Mayo agent, Captain Charles Boycott, was sent to a ‘moral Coventry.’ He described his plight in a letter to The Times: “…people collect in crowds upon my farm and order off all my workmen. The shopkeepers have been warned to stop all supplies to my house. My farm is public property, I can get no […]
On September 21st 1601 the Spanish landed in Kinsale Co Cork with some 4,000 men, took the town and awaited the arrival of the Gaelic chiefs from Ulster. With a fleet of twenty-eight, they occupied the port at Kinsale under the maestro de campo general, Don Juan del Águila. The ships were to be brought […]
Robert Emmett was an Irish Republican and patriot, orator and rebel leader. After leading an abortive rebellion in Dublin against British rule in 1803 he was captured then tried and executed for high treason against the British king George III of Great Britain. When asked if he had any thing to say in response to […]
Anne Devlin was born in County Wicklow around the end of the 1770s and in 1800 met Robert Emmet and assisted him in his plans for an uprising in Dublin. On the evening of the 23rd July 1803 the rising went ahead in Dublin, but despite taking the British authorities by surprise, the rebellion collapsed. […]
Dutch scientist Antonie van Leeuwenhoek is the first to report the existence of bacteria A largely self-taught man in science, he is commonly known as “the Father of Microbiology”, and one of the first microscopists and microbiologists. Van Leeuwenhoek is best known for his pioneering work in microscopy and for his contributions toward the establishment […]
Father Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla urged Mexicans to rise up against the Spanish-born ruling class. He made the first cry for independence. After a moving speech in the Mexican town of Dolores, Hidalgo took up the banner of the Virgin of Guadalupe, a Roman Catholic image of the Virgin Mary as she appears to Juan […]
Thomas Davis was an Irish writer who was the chief organiser of the Young Ireland movement, who was born in Mallow to a Welsh father and an Irish mother. Through his mother he was descended from the Gaelic noble family of O’Sullivan Beare. His father died one month after his birth and his family moved […]
Scottish biologist and bacteriologist Alexander Fleming discovers penicillin while studying influenza. At the time, Fleming was experimenting with the influenza virus in the Laboratory of the Inoculation Department at St. Mary’s Hospital in London. Fleming returned from a two-week vacation to find that a mold had developed on an accidentally contaminated staphylococcus culture plate. Upon […]
ON THIS DAY: 12TH SEPTEMBER 1919 Dáil Éireann was declared illegal by the British Parliament when Sinn Féin TDs refused to sit in Westminister and set up their own parliament in Dublin, Dáil Éireann The British authorities called it a ‘dangerous assembly, because of this the first Dáil had to meet in secret at different […]
The Battle of Stirling Bridge was a battle of the First War of Scottish Independence, Scottish rebel William Wallace and others defeated the English at Stirling Bridge. The Scots had some 300 cavalry, 10,000 infantry and the English had far greater numbers of 1,000 to 3,000 cavalry, 15,000-50,000 infantry but the Scots were victorious. The […]
Newspapers report a potato blight has hit Ireland. High rents imposed by absentee landlords meant that most people could only afford to live on small tenant farms with inferior soil that only potatoes could grow on; but the potato crop was prone to disease and the farmers did not have extra land to rotate crops. […]
Pádraig Mac Piarais founded St. Enda’s (Scoil Éanna) in Rathfarnham. St. Enda’s was to have an “Irish standpoint and ‘atmosphere’” and be based on what Pearse saw as the two key characteristics of the ancient Irish system of education: freedom for the individual student and inspirational teaching. He wrote later in his essay on education […]