This year will mark the 200th anniversary of one of Ireland’s most notorious murders: the brutal killing of a beautiful fifteen-year-old peasant girl called Ellie Hanley, who became known asthe Colleen Bawn. By Robert Whelan Elopement and sham marriage Ellie Hanley lived in Ballicahane, just outside the city of Limerick. Her great beauty attracted the … Read more
Labour’s 1918 anti-conscription ‘Plan of Action’—an alternative strategy for independence? By Padraig Yeates In 1918 the Irish Labour Party and Trade Union Congress (ILP&TUC) proposed methods of passive resistance to conscription that could have been adapted by Dáil Éireann to pursue the struggle for independence in 1919, rather than allowing the country to be catapulted … Read more
One of the most remarkable campaigns within this remarkable election. Daniel Purcell The 1918 general election was one of the most significant in Irish history. It provided a de facto mandate for Sinn Féin to pursue its republican agenda, signalled the electoral eclipse of the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP) and in the north-eastern six counties … Read more
By Fiona Fitzsimons The Public Health (Ireland) Act, 1878, gave power to local authorities to establish mortuaries, and authorised any justice to order the removal of dead bodies to a mortuary. Where death was sudden, violent or unexplained, the body could be brought to a morgue for post-mortem examination before burial. Depending on the result, … Read more
In R.M. Fox’s collection of biographical essays Rebel Irishwomen (1935), included alongside Maud Gonne MacBride, Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington and Constance Markievicz is an obscure London-born nurse, Dora Maguire. Who was she and what did she achieve during her short life? By James Curry An unlikely Irish republican and labour activist, Theodora Agnes Eleanor Maguire was born … Read more