In April 1912 the third Home Rule bill appeared to herald a new era, with the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP) poised to reap the harvest of a generation of constitutional agitation. Chief among their number was Belfast’s Joe Devlin and, at his back, what Devlin himself described as ‘a Catholic organisation with a membership of … Read more
Biddy Early died on the afternoon of 22 April 1874 in a small, two-roomed mud cottage overlooking Kilbarron Lake in Feakle, Co. Clare. Her life story was first published in 1903, with dark tales of witchcraft continuing to swirl around her memory ever since. In the 1970s an attempt to secure funding for a newly renovated … Read more
In 1888 Cecil Rhodes, an Englishman living in South Africa, donated £10,000 to Charles Stewart Parnell. His motive for contributing to a cause to which he had no emotional attachment is curious. The answer may lie in the manner in which Rhodes’s political ambitions were dependent on the Home Rule bill, and therefore on Parnell. … Read more
With an estimated four million people by the 1770s, Ireland had undergone a population explosion that made Dublin the second-largest city, after London, in the British Empire. Nevertheless, despite this growth, in terms of infrastructure Ireland’s capital city remained a small, densely populated, essentially medieval city, akin to contemporary Paris. Just as would happen in … Read more
Our understanding of the Cromwellian period from 1649 to 1660 has been sorely hampered by the fact that the records of the period were lost in the destruction of the Four Courts in 1922. The fact that the documentary evidence for this most controversial of historical periods is almost non-existent has meant that apocryphal stories, … Read more