Kilmainham Gaol opened in August 1796 as the new county gaol for Dublin. It was built for ordinary criminals and debtors but within a month it had received its first political prisoners, United Irishmen from Ulster, including Samuel Neilson, a founding member. Neilson was … Read more
popular imagination monuments appear to be timeless and unchanging. Once erected they quickly become a ‘natural’ fixture in the landscape. Highly visible and inhabiting a public space they encourage the viewer, as one writer has pointed out, ‘to mistake material presence and weight for immutable permanence’. Yet these silent, still, stone and bronze edifices have … Read more
The collection known as the ‘Rebellion Papers’ in the National Archives, Dublin, has been described as ‘the largest single source for the study of the 1790s’. The material ranges from the early 1790s to 1808, a period which witnessed developments that were to shape modern Ireland: the spread from revolutionary France of republicanism as a … Read more
TG: In the acknowledgements to Wolfe Tone: Prophet of Irish Independence (1989) you state that your interest in Tone goes back to childhood and traditions transmitted by your parents. Could you explain? ME: I grew up with the United Irishmen. My childhood was spent in the shadow of McArt’s Fort. My father was steeped in … Read more
Launching the Irish government’s 1798 commemorations earlier this year, the Taoiseach, Mr Ahern, declared: ‘we are commemorating the most sustained effort in Irish history to reconcile and unite what were the three communities with different religious beliefs and ethnic backgrounds—Protestants, Catholics and Dissenters’. He spoke on behalf of ‘a sovereign Irish government’, that, he claimed, … Read more