The first meeting to discuss the foundation of Cumann na mBan was held on 25 November 1913, the same night as the first meeting of the Volunteers. Its first ‘official’ meeting was in Wynn’s Hotel on 2 April 1914. Agnes O’Farrelly was its first president and Mary Colum was one of its first organisers. The … Read more
John Ruddy was allegedly murdered or died of cholera in the US in 1832, at the age of eighteen. He had been one of 57 young men from counties Donegal, Tyrone and Derry who had been employed in 1832 by Philip Duffy, an Irish-American contractor, to lay railroad tracks in Pennsylvania for the Philadelphia … Read more
A friend of mine got a text the other day—‘The wicked witch is dead’. It wasn’t until she tuned in to the news that evening that she realised that this wasn’t a cryptic reference to the Wizard of Oz but to the death (the result of a stroke) of an 87-year-old woman who had suffered … Read more