Sometimes historical anniversaries throw up interesting items. Examples of irony perhaps, or maybe indications as to how much things have altered over the course of time. On Friday evening, Sinn Féin was the main political party which took part in what was effectively a picket of a Catholic Church in Ballyfermot. They and others may […]
June 21, 1798 was the day on which the Irish insurgents were defeated at the Battle of Vinegar Hill. The British forces numbering up to 18,000 under the command of General Lake had been engaged in a sweep through Wexford that had forced the rebel army to muster its forces, to the number of up […]
June 20 marks a strange anniversary in Irish history. On that date in 1631, north African corsairs, or pirates, raided the village of Baltimore on the west Cork coast and took at least 107 of the villagers captive to be sold as slaves in Algiers. Most of those abducted were part of an English settlement […]
Secret Catholic societies against colonialism in Ireland
Armed with poles and boiling water
Having been crowned King of England, Scotland, and Ireland some 14 months earlier, on April 11th, 1689, William III of England landed in Ireland on this day to confront the Jacobite supporters of his father in law, the deposed King James II. A short military campaign that followed would lead to the Battle of the […]
This day 103 years ago – 8 June 1917 – an explosion in a copper mine in Butte, Montana, resulted in the death of 168 miners. 38 of them were from Ireland, by far the largest group of foreign-born workers. The fire in the Speculator Granite Mountain Mine shocked America and is still the worst […]
Though he has not been formally recognized as a saint, Talbot may be considered a patron of those struggling with alcoholism and addiction
Ó Néill was a Gaelic Irish soldier and one of the most famous of the O’Neill dynasty of Ulster in Ireland.
Hundreds of unarmed United Irishmen were killed by British forces in the Gibbet Rath massacre on the Curragh of Kildare following their surrender OTN in 1798. The rebellion of 1798 was strongly supported in Country Kildare and the rebels managed to take a number of towns and hold the British forces at bay for more […]
A Marist priest and Irish historian, he is known for his writings and his rejection of revisionist Irish history and historians. He relayed in an interview with History Ireland that he felt stifled in UCD and ironically, it was in Cambridge, which was originally the origin of revisionism, that he found the data and evidence […]
I was ten in 1974. It was the year that I mainly remember for the fact that Dublin won the All-Ireland and I had been at my first big game – although not my first ever game – in Croke Park, when they beat Cork in the semi-final. The other main memory I have is […]