History Ireland

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Let sleeping dogs lie

Buried in the small print of the recent budget was an announcement that the government intends to merge the National Library (NLI), the National Archives (NAI) and the Irish Manuscripts […]

‘Across the hawthorn hedge the noise of bugles’

The maritime town of Carrickfergus, Co. Antrim, has experienced several eras of military history since its foundation in medieval times. By the mid-Victorian period it was a significant barracks town, […]

‘When the blood was bubbling in my veins’

Election campaigns are usually opportunities for cynical self-promotion rather than self-reflection. But when standing for election to parliament in 1828, Daniel O’Connell chose to make an honest confession about his […]

From the files of the DIB…Accidental nationalist hero

O’Brien, Ignatius John, Baron Shandon (1857–1930), lord chancellor of Ireland, was born on 31 July 1857 in Cork, ninth child and youngest son of Mark Joseph O’Brien (chandler and brewer’s […]

Pre-Famine public health

There is a history of over 200 years of public health service in Ireland, and by the early nineteenth century county infirmaries, fever hospitals and public dispensaries had become the […]

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.

Let sleeping dogs lie

‘Across the hawthorn hedge the noise of bugles’

‘When the blood was bubbling in my veins’

From the files of the DIB…Accidental nationalist hero

Pre-Famine public health

Personal Histories

On this Day

April 18