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The Reformation in Ireland: interpretations old and new

WHY DID THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION FAIL IN IRELAND? By Henry A. Jefferies In terms of sheer importance in Irish history, few events compare with the Reformation. In particular, the contrasting […]

Richard Talbot—the man who didn’t kill Cromwell

The Stuart court-in-exile sponsored many schemes to assassinate Oliver Cromwell throughout the 1650s. Most plans envisioned a handful of gunmen ambushing the lord protector and his mounted escorts as they […]

‘Wild Irishmen’: cartographic evidence from the siege of Castle Maine, 1572

The map of the siege of Castle Maine was probably drawn shortly after the victory of Munster president Sir John Perrot in August 1572, since it was entered into the […]

Reconstructing the estate of Richard Boyle, first earl of Cork, c. 1602–43

Richard Boyle was one of the most significant and controversial characters in early modern Ireland. An archetypal English adventurer, by his own account he was variously an earnest royal official […]

Death in the lakelands: Tyrone’s proxy war, 1593–4

At the beginning of the 1590s Ireland stood on the brink of a new era that would forever alter the economic, cultural and social characteristics of its people. The catalyst […]

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 Reformation in Ireland: interpretations old and new

Richard Talbot—the man who didn’t kill Cromwell

‘Wild Irishmen’: cartographic evidence from the siege of Castle Maine, 1572

Reconstructing the estate of Richard Boyle, first earl of Cork, c. 1602–43

Death in the lakelands: Tyrone’s proxy war, 1593–4

Personal Histories

On this Day

April 18