Over the course of the Irish War of Independence and Civil War, nearly 300 ‘Big Houses’ (those belonging to aristocrats with in excess of 2,000 acres), 20% of a total of c. 1,500, were burned to the ground. Why? AuthorTerence Dooley, Professor of History at Maynooth University and Director of the Centre for the Study of … Read more
THE OWNER A Thomas Campion is recorded on the 1901 census at Seskin, Co. Kilkenny, as an unmarried agricultural labourer, along with his older and younger unmarried sisters, occupying a four-room stone or brick house (2nd class), with a slate or tile roof and four outbuildings. They were Roman Catholic, could all read and write, … Read more
Reporting on Croker’s death, the Boston Daily Globe noted that a ‘boss’ was a ‘self-appointed middleman’ who ‘set up other men for the empty honour of being mayor’. Tammany began as a fraternal society in New York in 1789, later becoming the city’s foremost political machine. Associated with corruption, vote-buying and jobbery in the era … Read more
The Anglo-Irish Treaty sparked turmoil within the IRA. Some accepted it and joined the ranks of the Provisional Government’s new ‘National Army’; some remained neutral; the majority opposed it, but with the added twist that on the eve of the Civil War there were two anti-Treaty factions of the IRA, not one. Two Army Conventions, … Read more
While an uneasy peace prevailed in the South following the Truce of July 1921, in Northern Ireland communal violence continued to rage, exemplified most notoriously on 24 March 1922 by the killings of a ‘respectable’ Catholic family, the McMahons, by an RIC ‘murder gang’. Was this a ‘one-off’ by a ‘rogue’ element or part of … Read more