On Friday 28 April 1916, with the GPO in flames and British forces closing in, Patrick Pearse, a badly wounded James Connolly and other leaders of the republican uprising in Dublin decided to break out of the Post Office and make for Parnell Place, where they hoped to renew their fight to better advantage. Under … Read more
CK: What is the nature of this collection? VL: The Bureau of Military History was established by the government in 1947 with the remit of gathering material relating to the period 1913 to 1921. So they set about establishing who was alive and interviewing those people. CK: What kind of people were they looking for? … Read more
Mollie Gill, often known as Maire, was born on 24 March 1891, one of four girls in a family of seven. Her father was a shoemaker and the family lived in a cottage in Murphystown, Co. Dublin, but from the age of 11 Mollie had been exposed to a different world when her older sister … Read more
The events of Bloody Sunday, 21 November 1920, are generally regarded as having marked a decisive turning-point in the military struggle between the British forces and the IRA, the military wing of the underground Dáil government. Three separate but connected events occurred on Bloody Sunday. First came the killings by Michael Collins’s ‘squad’ of twelve … Read more
Over the course of the Easter Rising of 1916, amongst reinforcements moved from England to assist those troops already in Ireland were two battalions of the Sherwood Foresters, recruited from Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire. One of the Sherwood battalions had been grievously mauled by the Irish Volunteer snipers defending Mount Street bridge, which controlled the route … Read more