Ó Néill (1585 – 6 November 1649) was a Gaelic Irish soldier and one of the most famous of the O’Neill dynasty of Ulster in Ireland. O’Neill left Ireland at a young age and began the formal continental military career serving in the Spanish army. He was a brilliant military strategist and tactician. With the […]
The Céide fields in Ballycastle, Co Mayo, date back 5,500 years, making them the world’s oldest field systems, with a complex of walls, houses and tombs, protected beneath a bog and is the largest Stone Age site on the planet. It is the most extensive Neolithic site in Ireland. Discovered in the 1930s by schoolteacher […]
ON THIS DAY: 16th May 1920, Joan Of Arc was cannonised a saint “You Englishmen, who have no right in this Kingdom of France, the King of Heaven sends you word and warning, by me Jehanne the Maid, to abandon your forts and depart into your own country, or I will raise such a war-cry against […]
Easter Rising leaders: Pádraig Pearse, Thomas Clarke and Thomas MacDonagh were executed by a firing squad in Kilmainham Gaol. #gript
“My dear Mother, You will I know have been longing to hear from me. I do not know how much you have heard since the last note I sent you from the G.P.O. On Friday evening the Post Office was set on fire and we had to abandon it. We dashed into Moore Street and […]
ON THIS DAY: Good Friday: Poem written by Joseph Mary Plunkett referencing Good Friday Joseph Mary Plunkett (Irish: Seosamh Máire Pluincéid, 21 November 1887 – 4 May 1916) was an Irish nationalist, republican, poet, journalist, revolutionary and a leader of the 1916 Easter Rising. He was married to his childhood sweetheart Grace Gifford in 1916, 7 hours before […]
Back in December I added Susan Cain’s Quiet: The power of introverts in a world that can’t stop talking, which was first published in 2012, to my reading list for 2020. At the time nobody could have imagined that Covid-19 would force large numbers of people around the world to literally stop talking and hole up […]
The infamous and notorious Black and Tans will not be forgotten in Irish history. 100 years ago, the first tranche of them arrived from Britain, mainly recruited from the unemployed veterans of World War 1. They had 3 months training and their pay was ten shillings a day. Their ‘uniforms’ were mixed, some with Khaki […]
Let’s take a break from Coronavirus for a moment to examine one of the most inexplicable Irish Times headlines in recent times: https://twitter.com/IrishTimes/status/1242131251584102402 If there’s one thing the Irish Times is good at, it’s lecturing the rest of us about what words to use and what you are, and are not, allowed to say. […]
Niamh wrote something of a polemic on this site last week about that god-awful “celebrities singing Imagine by John Lennon” video, declaring that “the level of self-awareness (in the video) is between zero and minus infinity”. Well Niamh, I have some bad news. Just take a look. https://twitter.com/Madonna/status/1241768707631841281 Where’s it all going to end? If […]
St Patrick is now one of the world’s best known Catholic figures but the earliest known celebration of the saint is believed to have been held on March 17, 1631, marking the anniversary of his death in the 5th century. In that year, bubonic plague raged across parts of Europe, especially impacting Italy where the epidemic […]
On the 5th February 1981, republican prisoners in Long Kesh issued a statement to the British government that unless the prisoners were awarded special category status, there could be further hunger strikes. There had been several smaller strikes in the Maze and Armagh Women’s Prison previously following the tradition of Thomas Ashe, Terence MacSwiney, Frank […]