In the Troubles loyalists killed 990 people; 708 simply because they were Catholics.1 The question is “Why?” Main Groupings The two most important and longest-established loyalist terrorist groups are: Ulster Volunteer Force founded in 1966, the fiftieth anniversary of the…
My attention was first called to Ulster-born writer George A. Birmingham by a review of his novel The Major’s Candlesticks on the Reading 1900–1950 blog. That novel is a comedy set in the aftermath of the Irish War of Independence…
Exciting news: IHC’s e-book guide to Irish history has been translated into Spanish and Portuguese, with an Italian translation in progress. As well as Amazon, all the usual retailers are stocking it: Apple, Google Play, Scribd, Kobo and so on,…
These are the posts that got the most views in 2014: History Carnival 131 (March 2014) Book Review: Fatal Path by Ronan Fanning (June 2014) Significant Commas in Irish History (February 2014) “Scots should recall the poverty of the Irish…
There wasn’t as much coverage of the revelations contained in declassified government papers this year as there was last year – surprising as they deal with the period of the Anglo-Irish Agreement. There are a few little gems nonetheless, such…
Nowadays, of course, there’s Irish History Compressed to deal with these kinds of annoyances!
This post was originally written on Quora in answer to the question: “Irish History: What was the ‘Flight of the Earls’, and why was it important?” This is my response: It probably matters most because of what it symbolised. The…
Here’s a brave man: historian and writer Tom Reilly, having gone back to the historical sources, says there is no credible contemporary evidence of the massacre of the population of Drogheda by Roundhead troops in 1649. […] in the eleven…
A few weeks ago I posed the question both here and on Twitter about what were the “six times [meaning six rebellions] during the last three hundred years” referred to on the 1916 Proclamation. I didn’t get any response. Having…
“British Isles Euler diagram 15” by TWCarlson – Own work. Licensed under CC0 via Wikimedia Commons. Some years ago I created the following guide to the minefield of names for the constituent parts of the, err, am I allowed…