February in History & the Irish Newspaper Archive We look back at events in history in the month of February through the pages of the Irish Newspaper Archive and the Radical Newspaper Archive. Land Wars 18th.February.1882 Entering its second year, the Land War and its repercussions were being severely felt all across Ireland during February 1882. No town or village escaped the ever present violence which pitted landlord an...
February in History & the Irish Newspaper Archive. We look back at events in history in the month of February through the pages of the Irish Newspaper Archive and the Radical Newspaper Archive. In February 1832 Ireland was in a state of crisis owing to continued Cholera epidemic and also because of agitation and lawlessness stemming from anti-tithe opposition. Tithes were a payment of usually 1/10 of a farmers produce to the...
We look back at events in history in the month of February through the pages of the Irish Newspaper Archive and the Radical Newspaper Archive. Gregory or Quarter Acre Clause In 1848, following the introduction of the Gregory or Quarter Acre Clause eviction in Ireland continued unabated. The Irish Famine Eviction Project lists close to 1,400 sites of eviction. More are still being uncovered including those which took place i...
On Christmas Day 1920 the Connacht Tribune published accounts of the violence which had occurred across the country on a single day, 18 December. The casualties included the military, members of the IRA and civilians as the catalogue of murder continued. At Ennistymon, county Clare news was received of an ambush at Gallery’s Cross, which although numbered more than 100 IRA men the military were not overpowered o...
The murder of District Inspector Philip J. O’Sullivan, RIC, son of F O’Sullivan, a solicitor in Kinsale, Cork was widely condemned in Dublin as crowds gathered in nearby shopping premises on the evening of 17 December. Just after 6pm as O’Sullivan left his ‘sweetheart’, a Miss Moore to whom he was engaged, at Nelson’s Pillar he was shot dead in Henry Street. Just after O’Sullivan had exchanged greeti...
Few of our blog posts so far have treated how the War of Independence impacted Ireland’s islands the communities which lived on them. In December 1920 the Aran islands off the coast of Galway were deeply impacted by a military search which resulted in the deaths of two islanders. Early on the morning of 19 December the military, having left Galway and proceeded to search the village of Kilronan and the houses. Dressed i...
On 11 December 1920 an auxiliary cadet was killed in an ambush in county Cork in which eleven others were wounded. The ambush, which obviously took the military by surprise, took place within half a mile of the military barracks, and bombs were thrown into the motor lorry in which the cadets were. The Cadet killed is F. S. X. Chapman of Westcliff-on-Sea, England. It is believed that the attacking party escaped wit...
What was Christmas 1920 in Ireland like as the War of Independence raged all around? The radical newspaper, Eire Og: Young Ireland provided an insight into the type of goods and products which were advertised for sale in the weeks leading up to Christmas as the Republican movement called on people to support the war effort. On Pearse Street, George Lyons had a ‘Sinn Fein Series of Xmas Cards’ for sale which we...
The recent publication of the book, The Dead of the Irish Revolution catalogues the deaths of over 2,300 people in Ireland between the years, 1917-1921. Among them were several civilians who were killed during the month of December 1920. Some of these deaths were included in the newspaper Eire Og: Young Ireland and other radical journals who were keen to highlight at every opportunity cases of British injustice....
The military response to the ambush at Kilmichael and the other attacks on crown forces in November 1920 came with vengeance in Cork City on the night of 11-12 December. Rampaging through the city hundreds of premises were destroyed or badly damaged. On that same night, the old City Hall on Albert Quay and the old Carnegie Library on Anglesey Street were also destroyed by fire. In the days that followed the Eire Og: Youn...