Founded 150 years ago, the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) was a secret, oath-bound, revolutionary organisation dedicated to the establishment of an independent Irish republic by force. The Fenians (as they were known generically) were an international phenomenon with a presence on all six continents. Not only did the organisation engage in military operations across the … Read more
Examples of monetary union include those between the city states of ancient Greece, the attempts to coordinate the currencies of nineteenth-century German states and the Latin Monetary Union that existed in continental Europe between 1866 and 1927. The United Kingdom, at that time including Ireland, decided to remain aloof from the Latin Monetary Union. The British maintained … Read more
Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin, was founded c. 1030 by Sitriuc, king of the Dublin Danes, when Dunán was bishop. In the following century, when the occupant of the see of Dublin had been elevated to the rank of archbishop, Lorcán Ua Tuathail (a.k.a. St Laurence O’Toole) established a priory of Augustinian canons there. After the … Read more
The 1641 rebellion has attracted a good deal of attention in recent years thanks to the online release of the ‘1641 Depositions’, collected from Protestant survivors in the aftermath. But as John Gibney explains, Irish Catholics had their own views on what had happened in 1641. When agents of the Irish … Read more
After the American Civil War, the Fenian movement decided to attack Britain by launching a raid north into Canada in 1866, and again in 1870. If they could not capture Canada, the Fenians hoped at least to provoke an international incident between Britain and the United States; if successful, Canada could be bartered for Irish … Read more