This post will explore the short and turbulent history of Middlesbrough’s Irish Literary Association, the first to open in the North East of England, and show how the clash between Fenians and Catholic priests led to its early closure. Founded 150 years ago in April 1871, Newcastle’s Irish Literary Institute is still remembered both for […]
This post will explore the history of the Irish Labour Party in Gateshead and highlight the key role played by Mary Gunn in this important, but today almost forgotten, organisation that eased the transfer of Irish nationalist allegiance in the town to the British Labour Party. In 2018, in celebration of the centenary of women […]
The Tyneside Irish Brigade, the only Irish corps raised in Britain during the Great War, was the crowning achievement of the pre-1916 Irish nationalist organisations in Britain. This post, which was originally given as a paper at the ‘Minorities and the First World War’ conference organised in 2014 by the University of Chester, tells the […]
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 made […]
With branches from Bishop Auckland to Wallsend, the Ladies’ Land League in the early 1880s was the first nationalist organisation for Irish women in the North East of England. This post will explore the history of this pioneering women’s organisation. In the preface to her book Unmanageable Revolutionaries, Margaret Ward explained that it was not […]
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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. […]
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 […]
In 1835, Daniel O’Connell – Ireland’s ‘King Dan’ – came to Tyneside on his first and only visit. This post will tell the story of that visit and examine the role local Ribbonmen, in the guise of Newcastle’s Hibernian Society, had in his tumultuous reception. On 14 September 1835, Daniel O’Connell, Member of Parliament for […]
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 