Captain Flora Sandes: ‘the Serbian Joan of Arc’

Flora Sandes (1876–1956) fought with the Serbian army during the Great War, and was awarded the country’s highest military honour. To the soldiers of Serbia she was nashi Engleskinja—‘our Englishwoman’. […]

The Captain and the Fenians: William Henry O’Shea and the IRB

When Charles Stewart Parnell’s coffin was drawn through the streets of Dublin on Sunday 11 October 1891, the carriages immediately following the hearse were occupied, appropriately, by members of his […]

A father’s tribute? The war trophies of Lieutenant Nevill Coghill VC

In 1879 Sir John Joscelyn Coghill of Drumcondra visited the Museum of Science and Art in Dublin (now the National Museum of Ireland) to donate a number of ethnographic items […]

The Great Famine general election of 1847

The ultimate responsibility for failure to cope effectively with the disaster of the Famine lay with the Westminster parliament, but we should remember that Ireland in 1847 returned 105 MPs […]

‘Forced from this world’: massacre on the Mary Russell

On 24 June 1828, as the schooner Mary Stubbs and the brig Mary Russell approached Cork Harbour, a man suddenly jumped overboard from the Mary Stubbs and swam towards nearby […]