Nick Maxwell Captain Jack White, an unsung hero of the Irish Revolution, first published his autobiography Misfit in 1930. He was an extraordinarily complex man and difficult to fit into any convenient slot. He was born into a loyalist and middle-class family, the son of Field Marshal Sir George White, governor of Gibraltar. He was brought up … Read more
Richard Whately was possibly the strangest archbishop Ireland has ever known. An eccentric Oxford professor of political economy, he was appointed Church of Ireland archbishop of Dublin in 1831 and remained in office until 1863. A new biography by Bryan MacMahon, Eccentric archbishop: Richard Whately of Redesdale, has just been published by the Kilmacud–Stillorgan Local … Read more
On Friday 28 April 1916, with the GPO in flames and British forces closing in, Patrick Pearse, a badly wounded James Connolly and other leaders of the republican uprising in Dublin decided to break out of the Post Office and make for Parnell Place, where they hoped to renew their fight to better advantage. Under … Read more
CK: What is the nature of this collection? VL: The Bureau of Military History was established by the government in 1947 with the remit of gathering material relating to the period 1913 to 1921. So they set about establishing who was alive and interviewing those people. CK: What kind of people were they looking for? … Read more
Mollie Gill, often known as Maire, was born on 24 March 1891, one of four girls in a family of seven. Her father was a shoemaker and the family lived in a cottage in Murphystown, Co. Dublin, but from the age of 11 Mollie had been exposed to a different world when her older sister … Read more