Nick Maxwell Who was Tony Small, friend and manservant of Lord Edward Fitzgerald? And what became of him and his family after Fitzgerald’s death in 1798? By Laura McKenna The Battle of Eutaw Springs in South Carolina in September 1781 was one of the last of the Revolutionary War and one of the bloodiest. Among those left … Read more
It might be expected that the Ireland in which Tony Small arrived would have had little experience of Africans or other people of colour living among them, but that was not the case—at least not in ports such as Dublin or Cork. There are many individual reports—in newspapers, church records and memoirs—of black people, usually … Read more
Tracing Black, Asian, Minority-Ethnic (BAME) and mixed-race people in Ireland c. 1700–1922, part I By Fiona Fitzsimons From at least the eighteenth century there were BAME people in Ireland and Britain. Recent scholarship has begun to ask questions about who these people were, where they came from and how they circulated. From the Classical Age … Read more
What the recently refurbished basement rooms of Newbridge House, Co. Dublin, reveal about servants’ lives in one of Ireland’s ‘big houses’. By Cathal Dowd Smith A country house can be defined as a place of two halves, like the analogy of the swan—a serene upper level kept afloat by a lot of hard work below. … Read more
The West’s awake!—Revolution in Roscommon 1916–1921 Roscommon was one of the first counties to reflect the ‘utter change’ of the post-1916 period, with the election of the first Sinn Féin-backed MP in February 1917. In less than two years that party would win a landslide victory in the general election of 1918, but that mandate … Read more