A young woman’s life in Edwardian Dublin

Christina Jessop was born in Dublin in 1878 and lived there until 1908, when she married Jack Wilson and moved with him to Cobh (then Queenstown), Co. Cork. From 1903 […]

Culture, carnality and cash: the Florentine adventures of John George Adair

John George Adair (1823–85) gained notoriety as a cruel landlord because of the Derryveagh evictions carried out on his estate in County Donegal in April 1861. The eviction of 244 […]

Granite as a building material in Dublin in the early eighteenth century

In 1772 John Rutty, in his ‘Essay towards a natural history of the county of Dublin . . .’, stated that granite ‘within these thirty years, is introduced and greatly […]

Tracing the Irish in the American Civil War

Earlier this year I wrote about Irish involvement in the First World War and how, although the numbers of Irish involved are still contested, official estimates currently stand at 210,000 […]

Women and O’Connellite politics, 1824–45

In 1843 Irish artist Joseph Patrick Haverty painted a scene from a ‘monster meeting’ at Clifden, Co. Galway. The meeting had been organised by the Loyal National Repeal Association and […]