Founded 150 years ago in April 1871, Newcastle’s Irish Literary Institute is still remembered both for the impact it had on the lives of the Irish migrants and their descendants living on Tyneside in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the key role it played in Irish nationalist politics in the North East […]
In 2018, in celebration of the centenary of women in British politics, Gateshead Library Service highlighted the lives of ten women, both local and national, in British political history, and presented a copy of the exhibition booklet to every Gateshead school.[1] One of the local women featured in the booklet is Mary Gunn (1883-1958), who […]
[Note: This post was originally given as a paper at the ‘Minorities and the First World War’ conference organised in 2014 by the University of Chester. Some small changes have been made to the text.] In June 1897, the annual convention of the Irish National League of Great Britain met in Manchester’s Free Trade Hall […]
[Note: This post was originally given as a paper entitled ‘An analysis of advanced nationalist activity amongst the Irish diaspora in the North East of England during the 1890s’ at ‘The Irish Diaspora and Revolution 1845-1945’ conference organised in 2012 by the Department of History, National University of Ireland, Maynooth. Some small changes have been […]
In the preface to her book Unmanageable Revolutionaries, Margaret Ward explained that it was not until the re-building of the nationalist movement in Ireland following the Easter Rising that nationalist women had ‘their demand for an equality of status at least partially accepted’.[1] Consequently, in 1919, Theresa Mason was able to join the leadership of […]
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1914: Irish Volunteers on Tyneside.
After the third Irish Home Rule Bill was introduced in parliament in April 1912, an armed militia was raised in Ulster to resist Home Rule and by December 1912 there were twenty battalions of the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) in Belfast alone.[1] It was inevitable that Irish nationalists would respond to defend Home Rule and […]
In February 1869, police in Liverpool arrested Michael James Kelly, a young Irish picture dealer and stationer, at his shop in Tithebarn Street for ‘seditiously exposing to view and selling a certain wicked, malicious, and seditious print against our Lady the Queen and Government’.[1] This ‘seditious print’, a chromo-lithograph imported from New York, was entitled […]
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Daniel O’Connell in Newcastle.
On 14 September 1835, Daniel O’Connell, Member of Parliament for Dublin City, made his first and only visit to Newcastle upon Tyne as part of a ten-day tour of northern England and Scotland. Six years before, ‘King Dan’, through his energetic mobilisation of the Catholic Association, had forced a hostile Tory government to yield Catholic […]
In March 1919, against a background of escalating violence in Ireland, a new nationalist political organisation, the Irish Self-Determination League of Great Britain (ISDL), was created by Sinn Féin to mobilise the support of the Irish living in Britain. And, in the industrial towns and colliery villages of the North East of England, from Ashington […]
exiles in england 