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The Irish and the Atlantic slave trade

It was the Stuarts who introduced the Irish to the slave trade. Charles II returned to the throne in 1660 at a time when it was becoming clear that sugar […]

Sunningdale and the 1974 Ulster Workers” Council strike

In March 1972 the British government abolished the unionist-dominated parliament at Stormont but subsequently found it extremely difficult to establish a new administration. The overall parameters of a political settlement […]

Southern Citizen: John Mitchel, the Confederacy and slavery

On 29 November 1853 John Mitchel arrived in New York City, having escaped from the penal colony of Van Diemen’s Land. He had been one of the most prominent and […]

Remembering “the Captain”

Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier was born in 1796 and sprang from a well-connected Banbridge family who first settled in County Down during the seventeenth century. His father, George Crozier, was […]

Irish post-war asylum:Nazi sympathy, pan-Celticism or raisons d’etat?

Much has appeared in the Irish media in recent months concerning the asylum granted to Axis collaborators and ‘war criminals’ in the years after 1945. The general tenor of this […]

April 18

1952 Edmund O’Brien (71), County Limerick-born author and yachtsman who in 1923 circumnavigated the globe in his ketch Saoirse, died.
1870 Robert Noonan, house-painter, sign-writer and author, notably of The ragged-trousered philanthropists (1914), born Robert Croker, the illegitimate son of an RIC officer, at 37 Wexford Street, Dublin.
1949 Under the terms of the Republic of Ireland Act (December 1948), designed by John A. Costello’s coalition government to ‘take the gun out of Irish politics’, Ireland formally left the Commonwealth and became a republic.
1918 The Mansion House conference, called by the lord mayor of Dublin, Laurence O’Neill, on the day the Military Service Bill became law, was attended by all shades of nationalist opinion. An anti-conscription pledge, drafted by Éamon de Valera, was issued.
1870 Robert Tressell, nom de plume of Robert Croker, latterly Robert Noonan, author of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists (first unabridged edition published in 1955), was born in Dublin, the illegitimate son of RIC inspector and later magistrate Sir Samuel Croker.
2019 The journalist Lyra McKee (29) was shot dead by a New IRA gunman who opened fire on PSNI officers monitoring disturbances in Derry’s Creggan area. President Michael D. Higgins and Taoiseach Leo Varadkar attended her funeral.

The Irish and the Atlantic slave trade

Sunningdale and the 1974 Ulster Workers” Council strike

Southern Citizen: John Mitchel, the Confederacy and slavery

Remembering “the Captain”

Irish post-war asylum:Nazi sympathy, pan-Celticism or raisons d’etat?

Personal Histories

On this Day

April 18