By Fiona Fitzsimons On 17 March 1858 the Fenian Brotherhood was founded to overthrow British rule in Ireland by armed insurrection and establish a republic. The Fenians were a secret society operating in plain sight. They held public meetings and published a newspaper, the Irish People. Fenian networks extended beyond Ireland to wherever the Irish … Read more
By Zoë Reid On 18 April 2026 the National Archives will publish online the first census of the Irish Free State, an extraordinary corpus of more than 700,000 individual household returns which were to have been completed on the night of 18 April 1926. Fully searchable and free to access, the census reveals the early … Read more
By Fiona Fitzsimons The Local Government (Ireland) Act, 1898, swept away the existing system of county government, grand juries and Poor Law boards. It introduced a new two-tier structure of local government, with county and city boroughs on the first tier, and urban and rural districts below them. It introduced democratically elected councils to manage … Read more
By Fiona Fitzsimons The Anglo-Normans introduced grand juries into Ireland to provide local government in the shired counties. The high sheriff of each county nominated 23 men to the grand jury—as distinct from the ‘petty’ trial jury of twelve—from the largest landowners, excluding peers. Their original role was judicial, deciding on whether cases should proceed … Read more
By Fiona Fitzsimons In the seventeenth century Ireland, not America, was the land of opportunity. There were more English settlers in Ireland, and more money to be made here, than in the American colonies, which were too distant, with little economic development. The other side of this particular coin was that those dispossessed by conquest … Read more