Nick Maxwell The activities of Irish merchants, students and above all mercenaries living and working in Catholic continental countries, especially France, Spain and Austria, have been well documented. However the histories of Irishmen operating in Scandinavia and northern Europe have been virtually ignored. Yet during the course of the early modern period hundreds of Irishmen sought their … Read more
EM: Tell us about your background. DBQ: My mother was from Cork and my father from Tyrone. I was born in the Rotunda Hospital, Dublin in 1909, but until I was fourteen we lived in Clara, County Offaly, where I attended the local Protestant primary school. My father was a head gardener and, when he … Read more
When Charles Hart (1824?-98), a Young Irelander from Dublin, was inWashington in March 1849 during a tour of the United States he took theopportunity to pay a visit to Matilda Tone, the elderly widow ofTheobald Wolfe Tone. Born in Dublin on 17 June 1769, she first arrivedin America in 1795 in the company of her … Read more
Not many leaders of armed rebellions in Ireland during the centuries of English rule had the opportunity to mull over their actions in later days. One who did was William Smith O’Brien, leader of the abortive Young Ireland rebellion of 1848, who spent five years, most of them on ticket-of-leave, in what was then Van … Read more
The Paris revolution of February 1848 raised unrealistic expectations in famine-ravaged Ireland. The sudden collapse of established regimes across Europe gave new hope to a divided and dispirited Repeal movement. Irish nationalists were led to believe that the Union could be repealed with similar ease. The romantic nationalists of Young Ireland were particularly heartened by … Read more