Irish Women’s Franchise League and Irish Women’s Workers’ Union

Hannah and Francis Sheehy-Skeffington and Margaret Cousins founded the radical Irish Women’s Franchise League (IWFL) in 1908; Hanna was elected chairwoman and Meg Connery served as vice-chairwoman. The IWFL was the most outspoken and public manifestation of women’s discontent and radical feminism in Ireland. Its primary aim was to secure women’s suffrage within Home Rule. … Read more

A Yankee in de Valera’s Ireland: the memoir of David Gray

‘The accumulating evidence supports the view that, even before the fall of France in 1940, de Valera believed that Hitler would win the war and in payment for keeping the Allies out of the Éire ports, he would obtain Northern Ireland on his own terms,’ the US wartime minister to Ireland David Gray wrote in … Read more

The dynamiters: Irish nationalism and political violence in the wider world, 1867–1900

The dynamiters tells the story of the first urban bombing campaign in history, that carried out by Irish-American Fenians in the latter decades of the nineteenth century. It provides a cogent analysis of Fenian urban bombings against the backdrop of transformations in late nineteenth-century revolutionary violence, and provides a detailed analysis of parallels between Irish-American … Read more

Wolfe Tone (2nd edition)

As a twenty-something enrolled at the Middle Temple, where he came to know as much about the law as ‘of necromancy’, and making not the slightest attempt to resist the temptations of an ‘idle and luxurious capital’, the future icon of Irish republican nationalism Theobald Wolfe Tone had, of a morning after the night before, … Read more

Domestic life in Ireland (Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, Section C, Volume III, 2011)

The strength of the Royal Irish Academy’s special issue on Domestic life in Ireland lies in its editorial courage. Having selected the domestic subject, the editors bring together studies charting diverse material from domestic archaeologies of everyday life through the Neolithic to the provision of 1950s local authority rural housing and the morphology of Celtic … Read more