Following the defeat of Gladstone’s first Home Rule bill in June 1886, some of Charles Stewart Parnell’s lieutenants decided to raise morale and lower rents by renewing the land war that had caused so much havoc and fear since the founding of the Irish National Land League in October 1879. Although Parnell opposed this new … Read more
Irish History Online (IHO) is a fully searchable electronic bibliography of publications on Irish history, which is making it much easier to discover what has been published on particular topics in Irish history. This free online resource, based in the Department of History, NUI Maynooth, Co. Kildare (principal investigator: Professor Jackie Hill), was set up … Read more
In the newly independent Irish Free State the Catholic Church was deeply insecure about its role in the new state, which had been born out of violence—a violence, moreover, that had revealed how unstable and volatile its flock could be. The ruthlessness and cruelty of the Civil War had appalled churchmen, and the Catholic Church’s … Read more
On 15 June 1843, huge crowds congregated on a racecourse outside Ennis at a ‘monster meeting’ in support of the repeal of the Act of Union. Adhering to a template, the mass rally of rousing speeches was followed by a magnificent evening banquet in the town’s old chapel, where Daniel O’Connell compared the momentum of … Read more
The roads of early twentieth-century rural Ireland may have been safer for the fact that Parnell did not live to see the advent of the motorcar. According to a society hostess acquaintance, he was ‘always in a hurry; he could never wait for anything; to wait for a train was anguish to him, he would … Read more