ÉAMONN CEANNT is, in many ways, the ‘unknown’ man among the leaders of the 1916 Easter Rising, and the signatories to the proclamation of the Irish Republic.

Stephen Sandford Irish Academic Press, €24.95 

When he died on a WW1 battlefield Basil Maclear was an Irish rugby star and acknowledged by many of the early game’s greats

National Museum of Ireland

A return to Ireland by Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II is looking increasingly likely after the success of President Michael D Higgins’ visit to London.

Adam, Ahern, Black, Bolger, Brennan, Breslin — the names read like poetry under the Menin Gate. Molloy, Moran, Morgen, Mulvihill, Murphy, Murray — all buried in unknown graves in Flanders soil.

It is important for all decent people on this island in both jurisdictions — the Republic, and in Northern Ireland

The year was 1916.

THE rousing cover picture of Michael Collins, fists clenched and in full flight, sets the tone of Great Irish Heroes, a lively collection of stories of men and women whose names have reverberated through the pages of history.

HE’S the latest of the Irish football management wild geese to take wing to exotic foreign climes – and trust Roddy Collins to bid farewell to his home town with a memorable soundbyte.

The work of an Irish author has been placed among eight of the world’s top novels in line for an international award.

SOME vital points regarding 1916 have been totally ignored not only by official Ireland, including all sides of the Dáil, but in the media and among the clergy.

IT was October 1914, two months after the outbreak of the Great War.

ON April 27, 1916, three days after Patrick Pearse stepped onto the portico of the General Post Office in Dublin to proclaim the new Irish Republic, 2,128 men of the 16th (Irish) Division suffered horrifically from a German gas attack.

Taoiseach Bertie Ahern’s plans for Northern Ireland Assembly members to attend 1916 Easter Rising and Battle of the Somme commemorations were dealt a blow today after they were rejected by the Ulster Unionists.

IN 1990, the Public Records Office released the files of the young men (some of them boys of no more than 16 or 17 years of age) executed by the British Army for desertion and allied breaches of military discipline in the First World War.