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
The most dangerous man in Britain’ or a paranoid crank? ‘The greatest fighter of the Scottish working class’ or a middle-class intellectual out of touch with working-class opinion? A Marxist ‘first, last, and always’ or a Communist Party heretic? A Scottish patriot on a par with William ‘Braveheart’ Wallace or a minor footnote to history? … Read more
This year, 2007, marks the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Ernie O’Malley, and it is almost 110 years since his birth in Ellison Street, Castlebar. He spent only eight years there, where his father, Luke, an official with the Congested Districts Board, was a supporter of the Irish Parliamentary Party, the typical Irish Catholic … Read more
In April 1920 Eamon de Valera stepped off the train at Birmingham, Alabama. Only days before the city had officially ‘unwelcomed’ him. A small party of merely curious onlookers were joined by a police squadron that had been mobilised to prevent disorder or to prohibit any type of parade given in honour of the ‘so-called … Read more
Bloody Sunday began with the attacks of Michael Collins’s ‘squad’ upon the British intelligence network in Dublin, and specifically the so-called ‘Cairo Gang’. These were the ‘particular ones’ whom Collins felt were bringing British intelligence closer and closer to the heart of the republican movement. By the end of the day, news of the deaths … Read more