Northumbria was the largest and most powerful of England’s seventh-century patchwork of independent Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, although in decline from the 670s. Of the five Northumbrian kings who ruled between 632 and 704, four had been ‘raised amongst the Irish’, as Bede puts it, and spoke Irish. All five were from the Bernician dynasty, which had … Read more
Established in 1947 by the Irish government in collaboration with a committee of professional historians and former Irish Volunteers, the purpose of the Bureau of Military History was ‘to assemble and coordinate material to form the basis for the compilation of the history of the movement for independence from the formation of the Irish Volunteers … Read more
Joseph Gleeson, Sinn Féin and IRB, LiverpoolI was born in Liverpool of Irish parents. My father and my uncle were Fenians. My earliest remembrance is being brought as a small boy to a lecture by O’Donovan Rossa in the Picton Lecture Hall, alongside the Museum and Art Gallery in Liverpool. The lecture was the usual … Read more
The County Roscommon district courthouse was crowded in January 1935 when sisters Elizabeth (23) and Rose E. (18) were tried for the murder of the elder sister’s infant daughter. Like most of the mothers who stood trial for infanticide in post-independence Ireland, Elizabeth was unmarried. Irish society was deeply intolerant of unmarried mothers and their illegitimate children … Read more
There was no separate category of infanticide in southern Ireland until the passing of the Infanticide Act in 1949 and thus the murder of infants under the age of one year was until then a capital offence. Most single women who stood trial for the murder of their illegitimate infants at the Central Criminal Court … Read more