Nick Maxwell BY AODHÁN CREALEY MAY 26/1900 Luke Dillon, a leading light in the Fenian dynamite campaign (1881–5), was sentenced to life imprisonment along with two others for attempting to bomb the Welland Canal in Canada, an important shipping lane at the time for Britain, then embroiled in the Boer War. There was little in ‘Dynamite’ … Read more
www.dib.ie By Terry Clavin In March 2021, the Dictionary of Irish Biography (DIB) moved to an ‘open-access’ model, making its entire corpus of nearly 11,000 biographical entries freely available to all users through a new website at www.dib.ie. The DIB marked its move to open access by publishing a number of high-profile new entries online, … Read more
While not in the vanguard of armed activity during the War of Independence, Wexford has the distinction of being one of the few counties outside Dublin that saw action during the 1916 Rising. On the other hand it was also one of the few places where John Redmond’s (a native of the county) Irish Parliamentary … Read more
June 22nd is the centenary of the opening by King George V of the Northern Ireland parliament—perhaps the most symbolic of the successive steps that copper-fastened partition (the next was the Anglo-Irish Treaty of December 1921, under whose terms Northern Ireland formally ‘opted out’ of the Irish Free State a year later, followed by the … Read more
While the constitutional outcomes of the revolutionary period have evolved over time, one has remained constant over the past century—partition. While a previous Hedge School in December 2020 examined how that came about in 1920/21, this discussion will focus on its effects over the following century, up to and including the uncertainly caused by Brexit … Read more