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1914: Irish Volunteers on Tyneside.

For a few months in 1914, companies of Irish Volunteers were raised on Tyneside. This post will explore their brief history, reveal why the movement failed to catch the imagination of Irish nationalists in the North East, and suggest that the Volunteers’ real importance was as the forerunner of the British Army’s Tyneside Irish Brigade. […]

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M J Kelly, Newcastle’s Fenian school teacher.

This post looks at the life of Michael Kelly, headmaster of the first Catholic secondary school for boys in Newcastle and ‘an ardent Fenian’, who moved to the United States in 1883 in the aftermath of the Phoenix Park killings. In February 1869, police in Liverpool arrested Michael James Kelly, a young Irish picture dealer […]