While Dublin Castle anticipated a revival of United Irish activity in Leinster 200 years ago, it was in New South Wales, Australia, that the republican organisation made its last show of force. The scale and potential of the Castle Hill revolt of March 1804 shocked a colonial regime that had weathered several ‘Irish plots’ between … Read more
The 1790s have emerged, over the past fifteen years or so, as the focus of some of the most vigorous and challenging writing currently forthcoming from Irish historians. In that explosion of debate and reinterpretation, Kevin Whelan is recognised as a central figure. The appearance of The Tree of Liberty will thus attract wide and … Read more
Few events in modern Irish history, especially in the history of revolutionary nationalism, haunt the imagination like the massacre that took place in the townland of Scullabogue in southern County Wexford on 5 June 1798. The killing of well over a hundred government supporters by rebels has been immortalised in the illustration that George Cruickshank … Read more
Last November, at Johnstown Castle, Wexford, Minister of State, Avril Doyle TD officially launched ‘Friends of Comóradh ’98’ and their flagship project, the reconvention of the Wexford Senate in 1998. She argued that the 1790s was the pivotal decade in the evolution of modern Ireland. It witnessed the emergence of popular Republicanism and Loyalism, of … Read more
Dáire Keogh and Kevin Whelan (eds.) (Four Courts Press, E50) ISBN 1851825304 This book contains the proceedings of two conferences held in Newman House, St Stephen’s Green, and at the Byrne-Perry Summer School in Gorey to mark the bicentenary of the Act of Union. This was the latest in a series of voluntarily organised but … Read more