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
On 28 June 1920, a company of the Connaught Rangers stationed at Jullundur on the plains of the Punjab refused to perform their military duties as a protest against the activities of the British Army in Ireland. On the following day, the mutineers sent two emissaries to a company of Connaught Rangers stationed at Solon, … Read more
Sir,—I am writing a biography of my great-uncle, Commandant Edward Daly of the Irish Volunteers. This is one of a series of biographies of the executed leaders of the 1916 Easter Rising planned for publication by O’Brien Press between 2012 and 2016. Aged 25 and unmarried, from Limerick, Edward Daly was one of the youngest … Read more
Sir,—John M. Regan (HI 20.1, Jan./Feb. 2012, pp 10–13) commits the same elision/omission for which he condemns Peter Hart when he writes, ‘Initially, Hart said that the 1922 West Cork massacre was what might be called “ethnic cleansing”’. This phrasing appears on p. 237 of Hart’s The IRA at war (2003). Regan then details some … Read more
An Conradh/The Treaty was broadcast last December on the 90th anniversary of the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty on 6 December 2011. This prelude to a forthcoming decade of centenaries came just after news that the German Bundestag had received a sneak preview of the current Irish government’s forthcoming austerity budget. The irony of the … Read more