The All-Ireland Football match behind barbed wire, Frongoch Internment Camp, June 1916

28/04/2023.Reading time 7 minutes.

It is over a century after a unique All-Ireland football final between Kerry and Louth was played among the men interned in the wake of the 1916 Rising in Frongoch in north Wales. Over 1,800 Irishmen were rounded up and detained without trial under the Defence of the Realm Act at the prisoner of war […]

#OTD in 1882 – Birth of republican activist, Joe Clarke, in Dublin.

22/12/2022.Reading time 6 minutes.

Born in Rush, Dublin, Clarke worked for the Sinn Féin Bank, and was active in the Easter Rising. Located in the vicinity of Northumberland Road and Mount Street Bridge, he took part in some of the fiercest fighting of the week, in an area where the Sherwood Foresters famously marched into a waiting party of […]

#OTD in 1923 – Republican prisoner Denny Barry dies on hunger strike in Newbridge camp.

20/11/2022.Reading time 6 minutes.

Denis ‘Dinny’ Barry (Donnchadh de Barra) was born into a farming family in Cullen, Riverstick, ten miles south of Cork city. Barry enjoyed Gaelic culture and sport, and was a prominent member of the Ballymartle hurling club. He later joined the famous Blackrock National Hurling Club where he won 4 senior county championships in a […]

#OTD in 1885 – Birth of Michael Staines in Kiltarnaght near Newport, Co Mayo.

01/05/2022.Reading time 4 minutes.

Michael Joseph Staines was born in Kiltarnaght near Newport, Co Mayo. His family moved to Dublin in 1904 and lived at Murtagh Road in Stoneybatter. Staines worked at Henshaw’s ironmongers on Parliament Street and joined the Irish Volunteers at their inaugural meeting in November 1913. Following a stint as quartermaster of the Dublin brigade, he […]