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 […]
“The town of Balbriggan they’ve burned to the ground While bullets Like hailstones were whizzing around; And women left homeless by this evil clan. They’ve waged war on the children, the bold Black and Tan.” (From the ‘Bold Black and Tans, Irish Songs of Resistance, Galvin, 1950) The sack of the north Dublin town […]
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 […]
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 […]
The Grand Armee of the Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte entered Moscow and captured it on this day, September 14th, 1812. It was the culmination of the biggest – and ultimately fatal – mistake of Napoleon’s brilliant career. Napoleon’s invasion of Russia was a major miscalculation. At the time of the invasion, he dominated Europe, with only […]
The men have continued to be honored and revered as heroes in Mexico.
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 […]
On the 10th of September, in 1649, Oliver Cromwell sat encamped outside the city of Drogheda with his 12,000-strong army and 11 siege cannons. They had already opened two large breaches in the town’s walls, as they were thin medieval structures and not designed to withstand cannon fire. Poised to attack the city, Cromwell wrote […]
Millions either died or emigrated as a result of the catastrophic failures of the authorities
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 […]
These laws sowed the seed for further discontent and rebellion.