Irish History, Culture, Heritage, Language, Mythology
“This rooting out of the Irish people; this transplanting of them from their native home into a foreign land, may be all very well, so far as the young people are concerned; but for the fathers and mothers who have reared families in Ireland, it is immediate decay and death.” ―Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa Death of […]
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Known as the “Ireland’s Uncrowned King,” Charles Stewart Parnell was haughty and aloof yet became a stirring political leader. He died at the age of 45, after a career marked by dramatic triumphs and a disastrous personal scandal. For someone strongly associated with the cause of Ireland’s rebellion against British rule, Charles Stewart Parnell had […]
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In the early hours of 21 April 1916, three days before the rising began, Roger Casement was taken by a German submarine and was put ashore at Banna Strand in Tralee Bay, Co Kerry. Suffering from a recurrence of the malaria that had plagued him since his days in the Congo, and too weak to […]
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Elizabeth O’Farrell was born in Dublin in November 1884. In 1906 she joined Inghinidhe na hÉireann and along with her lifelong friend Julia Grenan she also joined Cumann na mBan, the women’s branch of the Irish Volunteers. As plans were put in place for the Easter Rising of April 1916, Elizabeth and Julia were sent […]
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Nora Connolly was born in Edinburgh in 1893. She was the second daughter of James Connolly, and the family moved to Dublin having lived for a time in the United States and Belfast. Her father was an organiser for the Dublin Socialist club and the family lived in poverty for much of her childhood. For […]
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Frank Ryan was born in Co Limerick, in 1902. After leaving university he became an active member of the Irish Republican Army and fought in the Irish Civil War. In 1929 Ryan was appointed editor of An Phoblacht, the IRA newspaper. He was imprisoned several times over the following years for publishing seditious articles and […]
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“No person knows better than you do that the domination of England is the sole and blighting curse of this country. It is the incubus that sits on our energies, stops the pulsation of the nation’s heart and leaves to Ireland not gay vitality but horrid the convulsions of a troubled dream.” –Daniel O’Connell Eighteen […]
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Brady was one of the Invincibles – a Fenian splinter group – that murdered the Chief Secretary of Ireland on his first day in the country. Four others were executed for the murders. Brady by all accounts was a mountain of a man. The Times wrote after his execution. “He was brought up as a […]
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Grace was the second youngest of twelve children. Her sisters, Nellie and Muriel, were also avid nationalists as well as converts to Catholicism. Muriel married Thomas MacDonagh, who was executed in Kilmainham earlier on the day Grace married Joe Plunkett. It was said of the Gifford girls: “whenever those vivacious girls entered a gloomy Sinn […]
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“More and more I realised that Ireland could rely only on force, in some form or another, to free herself.” –Maud Gonne MacBride The daughter of an Irish army officer and his English wife, Maud Gonne converted to republicanism by an eviction she saw during the 1880s, and became a speaker for the Land League. […]
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