Msgr. Pádraig de Brún was born in Grangemockler, Tipperary in October 1889. His father was a school teacher and the young Pádraig was an excellent student, talented with many natural gifts. He was especially interested in the history of Ireland and the Gaelic language. He was particularly good and excelled at maths and studied it […]
ON THIS DAY: 12 OCTOBER 1645: Archbishop Rinuccini arrives in Ireland to offer assistance to O’Neill and the Irish Confederate Catholics in their war against English Protestant rule He wrote this letter to his brother, describing the Irish he met: “The men are fine-looking and of incredible strength, swift runners, and ready to bear every […]
Following a Catholic uprising in 1641, Cromwell and the New Model Army set sail to Ireland to defeat this coalition and reclaim Ireland for parliament. This proved to be a bloody and brutal affair, forever remembered for a series of controversial massacres. The Cromwellian Conquest of Ireland had begun, which included the destruction of Drogheda […]
Kuno Meyer was a German scholar who as an expert in Celtic philogoy and literature and a pioneering scholar of old Irish. He edited and translated scripts and documents which made him the chief interpreter of early Irish literature for English and German readers. He founded and edited four journals devoted to Celtic Studies, published […]
Charles the Great, known to history as Charlemagne, was crowned King of the Franks on this day, October 9th, 768AD. As King, he would go on, over the next 32 years, to unite most of Europe, and found the Holy Roman Empire. Successive wars brought the Kingdom of Lombardy (modern Italy) under his control, and […]
ON THIS DAY: 8TH OCTOBER 1974: SEÁN MACBRIDE became the first Irish person to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize MacBride was born in Paris in 1904 and remained ther until his father’s execution after the Easter Rising of 1916, when he was sent to school at Mount St Benedict’s, Gorey. In 1919, aged 15, […]
Pádraic Ó Conaire was an Irish writer who wrote extensively in the Irish Language and wrote 26 books, 473 stories, 237 essays and 6 plays. His acclaimed novel Deoraíocht has been described by Angela Bourke as ‘the earliest example of modernist fiction in Irish’. Orphaned by the age of eleven, he spent a period living […]
On October 5th, 1968 a Civil Rights march took place in Derry protesting gerrymandering and discrimination against the minority Catholic population. The march, organised by the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA) and the Derry Housing Action Committee, had been banned by the authorities in Stormont but it was decided to go ahead in defiance. At the […]
The Orient Express departs on its first official journey from Paris to Instanbul; It was a long-distance passenger train service created in 1883 by Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits (CIWL). It’s routes changed many times with several routes in the past concurrently used the Orient Express name, or slight variations. Although the original Orient Express […]
Ten IRA and INLA hunger-strikers die between 5 May and 12 August; all but one of the men were in their twenties, the youngest, Thomas McElwee, being 23 years of age. The hunger strike had started on March 1st 1981 after years of the prisoners being on the blanket (blanket protest) and the failure of […]
Recalling an interview with Dan Keating the last survivor of the Tan War In 2006, just a year years before his death in October 2007, I travelled to Castlemaine, Co. Kerry to talk to Ireland’s oldest man, Dan Keating. At 104 years of age Dan was the last surviving veteran of the Irish civil war. […]
The Whiteboys (na Buachaillí Bána) were a secret Irish agrarian organisation which defended tenant farmer land rights for subsistence farming. They sought to address rack-rents, tithe collection, excessive dues, evictions and other oppressive acts. As a result they targeted landlords and tithe collectors. Their operations were chiefly in the counties of Waterford, Cork, Limerick, and […]