Monday 25 November marks the centenary of the foundation of the Irish Volunteers: an organization that remains strangely neglected by historians. There are a couple of articles on the Volunteers in the current issue of History Ireland, but a quick glance through our back catalogue didn’t turn up much. We have some very good articles … Read more
On 24 October 1913 Jack White organised a pro-Home Rule rally in Ballymoney, Co. Antrim, aimed at rallying Ulster Protestants who supported Home Rule. While support for nationalism and unionism was usually intertwined with confessional affiliation – nationalists tended to be Catholic, unionists tended to be Protestant – there had always been a small minority … Read more
It is unlikely that the Buckingham Palace conference of July 1914 would feature prominently on a list of momentous events punctuating the discourse of Ireland’s partition. Indeed, its brevity and predictable collapse were another manifestation of an ever-tightening deadlock concerning the third Irish Home Rule bill, and it elicits merely cursory references in the general … Read more
When Edward Carson accepted the role of Irish Unionist Parliamentary Party leader in 1910 he could not have predicted what the next decade had in store for him and his beloved Ireland. Bitter divisions and the emergence of rival paramilitary forces, open rebellion, the Great War and events that led to the creation of two … Read more
No one anticipated the Irish revolution and the upheavals that accompanied it. By the outbreak of the First World War the Land Acts had transferred the ownership of most of the land of Ireland from a largely Protestant aristocracy or gentry to (mainly) Catholic tenant farmers. The Irish social revolution was effectively over before the … Read more