Regattas and horse-racing, flower shows and fashion, balls and banquets where the tables groaned under the weight of the sumptuous repast are the unlikely topics of this article related to the years of the Great Hunger. By Edmund O’Riordan Regattas According to the official report in the Cork Examiner in September 1846, the assemblage of … Read more
An ambitious scheme to build a ‘New Geneva’ on the Waterford coast in 1782 attracted a number of Swiss exiles, but ultimately floundered. By Isadore Ryan The story starts during the night of 1 July 1782, when the bourgeois citizens of Geneva decided not to oppose an expeditionary force sent by France, Bern and the … Read more
The United Irish League of America (UILA), Clan na Gael and The Cloven Foot By Tony King Established in New York on 4 December 1901, the United Irish League of America (UILA) was the reunited Irish Parliamentary Party’s (IPP) auxiliary organisation in the United States. Tasked with financing the constitutional movement at home, promoting the … Read more
As racism rears its head in the 21st century, an account of the efforts of one Irishman in the fight against slavery in the nineteenth century is timely. By Anne Chambers The only child and heir of John Denis, 1st marquess of Sligo, of Westport House, Co. Mayo, and his wife Louisa Catherine, daughter and … Read more
By Fiona Fitzsimons In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries some Huguenots fled the religious wars in France and settled in England and Ireland. As a group they had diverse social origins, and they assimilated into Irish society at every level, not only as artisans and businessmen. They were military pensioners, linen- and silk-weavers, silver- and … Read more