Nick Maxwell Ulster’s forgotten Fenians, 1858–1867 By Kerron Ó Luain On the surface, the 1850s were barren years for those with Irish nationalist ideals. The Cookstown, Co. Tyrone, Fenian James Mullins wrote in later years that national sentiment ‘in those days, the fifties … was almost extinct in Ireland’. In Ulster, the Ribbon secret societies kept alive … Read more
Frank Roney was recruited into the IRB in Belfast sometime in the early 1860s by Carlow native John Nolan. A moulder by trade, Roney was on the left wing of the Fenian movement. In his later memoir, Irish rebel and California labour leader, he wrote of his disappointment at missing the opportunity to meet Karl … Read more
Ribbonism had its origins in the militant Catholic nationalism of the eighteenth-century Defender secret societies. It continued to survive in the post-Famine years in the form of a benevolent society and it later transitioned into Hibernianism, which in turn allied itself to the Irish Parliamentary Party under Joe Devlin. Though there was some affinity with … Read more
Sir,—Rather than prolong the correspondence between myself and D.R. O’Connor Lysaght relating to my opinion that Arthur Griffith has been made a scapegoat for anti-Semitism in Ireland (argued in my article in HI 24.3, May/June 2016), may I simply refer those who are interested to a longer but related article in the current issue of … Read more
Sir,—Mark Phelan (HI 25.1, Jan./Feb. 2017) appears not to have consulted James Barros’s The Corfu Incident of 1923: Mussolini and the League of Nations (1965). Had he done so, he would have been encouraged to mention an important factor absent from his article—that the Treaty of London of 1864 (to which Britain, France, Russia, Prussia … Read more