Family background George Gavan Duffy, the eldest of the four children of Sir Charles Gavan Duffy’s third marriage was born in October 1882 at his mother’s home in Cheshire. His father had left Australia and settled in Nice. Louise Hall, whom he married in 1881, was his second wife’s niece and forty years his junior; … Read more
The unemployment is acute. Starvation is facing thousands of people. The official Labour Movement has deserted the people for the fleshpots of the empire. The Free State Government’s attitude towards striking postal workers makes clear what its attitude towards workers generally will be. Thus wrote Liam Mellows, IRA director of purchases, from his prison cell … Read more
Readers of Joseph Robins’ Lost Children will be familiar with the story of Irish female orphan adolescents who were sent from the workhouses of Ireland to the Australian colonies at the time of the Great Famine. Between 1848 and 1850 over 4,000 young women between the ages of fourteen and twenty arrived in Sydney, Melbourne … Read more
In 1924, the Caledonian Society of Calcutta honoured one of the most prominent local servants of the British Raj, Charles Augustus Tegart, the police commissioner of Calcutta. Tegart, later acclaimed as the most famous policeman of British India, was already a hero to the local Anglo-Indian community and a hated villain to Bengali revolutionary … Read more
Michael McGrath traces the costly financial implications of the voluntary Catholic sector from the early years through to the last decade of the twentieth century. He shows how education had always received financial assistance from the Catholic community, unlike contemporary Protestants, long before the creation of Northern Ireland. His story is a testament to the … Read more