A training school for rebels: Fenians in the French Foreign Legion

In 1920, six years before Hollywood made the film Beau Geste, Bray and Arklow doubled for North Africa in another, less famous silent film about the French Foreign Legion made by the Celtic Cinema Company, entitled Rosaleen Dhu. Based on a story by John Denvir, the film tells the romantic tale of an exiled Fenian who joins the Legion and later marries an Algerian woman, only to discover that she is the heiress to a large Irish estate. Such escapism was probably welcome in 1920 as the War of Independence entered its bloodiest phase, but, in the best tradition of film-making, the tale was, in fact, ‘based on a true story’. During the nineteenth century a considerable number of Irishmen served in the Légion Etrangère, and a number of them were indeed members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood. In 1851, seven years before the IRB was established, one of its founders, Thomas Clarke Luby, set out for France, intent on joining the Foreign Legion in order to learn infantry tactics. The Legion had temporarily suspended recruitment at the time, however, and so his ambition was frustrated. This is the first known instance of Irish separatists identifying the Legion as a training school for rebels, though the idea of going abroad to acquire military experience was then current. The Cork Fenian J. F. X. O’Brien took part in William Walker’s 1855 filibuster in Nicaragua for much the same purpose

An asymptotic existence result on compressed sensing matrices

For any rational number $h$ and all sufficiently large $n$ we give a deterministic construction for an $n\times \lfloor hn\rfloor$ compressed sensing matrix with $(\ell_1,t)$-recoverability where $t=O(\sqrt{n})$. Our method uses pairwise balanced designs and complex Hadamard matrices in the construction of $\epsilon$-equiangular frames, which we introduce as a generalisation of equiangular tight frames. The method is general and produces good compressed sensing matrices from any appropriately chosen pairwise balanced design. The $(\ell_1,t)$-recoverability performance is specified as a simple function of the parameters of the design. To obtain our asymptotic existence result we prove new results on the existence of pairwise balanced designs in which the numbers of blocks of each size are specified.Comment: 15 pages, no figures. Minor improvements and updates in February 201

‘Dying Irish’: eulogising the Irish in Scotland in Glasgow Observer obituaries

The Glasgow Observer newspaper, founded in 1885 by and for the Irish community in Scotland regularly published both lengthy and brief funereal and elegiac obituaries of the Irish in Scotland in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They marshal an impressive, emotive and oftentimes contradictory body of evidence and anecdote of immigrant lives of the kind utilised, and as often passed over, by historians of the Irish in Britain. They contain, however, a unique perspective on the march of a migrant people bespoke of their experiences and, perhaps more importantly, the perception of their experiences in passage, in the host society and ultimately in death. Moreover, the changing sense of Victorian sensibilities over the solemnity, purpose and ritual of death into the Edwardian era finds a moot reflection in the key staples of Irish immigrant obsequies with their stress on thrift, endeavour, piety, charity and gratitude. This article explores Glasgow Observer obituaries from the 1880s to the 1920s to see what they say about the immigrants, their lives, work and culture, the Scots, migration itself, the wider relations between Britain and Ireland, and the place where Irish and British attitudes to death meet in this period. It does so by drawing upon recent sociological perspectives on obituaries and their relationship with the formation and articulation of collective memory

Inequivalence of difference sets: on a remark of Baumert

An often cited statement of Baumert in his book Cyclic difference sets asserts that four well known families of cyclic (4t - 1,2t - 1,t - 1) difference sets are inequivalent, apart from a small number of exceptions with t ≤ 8. We are not aware of a proof of this statement in the literature. Three of the families discussed by Baumert have analogous constructions in non-cyclic groups. We extend his inequivalence statement to a general inequivalence result, for which we provide a complete and self-contained proof. We preface our proof with a survey of the four families of difference sets, since there seems to be some confusion in the literature between the cyclic and non-cyclic cases

Compressed sensing with combinatorial designs: theory and simulations

In 'An asymptotic result on compressed sensing matrices', a new construction for compressed sensing matrices using combinatorial design theory was introduced. In this paper, we use deterministic and probabilistic methods to analyse the performance of matrices obtained from this construction. We provide new theoretical results and detailed simulations. These simulations indicate that the construction is competitive with Gaussian random matrices, and that recovery is tolerant to noise. A new recovery algorithm tailored to the construction is also given.Comment: 18 pages, 3 figure

The Hard Times Cookbook : Good Food on a Budget

Published byLiberties Press, Taylor\u27s Lane, Dublin 8 in 2009. Cover design by Sin É Design, Internal design by Liberties Press, printed in Ireland by Colour Books. Éamonn Ó Catháin is the former proprietor of Dublin restaurent Shay Beano. 256p., 18cm.https://arrow.tudublin.ie/irckbooks/1100/thumbnail.jp

Around Ireland with a Pan : Food, Tales and Recipes

Published by Liberties Press, 51 Stephens Road, Inchicore, Dublin 8 in 2004. Cover design by Liam Furlong at Space.ie Arthur photographs by Peter Houlihan. Landscape photograph by Harry Weir Photography. Illustrations by Dermot Hall. Printed in Ireland by Colour Books. Éamonn Ó Catháin is the former proprietor of Shay Beano. 255p. 21cm.https://arrow.tudublin.ie/irckbooks/1101/thumbnail.jp