‘Make way for the Molly Maguires!’ The Ancient Order of Hibernians and the Irish Parliamentary Party, 1902–14

In April 1912 the third Home Rule bill appeared to herald a new era, with the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP) poised to reap the harvest of a generation of constitutional […]

Feakle’s Biddy Early: a victim of ‘moral panic’?

Biddy Early died on the afternoon of 22 April 1874 in a small, two-roomed mud cottage overlooking Kilbarron Lake in Feakle, Co. Clare. Her life story was first published in 1903, […]

Irish Home Rule: stepping-stone to imperial federation?

In 1888 Cecil Rhodes, an Englishman living in South Africa, donated £10,000 to Charles Stewart Parnell. His motive for contributing to a cause to which he had no emotional attachment […]

History repeating: Georgian Ireland’s property bubble

With an estimated four million people by the 1770s, Ireland had undergone a population explosion that made Dublin the second-largest city, after London, in the British Empire. Nevertheless, despite this […]

Cromwellian courts martial records

Our understanding of the Cromwellian period from 1649 to 1660 has been sorely hampered by the fact that the records of the period were lost in the destruction of the […]