IN 1816, landscape painter John Knox, travelled the 10 miles or so from Glasgow, to paint the Clyde from Faifley and Duntocher—two small settlements which were part of the parish of Old Kilpatrick. It was an early autumn scene, a rolling wooded hillside with a textile mill in the distance. It was pleasant, green and largely unoccupied. By the mid 1840s it was an entirely different picture.

BROGANS Bar at 75 Dame Street, in the heart of Dublin, is today famed for housing the largest collection of Guinness memorabilia outside the brewery. However, in the 1880s, when it was known as Swanns, the pub was infamous as a meeting place of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB).

DURING Easter weekend a number of commemorative ceremonies took place in several cemeteries in Glasgow and the west of Scotland, to honour Irish men and women who kept the national spirit alive among the exiles.