (probably Northern France), whereas the people whose language led to the Goidelic tongues were probably from somewhere in the Iberia (modern-day Spain or Portugal). The modern versions of Irish and Welsh do contain words borrowed from Latin, French and English so there are similarities there, but the original Celtic languages were very different.

Beannachtaí na Cásca!

Tá coinín na Cásca tagtha…

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