The passenger liner Athenia sailed from Glasgow on 1 September 1939, picked up more passengers off Belfast later that day, and departed from Liverpool at about 4am the next morning (2 September), bound for Quebec City and Montreal in Canada. War was declared by the British government at 11am on Sunday 3 September, by which … Read more
In the early years of independence, the new Irish Free State was faced with soaring poverty rates along the western seaboard. The post-war economic slump hit the cottage industries hard and forced most of those who relied on the linen trade to make a living off the land. A wet summer in 1924 caused widespread … Read more
During the Irish revolution, the creation of the physical-force tradition necessitated the humiliation of constitutional nationalists by their social inferiors in Sinn Féin and the Volunteers. The resentment generated by the destruction of the parliamentary tradition led to violent feuding between republicans and nationalists in County Galway between 1914 and 1918. While the much less … Read more
were a standard feature of late nineteenth-century Irish nationalism and were generally presented by voluntary subscription in recognition of outstanding achievement. The National Library of Ireland is the custodian of a large collection of such addresses, one of the most remarkable of which is the ‘Illuminated Address to Charles Stewart Parnell from the Tenant Farmers … Read more
By 1871 ‘Captain’ Charles Cunningham Boycott had been on Achill Island for seventeen years and had proven himself to be a good and successful farmer in a hostile and challenging environment; quite understandably, he wanted to move on to farm better land on the mainland, somewhere he could race his horses and be closer to … Read more