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The Battle of Kinsale, 1601

On 21 September 1601 a Spanish fleet of twenty-eight sail occupied the Irish port at Kinsale with about 3,300 men, disembarking in a badly victualled and furnished condition under the […]

The Spanish Basque Irish Fishery & Trade in the Sixteenth-Century

It is not clear when Basque mariners first began fishing off the coast of Ireland but the ordinances of 1553 of the confraternity of fishermen of the Spanish Basque port […]

Did the Irish Come from Spain?

Most of us have heard, at one time or another, that Ireland was peopled in remote times by settlers from Spain. These settlers, the ancestors of the Irish people of […]

Thomas Keneally: Australian for History

HM: Was your upbringing distinctively Irish? TK: Yes, an Irish Catholic one. It began roughly three hundred miles up the coast from Sydney in a town called Kempsey. Kempsey was […]

April 16

1871 John Millington Synge, key figure in the Irish Literary Revival, co-founder of the Abbey Theatre and playwright, notably of The Playboy of the Western World, born in Newtown Villas, Rathfarnham, Co. Dublin.
1947 The expression ‘Cold War’, a war waged through proxies, was coined by the US statesman and millionaire financier Bernard Baruch.
1917 After twelve years in exile, the leading Russian Bolshevik, Vladimir Illyich Lenin (47), arrived in St Petersburg after a week-long journey from Zurich in a sealed train.
1862 Sir Thomas Wyse, politician and diplomat and major player in the struggle for Catholic Emancipation, died in Athens.
1660 Sir Hans Sloane, physician and collector, whose natural history collection formed the foundation of the British Museum, was born at Killyleagh Castle, Co. Down.

The Battle of Kinsale, 1601

The Spanish Basque Irish Fishery & Trade in the Sixteenth-Century

Did the Irish Come from Spain?

Thomas Keneally: Australian for History

Personal Histories

On this Day

April 16