This post will explore the support provided by Irish nationalist women in the North East of England to the Tyneside Brigade of the Irish Republican Army during the War of Independence. No women were allowed in the ranks of the Irish Volunteers, in contrast to the Irish Citizen Army,[1] and, at the Volunteers’ inaugural meeting […]
On Monday 19 February 1883, newspaper readers across the north of England were presented with verbatim reports from the courthouse in Kilmainham, where, on the previous Saturday, James Carey, after turning Queen’s evidence, described the plot to murder Lord Frederick Cavendish, Chief Secretary for Ireland, and his Under Secretary, Thomas Burke, in Dublin’s Phoenix Park […]
Introduction.[1] The story of Mary Gunn and the Irish Labour Party has featured in a previous post on this website Mary Gunn: Gateshead’s Irish nationalist and Labour activist.[2] This post sets that story against the background of Irish Catholic settlement in Gateshead from the mid-nineteenth century, and shows how, by the late 1920s, the Labour […]
Under the headline ‘Fenian Outrage in Manchester. A Policeman Murdered’,[1] the Newcastle Journal reported the shooting dead of Police Sergeant Charles Brett during the rescue of two Fenian prisoners in Manchester on 18 September 1867.[2] In spite, however, of countrywide ‘sightings’ of Colonel Thomas Kelly, police searches, and mass arrests, the fugitives eluded re-capture. In […]
The assassination of the Chief Secretary for Ireland, Lord Frederick Cavendish, and the Under Secretary, Thomas Burke, in Dublin’s Phoenix Park on 6 May 1882 stunned Irish nationalists in Ireland and Britain. In the North East of England, hastily convened meetings of National Land League branches condemned the ‘foul murder’[1] with the ‘utmost horror and […]
After the collapse of the Repeal movement and the death of Daniel O’Connell in 1847, there was no organised outlet for Irish nationalists living in the North East of England other than for the semi-criminal and oath-bound Ribbon or Hibernian gangs, whose often-violent sectarian activities in Felling,[1] Crook,[2] Shotley Bridge[3] and elsewhere[4] during the 1850s […]
[Note: This post was originally presented as an on-line talk to the Tyneside Irish Cultural Society on 2 December 2021 to mark the centenary of the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty. As the talk was illustrated, some changes have been made to the text below.] 100 years ago next week, on 6 December 1921, the […]
After the Great War, though in severe financial difficulties following the collapse of the Irish Parliamentary Party in the 1918 general election, Dublin’s Freeman’s Journal still regularly reported Irish nationalist and Catholic news from Britain.[1] Each week a page, entitled ‘With the Irish in Great Britain’ or ‘The Irish in Great Britain’, included news from […]
Between 1903 and 1914, Irish nationalists in the North East of England held an annual gala in Wharton Park in Durham City. These galas, a mix of political demonstration, family day-out, sports day, and a celebration of the Gaelic revival, were, along with the St Patrick’s Day celebrations, a key element in the Irish nationalist […]
In early February 1866, ‘Yankee Irishmen’ were reported to be actively recruiting for the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) in the North of England in preparation for the long-anticipated Fenian rising in Ireland.[1] Taking no chances with the forthcoming St Patrick’s Day celebrations, police and local Rifle Volunteers in Newcastle, Sunderland and elsewhere were placed on […]
exiles in england 