In 1938, Dr Mark Ryan, who had joined the Irish Republican Brotherhood in Lancashire in 1865, declared in the foreword to his book ‘Fenian Memories’, that ‘next to my religion, Fenianism has been the greatest thing in my life’. Not all Irish nationalists, however, who had enthusiastically embraced Fenianism as young men remained loyal to […]
Tag: Irish Republican Brotherhood
Terence MacSwiney, Lord Mayor of Cork, died in Brixton prison on 25 October 1920 on the seventy-fourth day of his hunger strike, and was buried the following Sunday afternoon in his home city.[1] That same afternoon, in ‘scenes unparalleled in the history of Newcastle’, a symbolic funeral procession for the ‘Great Irish Patriot and Christian […]
This post explores the background to a heated night in Newcastle upon Tyne in February 1884, when Michael Davitt, former Fenian gun-runner and ex-Dartmoor prisoner, came face to face with Tyneside Fenians opposed to the Irish Land League, the very cause that had defined his nationalism since 1879. The Amnesty Association was formed in Dublin […]
Was Middlesbrough’s John Walsh part of the conspiracy that planned and executed the brutal Phoenix Park killings that so shocked Britain and Ireland in 1882? This post will examine the life of this ‘extreme Irish nationalist’, who died in exile in New York in 1891. The assassination of the Chief Secretary for Ireland, Lord Frederick […]
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 […]
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 