Irish History: every high king, rebel and turning point, from Newgrange to today

Mount Sandel: the first known homes (c. 8000 to 7000 BC (dates given vary; see below))

Mount Sandel sits on a bluff some 30 metres above the estuary of the River Bann, near Coleraine. Peter Woodman dug it in the 1970s, ahead of a housing scheme, and found the post-holes, hearths and pits of huts about 6 metres across. Reference works date the site differently: one suggests occupation could have begun by 8000 BC once the radiocarbon dates are calibrated, while another gives a round 7000 BC. Before these digs, it was widely assumed that people reached Ireland only around 6000 BC. The families here hunted, fished and gathered rather than farmed, on an island with few native mammals.

• Burnt food waste from the hearths shows a diet dominated by migratory fish, especially salmon and eels, along with wild pig, some birds and many thousands of hazelnut shell fragments.
• A 2009 Bayesian redating by Alex Bayliss and Peter Woodman confirmed the early date, but suggested the main phase of hut building may have lasted only a generation or two.
• Mount Sandel is no longer the only claimant to great age: the Alice and Gwendoline Cave in County Clare held a bear bone with cut marks, radiocarbon dated in 2016 to around 10,500 BC.

Sources: Excavations.ie (P. C. Woodman): 1973 report, Mount Sandel, Derry; University of Stirling repository: Bayliss and Woodman, A New Bayesian Chronology for Mesolithic Occupation at Mount Sandel (2009); Encyclopedia.com (Gale): Mount Sandel; Wikipedia: Mount Sandel Mesolithic site; Wikipedia: Prehistoric Ireland

The first farmers and the Céide Fields (fourth millennium BC (farmed c. 3500 to 3000 BC on one account; Heritage Ireland says almost 6,000 years old; one researcher argues for later))

Farming reached Ireland by sea: ancient DNA published in Nature in 2020 points to a rapid maritime colonisation that displaced the island's isolated hunter-gatherers, with only rare traces of their ancestry in the newcomers. The Céide Fields (Achaidh Chéide) in County Mayo are the most dramatic relic of that farming world. Stone-walled fields, houses and tombs were sealed beneath blanket bog as it grew over them. Heritage Ireland calls the complex the most extensive Stone Age monument in the world and dates its fields to almost 6,000 years ago. More than 100 kilometres of walls are estimated to lie hidden under the peat.

• Patrick Caulfield, a local teacher, noticed the lines of stones in the 1930s while cutting peat; about forty years later his son Seamas, trained as an archaeologist, began to investigate them.
• The date is not wholly settled: in 2017 Andrew Whitefield argued in the European Journal of Archaeology that the fields may compare better with much later Bronze Age or Iron Age systems, though the Neolithic date remains the usual view.
• The site is on the list Ireland has put forward as candidates for UNESCO World Heritage status, and the Behy court tomb stands within the complex.

Sources: Nature (Cassidy et al., 2020): A dynastic elite in monumental Neolithic society; Heritage Ireland: Céide Fields Neolithic Site and Visitor Centre; Wikipedia: Céide Fields; Wikipedia: Prehistoric Ireland

Newgrange and Brú na Bóinne (built c. 3200 BC on Heritage Ireland's date (other estimates run later); the valley's tombs c. 3300 to 2800 BC)

Heritage Ireland dates Newgrange to around 3200 BC, though other estimates run from about 3100 BC to as late as 3000 to 2500 BC. It stands in a bend of the River Boyne, alongside the great mounds of Knowth and Dowth and dozens of smaller tombs. Its cairn is about 12 metres high, with a 19-metre passage leading to a chamber with three recesses, and 97 large kerbstones ring its base. Some of the stone came from as far off as the Wicklow and Mourne mountains, perhaps moved partly by sea. Around the winter solstice, sunlight enters through a roofbox above the entrance and reaches the back of the chamber; the archaeologist Michael J. O'Kelly recorded seeing this on 21 December 1967. UNESCO inscribed Brú na Bóinne on the World Heritage List in 1993.

• The name is relatively modern: it comes from the 'new grange', a farm of the monks of Mellifont Abbey, whose link with the land outlasted the abbey's closure in 1539.
• In 2020 a genetic study reported that a man buried in the most elaborate recess at Newgrange was the son of a first-degree incestuous union, which the authors read as a sign of a ruling elite like those of later god-kings; the historian Roy Flechner objected, in a comment on the paper, that this rests on one burial and on doubtful comparisons.
• O'Kelly led excavations from 1962 to 1975 (World History Encyclopedia says to 1973), and his reconstruction of the front of the monument remains controversial.

Sources: Nature (Cassidy et al., 2020): A dynastic elite in monumental Neolithic society; World Heritage Ireland: Brú na Bóinne; Heritage Ireland: Brú na Bóinne Visitor Centre, Newgrange and Knowth; World History Encyclopedia: Newgrange; Wikipedia: Newgrange

Tara and the High Kings of legend (oldest monument c. 3000 BC; the unbroken line of High Kings is tradition, not history)

The Hill of Tara (Teamhair) in County Meath was sacred long before any Irish king is recorded. Its oldest monument, the Mound of the Hostages, is a passage tomb of about 3000 BC, and its largest, Ráith na Rí, was built around 100 BC with a circuit of 1,000 metres. Medieval Irish writing portrays an almost unbroken line of High Kings ruling from here over thousands of years, and tradition says the Lia Fáil, the stone of destiny, cried out at the touch of the rightful king. Modern historians treat that scheme as a construction of about the 8th century, built from the genealogies of powerful dynasties. The scholar John T. Koch judges it unlikely that any king had the power to dominate the whole island before the 9th century.

• The stories of early kings at Tara are legendary: one tale in the Book of Invasions tradition has the Milesian brother Eremon crowned there after defeating his brother Eber, in a war started by their wives.
• Law tracts of the 7th and 8th centuries show a real hierarchy of kingship, running from the king of one small kingdom through an overking of several to a provincial overking.
• The earthwork called the Banqueting Hall and the tomb called the Mound of the Hostages carry names from later tradition; the tomb is thousands of years older than any recorded Irish king.

Sources: Heritage Ireland: Hill of Tara; World History Encyclopedia: Hill of Tara; Wikipedia: High King of Ireland

The copper miners of Ross Island (c. 2400 to 1800 BC)

William O'Brien's excavations at Ross Island on Lough Leane, begun in 1992, showed that mines long thought to be a few centuries old were in fact far older. Radiocarbon dates put the first workings at about 2400 to 2100 BC, making this the oldest copper mine then known in north-western Europe. Miners heated the rock face with fire, broke it with stone hammers and scooped up the rubble with cattle shoulder blades. Beside the mine stood a work-camp with huts, ore-processing areas and early Beaker pottery, used until about 1800 BC. The technology did not appear from nowhere: it points to contact with mainland Europe.

• Copper axes, halberds and daggers of about 2400 to 2200 BC found across Ireland and western Britain are believed to have been made from Ross Island metal.
• Excavators found the remains of the camp's huts, including a sub-rectangular foundation, in an area totalling some 500 square metres by 1995.
• Mining came back much later: the Ross Island mines ceased work only in the early 19th century.

Sources: Excavations.ie: 1992 report, Ross Island, Kerry; Excavations.ie: 1995 report, Ross Island, Kerry; The Irish Times: Historic mining trail opened to public in Killarney; Wikipedia: Ross Island, Killarney

The gold of Bronze Age Ireland (c. 2400 to 700 BC)

Native Irish gold was worked on a large scale for the first time in the Bronze Age, and Irish ornaments have been found as far away as Germany and Scandinavia. The early pieces include thin crescent collars called lunulae, one example of which is dated about 2400 to 2000 BC. Late in the period came much heavier work, such as the Gleninsheen gorget from the Burren, of about 800 to 700 BC. The greatest find is the Mooghaun North hoard from County Clare, unearthed in 1854 by workers on the Limerick to Ennis railway, with about 150 gold objects, most of them soon melted down. Trade in gold may have been a major part of the island's economy.

• The Gleninsheen gorget weighs 276 grams and was found in 1932 in a rock cleft, folded in half, perhaps to take it deliberately out of use.
• Only nine such gold gorgets are said to survive, and few of them are intact.
• The Mooghaun hoard was found near a lake and is thought to have been a ritual deposit, and only 29 of its objects survive; the nearby Late Bronze Age hillfort of Mooghaun is believed to be the largest in Ireland.

Sources: Wikipedia: Gleninsheen gorget; Wikipedia: Mooghaun; Wikipedia: Bronze Age Ireland; The Irish Times (Fintan O'Toole, A History of Ireland in 100 Objects): Gleninsheen gold gorget; The Irish Times (Fintan O'Toole, A History of Ireland in 100 Objects): Mooghaun hoard

The Book of Invasions: the Irish origin legend (legend: Milesian landing in 'the Age of the World 3500' in the Annals of the Four Masters (about 1694 BC by their own count); text compiled 11th century)

Lebor Gabála Érenn, the Book of Invasions, was first compiled in the 11th century and tells how Ireland was taken by six peoples in turn. The people of Cessair, Partholón and Nemed and the Fir Bolg are wiped out or driven away; the Tuatha Dé Danann, who stand for the old pagan gods, then give way to the Milesians, ancestors of the Gaels. Scholars now read it as mainly myth, shaped by medieval Christian pseudo-history. It was nevertheless accepted as ordinary history for centuries, until about the 19th century. The Four Masters, writing in the 17th century, even gave the Milesian landing a year, which is tradition and cannot be taken as a date.

• The Annals of the Four Masters enter the arrival of the fleet of the sons of Míl under Age of the World 3500, and put the first year of Christ straight after Age of the World 5194.
• In the Annals' story, Scota, a daughter of Pharaoh, falls in the battle of Sliabh Mis, fought on the third day after the landing.
• One version of the legend, in the Book of Leinster, explains the fairies: a Milesian poet is said to have given his own people the land above ground and left the Tuatha Dé Danann everything beneath it.

Sources: CELT, University College Cork: Annals of the Four Masters, vol. 1 (O'Donovan's translation); World History Encyclopedia: Hill of Tara; Wikipedia: Lebor Gabála Érenn

The Dowris Hoard: trumpets and bells (c. 900 to 600 BC; found in the 1820s)

Farm labourers at Dowris, County Offaly, turned up more than 200 bronze objects in the 1820s, at least 218 by one count. The records are too poor to say whether it was a single deposit, and current thinking favours a series of ritual offerings into a lake over a long period. The collection is split between the National Museum of Ireland and the British Museum. It includes weapons and tools, along with trumpets and small rattling crotal bells, which make it a rare witness to the music of prehistoric Ireland. So important is the find that the last stage of the Irish Late Bronze Age is named the Dowris Phase.

• During the Dowris Phase ironworking was already known on the Continent and in Britain, but had not yet reached Ireland, on the traditional chronology, which newer dating now questions.
• Irish bronzesmiths had by now mastered both casting and sheet-metal work, and scabbard chapes and new long swords show ideas arriving from the Hallstatt culture of Europe, probably through southern Britain.
• The Dowris tradition ended with the coming of iron, and the culture that made it appears to have been disrupted around 600 BC.

Sources: Offaly History (John Dolan): The Dowris Hoard; Wikipedia: Dowris Hoard; Wikipedia: Prehistoric Ireland

Celtic Ireland: iron, language and La Tène art (Iron Age from c. 800 to 500 BC (dates debated); Turoe Stone c. 100 BC to AD 100)

The Irish Iron Age was long said to begin around 500 BC, but newer dating has pushed it back to the 7th or 8th century BC. A key find is a spear shaft from the River Inny near Lackan, carbon dated to between 811 and 673 BC. When a Celtic language first came to Ireland is still disputed: some scholars link it to Beaker people of the Bronze Age, others to the start of the Iron Age, and an older view had Celts arriving as late as 500 to 300 BC. Whatever the date, the language became Primitive Irish, the ancestor of the Irish spoken today. Curving La Tène ornament, as seen on the granite Turoe Stone in County Galway, shows Ireland sharing in a wider European art style.

• The Turoe Stone carries abstract curvilinear decoration across its top half, like the Castlestrange Stone in County Roscommon, and is usually dated to about 100 BC to AD 100.
• The stone stood for centuries at a fairy fort called a lios about 3 kilometres from Bullaun and was moved to Turoe in the 19th century, so its original setting is lost. It was taken away for conservation in 2014 and in 2025 was still at an Office of Public Works depot in Athenry.
• Primitive Irish developed into Old Irish about the 6th century AD, and is known only from fragments, mostly personal names, on ogham stones.

Sources: World History Encyclopedia: Newgrange (discussion of Celtic arrival dates); Wikipedia: Prehistoric Ireland; Wikipedia: Turoe stone; Wikipedia: Primitive Irish

Clonycavan Man and Old Croghan Man (died c. 392 to 201 BC (Clonycavan) and c. 362 to 175 BC (Old Croghan); found 2003)

In 2003 peat cutters and ditch diggers found two remarkably preserved Iron Age men in Irish bogs, about 40 kilometres apart. Clonycavan Man, from County Meath, had his skull smashed by heavy blows; he was about 1.57 metres tall and held his hair up with pine resin thought to come from France or Spain. Old Croghan Man, from County Offaly, was stabbed in the chest, beheaded and cut in half, with his arms bound by hazel ropes. The National Museum of Ireland led the research, with up to 30 specialists in six countries. Both men seem to have died violently in what the researchers read as ritual killings.

• Estimates of Old Croghan Man's height from his arm span run from 182 to 198 centimetres, and reports of his age at death range from his early twenties to his early or mid thirties.
• His smooth, well-kept hands and nails showed no signs of manual labour, which led the museum's Ned Kelly to call him an aristocrat.
• Kelly noted that about 40 Irish bog-body finds lay along old tribal boundaries, and argued that kingship objects and such burials were linked. That theory is his interpretation, not a settled fact.

Sources: The Irish Times: Men of Iron; The Irish Times (Dick Ahlstrom): Bog finds call for new view of our Iron Age ancestors; World Archaeology: Ireland, Iron Age bog bodies; Wikipedia: Old Croghan Man; Wikipedia: Clonycavan Man

The Corlea Trackway (148 to 147 BC, from tree-ring dating)

In 148 or 147 BC, people in the midlands laid a road of heavy oak planks across the bog at Corlea, at least a kilometre long. Tree rings give that unusually exact date, since the timber was felled in late 148 BC or early 147 BC. Barry Raftery, who led the excavation, estimated that the sleepers alone took some 300 large oak trees. Yet the road soon sank into the peat and became useless, which is exactly what preserved it for over two thousand years. Heritage Ireland says it is the largest road of its kind found in Europe, and suggests it may have been part of a ceremonial way between Uisneach and Rathcroghan.

• Timbers were radiocarbon dated to the Iron Age in 1984, when the Bronze Age had been expected, and that surprise launched the Raftery project.
• Local people called it the Danes' Road, an old name that has nothing to do with its true age; an 18-metre stretch is now displayed in a specially built hall.
• The excavators also found a separate Corlea 2 track of bundled birch rods nearby, probably cut from coppiced woodland.

Sources: Excavations.ie: Corlea Bog, Cloonbreany, Longford; Heritage Ireland: Corlea Iron Age Roadway and Visitor Centre; Wikipedia: Corlea Trackway

The Broighter Hoard (1st century BC; found February 1896)

In February 1896 Tom Nicholl and James Morrow, ploughing a field for Joseph L. Gibson near Lough Foyle, hit a clod some 14 inches down that was far too heavy. Inside were gold objects of the 1st century BC, including an 18-centimetre model boat, a bowl and a large buffer torc decorated in the La Tène style. The landlord sold the find on, and an antiquarian, Robert Day, sold it to the British Museum for £600. After Arthur Evans published the hoard, the Royal Irish Academy went to law. The court ruled that it was treasure trove, not a votive gift, and it went to Dublin in 1903.

• Nicholl's maid washed the finds in a sink and later admitted that smaller pieces may have gone down the drain.
• The British Museum argued the hoard was an offering to the gods, since the site was thought to have been under the waters of the lough.
• The torc is a hollow tube of hammered gold sheet with a sea-horse image, closed by a T-shaped catch fitted into its terminals.

Sources: Harvard, The Celts (Celtic 103, course exhibit): Broighter Torc; Claddagh Design: Irish Treasures, The Broighter Hoard; Wikipedia: Broighter Gold; The Irish Times (Fintan O'Toole, A History of Ireland in 100 Objects): Broighter boat

Navan Fort (Emain Macha) (central post felled 95 BC; the site is older and the Ulster capital story is tradition)

Navan Fort, Emain Macha in Old Irish, is a great hilltop enclosure 236 to 250 metres across (the sources differ), about 2 miles west of Armagh. Tradition makes it the capital of the Ulaid and the seat of the kings in the Ulster Cycle tales, though the pseudo-historical king-lists behind that story are not reliable. Excavation told a stranger story. Around 95 BC, dated by tree rings from its huge central oak, a round structure 40 metres wide with rings of posts was built here. Soon afterwards it was filled with stones, deliberately burnt and covered in a mound of earth. Its bank has the ditch on the inside, so it was hardly built for defence.

• Dudley Waterman excavated the site from 1961 to 1971, and his report, completed by C. J. Lynn, appeared in 1997.
• A Barbary ape skull found in an earlier structure on the same spot suggests a high-status owner with links reaching to North Africa.
• Scholars still debate whether the 40-metre building ever had a roof; its western entrance suggests it was no ordinary dwelling.

Sources: Encyclopedia.com (J. P. Mallory, Encyclopedia of Irish History and Culture): Emain Macha (Navan Fort); Wikipedia: Navan Fort; Wikipedia: Prehistoric Ireland (Navan Fort reconstruction and Iron Age sites)

The Táin and Queen Medb (legend) (set by tradition in the 1st century AD; surviving manuscripts from the 12th century on)

Táin Bó Cúailnge, the Cattle Raid of Cooley, is the central story of the Ulster Cycle and is often called Ireland's national epic. Queen Medb of Connacht and her husband Ailill invade Ulster to seize the stud bull Donn Cúailnge. A curse has laid the Ulster warriors low, so the youthful, semi-divine Cú Chulainn faces the army alone. The tale is set by tradition in a pagan heroic age of the 1st century, but it is literature and not a record of events. It survives in three recensions in manuscripts of the 12th century and later.

• Medb rules from Cruachan, now Rathcroghan in County Roscommon, and some scholars see in her a form of the sovereignty goddess.
• The Táin is written in prosimetrum, prose broken by passages of verse spoken by its characters.
• CELT publishes Cecile O'Rahilly's translation of the version in the 12th-century Book of Leinster, alongside her translation of Recension 1.

Sources: CELT, University College Cork: Táin Bó Cúalnge, Recension 1 (trans. C. O'Rahilly); CELT, University College Cork: Táin Bó Cúalnge from the Book of Leinster (trans. C. O'Rahilly); Wikipedia: Táin Bó Cúailnge; Wikipedia: Medb

Rome looks across the sea: Agricola and Ptolemy (c. AD 82 (Agricola); c. AD 150 (Ptolemy's Geography))

Rome never conquered Ireland, which is one reason its written history begins so late. Tacitus, writing about his father-in-law Agricola, says the governor stationed troops on the coast of Britain facing Ireland in his fifth campaign. Agricola sheltered an Irish petty king driven out by rebellion, keeping him for possible future use, and often said a single legion and some auxiliaries could conquer the island. No invasion followed. Around AD 150 the Greek geographer Ptolemy recorded Ireland as Iouernia.

• Tacitus thought Ireland's approaches and harbours were better known than Britain's, through the merchants who traded there, which is his evidence for regular contact.
• Drumanagh, a headland fort near Loughshinny in County Dublin, has produced Roman artefacts; some archaeologists have proposed a Roman bridgehead, others a trading site. It long went undug, but in May 2025 a Maynooth University excavation reported the first intact Roman pot found in Ireland.
• The names Hibernia, Iouernia and Iuverna are all thought to derive from a Celtic form, from which the Irish names Ériu and Éire also come.

Sources: Tacitus, Agricola, ch. 24 (Oxford translation, revised, ed. Edward Brooks), Project Gutenberg; Wikipedia: Hibernia; Wikipedia: Drumanagh

Ogham: Ireland's first writing (orthodox inscriptions c. 4th to 6th centuries AD; later scholastic use to the 9th or 10th century)

Ogham is an alphabet of strokes and notches, used chiefly to write the earliest form of Irish. About 400 inscriptions of the classic type survive on stones across Ireland and western Britain, with 60 per cent of the Irish ones in counties Cork and Kerry. They mostly give a person's name, sometimes with a father or tribe, and some may have marked land ownership. The Ogham in 3D project calls them the earliest recorded form of Irish, dating to at least the 5th century AD. The 20 original letters were arranged in four groups of five, and five more were added later.

• Scholars disagree about the origin of ogham: theories include a cipher based on Latin, a script invented by early Christians, and an invention in west Wales, while R. A. S. Macalister's idea of a Gaulish origin now finds little favour.
• Medieval legend offered its own answer: the Book of Invasions says ogham was devised soon after the fall of the Tower of Babel.
• The largest group of ogham stones outside Ireland is in Pembrokeshire in Wales; a late 14th-century manuscript, the Book of Ballymote, lists 92 secret ways of writing it.

Sources: Ogham in 3D (Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, with the Discovery Programme): introduction; World History Encyclopedia: Ogham; Wikipedia: Ogham

The Scoti: Irish raiders of Roman Britain (c. 360s to early 5th century)

Roman writers from about the late 3rd century called the people of Ireland Scoti, a name that later moved with Gaelic settlers to Scotland. Pacatus, Ammianus Marcellinus and Claudian all report their raids, which seem to have grown worse from the early 360s. Ammianus describes Britain under attack between 364 and 368 by Scoti, Picts, Saxons and a people called Attacotti, until Count Theodosius defeated them in 368. Some raiders took captives as well as loot. The clearest witness is Patrick himself, who writes in his Confession that he was seized from his family's estate at about sixteen and taken to Ireland along with thousands of others.

• An early use of the word is in a list of the Roman provinces dated to about AD 312, which names the Scoti among the peoples seen as a growing danger to the Empire.
• Where the Attacotti came from is uncertain; historians usually place them in Scotland or Ireland, and around AD 400 Roman army units were recruited from them.
• The name stayed with the Gaels for centuries: Brian Boru's Latin title made him emperor of the Scoti, and only after the 11th century did Scotia come to mean Scotland almost alone.

Sources: Saint Patrick's Confessio (Royal Irish Academy, ed. Bieler, trans. McCarthy): Confessio in English; Wikipedia: Scoti; Wikipedia: Hibernia; Wikipedia: Attacotti; Ammianus Marcellinus, History, book 27 (trans. J. C. Rolfe, Loeb), LacusCurtius, University of Chicago

Niall of the Nine Hostages (Four Masters: reigned 379 to 405 (tradition); modern estimates put his death around 452)

Niall Noígíallach, reputed High King and ancestor of the Uí Néill, Legendary High King · Tara

Niall is presented in medieval tradition as a High King who founded the Uí Néill dynasties, which dominated much of Ireland from the 6th to the 10th century. He is probably a real person, inferred from the importance of his supposed sons and grandsons, but the early annals say little about him and they disagree widely on his dates. The Annals of Inisfallen have him dead before 382, the Chronicon Scotorum in 411, and the Four Masters give him 379 to 405. Kathleen Hughes and Francis J. Byrne argued the annalists stretched events backward, and that he actually died around the mid 5th century. His high kingship is anachronistic, since the office did not become reality until the 9th century.

How they came to power: Unknown in fact. In an 11th-century tale he is the son of the High King Eochaid Mugmedón by a second wife, Cairenn, and wins out over his half-brothers; this is legend.

How it ended: Unknown. T. F. O'Rahilly and Byrne argue that late, garbled sources keep a genuine memory that he led raids on Britain and perhaps died on one.

• The medieval saga The Death of Niall explains his epithet by five hostages from the Irish provinces and one each from the Scots, Saxons, Britons and Franks.
• A 2006 study by Moore and colleagues at Trinity College Dublin found a Y-chromosome type in 21 per cent of men in north-western Ireland and linked it to one early medieval ancestor, but tying it to Niall himself has been called difficult to justify, and later estimates put the lineage's origin far earlier, in the 2nd millennium BC.
• The Annals of the Four Masters, compiled in the 17th century, say he ruled 27 years, a figure that belongs to the traditional king-list and not to any early record.

Sources: CELT, University College Cork: Annals of the Four Masters, vol. 1 (O'Donovan's translation); New World Encyclopedia: Niall of the Nine Hostages; Wikipedia: Niall of the Nine Hostages

Palladius (sent 431; death unknown)

Palladius, first bishop sent to the Christians of Ireland, Bishop · sent from Rome to Ireland

Patrick was not the first. Prosper of Aquitaine, a contemporary, records under 431 that Pope Celestine I consecrated Palladius and sent him as first bishop to the Scotti believing in Christ. The wording implies a Christian community already living in Ireland. The Annals of Ulster carry a similar notice at 431. Palladius was probably a deacon from a noble family of Gaul, though scholars differ over whether he served in Rome or under Germanus of Auxerre.

How they rose: Prosper says that in 429 the deacon Palladius urged Pope Celestine to send Germanus of Auxerre to Britain against the Pelagian heresy. Two years later Palladius was himself sent to the Irish.

How they died: Unknown for certain. Muirchú, writing two centuries later, says he gave up, sailed back and died in the territory of the Britons; Scottish tradition instead has him leading a Christian community in north Britain for about 20 years.

• Muirchú's Life of Patrick, written about two centuries later, says the Irish would not readily accept Palladius's teaching and that he did not wish to stay in a foreign land.
• Stories of the two men may have been merged: the Annals of Ulster give several death dates for Patrick, including 457 for an 'elder Patrick', and later writers may have confused the two.
• Palladius is linked especially with Leinster in Irish tradition, and with Fordoun in Scotland, where a church bears his name.

Sources: CELT, University College Cork: Annals of Ulster (trans. Mac Airt and Mac Niocaill), AD 431; CELT, University College Cork: Muirchú's Life of Patrick (ed. Ludwig Bieler); Catholic Encyclopedia (New Advent): St. Palladius, quoting Prosper's chronicle; Wikipedia: Palladius (bishop of Ireland)

Saint Patrick (active 5th century; annals say arrived 432 and died 457, 461, 492 or 493 (tradition, none certain))

Patricius (Latin); Naomh Pádraig (Irish), bishop and patron saint of Ireland, Bishop and missionary · northern and western Ireland

Patrick is the one figure of 5th-century Ireland who speaks in his own voice. His Latin Confession says he was the son of a deacon, Calpornius, and grandson of a priest, Potitus, and was taken from a villa near Bannavem Taburniae, a place never identified. He herded animals in Ireland as a slave for six years, ran away to a ship some two hundred miles off, and later returned as a bishop. He says he baptised many thousands, and wrote the Confession to answer accusations made against him. Almost all else about him comes from later writers, beginning with Muirchú and Tírechán in the 7th century.

How they rose: By his own account, he was not devout as a boy and turned to prayer while a slave. A vision of a man bringing letters from the Irish called him back; he was made a bishop, perhaps after long study in Gaul.

How they died: Unknown. The Annals of Ulster offer 457, 461, 492 and 493, and their claim that he reached his 120th year is plainly tradition; his feast, 17 March, is only the supposed day of his death.

• The shamrock and the snakes are legends and appear nowhere in the Confession: the earliest written shamrock story is by the botanist Caleb Threlkeld in 1726, though coins of the 1680s already show Patrick holding the plant.
• Patrick calls himself a simple country person, unlearned, and says his Latin is not that of men schooled from childhood; a second Latin work of his survives, the Letter to the soldiers of Coroticus.
• The annalists' dates are not neutral: the historians Kathleen Hughes and Francis J. Byrne argued that events of the later 5th century were stretched backward to fit as early an arrival for Patrick as possible, and the arrival date of 432 itself may have been chosen to play down Palladius.

Sources: Saint Patrick's Confessio (Royal Irish Academy): Confessio in English, trans. McCarthy; CELT, University College Cork: Annals of Ulster (trans. Mac Airt and Mac Niocaill); World History Encyclopedia: Saint Patrick; Wikipedia: Saint Patrick; Wikipedia: Niall of the Nine Hostages (on the annalists' chronology)

Saint Brigid of Kildare (c. 451 to c. 525 (tradition; the annals offer several birth dates))

Naomh Bríd; Brigid (often Bridget), abbess of Kildare, Abbess · Kildare

Brigid is the patroness of Ireland alongside Patrick and Columba, but there is little historical evidence for her life. Medieval hagiographies make her the daughter of a chieftain and an enslaved Christian woman, who became a consecrated virgin and founded the abbey of Kildare (Cill Dara, the church of the oak). The Catholic Encyclopedia describes Kildare as ruled for centuries by a double line of abbesses and abbot-bishops. Cogitosus of Kildare later described a great painted church with partitions. Her lives are full of miracles, and some historians suggest she is in part a Christianised form of a Celtic goddess of the same name.

How they rose: According to the Lives, which are hagiography and not records, she refused suitors, received the veil, and settled with companions before founding Kildare beneath a large oak.

How they died: The Annals of Ulster enter her death in her 70th year under both 524 and 526, and again, from another book, under 528; they put her birth under 439, 452 and 456, so the dates are uncertain. Later accounts place her death at Kildare.

• The earliest accounts of Brigid are two Old Irish hymns of the 7th century; a Life in Irish, Bethu Brigte, is available in translation on CELT.
• Gerald of Wales wrote in the late 12th century that nuns kept a perpetual fire burning at Kildare in her honour, and her feast on 1 February coincides with the old spring festival of Imbolc.
• Since 2023 her feast has been marked by a public holiday in the Republic of Ireland, with folk customs such as weaving Brigid's crosses.

Sources: CELT, University College Cork: Bethu Brigte (trans. Donnchadh Ó hAodha); CELT, University College Cork: Annals of Ulster (trans. Mac Airt and Mac Niocaill), AD 526; Catholic Encyclopedia (New Advent): St. Brigid of Ireland; Wikipedia: Brigid of Kildare

Saint Columba (traditionally 7 December 521 to 9 June 597)

Colum Cille (Irish, 'dove of the church'), abbot of Iona, Abbot and missionary · Donegal, Derry and Iona

Columba was born at Gartan in Donegal, of royal descent, and trained at Movilla and Clonard. He is credited with founding monasteries at Derry and Durrow in Ireland. Around 563 he crossed with twelve companions to Iona in the Hebrides, in the Gaelic kingdom of Dál Riata, and the abbey he built became the centre of a wide family of churches. He visited the Pictish king Bridei at his base near Inverness, winning respect though not a conversion. Much of what we know comes from the Life written a century later by Adomnán, ninth abbot of Iona.

How they rose: A churchman of royal birth, he became a major founder of monasteries. A well-known tradition blames his exile on a dispute over a psalter he copied and on the battle of Cúl Dreimhne in 561, but Adomnán's modern translator Richard Sharpe warns against trusting that tale.

How they died: According to traditional sources he died on Iona on Sunday 9 June 597 and was buried there by his monks; the scholar Daniel Mc Carthy argues for 593.

• The Annals of Ulster do record the battle of Cúil Dreimne under 561, with 3,000 dead, and credit the victors' success to the prayers of Colum Cille.
• A psalter known as the Cathach has traditionally been associated with Columba's disputed copy.
• He returned to Ireland for the assembly at Druim Ceat in about 574 or 575, and is said to have founded Drumcliff on that journey.

Sources: Fordham Medieval Sourcebook: Adamnan, Life of St. Columba (ed. William Reeves, 1874); CELT, University College Cork: Annals of Ulster (trans. Mac Airt and Mac Niocaill); Catholic Encyclopedia (New Advent): St. Columba; Wikipedia: Columba

Saint Columbanus (543 to 21 November 615)

Columbán, abbot of Luxeuil and Bobbio, Missionary abbot · Bangor to France and Italy

Columbanus left Bangor, County Down, around 590 with twelve companions, among them Saint Gall, and travelled through Britain to the Frankish kingdoms. He founded the monasteries of Annegray, Luxeuil and Fontaines in Burgundy. His strict rule and his penitential system, based on private confession followed by set penances, spread with his followers. He clashed with Frankish bishops in 603 over the Irish date for Easter, and around 610 he was banished after a quarrel with Queen Brunhilda over the morals of her family. He went on to Italy and founded Bobbio around 612 to 614.

How they rose: Born in Leinster, he studied under Sinell on Lough Erne, then entered Bangor under Comgall. The Catholic Encyclopedia says that at about forty he felt called to preach abroad, and Comgall eventually let him go.

How they died: He died at Bobbio on 21 November 615, in old age. His Life was written within decades by Jonas of Bobbio, a monk of his community.

• Jonas says that as a young man he leapt over his weeping mother, stretched across the threshold to stop him leaving. This comes from a saint's Life, written to edify.
• His own writings survive, including rules for monks, which CELT publishes in G. S. M. Walker's edition and translation.
• Bobbio became a renowned centre of learning in the early Middle Ages, and Saint Gallen in Switzerland takes its name from his companion Gall.

Sources: Fordham Medieval Sourcebook: The Life of St. Columban, by the Monk Jonas; CELT, University College Cork: Columbanus, Monks' Rules (ed. G. S. M. Walker); World History Encyclopedia: Saint Columbanus; Catholic Encyclopedia (New Advent): St. Columbanus; Wikipedia: Columbanus

Clonmacnoise (founded c. 544; flourished 8th to 12th centuries)

Saint Ciarán, called the son of the wright, founded Cluain Mhic Nóis on the Shannon around 544. He died young: the Annals of Ulster say in his 33rd year, only the seventh after he began to build. The monastery grew into one of Ireland's great centres of learning. Today the site has a cathedral, two round towers, three high crosses, nine churches and more than 700 early Christian grave slabs. Its finest monument is the 10th-century Cross of the Scriptures, now kept indoors in the visitor centre.

• Attackers were more often Irish than foreign: by one count it was attacked at least 27 times by the Irish, at least 7 times by Vikings and at least 6 times by Normans. The Annals record a Viking raid from Linn Duachaill in 842.
• Lebor na hUidre, the Book of the Dun Cow, the oldest surviving manuscript in Irish, was written here; its main scribe, Máel Muire, was reportedly killed in a raid in 1106.
• Early wooden buildings began to give way to stone from the 9th century; the site had declined by the 12th, and Irish kings such as Turlough O'Connor were still buried here.

Sources: CELT, University College Cork: Annals of Ulster (trans. Mac Airt and Mac Niocaill), AD 549 and 842; Heritage Ireland: Clonmacnoise Monastic Site; Wikipedia: Clonmacnoise; Wikipedia: Lebor na hUidre

Old Irish and the monastic scribes (Old Irish c. 6th to 10th centuries; Book of Leinster mid 12th century)

Primitive Irish developed into Old Irish about the 6th century, and the Christian schools developed and taught a written standard of it. Scholar Elva Johnston says the Irish seem to have been the first western Europeans to build a full written vernacular literature across many genres. Oddly, much of the strictly contemporary Old Irish survives abroad. It appears as notes written in the margins and between the lines of Latin manuscripts, preserved in monasteries in Germany, Italy, Switzerland, France and Austria. At home, great later compilations such as Lebor na hUidre, made before 1106 at Clonmacnoise, and the Book of Leinster, of the mid 12th century, saved the old sagas and histories.

• Key collections of glosses include those at Würzburg on the letters of Paul, at Milan on a commentary on the Psalms, and at St Gall on the Latin grammarian Priscian, all of the 8th and 9th centuries.
• The St Gall Priscian, written in AD 850 to 851 and probably in Ireland, has over 9,400 glosses, and more than a third of them are in Old Irish.
• The Cambrai Homily, thought to belong to the early 8th century, may hold the earliest Old Irish passages to survive; by about the 10th century, Old Irish had evolved into Middle Irish.

Sources: Encyclopedia.com: Brehon Law (on the Christian schools' standard Old Irish); Wikipedia: Old Irish; Wikipedia: Early Irish literature; Wikipedia: Lebor na hUidre; St Gall Priscian Glosses (Hofman, Moran, Bauer, v2.1, 2023): About the glosses

Skellig Michael (founded between the 6th and 8th centuries; monks left in the 13th century)

Skellig Michael (Sceilig Mhichíl) is a twin-peaked rock 11.6 kilometres off the Iveragh Peninsula, rising to 218 metres. Monks settled on it some time between the 6th and 8th centuries. Tradition names Saint Fionán as founder, but historians doubt that. They lived and prayed in beehive-shaped stone huts near the summit, many of which still stand, reached by 618 steep and uneven steps. Vikings found them even here: the Annals of Ulster record that Étgal of Scelec was carried off by the heathens and died of hunger and thirst, under the year 824. UNESCO made the island a World Heritage Site in 1996.

• The monks abandoned the rock in the 13th century, after which it became a pilgrimage site and, under the Penal Laws, a refuge for Catholics.
• The monastic settlement is unusually well preserved, thanks to the same isolation that made the crossing dangerous and restricts visits today to the summer months.
• Neighbouring Little Skellig is the second-largest gannet colony in the world, according to Heritage Ireland.

Sources: CELT, University College Cork: Annals of Ulster (trans. Mac Airt and Mac Niocaill), AD 824; Heritage Ireland: Sceilg Mhichíl UNESCO World Heritage Property; Wikipedia: Skellig Michael

Brehon law (oldest tracts written 7th century; Senchas Már compiled 8th century; in use into the 17th century)

Brehon law, from the Old Irish brithem, a judge, governed everyday life in Gaelic Ireland. The oldest surviving tracts were written in the 7th century and gathered in the 8th, chiefly in Senchas Már, the largest collection, with some twenty-five tracts on subjects such as fosterage, kindred, clientship, marriage and theft. It was a law of compensation, not of state punishment, and a person's rights depended on status. The texts are heavily shaped by Christianity, and they survive in manuscripts of the 12th to 17th centuries, layered with later glosses. It survived the Norman invasion in the parts of Ireland held by Gaelic and gaelicised lords, and English statute abolished it in the early 17th century.

• The Senchas Már prologue says Saint Patrick appointed nine men, three kings, three bishops and three scholars, to revise the laws; that is tradition, not evidence, and the compilation came centuries later.
• How far the laws favoured women is disputed. One account says most women had no honour-price of their own, though exceptions existed, while Gale says a wife normally had half her husband's, and modern writers who call the laws egalitarian have been criticised for overstating the evidence.
• When the church's law schools faded, hereditary families such as the MacEgans, O'Davorens, MacClancys and O'Dorans kept the legal tradition alive.

Sources: Encyclopedia.com (Gale): Brehon Law; EBSCO Research Starters (J. Momenzadeh, 2023): Brehon Law; Wikipedia: Early Irish law; Wikipedia: Senchas Már

Cáin Adomnáin: the Law of the Innocents (697)

In 697 Adomnán, ninth abbot of Iona, came to Ireland, and the Annals of Ulster credit him with giving the people the Lex Innocentium, the Law of the Innocents. The law was proclaimed at a gathering at Birr that resembled both a royal assembly and a church synod, and was binding on the men of Ireland and northern Britain. It aimed to protect church property and those it called innocents, clerics, women and children, exempting them from military service. It set far heavier penalties for harming them, and for killing a woman it doubled the customary fine from seven to fourteen cumals. Writers today often call it an early Geneva Convention, one of the first laws protecting non-combatants.

• Its text calls it a perpetual law 'on behalf of clerics and women and innocent children' (Kuno Meyer's translation, 1905).
• The law lists 91 guarantors, including the king of Ireland, Loingsech mac Oengus, and Bruide, king of the Picts; Máirín Ní Dhonnchadha found annal evidence that 59 of them were alive in 697.
• A much later introduction, of the late 10th or early 11th century, tells a fantastic story of Adomnán's mother Rónnat shaming him into the law; it is legend, and whether the law actually changed women's lives is unknown.

Sources: CELT, University College Cork: Annals of Ulster (trans. Mac Airt and Mac Niocaill), AD 697; History Ireland: Cáin Adomnáin, 697, the Irish 'Geneva Convention'; Offaly History (John Dolan): The Synod of Birr, 697 AD; Wikipedia: Cáin Adomnáin; Kuno Meyer (ed. and trans.), Cáin Adamnáin (Oxford, 1905), Internet Archive

The Ardagh Chalice (made in the 8th century; probably buried c. 900; found September 1868)

In late September 1868 Jim Quin and Paddy Flanagan were digging potatoes inside a ring fort at Reerasta, near Ardagh. Under a stone slab they found a large silver chalice, holding a smaller cup and four brooches. The chalice, thought to date from the 8th century, is assembled from 354 separate pieces, with gold filigree, enamel and the names of the apostles picked out around its bowl. A brooch in the hoard is later, suggesting it was hidden in a hurry around 900, in the Viking period. Quin's mother sold the find to the Bishop of Limerick for £50, and he sold it to the Royal Irish Academy, for £100 by one account and £500 by another.

• Why potatoes were being grown in a fort is unclear; one suggestion is that people believed the ground was safe from the blight that had caused the Great Famine.
• It has been suggested that Flanagan actually found it while Quin took the credit; Flanagan was buried in a paupers' graveyard in Newcastle West, and Quin died in Melbourne in 1934.
• The Sam Maguire Cup, prize of the All-Ireland Senior Football Championship and commissioned in the 1920s, is modelled on the chalice.

Sources: Diocese of Limerick Heritage Project: The Ardagh Chalice; Pilgrimage in Medieval Ireland: The Sam Maguire Cup and the Ardagh Chalice; Wikipedia: Ardagh Hoard; The Irish Times (Fintan O'Toole, A History of Ireland in 100 Objects): Ardagh Chalice; The Irish Times: National treasure, An Irishman's Diary on the Ardagh Chalice

The first Viking raids (795 to 837 (first dated raid 795; trading contacts may be older))

The Annals of Ulster note in 795 that heathens burned Rechru, generally read as Rathlin Island. For about forty years the attackers came in small hit-and-run groups of two or three ships, striking monasteries, which held stores and fine metalwork. On Iona, raided in 795 and burned in 802, 68 of the community were killed in 806, so the monks moved to a new house at Kells. Captives were also a prize, some held for ransom and others sold as slaves. In 837 the scale changed, when the Annals report fleets of sixty ships each on the Boyne and the Liffey.

• Before 837 no Viking leader is named in the Irish records, and Viking kings start to appear only in the mid 9th century.
• The monastic annals may tell only part of the story: two burials on South Great George's Street in Dublin were radiocarbon dated by the excavator Linzi Simpson to 670 to 880, most likely before 795. Gareth Williams of the British Museum accepts that contact may have come earlier, but warns the dates could be skewed, and more testing is needed.
• The raiders did not always win: the same Annals say the men of Brega routed a force in 837, killing six score Norsemen.

Sources: CELT, University College Cork: Annals of Ulster (trans. Mac Airt and Mac Niocaill), AD 795 to 837; Archaeology Magazine (March/April 2015): The Vikings in Ireland; World History Encyclopedia: The Vikings in Ireland; Wikipedia: Early Scandinavian Dublin

The Book of Kells (c. 800; first mentioned 1007; now at Trinity College Dublin)

The Book of Kells (Trinity College Dublin MS 58) contains the four Gospels in Latin, on 340 vellum leaves in a bold insular majuscule script. It was made close to the year 800, and most scholars now attribute it to the monastery of Iona, though Northumbria and Pictland have also been argued. It may have been made at Iona, at Kells, or partly at both; the monks moved to Kells after the raid of 806. Columba himself could not have written it, despite an old claim, since he died some two centuries before. Its pages of abstract, plant, animal and human decoration include the Chi Rho page at folio 34r, which Trinity calls the most famous page in medieval art.

• The Annals of Ulster report that in 1007 the Great Gospel of Colum Cille was stolen by night from the stone church at Kells and recovered over two months later, stripped of its gold; it is generally assumed to be this book.
• Some scholars think the book was made to be displayed at the altar more than read, partly because the text contains careless errors.
• Its edges were severely trimmed and gilded during a 19th-century rebinding, and since 1953 it has been bound in four volumes.

Sources: Trinity College Dublin Library: The Book of Kells; CELT, University College Cork: Annals of Ulster (trans. Mac Airt and Mac Niocaill), AD 1007; World History Encyclopedia: Book of Kells; Wikipedia: Book of Kells

Viking Dublin (naval camp recorded 841; a Norse kingdom c. 853 to 1170)

Under 841 the Annals of Ulster report a naval camp at Duiblinn, from which Leinster and the Uí Néill lands were plundered, and in the next year they note the heathens still there. Such bases, called longphorts, let raiders stay through the winter and became trading points. Norse rulers held Dublin from about 853 until the Normans took it in 1170, sometimes also ruling York, and the settlers gradually took on Gaelic ways. Dublin became a significant port for trading slaves. Irish kings fought the town repeatedly: Niall Glúndub fell attacking it in 919, while Máel Sechnaill's victory at Tara in 980 brought it under Gaelic control for about fifteen years.

• Excavations at Wood Quay, Winetavern Street and Fishamble Street have uncovered hundreds of houses (more than 120 at Fishamble Street alone), preserved in a waterlogged layer of mud about two metres thick.
• Finds show a prosperous, crowded commercial centre, and archaeologists now often call it Hiberno-Norse or Hiberno-Scandinavian and not simply Viking.
• At least 77 Viking burials have been found across Dublin since the late 1700s, some by accident.

Sources: CELT, University College Cork: Annals of Ulster (trans. Mac Airt and Mac Niocaill), AD 841, 919 and 980; Archaeology Magazine (March/April 2015): The Vikings in Ireland; Wikipedia: Early Scandinavian Dublin; Wikipedia: Kingdom of Dublin; Current Archaeology: Wood Quay, revealing the heart of Viking Dublin

Brian Boru (c. 941 to 23 April 1014; High King 1002 to 1014)

Brian Bóruma mac Cennétig (Brian Bóramha), High King of Ireland, High King · Dál gCais, Munster

Brian was born around 941 into the Dál gCais, a little-regarded Munster family. For half a millennium the Uí Néill had claimed the kingship of Tara, and with it the right to rule all Ireland. Brian spent some 20 years undermining that claim, until by 1002 the Uí Néill High King, Máel Sechnaill mac Domnaill, recognised him as superior. As the historian Seán Duffy puts it, this showed that a claimant need not descend from Niall. He had already beaten Leinster and Dublin at Glenmama in 999, and in 1002 the Annals have him taking the hostages of the Connachta and the men of Mide at Athlone.

How they came to power: His brother Mathgamain seized the Rock of Cashel in 964 and claimed Munster, but was killed in 976. Brian took over, and is recorded as King of Munster from about 978; he made Cashel his capital.

How it ended: He was killed at the Battle of Clontarf on 23 April 1014, along with his son Murchad and grandson Toirdelbach. The Annals of Ulster name Brotor, a Scandinavian fleet leader, as his killer.

• His nickname comes after his death, perhaps from Béal Bóruma, a fort north of Killaloe, though another, possibly later explanation links it to cattle tribute.
• The Annals of Ulster mourn him as the Augustus of all north-west Europe, and his Latin title made him emperor of the Scoti, emperor of the Gaels.
• The Annals of Ulster say he left twenty ounces of gold on Patrick's altar at Armagh in 1005. A note linked to the Book of Armagh is said to give 22 ounces and to have him recognise Armagh as Ireland's religious capital, details that are open to doubt.

Sources: CELT, University College Cork: Annals of Ulster (trans. Mac Airt and Mac Niocaill), AD 1002 and 1014; The Irish Times (Seán Duffy, 2014): What did Brian Boru ever do for us?; Heritage Ireland: Rock of Cashel; Wikipedia: Brian Boru; Wikipedia: Hibernia

The Battle of Clontarf (23 April 1014, by tradition Good Friday (the earlier annals do not give the day))

On 23 April 1014, by tradition Good Friday, Brian Boru's army fought an alliance of Máel Mórda, king of Leinster, Sigtrygg Silkbeard's Dublin, and fighters from overseas under Sigurd of Orkney and Brodir. The Annals of Ulster say the foreigners and Leinstermen broke first and were wiped out. Brian's side won, but he, his son and his grandson all died, along with Máel Mórda and Sigurd. The Annals give six thousand dead or drowned on the losing side; a modern estimate puts total deaths at 7,000 to 10,000, and none of these numbers can be checked. Sigtrygg, who by later accounts watched from Dublin's walls, survived, and Scandinavian rule in the town went on long after 1014.

• Historians disagree about what it meant: the traditional view is that Brian broke Viking power, while Fr John Ryan argued in 1938 that it was the end of a rebellion against Brian by Leinster and Dublin, and others see an Irish civil war with Vikings on both sides. Seán Duffy says few historians now picture Brian expelling the Vikings, but he himself argues it was an international contest and not just a Leinster revolt.
• The idea of Brian as a Christian martyr is not a modern invention: Marianus Scottus, writing in Germany before 1082, says he was killed while preparing for Easter, and Cogadh Gáedhel re Gallaibh, perhaps of the 1070s or 1080s, gives the Friday before Easter, though only in a 17th-century copy.
• The Annals of Ulster also list Máel Sechnaill as leading the army alongside Brian, and he regained the high kingship after Brian's death, holding it until 1022.

Sources: CELT, University College Cork: Annals of Ulster (trans. Mac Airt and Mac Niocaill), AD 1014; The Irish Times (Seán Duffy, 2014): What did Brian Boru ever do for us?; Wikipedia: Battle of Clontarf; Wikipedia: Máel Sechnaill mac Domnaill; History Ireland: When was it fought?

Twelfth-century church reform (1101 to 1152)

Irish Christianity had long centred on great monasteries led by powerful abbots. A reform movement in the 12th century changed that. In 1101 Muirchertach Ua Briain, King of Munster, gave the Rock of Cashel to the church, and a synod met there. The Synod of Ráth Breasail in 1111, under the papal legate Gille of Limerick, set up two provinces, Armagh and Cashel, of twelve dioceses each. At Kells and Mellifont in 1152, Cardinal Giovanni Paparoni raised the number of archbishops to four, granted Armagh the primacy and redrew the dioceses. Many Irish dioceses trace their boundaries to these meetings.

• Saint Malachy (Máel Máedóc Ua Morgair, 1094 to 1148), a leading reformer, went to Rome seeking the archbishops' pallia; on a second journey, in 1148, he died at Clairvaux in France.
• Mellifont, founded in 1142 in County Louth, was Ireland's first Cistercian abbey, built with monks sent by Bernard of Clairvaux; they did not take well to Ireland and soon returned to France, but the abbey was completed.
• Where the 1111 synod actually met is uncertain, with sites in Armagh, Laois, Tipperary and Cork all proposed.

Sources: Heritage Ireland: Old Mellifont Cistercian Abbey; Heritage Ireland: Rock of Cashel; Wikipedia: Synod of Ráth Breasail; Wikipedia: Synod of Kells; Wikipedia: Saint Malachy

Turlough Mór O'Connor and the Cross of Cong (1088 to 1156; King of Connacht from 1106; High King from c. 1120)

Tairrdelbach Ua Conchobair (Toirdhealbhach Mór), King of Connacht and High King, High King · O'Connor, Connacht

Turlough O'Connor became King of Connacht in 1106, and by about 1120 he was widely regarded as High King, part of the open contest for the title that Brian Boru's career had started. Around 1123 to 1127 a processional cross was made for him, as its inscription says, to give to the church at Tuam. It held a purported piece of the True Cross, and later moved to Cong Abbey. Made of oak covered in gold, silver, niello, enamel and glass, it blends Irish, Viking and Romanesque styles. It is considered one of the finest pieces of its age. Turlough also approved the decrees of the Synod of Kells in 1152.

How they came to power: The youngest son of Ruaidrí na Saide Buide, who was blinded in 1092, he grew up while Connacht was dominated by his uncle, Muirchertach Ua Briain of Munster. He became king in 1106, after his brother Domnall was deposed, and won the submission of Meath in campaigns on land and on the River Shannon.

How it ended: He died in 1156. The Annals of Ulster mourn him as archking of Connacht and a tower of splendour of all Ireland, and he was buried at Clonmacnoise.

• Through his mother he was a great-great-grandson of Brian Boru, and his son Ruaidrí would later hold the high kingship too.
• Annals and the cross's own inscriptions suggest that it was made in County Roscommon, though Fintan O'Toole says Roscommon or Tuam; annals call it the 'yellow staff' because of its golden colour.
• The contemporary Cormac's Chapel at Cashel, begun in 1127 and consecrated in 1134, shows the same openness of the 12th century to European Romanesque ideas.

Sources: CELT, University College Cork: Annals of Ulster (trans. Hennessy), AD 1156; Wikipedia: Tairrdelbach Ua Conchobair; Wikipedia: Cross of Cong; Wikipedia: Rock of Cashel; The Irish Times (Fintan O'Toole, A History of Ireland in 100 Objects): Cross of Cong

Diarmait Mac Murchada (c. 1110 to c. 1 May 1171; king of Leinster from about 1127, expelled 1166)

Diarmait Mac Murchada (Dermot MacMurrough), King of Leinster, later called Diarmait na nGall, 'of the Foreigners', King of Leinster · Uí Chennselaig, Ferns

Diarmait ruled the Uí Chennselaig lands around County Wexford and part of Carlow and claimed to be overking of all Leinster. In 1166 the other Leinster kings and the Norse of Dublin rebelled, backed by the new high king Ruaidrí Ua Conchobair and Tigernán Ua Ruairc of Breifne, and Diarmait fled overseas. At Bristol the merchant Robert fitz Harding sheltered him, and he went on to find Henry II on the Continent, swearing fealty in return for leave to recruit the king's subjects. He struck a deal with Strongbow and returned about August 1167 with a small Flemish force, paving the way for the larger landings of 1169 and 1170.

How they came to power: His father Donnchad died in 1115 attacking Domnall Gerrlámhach, king of Dublin. Wikipedia dates Diarmait's own kingship of Leinster from 1126 or 1127.

How it ended: He died at Ferns about 1 May 1171, within a year of the capture of Dublin. The Annals of the Four Masters, hostile to him, say he died of an unknown disease and 'became putrid while living' (O'Donovan, 1848-51), which they present as the saints' judgement for burning their churches.

• In 1152 Diarmait carried off Derbforgaill, wife of Tigernán Ua Ruairc, along with her goods. Abduction or elopement is still argued over: the Norman-side accounts give her a willing part, while the largely contemporary Irish annals do not blame her.
• Modern historians tend to read the Derbforgaill affair as one move in a long territorial rivalry over Mide (Meath and Westmeath), not as the cause of the invasion, which the sources wrongly telescope into a single story.
• O'Donovan's translation of the Four Masters calls him the king 'by whom a trembling sod was made of all Ireland'.

Sources: Seán Duffy, History Ireland: 1169 and all that; Denis Casey, History Ireland: Derbforgaill and the expulsion of Diarmait Mac Murchada; CELT, University College Cork: Annals of the Four Masters, vol. 2 (O'Donovan translation, 1848-51); CELT, University College Cork: The Song of Dermot and the Earl (Orpen translation, 1892); Wikipedia: Diarmait Mac Murchada

Ruaidrí Ua Conchobair (Rory O'Connor) (c. 1116 to 2 December 1198; high king from 1166)

Ruaidrí Ua Conchobair (Rory O'Connor), King of Connacht and High King of Ireland, High King · Connacht

Ruaidrí became high king in 1166 on the death of Muirchertach Mac Lochlainn and at once helped drive Diarmait Mac Murchada out of Leinster. He underestimated Diarmait's foreign allies: in 1169 he let Diarmait stay in power in return for a hostage and a secret promise to send them home. After Dublin fell in 1170 he led a long siege of the city in 1171, which collapsed when the new garrison made a surprise sortie against his camp. When Henry II came to Ireland in 1171, Ruaidrí and the kings of north-west Ulster refused to submit at the Christmas gathering in Dublin. His power was steadily eroded, as Norman barons went on taking land and lesser Irish kings ignored him.

How they came to power: He was king of Connacht from 1156. On Mac Lochlainn's death he rode to Dublin and was inaugurated, and then took hostages from the main Irish kingdoms.

How it ended: He abdicated in 1183 and returned briefly twice. The Four Masters record that he died among the canons at Cong in 1198 and was buried at Clonmacnoise.

• His army at the siege of Dublin was allegedly sixty thousand strong, with a fleet of 30 ships; the figure is a claim, not a count.
• The Four Masters style him king 'of all Ireland, both the Irish and the English', a title far grander than the power he held in 1198.
• He celebrated the Óenach Tailten, a fair regarded as a prerogative of high kings, soon after his inauguration.

Sources: Seán Duffy, History Ireland: 1169 and all that; CELT, University College Cork: Annals of the Four Masters, vol. 3 (O'Donovan translation, 1848-51); Wikipedia: Ruaidrí Ua Conchobair; Wikipedia: Treaty of Windsor (1175)

The Norman landing at Bannow Bay (about 1 May 1169)

About 1 May 1169 Robert fitz Stephen landed at Bannow Bay in County Wexford with three ships, around a dozen knights, 60 men in mail and 300 foot archers. A day later Maurice de Prendergast, a Fleming from Haverfordwest, followed with two more ships. Joining Diarmait Mac Murchada, they took the Norse town of Wexford after a two-day assault, and Diarmait paid them in land, not wages: the town went to fitz Stephen and Maurice fitz Gerald, and two neighbouring cantreds to Hervey de Montmorency. They were few, but their armour and organisation gave them an edge over Irish forces.

• Almost all the detail comes from two partisan accounts written about twenty years later: Gerald of Wales's Latin Expugnatio Hibernica and the French poem now called The Song of Dermot and the Earl.
• Gerald was closely related to several of the invaders; Seán Duffy calls him in effect a paid propagandist for the conquerors, and his brother Robert de Barry was among the first knights ashore.
• In 1170 another Geraldine force under Raymond le Gros beat the Waterford Norse at Baginbun, and 70 prisoners were mutilated and thrown from a cliff, which is remembered in the saying 'At the creek of Baginbun, Ireland was lost and won'.

Sources: Seán Duffy, History Ireland: 1169 and all that; CELT, University College Cork: The Song of Dermot and the Earl (Orpen translation, 1892); Wikipedia: Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland; Sylvie Kleinman, History Ireland: Invasion: The Normans (review of the RTÉ series)

Strongbow (c. 1130 to 1176 (Wikipedia gives both 20 April and June for his death); in Ireland from August 1170)

Richard de Clare (Richard fitz Gilbert), 2nd Earl of Pembroke, called Strongbow, Lord of Leinster, Anglo-Norman lord · Leinster and Striguil

In August 1170, despite messengers from Henry II forbidding it, Strongbow sailed from Milford Haven to Crook, near Waterford, and stormed the town. There he married Diarmait Mac Murchada's daughter Aífe (Aoife), as promised. In September his forces took Dublin in a surprise assault during surrender talks, with a slaughter of the inhabitants, and its Norse king Ascall Mac Turcaill fled. When Diarmait died in May 1171 Strongbow claimed Leinster through his wife, although Irish kingship did not pass in the female line. Henry II imposed a blockade, and in autumn 1171 Strongbow made his peace, receiving Leinster, without Dublin and the older towns, for the service of 100 knights.

How they rose: Son of Gilbert, the first Earl of Pembroke, he inherited about 1148 but was deprived of the title in 1154 by Henry II and was known as Earl of Striguil. Diarmait offered him Aífe and the right to succeed in Leinster.

How they died: He died in 1176 of an infection of the leg or foot and was buried in Holy Trinity Church (Christ Church), Dublin.

• Daniel Maclise's famous painting of the marriage dates from 1854, nearly seven centuries after the event, and romanticises it.
• Ascall Mac Turcaill came back from the Western Isles in 1171 to retake Dublin, but his naval force was destroyed and he was beheaded.
• His son Gilbert died young, so his great inheritance passed to his daughter Isabel and, through her, to William Marshal.

Sources: Seán Duffy, History Ireland: 1169 and all that; CELT, University College Cork: The Song of Dermot and the Earl (Orpen translation, 1892); Wikipedia: Richard de Clare, 2nd Earl of Pembroke; Wikipedia: Isabel de Clare, 4th Countess of Pembroke

Henry II comes to Ireland (17 October 1171 to 17 April 1172)

On 17 October 1171 Henry II landed at Crook, near Waterford, with a fleet of 400 ships, the first reigning English king to set foot on Irish soil. Wikipedia says he came to assert control over both the Anglo-Normans and the Irish. Strongbow did homage for Leinster, and the kings of Thomond and Desmond also submitted, no doubt hoping for protection against his barons. At Dublin he kept Christmas in a specially built post-and-wattle palace, receiving many more Irish kings and lords, and granted the city by charter to the men of Bristol. Under his auspices the Council of Cashel ordered the Irish church to be run on English lines, and he sailed for Wales on 17 April 1172.

• Henry's justification lay in Laudabiliter, a privilege said to have been granted by the English pope Adrian IV in the 1150s. Duffy notes the surviving text comes through Gerald of Wales and may be forged or heavily edited, though Adrian probably did approve an expedition.
• About 1 March 1172 at Wexford he granted the kingdom of Mide to the Herefordshire baron Hugh de Lacy for the service of 50 knights, and gave him custody of Dublin.
• Diarmuid Scully points out that Laudabiliter depended on the Donation of Constantine, a document exposed as a forgery in the fifteenth century.

Sources: Seán Duffy, History Ireland: 1169 and all that; Diarmuid Scully, History Ireland: The Remonstrance of Irish Princes, 1317; Wikipedia: Laudabiliter; Wikipedia: Lordship of Ireland; Wikipedia: Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland

The Treaty of Windsor (October 1175; effectively abandoned by 1177)

After Ruaidrí Ua Conchobair led several armies against the new settlements and razed castles, the two sides negotiated, and envoys for Ruaidrí agreed terms with Henry II at Windsor in October 1175. Henry kept Leinster, Dublin and a territory from Waterford to Dungarvan; Ruaidrí held the rest under him, with tribute of one treated hide for every ten cattle. Ruaidrí's side saw a major achievement, which might have preserved Ireland as a distinct kingdom only loosely under England. The colonists did not accept it. In February 1177 John de Courcy began his conquest of east Ulster, and at Oxford later that year Henry granted Thomond and Desmond to his barons and named his son John lord of Ireland.

• Ruaidrí's envoys were the archbishop of Tuam, the abbot of Clonfert and his chancellor Laurence; Laurence O'Toole, archbishop of Dublin, was among the witnesses.
• The Annals of Tigernach reported the agreement in terms far more generous to Ruaidrí than the text itself, as giving him the kingship of Ireland over both foreigner and Gael.
• John was ten when he was named lord of Ireland, and first visited only in 1185; Pope Lucius III refused Henry's request to have him crowned king of Ireland.

Sources: Seán Duffy, History Ireland: 1169 and all that; Wikipedia: Treaty of Windsor (1175); Wikipedia: Lordship of Ireland

Isabel de Clare (c. 1172 to 11 March 1220; married August 1189)

Isabel de Clare, suo jure Countess of Pembroke and Striguil, heiress of Leinster, Countess and heiress · Leinster and Pembroke

Isabel was the daughter of Strongbow and Aoife, and granddaughter of Diarmait Mac Murchada. When her brother Gilbert died in the mid-1180s (sources differ on the year) she became heir to great estates in England, Wales and Leinster. Henry II promised her to the knight William Marshal, and Richard I confirmed it, with the marriage in August 1189. With Isabel he built St Mary's Church in New Ross, considered the largest parish church built in medieval Ireland. Marshal also commissioned Hook Lighthouse and founded Tintern Abbey in Wexford after nearly being shipwrecked.

How they rose: Her rank came through inheritance. After her brother's death she became a royal ward, kept under Henry II's control so that he could decide whom she married, and Richard I then carried out the match.

How they died: She died on 11 March 1220, less than a year after her husband, and was buried at Tintern Abbey in Monmouthshire.

• She allegedly spoke French, Irish and Latin; the claim is reported without firm evidence.
• Though she and Marshal had five sons, all of them died without legitimate heirs. A curse by Albin O'Molloy, Irish bishop of Ferns, was later blamed, which is tradition; the Dictionary of National Biography records only a quarrel between Marshal and the bishop.
• Hook Lighthouse, on the tip of the Hook Peninsula, is one of the oldest lighthouses in the world; tradition says the missionary Dubhán set up a beacon there as early as the 5th century.

Sources: Wikipedia: Isabel de Clare, 4th Countess of Pembroke; Visit New Ross: The Norman Way at New Ross; Wikipedia: Hook Lighthouse; Dictionary of National Biography (1893), Wikisource: Marshal, William; Linda Asman, People's Collection Wales: Isabel de Clare, Countess of Pembroke and Striguil

The Gaelic revival of the later Middle Ages (14th and 15th centuries)

English rule reached its widest extent in the late 13th and early 14th centuries, then contracted after the Scottish invasion of 1315 to 1318, famine and the Black Death. Gaelic lords recovered ground, and in border areas and even in the colony's heartlands Brehon law competed and mixed with English common law. Learned families kept up history, law and poetry, and in the late 14th century the great manuscript known as the Book of Ballymote was written in what is now County Sligo. How far the colonists themselves went native is still debated: the Tudor historian Steven Ellis rejects the idea of 'gaelicisation', arguing that these colonists still saw themselves as English, and a reply in the same magazine argues that lords such as the Kildares operated in both worlds.

• The Book of Ballymote gathers genealogies, sagas of Finn and Brian Boru, a treatise on Ogham and the profession of the poet, and Irish versions of Greek stories such as the fall of Troy and the wanderings of Ulysses.
• Many poorer settlers spoke English, Welsh or Flemish, and the elite Norman French and Latin. In County Wexford a survivor of early English called Yola lasted on.
• Officials sometimes adopted Brehon rules for order's sake, such as a kin group's liability for its members' offences, and as late as the sixteenth century Brehon law was reported alive in supposed strongholds of common law, says John Biggins.

Sources: John Biggins, History Ireland: Afterlives of the 'Brehon laws'; Steven G. Ellis, History Ireland: 'More Irish than the Irish themselves?'; History Ireland: Worlds Apart? (reply to Ellis); Wikipedia: Book of Ballymote; Wikipedia: Lordship of Ireland

The Bruce invasion (26 May 1315 to 14 October 1318)

On 26 May 1315 Edward Bruce, brother of the Scottish king Robert, landed around Larne with more than 5,000 men. Domhnall Ó Néill of Tyrone and about twelve northern lords swore fealty to him as King of Ireland at Carrickfergus. He defeated Richard de Burgh, the Red Earl of Ulster, at Connor that September, and his campaign ranged through Louth, the midlands and Kildare, with Robert joining him later. It coincided with the Great European Famine. On 14 October 1318 an Anglo-Irish force under John de Bermingham and Edmund Butler defeated and killed Edward at Faughart, County Louth.

• Domhnall Ó Néill traded his claim to the high kingship to Edward in return for help against his rivals, and in his Remonstrance to Pope John XXII in 1317 he set out the Irish case against English rule and against Laudabiliter.
• The Four Masters, far from mourning him, call Edward 'the destroyer of the people of Ireland in general' and say a famine in his three and a half years drove men to eat one another.
• Chris Chevallier measures the damage through papal tax valuations before and after the invasion, between the 1302-7 and 1319-20 assessments, and concludes that the colonial economy could recover from war, even though the invasion helped turn the tide against the colony.

Sources: Chris Chevallier, History Ireland: Mapping and measuring the impact of the Bruce invasion; Diarmuid Scully, History Ireland: The Remonstrance of Irish Princes, 1317; CELT, University College Cork: Annals of the Four Masters, vol. 3 (O'Donovan translation, 1848-51); Wikipedia: Bruce campaign in Ireland; Wikipedia: Battle of Faughart

Alice Kyteler (c. 1260 to after 1324)

Dame Alice Kyteler of Kilkenny, Accused witch and moneylender · Kilkenny

Alice Kyteler, a woman of Flemish descent, was a wealthy Kilkenny widow who married at least four times and lent money. In 1324 her stepchildren, resentful over her wealth and dower, brought complaints to Richard de Ledrede, bishop of Ossory, who accused her and her associates of heresy and sorcery. She had powerful defenders, among them Arnold le Poer, kinsman of her last husband, who opposed the bishop at every turn. She escaped before sentence, along with Sarah, daughter of her associate Petronilla de Midia, and there is no later record of her. Petronilla, whom one account calls her maid, was flogged and burned at the stake on 3 November 1324 after a forced confession.

How they rose: Her first husband, William Outlaw, was a rich Kilkenny merchant and moneylender, and her son by him, also William, was mayor of Kilkenny in 1305. Her third husband, Richard de Valle, was a wealthy Tipperary landholder.

How they died: Unknown. She is believed to have fled to England or Flanders; neither the date nor place of her death is recorded.

• Back in 1302 she and her second husband were accused of homicide by a kinsman who, with an accomplice, had stolen £3,000 from them; Edward I helped resolve the matter in their favour.
• Her first three husbands raised no accusation of witchcraft. Ledrede claimed the fourth, John le Poer, suspected poison when he fell ill, but he may have lived for decades after 1324.
• Her son William Outlaw, also caught up in the case, was sentenced to acts of repentance rather than death, which shows how closely church and courts worked together.

Sources: Wikipedia: Alice Kyteler; Wikipedia: Petronilla de Meath; Encyclopedia.com (Encyclopedia of Occultism and Parapsychology): Kyteler, Dame Alice

The Black Death in Ireland (summer 1348 to about 1350, with later outbreaks)

Plague reached Ireland in 1348, first appearing at Howth or Dalkey according to Friar John Clyn of Kilkenny, and spreading to Dublin and Drogheda by late July or early August. It reached Kilkenny by 25 December and ran along the ports and rivers of the east and south, where the Anglo-Irish colony lived. Twenty-five Franciscans died in Drogheda and twenty-three in Dublin. The nuns of Lismullin in Meath fell from 54 to 32 across this outbreak and its 1361 successor, and by 1351 manors in Kilkenny and Meath had empty cottages and untilled land. No reliable national death toll exists, because the evidence does not allow one to be calculated.

• Clyn's account is virtually the only eyewitness record. In Alfred Webb's 1878 rendering he wrote: 'I leave behind me parchment for continuing it'. His annals stop in 1349; Maria Kelly thinks he very likely died of plague.
• Commentators at the time thought it fell hardest on the Anglo-Irish colony: Geoffrey Le Baker wrote that it scarcely touched the native Irish of the uplands, but added that a 1357 outbreak hit them everywhere.
• Archbishop Richard Fitzralph of Armagh told the pope in 1349 that fisherfolk and sailors were among those worst hit, and his own preaching record breaks off between May 1348 and March of the following year.

Sources: Maria Kelly, History Ireland: 'Unheard-of Mortality': The Black Death in Ireland; Wikipedia: John Clyn; Wikipedia: Lordship of Ireland; Library Ireland (Alfred Webb, A Compendium of Irish Biography, 1878): John Clyn

The Statutes of Kilkenny (1366 (the CELT edition's title gives 1367))

A parliament at Kilkenny under Lionel of Antwerp, Duke of Clarence, passed thirty-five acts to halt the erosion of the English colony. The preamble complained that many English were forsaking 'the English language, manners, mode of riding, laws and usages' and living like the 'Irish enemies'. Marriage, fostering and concubinage between English and Irish were banned on pain of being treated as a traitor, and Englishmen had to use English speech, names, dress and saddles or face forfeiture or prison. Irish pipers, story-tellers and rhymers, branded as spies, were barred from coming among the English. The statute's main target was the settlers themselves, and it was written in French.

• Lionel, who was also Earl of Ulster, had come to Ireland as viceroy in 1361 hoping to recover his Ulster lands; he left the year after the parliament.
• The statutes did not settle the matter. Elizabeth Veele lost her lands for marrying the Leinster king Art MacMurrough, and Poynings's parliament had to re-enact the statutes in 1494-95.
• The surviving version is in Hiberno-Norman French with some Latin; James Hardiman printed it with an English translation in 1843.

Sources: CELT, University College Cork: A Statute of the Fortieth Year of King Edward III (Hardiman translation, 1843); Wikipedia: Statutes of Kilkenny; John Biggins, History Ireland: Afterlives of the 'Brehon laws'; Wikipedia: Edward Poynings; Wikisource: Dictionary of National Biography (1893): MacMurrogh, Art

Art MacMurrough-Kavanagh (1357 to about December 1417; reigned 42 years)

Art Óg Mac Murchadha Caomhánach, King of Leinster, King of Leinster · Carlow, Wexford and Wicklow

Art revived the power of the kings of Leinster, dominating both Gaelic and Hiberno-Norman neighbours from the Kavanagh lands in what are now Carlow, Wexford and Wicklow. The Four Masters record that in 1394 he burned New Ross and carried off gold, silver and hostages. Richard II spent much of 1394 and 1395 confronting him; Art submitted, and according to the chronicler Froissart was knighted at Dublin, in a deal that also promised to restore his wife's lands and pay an old annual subsidy. When those promises were not kept he fought again, and when Richard came back in 1399 talks with the Earl of Gloucester failed; the king then offered a hundred marks of gold for him alive or dead. Henry IV's officials also negotiated with him, on and off.

How they came to power: He descended from Domhnall, son of Diarmait Mac Murchada. His family had long been paid a subvention by the Dublin government for protecting settlers in its territory, and disputes over the payment led to war.

How it ended: He died soon after Christmas 1417. Accounts differ: perhaps in his bed at Ferns, perhaps poisoned at New Ross.

• He married Elizabeth Veele (le Veel), heiress to the barony of Norragh; the Crown seized her lands on the ground that the marriage broke the Statutes of Kilkenny.
• The French writer Creton described their 1399 meeting between two woods near the sea, picturing Art as a large, agile, stern-looking man on a very swift horse, spear in hand.
• The Four Masters praise him as a lord who defended his province against English and Irish from his sixteenth to his sixtieth year.

Sources: CELT, University College Cork: Annals of the Four Masters, vol. 4 (O'Donovan translation, 1848-51); Wikisource: Dictionary of National Biography (1893): MacMurrogh, Art; Wikipedia: Art Óg Mac Murchadha Caomhánach

Margaret O'Carroll (died 1451; her two great feasts were held in 1433)

Mairgréag Ní Chearbhaill, Mairgréag an Einigh ('Margaret of the Hospitality'), Gaelic noblewoman and patron · Offaly

Margaret, daughter of Tadhg Ó Cearbhaill of Ely, married Calbhach Ó Conchobhair Failghe, chief of Offaly, and is remembered as the great patron of Irish learning in her day. In 1433, the Four Masters report, she gave two general invitations of hospitality to the 'colleges and professional men', the learned classes of Gaelic Ireland. The Annals of Connacht place them at Killeigh in March and, for those who missed it, at Rathangan in August. The Four Masters add that the summer of 1433 was long remembered for a famine so hard that no one recognised friend or relative. In 1445 she went on pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela. The Women's Museum of Ireland sees such gatherings as important in preserving Gaelic culture during conquest.

How they rose: Born into a ruling family of Ely, she may have been fostered by a prominent family, though little is known of her early life. Her position came from her marriage to Calbhach, whom the Four Masters credit with winning more wealth from English and Irish enemies than any lord in Leinster.

How they died: She died in 1451. The Four Masters call her 'the best woman in her time in Ireland' and record that her son Felim died only one night apart from her.

• She had five sons and two daughters. Her daughter Fionnghuala married first Niall Garbh Ó Domhnaill and then Aodh Buidhe Ó Néill.
• A poem of about 1425 on Fionnghuala's marriage praises both the bride's generosity and her mother's.
• Her son Teige is called in the Four Masters a plunderer of English and Irish alike, and he died of plague.

Sources: CELT, University College Cork: Annals of the Four Masters, vol. 4 (O'Donovan translation, 1848-51); Wikipedia: Margaret O'Carroll; Women's Museum of Ireland: Margaret O'Carroll

Gerald Mór FitzGerald, the Great Earl (c. 1456 to c. 3 September 1513; Lord Deputy 1477 to 1494 and 1496 to 1513)

Gearóid Mór FitzGerald, 8th Earl of Kildare, 'The Great Earl' (An tIarla Mór), Lord Deputy of Ireland · Kildare

Gerald Mór was the most powerful man in late medieval Ireland, heading the Gaelicised Geraldine dynasty and governing as deputy for three decades. Kings tried to replace him and could not: when Edward IV put in Lord Grey in 1477 the Pale lords held a breakaway parliament and Kildare came back. He backed Lambert Simnel in 1487 yet kept his office. In 1494 enemies had him sent to London, where he was imprisoned in the Tower and attainted by Poynings's parliament, but after trial in 1496 Henry VII restored him. In 1500 he hanged the mayor of Cork, and in August 1504 he defeated Ulick Burke of Clanricarde at Knockdoe in County Galway.

How they rose: He inherited the earldom from his father, the 7th Earl, in 1477 and was appointed Lord Deputy the same year. The Geraldines descended from Gerald de Windsor and the Welsh princess Nest.

How they died: On an expedition against the O'Carrolls in 1513 he was mortally wounded at Kilkea while watering his horse in the River Greese, and died at Kildare about 3 September. A History Ireland study of Archbishop Octavian says he died of gunshot wounds received in battle.

• His first wife Alison reportedly died of grief at his arrest in 1494; he then married Elizabeth St John, a cousin of Henry VII.
• All the sons of his second marriage joined the rebellion of their nephew Silken Thomas and were executed at Tyburn on 3 February 1537.
• Knockdoe, on 19 August 1504, was fought between two Hiberno-Norman lords, each with Gaelic allies, not as a simple clash of English against Irish.

Sources: Wikipedia: Gerald FitzGerald, 8th Earl of Kildare; Wikipedia: Battle of Knockdoe; Wikipedia: Edward Poynings; Hiram Morgan, History Ireland: Overmighty Officers

A king crowned in Dublin: Lambert Simnel (crowned 24 May 1487; defeated at Stoke Field later in 1487)

Lambert Simnel, a boy of about ten, was presented as Edward Plantagenet, Earl of Warwick, the Yorkist heir, as a challenge to the new king Henry VII. Yorkist Ireland took him up: on 24 May 1487 he was crowned at Christ Church Cathedral in Dublin as 'King Edward VI', and the Earl of Kildare collected an army of Irish soldiers under his brother Thomas FitzGerald of Laccagh. The rebellion, organised by John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln, was crushed at the Battle of Stoke Field in 1487. Henry VII pardoned the boy because of his youth. The affair helped convince the Crown that the Irish parliament had to be restrained, which led towards Poynings' Law.

• Octavian del Palagio, archbishop of Armagh, kept his oath to Henry VII and stayed away from the coronation; he later said Kildare's personal intervention saved him from the Earl of Lincoln's anger.
• Simnel, pardoned, worked as a scullion in the royal household and lived until after 1534.
• Hiram Morgan links the coronation directly to the passing of Poynings' Law, meant to restrain the Irish parliament.

Sources: Wikipedia: Lambert Simnel; Hiram Morgan, History Ireland: Overmighty Officers; History Ireland: The Italian Connection: The Great Earl and Archbishop Octavian; Wikipedia: Gerald FitzGerald, 8th Earl of Kildare

Poynings' Law (parliament opened 1 December 1494; the law is often dated 1495)

Sir Edward Poynings landed at Howth on 13 October 1494 with a thousand men and English officials to control the Irish courts and treasury, sent by Henry VII after Ireland had backed Simnel and been in contact with Perkin Warbeck. His parliament opened on 1 December 1494, attainted the Earl of Kildare, and passed acts to make the Irish administration depend directly on the Crown. Its most lasting measure required Irish bills to be approved in advance by the Irish and English Privy Councils. Judges now held office at pleasure, chief castles went into English hands and private war without licence became illegal. The Statutes of Kilkenny were re-enacted, with their bans on marriage and on Irish custom.

• Under the law Irish parliaments could pass only what London had already seen. Thomas Wentworth, Lord Deputy from 1633 to 1640, used it to push colonising and tax programmes through parliament, says Hiram Morgan.
• Before the Tudor reconquest the Irish parliament represented only the 'English of Ireland'; the first Gaelic lords were summoned in the sixteenth century.
• Poynings was recalled in January 1496. Henry VII then fell back on governing through the great Anglo-Irish families, and Kildare, whom Poynings's parliament had condemned, was once more made deputy.

Sources: Wikipedia: Parliament of Ireland; Hiram Morgan, History Ireland: Overmighty Officers; Dictionary of National Biography (1896), Wikisource: Poynings, Edward; Ulster Historical Foundation: The constitutional position (the impact of Poynings' Law); J. A. Cannon, The Oxford Companion to British History (Encyclopedia.com): Poynings's law

Silken Thomas (1513 to 3 February 1537; rebellion began 11 June 1534)

Thomas FitzGerald, 10th Earl of Kildare, Lord Offaly, Tomás an tSíoda, Rebel lord · Kildare and Maynooth

In February 1534 Gerald, the 9th Earl of Kildare, was summoned to London and left his 21-year-old son Thomas, then Lord Offaly, as deputy. Hearing rumours that his father had been executed, Thomas rode to St Mary's Abbey in Dublin on 11 June 1534 with 140 armoured gallowglasses, whose silk helmet fringes gave him his nickname, and renounced his allegiance to Henry VIII. He attacked Dublin Castle in July, but was routed. The killing of Archbishop John Alen at Artane, for which he was blamed rightly or wrongly, cost him clerical support. The revolt was crushed by the new English governors, who began to build up an English garrison in Ireland.

How they rose: Born in London in 1513 and spending years at the English court, he took power as deputy when his father left for London, and held the title after his father died while the revolt went on.

How they died: Seeing his army melt away, he submitted to Lord Leonard Grey in 1535 on a guarantee of his safety. He was sent to the Tower in October 1535, and, despite the guarantee, was executed at Tyburn on 3 February 1537 with his five uncles.

• A long-standing tradition says Alen's killers took his Irish order 'take this fellow away' as an order to kill the archbishop.
• His wife Frances Fortescue stayed with him through the rebellion until it nearly collapsed in May 1535, says Henry Jefferies in his study of rebel women in Tudor Ireland.
• The Four Masters report that Earl Gerald left the king's sword with Thomas on departing for England, and was confined in the Tower for a year.

Sources: Wikipedia: Thomas FitzGerald, 10th Earl of Kildare; Henry A. Jefferies, History Ireland: Rebel women in Tudor Ireland; Hiram Morgan, History Ireland: Overmighty Officers; CELT, University College Cork: Annals of the Four Masters, vol. 5 (O'Donovan translation, 1848-51)

Grace O'Malley (c. 1530 to c. 1603; met Elizabeth I in 1593)

Gráinne Ní Mháille (Granuaile), head of the Ó Máille lordship, Sea captain and lord · Umhaill, Clew Bay

Grace O'Malley took over her family's lordship by land and sea on her father's death despite having a brother, and her marriage to Dónal Ó Flaithbheartaigh brought her more wealth. Most of her record comes from English papers, since the Irish annals never mention her. By spring 1593 Sir Richard Bingham, governor of Connacht, had put a garrison in her castle of Rockfleet and taken her herds, and her son Tibbot Bourke was imprisoned for treason. She wrote to Elizabeth I, then sailed from Clew Bay and reached London in July 1593 to plead in person. By Anne Chambers's account Elizabeth ordered her son's release and let her carry on her 'maintenance by land and sea', though O'Malley does not seem to have delivered the service she promised once the Nine Years' War began.

How they rose: Daughter of Eóghan Dubhdara Ó Máille, she took over active leadership after his death, even though she had a brother, Dónal an Phíopa.

How they died: She probably died at Rockfleet Castle about 1603; neither place nor date is firmly recorded.

• Before she met the queen she had to answer the eighteen 'Articles of Interrogatory' in writing, one of the best sources for her life.
• Popular tales about her, such as cutting her hair to go to sea as a girl, are legend, and are told as such by World History Encyclopedia.
• World History Encyclopedia notes that Irish histories have often given her little space, because she fought for her family's interests rather than a national cause.

Sources: Anne Chambers, Grace O'Malley site: When the Sea Queen met the Virgin Queen (extract from Granuaile); World History Encyclopedia: Grace O'Malley; Encyclopedia.com (Women in World History): O'Malley, Grace; Wikipedia: Grace O'Malley

Henry VIII becomes King of Ireland (18 June 1541 (some sources give 1542))

After crushing the Kildare revolt, the Crown changed the basis of its claim. A parliament in Dublin under Lord Deputy Anthony St Leger passed the Crown of Ireland Act, making Henry VIII the first King of Ireland, in place of the older title Lord of Ireland that rested on a papal grant. The act was read out in English and Irish, and in the upper house in Irish alone. It came with a new policy, surrender and regrant: Gaelic chiefs and autonomous Norman-Irish lords were urged to give up their lands to the king and receive them back under English common law, with English titles. It offered a route into the kingdom, but it clashed with Gaelic rules of succession.

• Conn Bacach O'Neill became first Earl of Tyrone under the scheme. English law named Matthew as his heir, which set off the feud that made Shane O'Neill's career.
• Pope Paul IV recognised Philip and Mary as rulers of Ireland in a bull of 1555, resolving for a time the question of whether Rome would accept the kingdom.
• Steven Ellis argues that the Tudor conquest changed what 'Irish' meant: before 1541 it marked Gaelic culture and law, and by 1641 it meant Ireland's native Catholics of either Gaelic or English descent.

Sources: Wikipedia: Crown of Ireland Act 1542; Wikipedia: Surrender and regrant; Hiram Morgan, History Ireland: Overmighty Officers; Steven G. Ellis, History Ireland: 'More Irish than the Irish themselves?'

Shane O'Neill (c. 1530 to 2 June 1567)

Seán mac Cuinn Ó Néill, The O'Neill of Tyrone, later called Shane the Proud, Chief of the O'Neills · Tír Eoghain (Tyrone)

Shane, the youngest son of Conn Bacach O'Neill, refused to accept the English settlement that made Matthew, Baron Dungannon, heir to the earldom of Tyrone. Matthew was ambushed and killed by Shane's foster brothers, and Shane took up the fight for the lordship. He went to London, arriving on 4 January 1562, with the Earls of Ormond and Kildare as surety; Camden describes the wonder his gallowglasses caused there with their long hair. He beat the MacDonnells of Antrim at Glentaisie in 1565, capturing Sorley Boy MacDonnell. In 1567 Hugh O'Donnell's forces routed him at Farsetmore near Letterkenny, and his power collapsed.

How they came to power: As was Gaelic custom he was fostered, by the O'Donnelly family. He based his claim on Gaelic custom, where the successor to a lordship was elected from among his kinsmen, against the English rule of descent that favoured Matthew.

How it ended: After Farsetmore he went to the MacDonnells at Cushendun with Sorley Boy, hoping for an alliance, and on the evening of 2 June 1567 he was hacked to pieces there, with a state reward of 1,000 pounds on offer, says the Dictionary of National Biography.

• The nickname Shane the Proud was coined after his death by English writers, and was meant as an insult that undermined his claim, says Wikipedia.
• The Annals of the Four Masters call him John, son of Con, son of Henry, son of Owen, and tell of his march into Tirconnell in 1567.
• Catherine MacLean, former wife of Calvagh O'Donnell, went with him as his wife on the last journey to Cushendun, according to the Dictionary of National Biography.

Sources: Wikipedia: Shane O'Neill (Irish chieftain); Wikisource: Dictionary of National Biography (1885-1900): O'Neill, Shane; CELT, University College Cork: Annals of the Four Masters, vol. 5 (O'Donovan translation, 1848-51)

The Desmond rebellions and the Munster famine (1569 to 1573 and 18 July 1579 to 11 November 1583)

James FitzMaurice FitzGerald led a first rising from 1569 to 1573, and landed with a small papal force in July 1579, setting off a second. He was killed within weeks, but Gerald FitzGerald, Earl of Desmond, joined the revolt. In autumn 1580 a papal force of Spanish and Italian soldiers, numbering between 400 and 700 by Wikipedia's account, landed at Smerwick in Kerry. They surrendered at Dún an Óir on 10 November to Lord Grey de Wilton, whose dispatch to Elizabeth says he refused terms, though other contemporary accounts contradict his version; the officers were spared and the rest executed. The war destroyed the Desmond dynasty, and famine and disease are thought to have killed up to a third of Munster's pre-war population.

• Desmond's lands were then planted. About 500,000 acres went to English colonists, but in place of the hoped-for 15,000 settlers, most estimates put the English population at about 4,000 by 1598, when the Nine Years' War drove most of them off.
• Desmond himself was proclaimed a traitor in November 1579, and on 11 November 1583 he was surprised in a cabin in the wood of Glenageenty and beheaded.
• Walter Raleigh served in the English force at Smerwick under Grey. Of 1582 the Four Masters say 'the lowing of a cow, or the voice of the ploughman, could scarcely be heard from Dun-Caoin to Cashel' (O'Donovan, 1848-51).

Sources: Wikipedia: Second Desmond Rebellion; Wikipedia: Siege of Smerwick; Wikipedia: Plantations of Ireland; CELT, University College Cork: Annals of the Four Masters, vol. 5 (O'Donovan translation, 1848-51); Dictionary of National Biography (1889), Wikisource: Fitzgerald, Gerald (d.1583)

Hugh O'Neill, Earl of Tyrone (c. 1550 to 20 July 1616 (New Style); earl from 1585, The O'Neill from 1595)

Aodh Mor Ó Néill, Earl of Tyrone, last inaugurated Chief of the Name of the O'Neills, Earl of Tyrone · Dungannon, Ulster

Son of Matthew O'Neill, Baron Dungannon, Hugh was recognised as Earl of Tyrone in 1585 and in the early 1590s publicly stayed loyal while secretly backing rebels in Ulster. He brought firearms and continental tactics to Ireland, and in early 1595 went into open revolt with an assault on the Blackwater Fort. That year he was inaugurated The O'Neill, the last to be so. On 14 August 1598 he almost annihilated Sir Henry Bagenal's army at the Yellow Ford on the Blackwater. But after Kinsale he surrendered to Mountjoy in 1603 under the Treaty of Mellifont, and in 1607 he left Ireland for good.

How they came to power: After his father's killing he and his brother became wards of the Crown and were raised by the Anglo-Irish Hovenden family at Balgriffin, County Dublin. The Crown recognised him as earl in 1585.

How it ended: He settled in Rome on a small pension from Pope Paul V, planned to return, and died in exile in 1616.

• Historians think his motives were mainly political, despite the wartime propaganda of a Catholic crusader, though he seems to have undergone a real conversion around 1598.
• He remains a puzzle to historians because of the elaborate bluffs he used, including bribes and false information fed to officials.
• He married four times and had many concubines and children.

Sources: Wikipedia: Hugh O'Neill, Earl of Tyrone; Wikisource: Dictionary of National Biography (1885-1900): O'Neill, Hugh; Wikipedia: Nine Years' War (Ireland); The Irish Times: Collapse of the old Gaelic order

The Nine Years' War and Kinsale (May 1593 to 30 March 1603; siege of Kinsale 2 October 1601 to 3 January 1602)

The war began in May 1593, when Hugh Maguire revolted against the appointment of an English sheriff in Fermanagh, and grew into a confederacy under Hugh O'Neill and Red Hugh O'Donnell, with Spanish support. After Yellow Ford in 1598 revolt spread nationwide, but in 1600 the new Lord Deputy, Charles Blount (Lord Mountjoy), and Henry Docwra at Derry turned the war. In 1601 Philip III sent Don Juan del Águila with 6,000 men, of whom storms scattered many, and he landed at Kinsale. O'Neill and O'Donnell marched the length of Ireland to join him, and were beaten outside the town. Del Águila surrendered in January 1602, and O'Neill made peace in March 1603.

• Wikipedia's figures for Kinsale are about 1,200 Irish killed, wounded or captured, 100 Spanish killed or wounded and 3,400 Spanish who surrendered.
• Wikipedia gives a war total of over 120,000 dead, with famine causing the vast majority of the Irish deaths.
• Hiram Morgan prefers to call the conflict Tyrone's Rebellion, and James O'Neill argues the early years were a proxy war, so even the name of the war is argued over.

Sources: Wikipedia: Nine Years' War (Ireland); Wikipedia: Siege of Kinsale; CELT, University College Cork: Annals of the Four Masters, vol. 6 (O'Donovan translation, 1848-51); Wikisource: Dictionary of National Biography (1885-1900): O'Neill, Hugh; The Irish Times: Collapse of the old Gaelic order

The Flight of the Earls (14 September 1607 (4 September Old Style))

On 14 September 1607 Hugh O'Neill, Earl of Tyrone, and Rory O'Donnell, Earl of Tyrconnell, sailed from Rathmullan on Lough Swilly, with Cuconnaught Maguire and family and followers. Their exact motive is unclear. O'Neill had lost his temper at the Privy Council in a land case against O'Cahan, Lord Deputy Arthur Chichester and the attorney general John Davies were seeking evidence of treason against him, and the earls may have been plotting and feared arrest. Aiming for Spain, they were driven by storms to Quillebeuf in France, Philip III kept them out of Spain, and they reached Rome on 29 April 1608. Their departure opened the way for the Plantation of Ulster.

• The Four Masters list the passengers, including Countess Catherina, O'Neill's three sons and O'Donnell's son Hugh, 'wanting three weeks of being one year old' (O'Donovan, 1848-51).
• The annalists add that it was a distinguished crew for one ship, and they lament the loss to Ireland at length.
• Tyrconnell died in Rome in 1608 and O'Neill in 1616, and most of the passengers never returned. The earls had left their young children at the Irish College of St Anthony in Leuven.

Sources: Wikipedia: Flight of the Earls; CELT, University College Cork: Annals of the Four Masters, vol. 6 (O'Donovan translation, 1848-51); The Irish Times: Collapse of the old Gaelic order; Wikisource: Dictionary of National Biography (1885-1900): O'Neill, Hugh

The Plantation of Ulster (private plantations from 1606; official scheme from 1609, with grants from 1610; surveyed in 1622 (no formal end date))

After the Flight of the Earls, James I ordered the largest of Ireland's plantations. An estimated half a million acres in six counties, Armagh, Cavan, Fermanagh, Tyrone, Donegal and Londonderry, were confiscated and allotted, while Antrim and Down saw private Scottish settlement from 1606. Undertakers took the largest share, about 161,500 acres, and were meant to bring in British tenants and have no Irish ones, while servitors, former soldiers and officials, got nearly 55,000 acres and could have Irish tenants. London's livery companies were pressed into funding the new city of Londonderry on the River Foyle. The remaining Irish landowners were to get a quarter of the land, in a scheme James and his officials saw as anglicising and 'civilising' the province that had resisted them most.

• Ulster's population before the plantation is estimated at 180,000 to 200,000, after the deaths of war and famine, says Wikipedia.
• There were 59 Scottish undertakers to 51 English, in holdings of 1,000, 1,500 or 2,000 acres.
• The Protestant Church of Ireland was granted all the churches and lands formerly held by the Catholic Church.

Sources: Wikipedia: Plantation of Ulster; Ulster Historical Foundation: Plantation People; Jane Ohlmeyer, History Ireland: Anatomy of plantation: the 1641 Depositions; BBC History: Plantation of Ulster

The Four Masters (compiled 1632 to 1636)

Mícheál Ó Cléirigh and his collaborators, compilers of the Annála Ríoghachta Éireann, Franciscan annalists · Bundrowes, County Donegal

Between 1632 and 1636 the friar Mícheál Ó Cléirigh directed the compiling of the Annals of the Kingdom of Ireland, with his colleagues Cú Choigcríche Ó Cléirigh, Fearfeasa Ó Maol Chonaire and Cú Choigcríche (Peregrinus) Ó Duibhgeannáin. Modern scholarship places the work at a Franciscan house of refuge at Bundrowes near Bundoran. The annals are mainly a compilation of older chronicles, with some original material, running from the Deluge to AD 1616. Their earliest entries are tradition and their early dates cannot be taken as fact, but for later centuries they became a basic source. They give a view from Gaelic Ulster, written a generation after Kinsale.

How they rose: Ó Cléirigh, born about 1590, came of one of the foremost learned families of Gaelic Ireland and became a Franciscan friar.

How they died: Mícheál Ó Cléirigh died about 1643.

• John O'Donovan's translation of 1848 to 1851 is online through the CELT project at University College Cork.
• Owen Connellan had published the first substantial English translation, starting at AD 1171, in 1846.
• The work was sponsored by Fearghal Ó Gadhra of Coolavin, County Sligo, and the compilers' own manuscripts survive in the Royal Irish Academy and University College Dublin.

Sources: Wikipedia: Annals of the Four Masters; Wikipedia: Mícheál Ó Cléirigh; CELT, University College Cork: Annals of the Four Masters, vol. 6 (O'Donovan translation, 1848-51); Trinity College Dublin: The Annals of the Four Masters reunited for first time since 1636; Irish Script on Screen (DIAS): RIA MS 23 P 7, The Annals of the Four Masters

The Rising of 1641 (22 to 23 October 1641 to about May 1642)

A small group of Catholic gentry and officers, many from Ulster, planned to seize Dublin Castle on 23 October 1641, but Owen O'Connolly informed. In Ulster Sir Phelim O'Neill took Dungannon and other forts, proclaiming no harm to settlers, but as order collapsed attacks on Protestants spread. Pamphlets in London claimed over 200,000 dead, more than the settler population. Recent research reported by Wikipedia puts settler deaths at about 4,000 killed and up to 12,000 with those who died of exposure or disease; Fintan O'Toole, writing with thanks to Jane Ohlmeyer, says roughly 5,000 Protestants and 5,000 Catholics died that winter. Catholics were killed too: about two dozen at Islandmagee by the Carrickfergus garrison, and more after the Scottish army came in 1642.

• At Portadown in November 1641 prisoners were forced off a broken bridge into the River Bann and shot if they swam. Reported tolls range from 68 to 196; the sole survivor and only eyewitness William Clarke's figure of about 100 is usually preferred.
• Deponent Francis Leiland swore that most of 8,000 Protestants in two Armagh parishes were murdered. Ohlmeyer calls that grossly exaggerated, and cites research putting Armagh's settler deaths at 600 to 1,300, or 10.5 to 25 per cent.
• For Protestants the killings became the proof of a planned general massacre, in the depositions and in John Temple's 1646 book, and Ulster Protestants marked the anniversary for over two hundred years. Perceval-Maxwell and O'Toole note how that charge was then used to justify later English policy; the historian Lecky wrote it was 'far from clear on which side the balance of cruelty rests'.

Sources: Jane Ohlmeyer, History Ireland: Anatomy of plantation: the 1641 Depositions; Fintan O'Toole (thanks to Jane Ohlmeyer), The Irish Times: Deposition on Atrocities, 1641; M. Perceval-Maxwell, Irish Historical Studies (Cambridge Core): The Ulster Rising of 1641, and the depositions; Wikipedia: Irish Rebellion of 1641; Wikipedia: Portadown massacre

The Confederation of Kilkenny (1642 to 1652)

After the rising, Catholic nobles, gentry, clergy and soldiers of both Gaelic and Anglo-Norman descent formed a government based in Kilkenny, and at its height held up to two-thirds of Ireland. It had a General Assembly, a Supreme Council and armies, minted coins, levied taxes and set up a printing press, and it sent envoys to France, Spain and the Papal States. Its motto declared Irishmen united for God, king and country, and most members professed loyalty to Charles I in the hope of a settlement. Charles's agents agreed a ceasefire in September 1643, but talks kept stalling. Its armies fought Parliamentarians, Scots Covenanters and, at times, Royalists, until the Cromwellian conquest ended it.

• At Benburb on 5 June 1646 Owen Roe O'Neill beat Robert Monro's army of Scots and settlers. Wikipedia's article gives Monro's losses as 2,000 killed and captured in one place and 2,000 to 3,000 killed or wounded in another, against some 300 on O'Neill's side.
• The papal nuncio Giovanni Battista Rinuccini reached Ireland in November 1645 and became the dominant figure in the faction that wanted no settlement without religious concessions.
• Owen Roe, who had made his career in the Spanish army, sided with Rinuccini against the treaty with Ormond, and later relieved the Parliamentarian Charles Coote at Derry in return for 2,000 cattle. He died on 6 November 1649.

Sources: Wikipedia: Confederate Ireland; Wikipedia: Battle of Benburb; Wikipedia: Owen Roe O'Neill; History Ireland: The Confederation of Kilkenny; The Oxford Companion to British History (Encyclopedia.com): Kilkenny, Confederation of

Oliver Cromwell in Ireland (25 April 1599 to 3 September 1658; in Ireland August 1649 to 1650)

Oliver Cromwell, Parliamentarian general, later Lord Protector of England, Scotland and Ireland, Parliamentarian commander · Dublin to Clonmel

Cromwell landed near Dublin in August 1649 with an expeditionary force and heavy siege guns, to reconquer Ireland for the English Commonwealth, after Parliament's long commitment to retake it following 1641. He needed the east-coast ports, so Drogheda was stormed in September and Wexford sacked in October. After that many towns such as New Ross and Carlow surrendered on terms, and he kept those terms at Kilkenny and Clonmel, where, on Wikipedia's account, his army met its only serious reverse in Ireland, with up to 2,000 men lost. Others held out longer because of what had happened at Drogheda and Wexford. He handed the command to Henry Ireton in 1650, returned to England, and became Lord Protector in December 1653.

How they rose: A Puritan cavalry commander in the English Civil War, he was a leading advocate of the execution of Charles I in January 1649. The Irish Times review of Micheál Ó Siochrú's book calls the Irish expedition partly a move to ward off unpopularity at home.

How they died: He died on 3 September 1658. After the Restoration his body was removed from Westminster Abbey and hanged at Tyburn on 30 January 1661.

• A speaker at a 1999 Old Drogheda Society symposium argued that there was no strong hostility to Cromwell among literate Irish Catholics until the mid-nineteenth century, when nationalists built up his image, though he warned against minimising the slaughter.
• Micheál Ó Siochrú's God's Executioner argues the Irish massacres fell outside the conventions of the time, while Tom Reilly holds Cromwell broke no rules of war and is unfairly blamed.
• In his declaration of January 1650, addressed to the Catholic clergy, he blamed them for the 1641 massacres and accused them of breaking a peaceful union.

Sources: Wikipedia: Oliver Cromwell; Wikipedia: Cromwellian conquest of Ireland; History Ireland: The Curse of Cromwell (Old Drogheda Society symposium, 1999); Martin Mansergh, The Irish Times: Cromwell: the Irish years (review of Micheál Ó Siochrú, God's Executioner); John Dorney, The Irish Story: Book Review: Was Cromwell Framed?

The storming of Drogheda (besieged from 3 September, stormed 11 September 1649)

Drogheda, held for the Royalists by Sir Arthur Aston with about 2,550 English and Irish, Catholic and Protestant troops, refused surrender and was stormed on 11 September 1649. Cromwell reported that he forbade his men to spare any 'in Arms' and that about 2,000 were put to the sword that night; the army chaplain Hugh Peters gave 3,552 dead in all. If about 2,800 were soldiers, that leaves 700 to 800 civilians (Wikipedia, citing Morrill) or 500 to 700 civilians and clerics (Eugene Coyle in History Ireland). The Royalist press soon claimed 2,000 civilian dead, and Irish clerical accounts of the 1660s claimed 4,000. The true number is not known.

• Cromwell called it 'a righteous Judgement of God upon these Barbarous wretches', and said it would prevent bloodshed later. Yet Drogheda had not fallen to the rebels of 1641, as Wikipedia notes, and John Morrill argues that English Royalist officers were the ones singled out for the harshest treatment.
• The local historian Tom Reilly holds that there was no massacre of civilians and Cromwell kept to the laws of war; John Barratt wrote in 2009 that no reliable report on either side shows many civilians were killed; John Dorney also finds little evidence of large-scale civilian killing, while allowing that perhaps several hundred died.
• Micheál Ó Siochrú argues the killings fell outside the conventions of war, and his reviewer Martin Mansergh says many civilians died by Cromwell's own testimony, though Dorney reports Reilly's point that 'many inhabitants' appears in only some copies of that letter. Eugene Coyle calls the sack organised butchery and rejects Reilly's case. The Protestant cleric Dean Bernard left the only surviving civilian account, describing troops firing into his house.

Sources: The Cromwell Association (commentary by Joan Redmond): Cromwell to Speaker Lenthall, 17 September 1649; Eugene Coyle, History Ireland (review): Cromwell: An Honourable Enemy, by Tom Reilly; Martin Mansergh, The Irish Times: Cromwell: the Irish years (review of Micheál Ó Siochrú, God's Executioner); John Dorney, The Irish Story: Book Review: Was Cromwell Framed?; Wikipedia: Siege of Drogheda

The sack of Wexford (2 to 11 October 1649)

Cromwell reached Wexford with about 6,000 men on 2 October 1649 and offered terms to its Confederate and Royalist garrison under David Synnot. As his guns opened fire on 11 October, Synnot's delegates made new demands, which Cromwell rejected, and the castle governor James Stafford surrendered without telling Synnot. Commonwealth troops then broke into the town from the castle. One Wikipedia article gives 1,500 to 2,000 soldiers and civilians dead, over 300 of them drowned in the River Slaney, with up to 3,000 taken prisoner, for the loss of about 20 attackers. Another of its articles puts it at about 2,000 soldiers and 1,500 townspeople, about 3,500 in all.

• Whether Cromwell ordered the assault is argued over. Tom Reilly, Nicholas Canny and Roger Hainsworth suggest it began without his approval, and Reilly accepted in 1999 that the slaughter got out of control there; Cromwell's report to London presented it as retribution for earlier killings of Protestants.
• Royalist writers later alleged a massacre of 300 women at the market cross. Tom Reilly, who defends Cromwell, names James Heath's 1660 book as an early source for this and says few historians trust Heath.
• The brutality was not one-sided: between 2,000 and 3,000 Scots and Ulster Presbyterians had died in the pursuit after Benburb in 1646, and Irish Catholic prisoners were routinely executed in England and Scotland.

Sources: Wikipedia: Sack of Wexford; Wikipedia: Cromwellian conquest of Ireland; History Ireland: The Curse of Cromwell (Old Drogheda Society symposium, 1999); Tom Reilly, The Irish Story: Opinion: 'Cromwell was Framed'; Martin Mansergh, The Irish Times: Cromwell: the Irish years (review of Micheál Ó Siochrú, God's Executioner)

The Cromwellian land settlement (Act passed 12 August 1652; transplantation ordered by 1 May 1654)

The Act for the Settlement of Ireland, passed on 12 August 1652, excluded 104 named men from pardon of life and estate, along with the rebels of 1641 and Catholic clergy. Even those who had not shown 'constant good affection' to the Commonwealth could lose three-quarters of their land, with poorer land in Connacht or Clare offered in exchange. The authorities ordered landowners to go there by 1 May 1654 or face death, but in practice, says Wikipedia, most stayed on as tenants, and few were transplanted or executed, though later memory recalled the choice as 'to hell or to Connacht'. Catholic land ownership fell, on Wikipedia's figure, to just 8 per cent. The land was needed to pay army arrears and the Adventurers, mostly London merchants and English landowners who had advanced money for the war in return for promised land.

• To divide the land, the regime made the Gross Survey of 1653, the Civil Survey of 1654 and William Petty's mapped Down Survey of 1656 to 1658, with over 2,000 parish and barony maps.
• Cromwell himself told Parliament that Drogheda's surviving soldiers were 'Shipped for the Barbadoes'. Later estimates grew: Cornelius Nary said 15,000 to 20,000 in 1723, and early twentieth-century writers over 100,000.
• Modern estimates generally agree that war, famine and disease cut Ireland's pre-1641 population by 15 to 25 per cent or more, says Wikipedia.

Sources: Wikipedia: Act for the Settlement of Ireland 1652; History Ireland: The Down Survey of Ireland project; History Ireland: Civil and Down Surveys; History Ireland: The curse of Cromwell: revisiting the Irish slavery debate; Wikipedia: Cromwellian conquest of Ireland

The Siege of Derry (gates shut 7 December 1688 (Jonathan Bardon gives 18 December); siege 18 April to 1 August 1689)

On 7 December 1688, with a Jacobite regiment ready to cross the Foyle, 13 apprentices seized the keys of Derry and locked the gates. Governor Robert Lundy's defence of the River Finn line collapsed in April 1689, and on 18 April James II himself appeared before the walls and was refused. After failing to storm the walls, the besiegers tried to starve the town. Hunger and disease took hold inside, and Wikipedia puts the defenders' losses at about 4,000 killed or wounded out of some 8,000, mostly through disease; Jonathan Bardon says as many as 15,000 may have died among the 30,000 or so who sheltered there. Percy Kirke's relief fleet, which sailed from Liverpool on 17 May, at first thought the river too risky, since a boom blocked it; on 28 July the Mountjoy broke through it, and the Jacobites left on 1 August after 105 days.

• About four months lay between the apprentices' act and the start of the siege, and Wikipedia treats them as two separate Jacobite attempts on the city.
• The siege is commemorated each year by the Protestant Apprentice Boys of Derry, founded in 1814, who in December burn or hang an effigy of Lundy, remembered among them as a traitor.
• Harman Murtagh notes that English funds for the war only belatedly let William relieve Derry, and treats it as part of a war that was at once European, British and Irish.

Sources: Wikipedia: Siege of Derry; Harman Murtagh, History Ireland: The Williamite War 1689-91; Wikipedia: Apprentice Boys of Derry; Jonathan Bardon, Encyclopedia.com: Derry, Siege of; Thomas Witherow, Derry and Enniskillen in the Year 1689 (Library Ireland): The Relief

Patrick Sarsfield (c. 1655 to August 1693; Treaty of Limerick 3 October 1691)

Patrick Sarsfield, 1st Earl of Lucan (Pádraig Sáirséal), Jacobite general · Lucan and Limerick

Sarsfield came of a wealthy Catholic family and served as a senior Jacobite commander in the war of 1689 to 1691. After the Boyne, on the night of 9 August 1690, he slipped out of Limerick with a force of horse, guided by the raparee Michael 'Galloping' Hogan. At Ballyneety he wrecked the Williamite siege train, in a raid widely credited with forcing the first siege of Limerick to be abandoned, though a 1995 study suggests it had limited military value and Flynn also cites rain, plague and short ammunition. The Jacobite army was broken at Aughrim on 12 July 1691, where about 7,000 died on the two sides together. Limerick held on until the treaty of 3 October 1691, which Sarsfield negotiated, and under it about 14,000 soldiers (Wikipedia's treaty article) to 19,000 (its Sarsfield article) left for France, in what became known as the Flight of the Wild Geese.

How they rose: He began his military career in the Third Anglo-Dutch War of 1672 to 1674. By the treaty of 1691 he held the title Earl of Lucan.

How they died: Fatally wounded at the Battle of Landen on 29 July 1693 in French service, he died at Huy between 3 and 11 August. Searches have found no grave or burial record.

• The treaty's civil articles promised religious freedom and property, but many terms were altered or ignored, and Harman Murtagh says Catholic land ownership fell from 22 to 14 per cent, and to about 5 per cent by 1780.
• The password Sarsfield's men were given for the raid was, the story goes, his own surname, picked up from an apple seller who had been in the enemy camp.
• According to one eyewitness account quoted by Flynn, Hogan himself lit the fuse that blew up the guns.

Sources: Wikipedia: Patrick Sarsfield, 1st Earl of Lucan; Kevin Haddick Flynn, History Ireland: Ballyneety; Wikipedia: Treaty of Limerick; Harman Murtagh, History Ireland: The Williamite War 1689-91; Wikipedia: Battle of Aughrim

The Battle of the Boyne (1 July 1690 Old Style (11 July New Style))

William of Orange and his father-in-law James II faced each other across the Boyne near Drogheda on 1 July 1690 (Old Style). William had about 36,000 men with up to forty field guns, and James 23,500 to 25,000 with only six small cannon, by Flynn's and Wikipedia's counts. William sent about a quarter of his army upstream as a diversion, then forced the ford at Oldbridge, where his second-in-command, the Duke of Schomberg, and George Walker were killed. The Jacobites withdrew in good order and a rearguard held at Duleek, and Wikipedia counts 1,500 Jacobites and 500 Williamites killed or wounded. James, however, fled to France, and never returned.

• Kevin Haddick Flynn calls it a battle ridiculously overplayed for partisan purposes. Pádraig Lenihan agrees it was relatively bloodless, with far fewer deaths than at Landen in 1693.
• In European terms, Pope Alexander VIII's Papal States belonged to the Grand Alliance with William against Louis XIV of France.
• The Twelfth of July originally commemorated Aughrim, fought on 12 July 1691, and the Boyne ranked behind it in Protestant remembrance. Wikipedia says the two were combined after the Orange Order was founded in 1795.

Sources: Pádraig Lenihan, History Ireland: King Billy; Kevin Haddick Flynn, History Ireland: Ballyneety; Harman Murtagh, History Ireland: The Williamite War 1689-91; Wikipedia: Battle of the Boyne; Wikipedia: Treaty of Limerick

Turlough O'Carolan (born 1670, Nobber; travelling harper from about 1691; died 25 March 1738)

Toirdhealbhach Ó Cearbhalláin, harper and composer, Blind harper and composer · Nobber, County Meath, and all Ireland

Turlough O'Carolan, in Irish Toirdhealbhach Ó Cearbhalláin, was born in 1670 at Nobber in County Meath, where, on Wikipedia's account, his father was a blacksmith; the Victorian DNB instead calls his father a farmer and puts the birth at Newtown, near Nobber. For almost fifty years he travelled Ireland composing and performing for patrons, and most of his songs were written for and about particular people. His career falls in the years when the old Gaelic world of poets and harpers was losing its patrons. His tunes were mostly not written down in his lifetime; they survived in the playing of fiddlers, pipers and the last of the old harpers before collectors such as Edward Bunting printed them.

How they rose: Accounts of his blindness differ. Wikipedia's account says Mrs MacDermott Roe, of the family that employed his father, gave him schooling, apprenticed him to a harper after smallpox blinded him at eighteen, and at twenty-one gave him a horse and a guide. The Victorian DNB says smallpox blinded him at fourteen, and the older Compendium of Irish Biography says in infancy.

How they died: He died on 25 March 1738 and was buried in the MacDermott Roe family crypt at Kilronan, near Ballyfarnon in County Roscommon.

• He married Mary Maguire in 1720, when he was about 50.
• A modern edition of his music, built on Donal O'Sullivan's study of him, runs to 214 airs, and only one of his songs is known to have been composed in English.
• The old harping tradition outlived him only briefly: ten Irish harpers and one Welsh harper came to the Belfast gathering of 11 to 14 July 1792, where the young Edward Bunting noted down their tunes.

Sources: Library Ireland (A Compendium of Irish Biography, 1878): Turlough O'Carolan; Wikipedia: Turlough O'Carolan; Wikipedia: Belfast Harp Festival; Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900 (Wikisource): O'Carolan, Torlogh

The Penal Laws (main acts 1695 to 1728; relaxed from 1771 and 1778; last major bars removed 1829)

After the Williamite victory, the Irish Parliament, from which Catholics were barred, passed a run of acts against the Catholic majority and, to a lesser degree, Protestant Dissenters. They included the Education Act of 1695, the Banishment Act of 1697, the Registration Act of 1704, the Popery Acts of 1704 and 1709 and the Disenfranchising Act of 1728. Catholics were barred from the vote, the legal professions, the army and leases of more than 31 years. The estate of a Catholic landowner was to be divided among all his sons unless the eldest converted to the Church of Ireland, in which case he took the whole. The laws were aimed at securing land and office for the Protestant Ascendancy, and enforcement of the rules on worship was uneven: priests could register and services in private were often tacitly tolerated, while bishops had to work in hiding.

• The Treaty of Limerick, signed on 3 October 1691, had promised religious guarantees for Catholics who stayed in Ireland; many Jacobite soldiers left for France in what became known as the Flight of the Wild Geese.
• The Banishment Act ordered bishops, deans, vicars-general and friars out of the country; the Catholic Encyclopedia of 1911, written from the Catholic side, says the aim was to leave Catholics helpless and poor.
• Repeal came piecemeal: the relief acts beginning in 1771, then those of 1778, 1782 and 1793, removed many bars, including the limits on land leases and the ban on voting, and the ban on Catholics at Trinity College Dublin ended in 1793.

Sources: Catholic Encyclopedia (1911): Penal Laws; Wikipedia: Penal laws (Ireland); Wikipedia: Treaty of Limerick; University of Minnesota Law Library: Laws in Ireland for the Suppression of Popery, chronological list

Jonathan Swift (born 30 November 1667, Dublin; Dean of St Patrick's from 1713; died 19 October 1745)

The Very Rev. Jonathan Swift, Dean of St Patrick's, Satirist and Dean of St Patrick's · Dublin

Jonathan Swift was an Anglo-Irish Anglican cleric, born in Dublin in 1667, who hoped for high office in England and got the deanery of St Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin in 1713. He held it until his death. Back in Ireland he became a pamphleteer for Irish causes with his Proposal for Universal Use of Irish Manufacture of 1720 and the Drapier's Letters of 1724, written under the name M. B. Drapier. Gulliver's Travels followed in 1726. A Modest Proposal of 1729 uses the cold voice of an economic planner to suggest that the children of the Irish poor be sold as food, an attack on those who treated people as figures in an account.

How they rose: Swift made his name as a political writer in London. The Deanery of St Patrick's was the best post his friends could obtain for him, and it sent him back to Ireland.

How they died: He died in Dublin on 19 October 1745, aged 77, and is buried in St Patrick's Cathedral.

• He published nearly everything under pen names or anonymously, including Lemuel Gulliver and Isaac Bickerstaff as well as Drapier.
• The Drapier's Letters attacked William Wood's patent to mint copper halfpence for Ireland, and they made Swift a popular hero whom the government found unwelcome.
• The Irish patriot label came late: he had first supported the Glorious Revolution and joined the Whigs, and much of his ambition lay in England.

Sources: Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900 (Wikisource): Swift, Jonathan; Project Gutenberg: A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift; Wikipedia: Jonathan Swift; Wikipedia: A Modest Proposal

The Great Frost and the famine of 1740 to 1741 (December 1739 to September 1741)

An extraordinary spell of cold struck Ireland and the rest of Europe from December 1739, after a run of mild winters, and its cause is still unknown. Seven weeks of frost in the winter of 1739 to 1740 were followed by bad grain harvests, a shortage of milk and frost-damaged potatoes, at a time when oats mattered more than potatoes in most workers' diets. Estimates summarised by Wikipedia and the Brehon Academy, drawing on the historian David Dickson, put excess deaths at 300,000 to 480,000, between 13 and 20 per cent of a population of about 2.4 million, which Wikipedia calls a greater proportional loss than the Great Famine a century later; The Irish Times has given some half a million. In Irish it was called Bliain an Áir, the Year of Slaughter. Records are thin, so these numbers are estimates rather than counts.

• In the strange autumn of 1740 a brief cold snap sent great chunks of ice down the Liffey through Dublin, overturning light vessels and breaking larger ones from their anchors.
• Relief depended on the Protestant elite: Archbishop Boulter paid for an emergency feeding programme in Dublin at his own expense, and the Privy Council told each county's High Sheriff to count stocks of grain.
• The Conolly Folly was built in 1740 to give work to local labourers during the crisis.

Sources: The Irish Times: The Great Frost and forgotten famine; Wikipedia: Irish Famine (1740-1741); Wikipedia: Great Famine (Ireland); The Brehon Academy: The Year of Slaughter, Ireland's Forgotten Famine?; Waterford Treasures: Bliain an Áir, the forgotten famine of 1740-41

Nano Nagle (born c. 1718, Ballygriffin, County Cork; first school 1754; died 26 April 1784 (the DNB gives 20 April))

Honora Nagle, foundress of the Presentation Sisters, Educator and founder of a religious order · Cork

Honora Nagle, known as Nano, was born about 1718 at Ballygriffin in County Cork into a Catholic gentry family and was educated in France. The Education Act of 1695 had banned Catholic schoolteachers. In 1754 she opened her first school for poor children in a rented mud cabin in Cove Lane, Cork, with about 30 pupils. She brought the Ursuline sisters to Cork in 1771, but their rule of enclosure kept them from the poor she wanted to reach. So on Christmas Eve 1775 she founded her own community, later the Presentation Sisters.

How they rose: She considered entering a convent in France, but a religious director advised her to help the poor of her own country instead, and she came home to her brother Joseph in Cork.

How they died: She died of tuberculosis in her convent in Cork in April 1784, aged about 65.

• Her evening rounds to the sick and elderly earned her the nickname The Lady with the Lantern, and the lantern became the Presentation Sisters' symbol.
• Her exact birth year is disputed: Wikipedia prefers 1718, while the Victorian DNB and the 1878 Compendium both give 1728.
• The Presentation Sisters became one of Ireland's prominent Catholic teaching orders, and in a 2005 radio poll she was voted Ireland's greatest woman.

Sources: Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900 (Wikisource): Nagle, Nano; Library Ireland (A Compendium of Irish Biography, 1878): Nano Nagle; Wikipedia: Nano Nagle

Henry Grattan (born 3 July 1746, Dublin; MP in Dublin 1775 to 1797 and again 1800 to 1801; MP at Westminster 1805 to 1820; died 4 June 1820)

Henry Grattan, MP, Patriot parliamentarian · Dublin and Westminster

Henry Grattan was a Dublin lawyer and orator who entered the Irish Parliament in 1775 and campaigned to free it from the control of the British Parliament and Privy Council under Poynings' Law. The American revolt constrained Britain, and the Irish Volunteers, a patriot militia, gave weight to the demand: 242 delegates of the Ulster Volunteers met at Dungannon on 15 February 1782. On 16 April 1782 Grattan passed through ranks of Volunteers to the parliament house, and Britain soon conceded the arrangement often called the Constitution of 1782. Yet that parliament still shut out the Catholic majority, and two-thirds of its Commons seats were controlled by patrons of small boroughs. Grattan favoured Catholic emancipation and reform, helped carry the Relief Act of 1793, withdrew from parliament in 1797, and returned in 1800 but failed to prevent the Union.

How they rose: He was educated at Trinity College Dublin and made his name in parliament as an orator for the patriot cause.

How they died: He died in London on 4 June 1820, still sitting at Westminster, and was buried in Westminster Abbey.

• The British Renunciation Act of 1783 confirmed that the people of Ireland were bound only by laws of the king and their own parliament.
• Grattan opposed the Act of Union but later took a seat in the united Parliament in London, from 1805 until his death.
• On Wikipedia's account he spoke and voted after 1782 for the repressive legislation that followed Whiteboy violence in 1785, though the Victorian DNB records that he also pressed tithe reform to remove a chief cause of those disturbances.

Sources: Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900 (Wikisource): Grattan, Henry; Library Ireland (A Compendium of Irish Biography, 1878): Henry Grattan; Wikipedia: Henry Grattan; Wikipedia: Constitution of 1782

Wolfe Tone (born 20 June 1763, Dublin; United Irishmen founded October 1791; died 19 November 1798)

Theobald Wolfe Tone, in Irish Bhulbh Teón, United Irish leader · Dublin, Belfast and France

Theobald Wolfe Tone, the Protestant son of a Dublin coach-maker, wrote An Argument on behalf of the Catholics of Ireland in 1791. Its success brought an invitation to Belfast, where Presbyterian radicals founded the Society of United Irishmen that October, aiming to unite Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter behind reform. In 1792 he became assistant secretary of the Catholic Committee. After the government suppressed the society and he was compromised in a French spying case, he left for America and then France. There he helped win the expedition under General Hoche that reached Bantry Bay in December 1796 with, on Thomas Bartlett's figure, some 14,000 soldiers, only for storms to prevent a landing.

How they rose: A graduate lawyer and pamphleteer, he rose by connecting the Catholic Committee in Dublin with Belfast's Presbyterian radicals.

How they died: He was captured aboard the French ship Hoche off Lough Swilly in October 1798 and sentenced to hang as a traitor. On the morning set for execution he was found with a wound to his throat, apparently self-inflicted, though this has been questioned, and he died on 19 November.

• He is the founding hero of Irish republicanism, and rival republican factions hold separate annual commemorations at his grave at Bodenstown, County Kildare.
• His first name was pronounced 'Tibbald', not as it is usually said now.
• Tone was personally hostile to what he saw as papal power, even as he argued for Catholic rights: he later welcomed Napoleon's removal of Pope Pius VI.

Sources: BBC History (Thomas Bartlett): The 1798 Irish Rebellion; Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900 (Wikisource): Tone, Theobald Wolfe; Wikipedia: Theobald Wolfe Tone; Wikipedia: Society of United Irishmen

The Rebellion of 1798 (24 May to 23 September 1798)

The Society of United Irishmen planned a national republican rising with French help, but on the night of 23 to 24 May 1798 Dublin failed to rise and the rebellion broke out piecemeal. Government forces and loyalist magistrates had already spread fear with half-hangings, floggings and pitch-capping, and some 34 suspects were summarily executed at Dunlavin. Wexford rose after rebels under Father Murphy of Boolavogue beat the North Cork Militia at Oulart, and the army broke their camp at Vinegar Hill on 21 June. Presbyterian-led rebels in Antrim and Down rose and were routed at Ballynahinch. General Humbert landed about 1,100 French soldiers in Mayo on 22 August and won at Castlebar, but surrendered at Ballinamuck on 8 September. Death tolls are disputed. Thomas Bartlett's BBC essay gives 10,000 to 25,000 rebels, many of them non-combatants, and about 600 soldiers, and Wikipedia reports that he has elsewhere proposed perhaps 10,000 for the whole island. Thomas Pakenham's history of 1969 gives 30,000, which Wikipedia calls mid-range among the contemporary estimates, and Wikipedia's overall range runs to 50,000. Those estimates include about 1,000 loyalist civilians and 500 to 2,000 soldiers.

• Rebels also killed prisoners: Bartlett's account says about 100 loyalists died at a barn at Scullabogue after the defeat at New Ross (others say up to 200), and about 70 Protestant prisoners were piked on Wexford bridge after Vinegar Hill. He adds that the army repaid these killings with interest, and that its mopping-up, to the fury of the Lord Lieutenant, Cornwallis, resembled universal rape, plunder and murder.
• Bartlett writes that a rising meant to create a brotherhood of affection ended with sectarian bitterness greater than before, and with the end of the Irish parliament.
• In Irish-speaking Mayo the French landing was remembered as Bliain na bhFrancach, the Year of the French, and it ended with the killing of some 2,000 poorly armed insurgents outside Killala on 23 September.

Sources: BBC History (Thomas Bartlett): The 1798 Irish Rebellion; Wikipedia: Irish Rebellion of 1798; Wikipedia: Battle of Vinegar Hill

The Act of Union (Irish Act assented 1 August 1800; in force 1 January 1801)

After the rebellion of 1798 the British government moved to end the separate Irish parliament, in which no Catholic could sit and which represented a small Protestant minority. A first attempt was defeated in the Irish House of Commons in 1799 by 109 votes to 104, but in 1800 the measure passed by 158 to 115. Contemporary accounts say peerages and honours were used to win over opponents. From 1 January 1801 the two kingdoms became the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, and Dublin lost its parliament. Prime Minister William Pitt had held out the promise of Catholic emancipation alongside the Union, but George III's objections stopped it and it took another 28 years.

• The text of the Irish Act declares the two kingdoms united from 1 January 1801 'for ever'.
• Henry Grattan was the best-known opponent of the Union in Dublin, though he later sat at Westminster.
• Repeal of the Union was Daniel O'Connell's declared objective for Ireland, and he failed to win it.

Sources: legislation.gov.uk: Act of Union (Ireland) 1800; BBC History (Thomas Bartlett): The 1798 Irish Rebellion; Wikipedia: Acts of Union 1800; Wikipedia: Catholic emancipation

Robert Emmet (born 4 March 1778, Dublin; rising 23 July 1803; executed 20 September 1803)

Robert Emmet, Republican rebel leader · Dublin

Robert Emmet, the youngest son of the physician to the Lord Lieutenant, tried to renew the United Irish cause after 1798 and to break the new Union. He planned a rising in Dublin and stored pikes, grenades and rockets. An accidental explosion at a rebel arms depot in Patrick Street on 16 July 1803 forced him to bring the date forward to 23 July. The rising fell apart that evening amid sporadic clashes in the streets, in which the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Kilwarden, was dragged from his carriage and killed with pikes. Of the 10,000 copies of his printed proclamation only two are known to survive.

How they rose: His father was physician to the Lord Lieutenant; he took up the United Irish cause as the rising of 1798 was being suppressed.

How they died: Lord Norbury sentenced him for treason, and on 20 September 1803 he was hanged and then beheaded in Thomas Street, in front of St Catherine's Church, aged 25.

• His speech from the dock, and the manner of his death, inspired later republicans; Patrick Pearse invoked his memory.
• His attachment to Sarah Curran became part of his legend.
• Daniel O'Connell declared that, as the cause of so much bloodshed, Emmet had forfeited any claim to compassion.

Sources: Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900 (Wikisource): Emmet, Robert; Library Ireland (A Compendium of Irish Biography, 1878): Robert Emmet; Wikipedia: Robert Emmet; Wikipedia: Daniel O'Connell

Daniel O'Connell (born 6 August 1775; Catholic Association 1823; elected MP 1828; died 15 May 1847, Genoa)

Dónall Ó Conaill, 'the Liberator', Catholic leader and MP · Kerry, Dublin and Westminster

Daniel O'Connell, in Irish Dónall Ó Conaill, grew up at Derrynane in County Kerry in the household of his uncle Maurice 'Hunting Cap' O'Connell and became a leading barrister. In 1823 he set up the Catholic Association, whose 'Catholic rent' of a penny a month brought the labouring poor into a national movement for the first time. In July 1828 he defeated a cabinet minister in the County Clare by-election, and the crisis that followed forced Catholic Emancipation in 1829. His second aim, repeal of the Union, failed: more than fifty 'monster meetings' in 1843 and 1845 drew huge crowds. The nationalist press put the one at Tara at over a million, figures History Ireland treats as inflated, and the 1878 Compendium gives about a quarter of a million. When the government banned the Clontarf meeting of 8 October 1843 and sent in troops, he called it off.

How they rose: Raised by a wealthy uncle at Derrynane, he became a Catholic lawyer and built his following through the long campaign for emancipation.

How they died: Convicted of conspiracy, he spent three months in the Richmond Bridewell in 1844 until the House of Lords quashed the verdict. Failing in health as the Famine deepened and Young Ireland broke away, he set out for Rome and died at Genoa on 15 May 1847, aged 71; his heart went to Rome and his body to Ireland.

• At Westminster he was an internationally known abolitionist and played a major part in the passage of the Reform Act of 1832 and the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833.
• He declared that the Catholic Church in Ireland was a national church, a line that later historians say came close to making Catholicism the mark of the Irish nation.
• He insisted on addressing his open-air meetings in English, with interpreters in the crowd, and said he did not regret the gradual abandonment of Irish.

Sources: History Ireland: Hedge Schools of Politics, O'Connell's monster meetings; History Ireland: The Emancipator; Library Ireland (A Compendium of Irish Biography, 1878): Daniel O'Connell; Wikipedia: Daniel O'Connell

Catholic Emancipation (Clare by-election July 1828; Act passed 1829)

The Clare by-election of July 1828 sent Daniel O'Connell to Westminster, but as a Catholic he would not swear the Oath of Supremacy and could not take his seat. Fearing insurrection in Ireland, Robert Peel drafted a relief bill and steered it through the Commons, while the Duke of Wellington threatened to resign to overcome George IV and the Lords. The Roman Catholic Relief Act of 1829 removed the religious tests that barred Catholics from Parliament and most high offices. A companion act, assented on the same day, raised the county vote from the forty-shilling freehold to the British £10 standard. Ireland's electorate fell from about 216,000 to just 37,000, and most of the tenant farmers who had voted for O'Connell lost their votes.

• History Ireland describes O'Connell as the first Irish Catholic to enter the House of Commons.
• The £10 threshold stayed, but the Irish parts of the Reform Act of 1832 almost trebled the electorate three years later. The Young Irelander John Mitchel believed the disfranchisement was meant to separate propertied Catholics from poorer ones.
• Wellington's forcing of the measure through split the Tory party, and some Ultra-Tories then came to demand parliamentary reform.

Sources: legislation.gov.uk: Roman Catholic Relief Act 1829; History Ireland: The Emancipator; Wikipedia: Roman Catholic Relief Act 1829; Wikipedia: Daniel O'Connell

Hedge schools, national schools and the shift to English (national schools from 1831; language figures to 1851)

Under the Penal Laws Catholic and Presbyterian children often learned in hedge schools, small and unofficial schools that in fact mostly met indoors. After Catholic teaching became legal, new teaching orders spread, among them Edmund Ignatius Rice's Christian Brothers and Catherine McAuley's Sisters of Mercy, founded in Dublin in 1831. That same year Edward Stanley, the Chief Secretary, set up a state-funded national school system, intended to be multi-denominational, which Bishop James Doyle and other Catholic bishops welcomed and under which the hedge schools declined. The Irish language was already in retreat long before the Famine. One estimate gives about 800,000 people speaking only Irish in 1800, 320,000 by the end of the Famine and under 17,000 by 1911.

• Hedge teachers were apparently not prosecuted: no case is known, even though Catholic education was forbidden.
• County Meath is the clearest example of the speed of change: an estimated 41 per cent or more were Irish speakers in 1771 to 1781, and under 3 per cent by 1851.
• An estimated quarter to a third of Famine-era Irish immigrants to the United States were Irish speakers.

Sources: RTÉ History: 'So sad in themselves', the impact of the Great Famine; Wikipedia: Hedge school; Wikipedia: National school (Ireland); Wikipedia: Irish language; Wikipedia: Catherine McAuley

Thomas Davis (born 14 October 1814, Mallow; The Nation first published October 1842; died 16 September 1845)

Thomas Osborne Davis, Young Ireland writer · Mallow and Dublin

Thomas Davis was born in Mallow, County Cork, the son of a Welsh surgeon in the Royal Artillery and an Irish mother, and was educated at Trinity College Dublin. In October 1842 he, Charles Gavan Duffy and John Blake Dillon launched the weekly newspaper The Nation. The group became known as Young Ireland. Davis has been read as an early exponent of cultural nationalism, drawing on Herder's idea that a nation was made by its culture and language, not by birth or creed. He wrote the song A Nation Once Again, and wrote that a song is worth a thousand harangues.

How they rose: He became auditor of the College Historical Society at Trinity and then moved from student politics to journalism and the Repeal movement.

How they died: He died of scarlet fever on 16 September 1845, aged 30, in the first autumn of the potato blight, and was buried at Mount Jerome in Dublin.

• He admired Wolfe Tone as an alternative hero to O'Connell, wrote the poem Tone's Grave and organised the first Tone memorial at Bodenstown.
• After his death Young Ireland broke with O'Connell over the Peace Resolutions of July 1846, withdrew from the Repeal Association and formed the Irish Confederation in January 1847.
• In 1848 his former colleagues tried armed rebellion: William Smith O'Brien's rising ended near Ballingarry in County Tipperary with a failure to dislodge fewer than 50 police from Widow McCormack's house.

Sources: Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900 (Wikisource): Davis, Thomas Osborne; History Ireland: The IRB, 'a natural outcome of Young Irelandism'?; Wikipedia: Thomas Davis (Young Irelander); Wikipedia: Young Ireland

The Great Famine (1845 to 1852; worst year 1847, 'Black '47')

From 1845 the blight Phytophthora infestans destroyed the crop on which over three million Irish people depended, taking about three-quarters of the harvest in 1846, with 1847 the worst year for deaths. About a million people died of starvation and disease between 1846 and 1851, according to the historian James Donnelly; the range of excess deaths in Wikipedia's summary runs from 775,000 to 1.5 million. The census counted 8,175,124 people in 1841 and 6,552,385 in 1851, and emigration accounts for most of the rest of the fall. Peel's government bought £100,000 of American maize in secret and repealed the Corn Laws, while Russell's Whig government of 1846 relied on public works, then soup kitchens that fed up to three million people a day at their peak in July 1847, then the Poor Law. Donnelly estimates that up to 500,000 people were evicted between 1846 and 1854, and a clause denying relief to anyone holding more than a quarter acre forced many to give up their land.

• The British response is still argued over. Nationalist writers from John Mitchel in 1861 blamed the government. Donnelly writes that laissez-faire economics, providentialism and ethnic prejudice worsened a natural disaster, and that from 1847 there was enough food if it had been distributed; he also says the initial shortage was real and that almost three times as much grain probably entered Ireland as left it. Wikipedia reports that the majority of historians of the subject reject the charge of genocide, while the question remains in public debate.
• Aid came from far away: the Quakers' Central Relief Committee ran relief on the ground, Queen Victoria gave £2,000, and in 1847 a group of Choctaw people in America sent $170.
• In 1997 a message in Prime Minister Tony Blair's name, read at a commemoration in County Cork, said those who governed in London at the time had failed their people; files released in 2021 showed that his private secretary approved it without reaching him.

Sources: BBC History (James Donnelly): The Irish Famine; RTÉ History: 'So sad in themselves', the impact of the Great Famine; Wikipedia: Great Famine (Ireland)

Famine emigration and the coffin ships (1845 to 1855; peak of deaths at sea and in quarantine 1847)

The historian James Donnelly puts emigration at some two million people between 1845 and 1855. The 1851 census recorded 967,952 long-distance emigrants, mainly to North America, in the years to 1851, with perhaps 200,000 more going the short distance to Britain. Crowded, cheaply run vessels, the so-called coffin ships, carried typhus across the Atlantic and set off an epidemic at the quarantine stations in Canada in 1847. At the quarantine station on Grosse Île in the St Lawrence River it is believed that over 3,000 Irish people died on the island and that over 5,000 are buried there, the largest burial ground for Famine refugees outside Ireland.

• Not every ship was deadly: no one died aboard the Jeanie Johnston, thanks to the practices of her captain and doctor.
• After the Famine, as many women as men left Ireland, an unusual pattern among European emigrants of the time.
• The landlord Denis Mahon, who sent tenants to Canada on such ships, was murdered in 1847.

Sources: Wikipedia: Great Famine (Ireland); BBC History (James Donnelly): The Irish Famine; RTÉ History: 'So sad in themselves', the impact of the Great Famine; Wikipedia: Coffin ship; Wikipedia: Grosse Isle

The Fenians and the rising of 1867 (IRB founded 17 March 1858; rising February and March 1867)

James Stephens and John O'Mahony, veterans of the failed 1848 rising, created the Irish Republican Brotherhood in 1858, an oath-bound movement aiming at an independent democratic republic. Its American partner, the Fenian Brotherhood, gave the movement its popular name. An attempted rising in County Kerry in February 1867 was followed by the main attempt on the night of 5 March, which broke up in a series of skirmishes, including one with police at Tallaght. Between 8 April and 19 June 169 prisoners were tried before Special Commissions in Dublin, Cork and Limerick. In November, three Fenians were hanged after an attack on a prison van in Manchester in which Police Sergeant Charles Brett was shot dead; Irish nationalists came to call them the Manchester Martyrs.

• In December 1867 a gunpowder explosion at Clerkenwell Prison in London, meant to free a Fenian prisoner, blew down a wall, killing twelve people and injuring 120, according to Wikipedia's account.
• Fenians under Colonel John O'Neill raided Canada in June 1866 and beat Canadian militia at Ridgeway before US troops blocked them.
• After the Irish People arrests of 1865 the sentences drew criticism even in the British press: O'Donovan Rossa got life, and Luby and O'Leary twenty years.

Sources: History Ireland: The IRB, 'a natural outcome of Young Irelandism'?; Wikipedia: Fenian Rising; Wikipedia: Irish Republican Brotherhood; Wikipedia: Fenian raids; Wikipedia: Manchester Martyrs

Disestablishment and the first Land Act (Irish Church Act 1869, effective 1 January 1871; Land Act assented 1 August 1870)

The Liberals under William Gladstone won the 1868 election promising justice for Ireland, and the state church was the first target. The Church of Ireland commanded the adherence of a small minority, yet the Catholic majority had been made to pay for it through tithes, which had sparked the mostly non-violent Tithe War of 1830 to 1836 and clashes such as Carrickshock in 1831. The Irish Church Act of 1869 ended its establishment from 1 January 1871, after Queen Victoria stepped in to mediate between Lords and Commons. The Landlord and Tenant (Ireland) Act of 1870 gave the Ulster Custom the force of law where it existed and gave other tenants some compensation for eviction. The land question was not settled, and within a decade it erupted in the Land War.

• The Act also ended the state's arrangements with the Catholic seminary at Maynooth: its sections repeal the Maynooth Acts and remit the trustees' debt.
• John Bright, in Gladstone's cabinet, wrote in May 1869 that once the church question was out of the way, north and south would unite in demanding land reform.
• The tithe grievance was eased by the Tithe Rentcharge (Ireland) Act of 1838, but the church remained established for three decades more.

Sources: legislation.gov.uk: Irish Church Act 1869; Wikipedia: Irish Church Act 1869; Wikipedia: Landlord and Tenant (Ireland) Act 1870; Wikipedia: Tithe War

Charles Stewart Parnell (MP from 17 April 1875; party leader from 1880; died 6 October 1891)

Charles Stewart Parnell, MP, Leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party · Avondale, County Wicklow, and Westminster

Charles Stewart Parnell, born into a Protestant landowning family in County Wicklow, entered the Commons at the County Meath by-election of April 1875 as a Home Rule League MP. He helped found the Irish National Land League in 1879 and became leader of the Irish party in 1880, balancing constitutional politics with land agitation and support from Fenians in America. He was jailed in Kilmainham in October 1881 and released in 1882 on an understanding that he would turn away from violent agitation. In the crisis of 1885 to 1886 his party held the balance of power in the Commons, and Gladstone brought in the first Home Rule Bill. It failed on 8 June 1886 by 341 votes to 311, with 93 Liberals voting against, while Protestant unionists opposed it out of fear of industrial decline and of rule by a Catholic-dominated government.

How they rose: He rose through obstruction in the Commons and his link with Michael Davitt's land movement, with backing from John Devoy's Clan na Gael in America.

How they died: In 1890 he was named in the O'Shea divorce case because of his long relationship with Katherine O'Shea. Liberals refused to work with him, his party split, and after a last round of by-election defeats he died at Hove in Sussex on 6 October 1891, aged 45.

• In March and April 1887 The Times accused him of supporting the Phoenix Park killings of 1882; letters it printed were later shown to have been forged by Richard Pigott.
• The Phoenix Park killings, in which Lord Frederick Cavendish, the newly appointed Chief Secretary, and Thomas Henry Burke were stabbed to death on 6 May 1882, came just after his release.
• He is buried in Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin.

Sources: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1911 (Wikisource): Parnell, Charles Stewart; Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900 (Wikisource): Parnell, Charles Stewart; Wikipedia: Charles Stewart Parnell; Wikipedia: Government of Ireland Bill 1886; Wikipedia: Phoenix Park Murders

The Land War (main phase 20 April 1879 to 6 May 1882; later agitation to 1923)

Falling farm prices and bad harvests in the late 1870s brought back fear of eviction in the west. The Irish National Land League, founded in 1879 by Michael Davitt with Parnell at its head, demanded the 'three Fs': fair rent, fixity of tenure and free sale. Its tools were rent strikes, mass meetings, and the shunning of anyone who took an evicted farm. In 1880 tenants on Lord Erne's estate at Lough Mask in County Mayo turned on his agent, Captain Charles Boycott, in resistance to proposed evictions, and his name became the word. When the leaders were jailed in 1881, the Ladies' Land League, founded on 31 January that year and led by Anna Parnell, which Wikipedia calls the first political association of Irish women, took over their work until it was dissolved on 10 August 1882. Gladstone's Land Act of 1881 granted much of what the tenants wanted, and later acts moved towards ownership.

• An RTÉ Brainstorm article shows that women, such as the O'Halloran family of Bodyke in County Clare in 1887, stood on the front line of resisting evictions.
• Agitation returned in the Plan of Campaign of 1886 to 1891 and the Ranch War of 1906 to 1909.
• The Land Purchase (Ireland) Act of 1903 set the conditions for breaking up large estates through government-sponsored purchase, so tenants became owners.

Sources: RTÉ Brainstorm: How Irish women resisted evictions during the Land War; RTÉ History teachers' handbook: The Rise of the Land Movement, 1879-1882; Wikipedia: Land War; Wikipedia: Charles Boycott; Wikipedia: Ladies' Land League

Michael Davitt (born 25 March 1846, Straide; Land League 1879; died 30 May 1906, Dublin)

Michael Davitt, Land League founder · Straide, County Mayo, and Lancashire

Michael Davitt was born at Straide in County Mayo on 25 March 1846, during the Famine, to tenant farmers. The family was evicted in 1850 and settled at Haslingden in Lancashire. He went to work in a cotton mill at nine, and two years later his right arm was mangled in a cogwheel and had to be amputated. He joined the Irish Republican Brotherhood, and in 1870 was convicted of treason felony for arms trafficking and sentenced to fifteen years, of which he served seven, some of them at Dartmoor. After his release he pioneered the New Departure, an alliance of physical-force republicans and land agitators, and co-founded the Land League with Parnell in 1879.

How they rose: His prison record and his own family history made him a powerful voice for the tenant cause, and he toured America in 1878 to raise money and support.

How they died: He died in Elpis Hospital, Dublin, on 30 May 1906, aged 60.

• He was elected for County Meath at an 1882 by-election but was disqualified because he was in prison.
• History Ireland calls his relationship with Parnell difficult, and says that by 1883 Parnell's group had put a brake on the land agitation Davitt wanted to push further.
• He lectured around the world, and History Ireland describes his later career as that of a freelance radical.

Sources: History Ireland: Michael Davitt, after the Land League 1882-1906; History Ireland: Michael Davitt, freelance radical and frondeur; Wikipedia: Michael Davitt

The Gaelic Revival (GAA founded 1 November 1884; Gaelic League founded 31 July 1893)

On 1 November 1884 Michael Cusack, Maurice Davin and others founded the Gaelic Athletic Association at Hayes' Hotel in Thurles, County Tipperary, to run Irish games on Irish terms. On 25 November 1892 Douglas Hyde, the son of a Church of Ireland rector, lectured the Irish National Literary Society in Dublin on The Necessity for De-Anglicising Ireland, arguing that Ireland should follow its own traditions in language, literature and dress. The next year Eoin MacNeill and others founded the Gaelic League (Conradh na Gaeilge) with Hyde as first president, to keep Irish alive as a spoken language. Patrick Pearse joined the League on leaving school and became committed to reviving the language.

• From 1915 members of the League's executive acknowledged the leadership of the Irish Republican Brotherhood.
• Revival movements did not always agree: Pearse once said of the Irish Literary Theatre of Yeats and Lady Gregory that it should be strangled at birth.
• Hyde later became the first President of Ireland, from 1938 to 1945.

Sources: Wikipedia: Gaelic revival; Wikipedia: Gaelic League; Wikipedia: Gaelic Athletic Association; BBC History: Patrick Pearse (1916 Easter Rising profiles); Project Gutenberg: The Revival of Irish Literature, with Hyde's lecture of 1892

James Connolly (born 5 June 1868, Edinburgh; Dublin from 1896; executed 12 May 1916)

James Connolly, in Irish Séamas Ó Conghaile, Socialist and Irish Citizen Army commander · Edinburgh, Dublin and Belfast

James Connolly was born in the Cowgate district of Edinburgh in 1868, the son of Irish immigrants, and grew up in poverty, largely self-educated. He came to Dublin in 1896 as paid organiser of the Dublin Socialist Society, emigrated to the United States in 1903 and returned in 1910, by then fusing socialist and nationalist ideas. He rose to prominence in the 1913 Lockout. In October 1914, after James Larkin left for America, he became General Secretary of the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union and commander of the small but disciplined Irish Citizen Army. In January 1916 he agreed with the IRB's Military Council to join in a rising at Easter.

How they rose: He rose through the labour movement, moving, in the BBC's account, from organiser and agitator to military commandant and theorist.

How they died: Wounded in the Rising, he was executed by firing squad in Kilmainham Gaol on 12 May 1916, supported in a chair because of his wounds. The manner of it added to the bitter mood in Ireland.

• The Irish Citizen Army had over 1,000 members during the Lockout but only 220 by 1916, according to the BBC, and it aimed at an independent Irish socialist republic.
• It grew from the need to protect union men on picket lines and at rallies during the Lockout, and the Boer War veteran Jack White took up the idea.
• He signed the Proclamation of the Irish Republic.

Sources: BBC History: James Connolly (1916 Easter Rising profiles); BBC History: Irish Citizen Army (1916 Easter Rising profiles); Wikipedia: James Connolly

Lady Gregory (born 15 March 1852, Roxborough, County Galway; Abbey Theatre 1904; died 22 May 1932)

Isabella Augusta, Lady Gregory, née Persse, Dramatist and co-founder of the Abbey Theatre · Coole Park, County Galway

Augusta Persse was born at Roxborough in County Galway in 1852, and in 1880 married Sir William Gregory, who died in 1892. Her home at Coole Park became a meeting place for leading figures of the Irish Literary Revival. With W. B. Yeats and Edward Martyn she co-founded the Irish Literary Theatre and then the Abbey Theatre, which opened in 1904 with her Spreading the News among its first plays. She produced versions of Irish myth such as Cuchulain of Muirthemne of 1902 and Gods and Fighting Men soon after, written in what she called Kiltartanese, English with Gaelic syntax based on local speech. Her work on the Abbey's board was, Wikipedia says, at least as important as her writing.

How they rose: An Anglo-Irish landed widow, she took up folklore and playwriting in middle age and used her energy and connections to build a national theatre.

How they died: She died on 22 May 1932, aged 80.

• Annie Horniman's patronage paid for converting the Mechanics Institute in Abbey Street into the theatre.
• Her nephew was the art collector Sir Hugh Lane.
• The Playboy of the Western World by J. M. Synge caused riots in the audience in 1907, and the cast faced trouble again on the first American tour in 1912.

Sources: Abbey Theatre: History; Wikipedia: Lady Gregory; Wikipedia: Abbey Theatre; Project Gutenberg: Gods and Fighting Men by Lady Gregory; Dublin City Libraries: Happy Birthday Lady Gregory

Yeats, Joyce and Irish writing (Abbey Theatre 1904; Dubliners 1914; Ulysses 1922; Nobel Prize for Yeats 1923)

William Butler Yeats, born at Sandymount in County Dublin on 13 June 1865, co-founded the Abbey Theatre and became the leading poet of the revival. His poem Easter, 1916, with its refrain about a terrible beauty, shows him reassessing men he had not taken seriously. He served as a senator of the Irish Free State from December 1922 and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1923. James Joyce, born in Dublin in 1882, left with Nora Barnacle in 1904 and lived in Pola, Trieste, Zurich and Paris. Dubliners appeared in 1914, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in 1916 and Ulysses, whose episodes parallel Homer's Odyssey, in 1922; its date, 16 June, marks his first outing with Nora.

• Yeats died at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin in France on 28 January 1939, aged 73.
• Joyce wrote much of Ulysses in Zurich during the First World War.
• In 1926, during the first run of Sean O'Casey's The Plough and the Stars at the Abbey, a riot broke out among audience members who objected to its picture of the 1916 Rising.

Sources: NobelPrize.org: William Butler Yeats, biographical; Abbey Theatre: History; Wikipedia: W. B. Yeats; Wikipedia: James Joyce; Project Gutenberg: Ulysses by James Joyce

Patrick Pearse (born 10 November 1879, Dublin; St Enda's 1908; executed 3 May 1916)

Pádraig Mac Piarais, Teacher and leader of the Rising · Dublin

Patrick Pearse, in Irish Pádraig Mac Piarais, was the Dublin-born son of an English sculptor of church work. He was called to the bar but gave himself to the Gaelic League and to education, founding the Irish-speaking boys' school St Enda's in 1908. He appeared on Home Rule platforms up to 1912, then moved to physical-force republicanism and spoke of a necessary blood sacrifice. He joined the Irish Volunteers at their foundation in November 1913 and in May 1915 went onto the IRB's secret Military Council. His graveside oration for the old Fenian O'Donovan Rossa in August 1915 ended with the line that an unfree Ireland would never be at peace.

How they rose: The Military Council named him Commandant-General of the Army of the Irish Republic and President of the Provisional Government on 23 April 1916, the eve of the Rising.

How they died: He agreed to unconditional surrender on 29 April 1916, was court-martialled, and was shot in Kilmainham Gaol on 3 May 1916, aged 36.

• The BBC's profile says that in the preparations he helped deceive Eoin MacNeill, the Volunteers' Chief of Staff; MacNeill then countermanded the orders in a newspaper, which greatly reduced turnout.
• His younger brother Willie, also educated by the Christian Brothers, was executed after the Rising.
• St Enda's pupils were to work hard for their fatherland and, if it should ever be necessary, die for it, as the BBC quotes him.

Sources: BBC History: Patrick Pearse (1916 Easter Rising profiles); Wikipedia: Patrick Pearse; Wikipedia: Easter Rising

Constance Markievicz (born 1868, London; Fianna Éireann 1909; elected December 1918 (poll 14 December, seat from 28 December); died 15 July 1927)

Constance Georgine Gore-Booth, Countess Markievicz, Revolutionary and first woman elected to Westminster · Lissadell, County Sligo, and Dublin

Constance Gore-Booth was born in London in 1868 into the Protestant Ascendancy family that owned Lissadell in County Sligo, and was presented at court to Queen Victoria in 1887. She married a Polish count, Casimir Markievicz, and turned to Irish causes, helping to found Na Fianna Éireann in 1909, a scouting body meant to train boys to fight. She fed workers' families in the 1913 Lockout and helped organise the Irish Citizen Army. In the Rising she was second-in-command to Michael Mallin at St Stephen's Green and the College of Surgeons. At the general election of December 1918, while in Holloway Prison, she became the first woman elected to the UK Parliament, a seat she did not take.

How they rose: She came to nationalism through Inghinidhe na hÉireann, the women's movement founded by Maud Gonne, and through her work with Larkin and Connolly.

How they died: She served again as a TD for Dublin and died on 15 July 1927, aged 59. She is buried in Glasnevin Cemetery.

• She was the only woman court-martialled after the Rising; on 4 May 1916 she was sentenced to death, commuted to life imprisonment on account of her sex.
• As Minister for Labour in the Dáil from 1919 to 1922 she became, on Wikipedia's account, the second woman cabinet minister in Europe.
• She was also active in the campaign for women's suffrage.

Sources: BBC History: Countess Markievicz (1916 Easter Rising profiles); Wikipedia: Constance Markievicz; Wikipedia: 1918 Irish general election

Edward Carson (1854 to 1935; born in Dublin; Irish Unionist leader from February 1910; Ulster Covenant 28 September 1912)

Edward Henry Carson, Lord Carson of Duncairn, Unionist leader · Dublin and Ulster

Edward Carson was born in Dublin, studied law at Trinity College and became one of the most successful lawyers of his generation, defending Queensberry in the first trial of Oscar Wilde in 1895. He sat as Unionist MP for Trinity College from 1892 to 1918. He became leader of the Irish Unionist parliamentary party in February 1910, and in June 1911 accepted James Craig's invitation to lead the Ulster Unionists against the Third Home Rule Bill, which they opposed. Nearly 500,000 people signed the Ulster Covenant on and before 28 September 1912. The Ulster Volunteers, at least 100,000 strong, followed in January 1913 and in April 1914 smuggled 25,000 rifles from Germany into Ulster through Larne. Home Rule reached the statute book in 1914 but was suspended for the war by the Suspensory Act.

How they rose: His legal fame and oratory, including his speech against the Second Home Rule Bill in 1893, made him one of the most prominent politicians in the United Kingdom by 1906.

How they died: He stayed unionist leader until 1921 and accepted a peerage that year. He died in 1935 and was buried in St Anne's Cathedral, Belfast.

• The BBC's profile says he aimed to use Ulster's resistance to block self-government for all of Ireland, and felt deep unease about the measures his supporters were taking.
• In the war he served in the British government as Attorney General, First Lord of the Admiralty and a member of the War Cabinet.
• He criticised the Anglo-Irish Treaty strongly, but from the standpoint of southern unionists left behind.

Sources: BBC History: Edward Carson (1916 Easter Rising profiles); Wikipedia: Edward Carson; Wikipedia: Ulster Covenant; Wikipedia: Ulster Volunteers; Wikipedia: Government of Ireland Act 1914

The 1913 Lockout (26 August 1913 to 18 January 1914)

James Larkin, a Liverpool-born docks organiser, founded the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union, which within three years was Ireland's largest and most militant union. The tramway owner William Martin Murphy led employers against it, and from 26 August 1913 some 300 employers fought about 20,000 workers over the right to join a union. Many lived in terrible conditions in the city's tenements. Police broke up a banned rally in Sackville Street on 31 August, and the dispute saw two dead and several hundred injured, with some 200 police among the injured. By 18 January 1914 strikers were going back to work, many of them signing pledges not to join the union, although the principle of unions was accepted.

• British trade unions and other sources sent about £150,000 in aid; a scheme for British trade unionists to look after strikers' children was blocked by Catholic opposition.
• The Irish Citizen Army was formed during the dispute to protect workers from the police.
• George Bernard Shaw called Larkin the greatest Irishman since Parnell, according to the BBC's profile.

Sources: BBC History: James Larkin (1916 Easter Rising profiles); BBC History: Irish Citizen Army (1916 Easter Rising profiles); Wikipedia: Dublin lock-out; Wikipedia: James Larkin

Ireland and the First World War (1914 to 1918)

Over 200,000 men from Ireland fought in the First World War. About 30,000 died serving in Irish regiments of the British forces, and some estimates reach as many as 49,400. On 20 September 1914 at Woodenbridge in County Wicklow, John Redmond called on the Irish Volunteers to enlist in Irish regiments of the British Army. Unionists joined the 36th (Ulster) Division, largely recruited from the Ulster Volunteers, which attacked between the Ancre and Thiepval on the first day of the Somme, 1 July 1916. Nationalist recruits largely filled the 16th (Irish) Division, and in 1917 the two fought alongside each other at Messines.

• The 36th Division lost 5,500 men killed, wounded or missing on 1 and 2 July 1916, according to the BBC, and unionists contrasted that loyalty with the Rising two months earlier.
• The timing of the Rising outraged many families with men at the front, the BBC's account of its aftermath notes.
• Lloyd George later said that the failure to reconcile Ireland through shared war service broke Redmond's heart.

Sources: BBC History: The Executions (1916 Easter Rising, Aftermath); BBC History: Perspectives (1916 Easter Rising, Insurrection); Wikipedia: Ireland and World War I; Wikipedia: 36th (Ulster) Division; Wikipedia: 16th (Irish) Division

The Easter Rising (24 to 29 April 1916; executions from 3 to 12 May, Roger Casement on 3 August)

A seven-man Military Council of the Irish Republican Brotherhood planned the Rising, which began on Easter Monday, 24 April 1916, when Irish Volunteers and the Irish Citizen Army seized the GPO and other Dublin buildings and Pearse read a Proclamation of an Irish Republic. The British Army, reaching 16,000 troops by the end of the week, used artillery on the city centre, and Pearse surrendered on 29 April. Of the 485 people killed, 260 were civilians, 143 British military and police and 82 rebels, including the 16 executed afterwards. About 3,430 men and 79 women were arrested, and about 1,800 sent to Britain. Reaction was divided: some surrendering rebels had to be protected from hostile crowds while others were met warmly, John Redmond condemned the Rising outright, and unionists generally saw it as treachery.

• Civilians were also killed by British troops: Captain Bowen-Colthurst had six shot, including the pacifist Francis Sheehy-Skeffington, and was found guilty but insane by a court martial, and 15 civilians died in the North King Street massacre.
• General Maxwell's courts martial and executions, spread over days, contributed to the shift in opinion: Sinn Féin won 73 of 105 Irish seats in December 1918.
• The BBC's account says the Proclamation spoke for what it calls a tiny minority claiming to act for the nation; Connolly, for his part, was sure that even a failed rising would reawaken the country.

Sources: BBC History: The Proclamation (1916 Easter Rising, Insurrection); BBC History: The Executions (1916 Easter Rising, Aftermath); BBC History: Perspectives (1916 Easter Rising, Insurrection); Wikipedia: Easter Rising

Michael Collins (born 16 October 1890, Woodfield, Clonakilty; killed 22 August 1922)

Mícheál Ó Coileáin, IRA intelligence chief and head of the Provisional Government · Clonakilty, County Cork, and Dublin

Michael Collins was born at Woodfield near Clonakilty in County Cork and moved to London in 1906, working in the post office and in finance while joining the Gaelic League and the IRB. He fought in the GPO in 1916 as aide to Joseph Plunkett, was interned at Frongoch, and came home at Christmas 1916 to rebuild the IRB. As Minister of Finance in the Dáil from 1919 he organised the loan that paid for the alternative government, and he co-ordinated much of the IRA's campaign through an intelligence network that penetrated Dublin Castle. His 'Squad' assassinated detectives and, on 21 November 1920, suspected British intelligence officers. With Arthur Griffith he led the delegation that signed the Treaty on 6 December 1921.

How they rose: Elected to Sinn Féin's executive in 1917 and returned for Cork South in 1918, he came to control the re-formed Volunteers in effect.

How they died: Commander-in-Chief of the Free State Army, he was shot dead in an ambush by anti-Treaty republicans at Béal na Bláth, County Cork, on 22 August 1922, aged 31, while on a tour of Munster.

• He said the Treaty gave Ireland not the ultimate freedom all nations desire but the freedom to achieve it.
• He became president of the secret IRB's Supreme Council and held the post until his death.
• The BBC calls him widely regarded as the most charismatic Irish political leader of the century, and speculation about what he might have done had he lived has never stopped.

Sources: BBC History: Michael Collins (1916 Easter Rising profiles); BBC History: The Treaty (1916 Easter Rising, Aftermath); BBC History: The Anglo-Irish War (1916 Easter Rising, Aftermath); Wikipedia: Michael Collins (Irish leader)

The War of Independence (21 January 1919 to 11 July 1921)

Sinn Féin won 73 of Ireland's 105 seats in December 1918, and on 21 January 1919 those attending the First Dáil met in Dublin and declared independence; the same day IRA volunteers acting on their own initiative killed two RIC officers at Soloheadbeg. The IRA, about 15,000 volunteers with some 3,000 active at a time on the BBC's figures, used ambushes and raids, with the Royal Irish Constabulary as its main target. Britain reinforced the police with the Black and Tans and Auxiliaries, whom the BBC describes as gaining a reputation for ill-discipline, drunkenness and brutality, and who carried out reprisals. On 21 November 1920, Bloody Sunday, Collins's Squad killed suspected British intelligence officers in Dublin (Wikipedia says 14, the BBC 19), and police then fired on a Gaelic football crowd at Croke Park, killing 14 civilians by one count, 12 by another. The count by Eunan O'Halpin and Daithí Ó Corráin in The Dead of the Irish Revolution, as summarised by Wikipedia, gives 2,346 deaths including a few just before and after the war: 491 IRA, 936 British forces and police, and about 900 civilians. The BBC's older account gives over 1,300, of them 550 troops and police.

• British forces burned the centre of Cork city in December 1920 in reprisal for an ambush, and the IRA killed seventeen Auxiliaries at Kilmichael a week after Bloody Sunday.
• The war in the north-east took a sectarian form: Protestant unionist and Catholic nationalist civilians were caught up in communal violence, and over 75 per cent of conflict deaths fell in Munster, Dublin and Belfast.
• Some 4,500 people were interned on suspicion by August 1921, and the BBC notes that police atrocities, confirmed by independent journalists, drew criticism in Britain and America.

Sources: BBC History: The Anglo-Irish War (1916 Easter Rising, Aftermath); BBC History: The Black and Tans (1916 Easter Rising, Aftermath); RTÉ History: The War of Independence; Wikipedia: Irish War of Independence

Partition and the birth of Northern Ireland (Act passed 1920; in force 3 May 1921; Boundary Commission report 1925)

The Government of Ireland Act of 1920 created two devolved parliaments, one in Belfast for the six north-eastern counties and one in Dublin for the rest, and it came into force on 3 May 1921. Ulster unionists accepted and worked it; Irish nationalists did not. In Belfast between 1920 and 1922 severe communal violence, mainly between Protestant and Catholic civilians, killed more than 500 people and made more than 10,000 refugees, most of them from the Catholic minority. An IRA Northern Offensive into border areas failed the same year. The Treaty promised a Boundary Commission, which nationalists hoped would shrink the northern state, but in 1925 it proposed only small changes, and these were not carried out.

• The Act's long title speaks of the better government of Ireland, and it intended both territories to stay in the United Kingdom, with provision for eventual reunification.
• Collins warned Austen Chamberlain that a Boundary Commission would mean the coercion of one third of Northern Ireland's area, including Tyrone and Fermanagh.
• Unionists feared what the Home Rule debates had raised since 1886, industrial decline and rule by a Catholic-dominated Irish government, and most nationalists after partition continued to seek a united Ireland.

Sources: legislation.gov.uk: Government of Ireland Act 1920; BBC History: The Treaty (1916 Easter Rising, Aftermath); Wikipedia: Partition of Ireland; Wikipedia: Irish Boundary Commission; Wikipedia: The Troubles in Ulster (1920-1922)

The Anglo-Irish Treaty (signed 6 December 1921; Dáil approved 7 January 1922 by 64 votes to 57)

After the truce of 11 July 1921, a Sinn Féin delegation led by Arthur Griffith and Michael Collins negotiated in London from 11 October with David Lloyd George's team. Lloyd George insisted that Ireland remain in the Empire with the Crown as head of state. On 6 December the delegates signed without consulting their colleagues in Dublin. The Irish Free State became a self-governing dominion with control of its domestic affairs, taxes, trade and an army, but with an oath of allegiance, and Britain kept naval bases there. After nine days of public debate the Dáil approved the Treaty on 7 January 1922 by 64 votes to 57, and de Valera, while accepting it had majority support, said the majority had no right to do wrong.

• Its supporters argued that the alternative was renewed war with Britain and that the powers granted would lead to unity; its opponents said it failed to do the fundamental thing, grant a republic.
• The oath required members of the Free State parliament to swear allegiance to the Free State and to be faithful to King George V and his successors.
• The Treaty came into full effect on 6 December 1922, a year after the signing, with Northern Ireland given the right to withdraw from the new state.

Sources: BBC History: The Treaty (1916 Easter Rising, Aftermath); Wikipedia: Anglo-Irish Treaty; BBC History: Arthur Griffith (1916 Easter Rising profiles)

The Irish Civil War (28 June 1922 to 24 May 1923)

In April 1922, 200 anti-Treaty IRA men under Rory O'Connor occupied the Four Courts in Dublin. On 28 June the Provisional Government's forces shelled the building, and open war followed. The National Army took the cities and towns by August, Michael Collins was killed in an ambush that month, and the anti-Treaty side turned to guerrilla war and the burning of houses until the IRA leadership under Frank Aiken ordered its units to dump arms on 24 May 1923. A University College Cork project, the first systematic count, identified 1,426 violent deaths in the Free State: 648 pro-Treaty, 438 anti-Treaty, 336 civilians and four Crown forces, rising to 1,485 with deaths north of the border. Earlier counts were partial: the republican roll The Last Post, for example, lists at least 426 anti-Treaty dead. The Free State officially executed 81 of its roughly 12,000 Republican prisoners, under emergency powers passed in September 1922.

• On 7 December 1922 the anti-Treaty IRA assassinated TD Seán Hales in reprisal for executions, and the next day four prominent republican prisoners, held since the first week of the war, were shot.
• The Catholic bishops issued a statement on 10 October 1922 condemning the anti-Treaty campaign and refusing the sacraments to its fighters, while Cumann na mBan overwhelmingly opposed the Treaty.
• A memorial at Ballyseedy in County Kerry marks republicans killed by Free State forces, and the split carried into politics when de Valera and Aiken left Sinn Féin to found Fianna Fáil.

Sources: RTÉ History (Andy Bielenberg, UCC): Death and killing in the Irish Civil War; RTÉ History: Civil War; BBC History: The Treaty (1916 Easter Rising, Aftermath); Wikipedia: Irish Civil War

W. T. Cosgrave (born 5 June 1880, Dublin; head of government 6 December 1922 to 9 March 1932; died 16 November 1965)

William Thomas Cosgrave, President of the Executive Council, First head of government of the Irish Free State · Dublin

William Cosgrave was born in the Liberties of Dublin and went into his father's public house business. He attended the first Sinn Féin convention in 1905, sat on Dublin Corporation from 1909 and fought at the South Dublin Union in 1916, when he was sentenced to death and had the sentence commuted. After the deaths of Griffith and Collins in August 1922 he led the Provisional Government and then, from 6 December, the Free State's Executive Council. He stayed in office for almost ten years, founding the Cumann na nGaedheal party in 1923. He led the state through the Civil War and its executions, and in March 1924 faced an ultimatum from army officers over demobilisation.

How they came to power: He had been a Sinn Féin councillor and minister in the revolutionary Dáil. The sudden deaths of Griffith and Collins in August 1922 left him to lead the government.

How it ended: He lost power to Fianna Fáil in 1932, led the opposition until 1944, and led Fine Gael from 1934. He died on 16 November 1965, aged 85, and was buried at Goldenbridge in Inchicore.

• He never joined the IRB, because he did not believe in secret societies.
• On 22 July 1929 he opened the Ardnacrusha power station at Parteen, County Clare.
• A 1931 recording of a speech by him survives from British Movietone.

Sources: RTÉ Brainstorm: The story of Ardnacrusha's 'quiet revolution'; BBC History: Eamon de Valera (1916 Easter Rising profiles); Wikipedia: W. T. Cosgrave

Mother and baby homes and Magdalene laundries (institutions covered 1922 to 1998; final report 12 January 2021; State apology 13 January 2021)

For much of the twentieth century many unmarried pregnant women in Ireland entered mother and baby homes, many of them run by religious orders. The Commission of Investigation's final report, published on 12 January 2021, covered 14 mother and baby homes and four county homes from 1922 to 1998. It found that about 56,000 women, some as young as 12, and about 57,000 children passed through them, and that around 9,000 children died there, about 15 per cent of the children. It reported no evidence that Church or State forced women in, but much that they had no alternative. The next day Taoiseach Micheál Martin apologised on behalf of the State for what he called a profound generational wrong. Survivors criticised both the report's handling, including a leak before publication, and some of its findings; the commission objected to the term 'forced adoption', which many people adopted from the homes prefer, and the Adoption Rights Alliance called its finding on forcible removal of children astonishing.

• The inquiry followed the local historian Catherine Corless's research into burials at the Bon Secours home in Tuam, County Galway.
• Protestant institutions were included as well as Catholic ones: the order setting up the commission lists Bethany Home in Dublin.
• On Magdalene laundries, a 2013 report from a committee chaired by Senator Martin McAleese counted 10,012 women, and 14,607 admissions, at eight of the ten laundries from 1922 to 1996, leaving out two run by the Sisters of Mercy. That replaced an often-quoted estimate of 30,000, which covered a longer period.

Sources: RTÉ News: 'The State failed you', survivors of homes told; RTÉ News: Injustices of the past laid bare in report on homes; Irish Statute Book: S.I. No. 57/2015, Commission of Investigation (Mother and Baby Homes and certain related Matters) Order 2015; The Irish Times: Mother and baby homes report finds rampant infant mortality; Irish Examiner: 'Horrifying and shameful' (McAleese report on the Magdalene laundries)

The Shannon Scheme (construction 1925 to 1929; opened 22 July 1929)

At the end of 1923 the Irish engineer Thomas McLaughlin, then working for Siemens, put forward a plan to harness the River Shannon for electricity, and Patrick McGilligan, Minister for Industry and Commerce, was given the task of carrying it through. The Free State's government backed it despite tight finances, and the German firm Siemens-Schuckert built the plant at Ardnacrusha from 1925, with much of the design done by Irish engineers. A peak workforce of 4,800 was housed in nearby camps and fed a diet of 3,000 calories a day. Some 250,000 tourists came to see the works, and W. T. Cosgrave opened the station on 22 July 1929.

• RTÉ's Brainstorm calls it the largest civil engineering project in the history of modern Ireland.
• Siemens published a monthly report, Progress on the Shannon, on the works.
• The painter Sean Keating's pictures of the works are discussed by History Ireland.

Sources: RTÉ Brainstorm: The story of Ardnacrusha's 'quiet revolution'; History Ireland: Keating, Siemens and the Shannon Scheme; Wikipedia: Ardnacrusha (Shannon Scheme)

Éamon de Valera (born 14 October 1882, New York; founded Fianna Fáil 1926; head of government from 9 March 1932; President 1959 to 1973; died 29 August 1975)

Éamon de Valera, Taoiseach and President of Ireland, Fianna Fáil leader, Taoiseach and President · New York, Limerick and Dublin

Éamon de Valera was born in New York to a Spanish-born father and an Irish mother and raised in Limerick after his father's death in 1885. As the senior surviving commander of 1916, he led Sinn Féin from 1917 and opposed the Treaty, saying that the majority had no right to do wrong. He led the anti-Treaty side until 1926, when he left Sinn Féin to found Fianna Fáil, which entered the Dáil and won power in 1932. That began 16 unbroken years in office. His policies were economic self-sufficiency, weakening ties with Britain, the 1937 constitution and neutrality in the Second World War.

How they came to power: After release from prison in England under the amnesty of June 1917 he won a by-election in East Clare and was elected President of Sinn Féin and of the Irish Volunteers.

How it ended: He resigned as Taoiseach in 1959, was elected President that year and again in 1966, retired in 1973, and died on 29 August 1975, aged 92. He is buried in Glasnevin Cemetery.

• He founded a newspaper, the Irish Press, in 1931.
• Fianna Fáil lost power for six years between 1948 and 1957, then returned with a large majority.
• The BBC's profile describes his constitution of 1937 as deeply conservative.

Sources: BBC History: Eamon de Valera (1916 Easter Rising profiles); BBC History: Eamon de Valera (Historic figures); BBC History: The Treaty (1916 Easter Rising, Aftermath); Wikipedia: Éamon de Valera

The Constitution of 1937 (plebiscite 1 July 1937; in force 29 December 1937)

Bunreacht na hÉireann replaced the 1922 Constitution of the Irish Free State after a plebiscite on 1 July 1937, held the same day as a general election. It passed by a plurality, with about 56.5 per cent of valid votes in favour, or 38.6 per cent of the whole electorate, and came into force on 29 December. It guarantees freedom of worship and that the State will not endow any religion, but in its original form gave a special position to the Catholic Church. Article 41.2 spoke of a woman's life within the home, which women's groups and Hanna Sheehy Skeffington attacked as a threat to their rights as citizens and workers. It can be changed only by a national referendum, which has made referendums a central part of Irish politics.

• The London Daily Telegraph criticised the special position of the Church of Rome, and the Sunday Times said the text would only help perpetuate division in Ireland.
• Articles 2 and 3, which made a claim on the whole island, were changed in 1999 under the Good Friday Agreement.
• The text is published in full by the Irish Statute Book along with a list of amendments.

Sources: Irish Statute Book: Constitution of Ireland; BBC History: Eamon de Valera (1916 Easter Rising profiles); Wikipedia: Constitution of Ireland

The Emergency and the Belfast Blitz (state of emergency proclaimed 2 September 1939; Belfast raids April and May 1941)

Dáil Éireann proclaimed a state of emergency on 2 September 1939, and the state stayed neutral throughout the Second World War. Northern Ireland, part of the United Kingdom, was at war. On Easter Tuesday, 15 April 1941, 200 Luftwaffe bombers attacked Belfast, and some 987 people died and 1,500 were injured; apart from raids on London, Wikipedia says, it was the greatest loss of life in any night raid of the Blitz. Dublin fire brigades crossed the border to help. Dublin itself was bombed on 31 May 1941, when German bombs killed 28 people in the North Strand area; Wikipedia's article on the Emergency gives 38.

• The IRA's leaders were mostly interned at the Curragh Camp or on the run during the war.
• Although Éire was neutral, it arrested the German spies its police and military intelligence caught.
• In 1995 Taoiseach John Bruton paid tribute to the Irish who volunteered to fight against Nazi tyranny, at least 10,000 of whom, he said, were killed serving in British uniforms.

Sources: BBC History: Eamon de Valera (1916 Easter Rising profiles); Wikipedia: The Emergency (Ireland); Wikipedia: Belfast Blitz; Wikipedia: Bombing of Dublin in World War II

The Republic and the emigrant decade (Act signed 21 December 1948; in force 18 April 1949)

John A. Costello's government passed the Republic of Ireland Act, which was signed on 21 December 1948 and came into force on 18 April 1949, Easter Monday, the 33rd anniversary of the start of the Rising. It ended the remaining statutory role of the British monarch, though some argued that the state had been a republic already. Britain answered with the Ireland Act 1949, which asserted that the state was no longer part of the King's dominions and said Northern Ireland would not leave the United Kingdom without its parliament's consent. The 1950s were a low point at home: over 500,000 people emigrated in the decade, chiefly to Britain.

• The Act itself is very short: it declares that the description of the state shall be the Republic of Ireland.
• Emigration was also heavy in the 1980s, at about 450,000.
• Wikipedia gives over 3 million Irish citizens living outside Ireland in 2017.

Sources: Irish Statute Book: The Republic of Ireland Act, 1948; Wikipedia: Republic of Ireland Act 1948; Wikipedia: Emigration from Ireland

Ian Paisley (born 6 April 1926; Free Presbyterian Church 1951; DUP leader 1971 to 2008; First Minister 8 May 2007 to 5 June 2008; died 12 September 2014)

The Rev. Ian Richard Kyle Paisley, Baron Bannside, Free Presbyterian leader, DUP founder and First Minister · Northern Ireland

Ian Paisley, the son of a Baptist minister, became an evangelical minister in 1946 and in 1951 co-founded the fundamentalist Free Presbyterian Church of Ulster, which he led until 2008. Wikipedia records that his fiery sermons regularly preached anti-Catholicism; he wrote that the Roman church had deviated from true Christianity. In the 1960s he targeted Prime Minister Terence O'Neill for weakening the link with Britain. He led the Democratic Unionist Party from 1971, opposed the Sunningdale Agreement of 1973 and backed the Ulster Workers' Council strike of May 1974 that brought it down. The DUP was the only major party in Northern Ireland to oppose the Good Friday Agreement. Yet after the St Andrews Agreement it agreed to share power, and in May 2007 he became First Minister with Martin McGuinness of Sinn Féin as his deputy.

How they rose: He built a following through his church and street politics, and entered Westminster in 1970 as an MP.

How they died: He stepped down as First Minister and DUP leader in 2008, and died on 12 September 2014.

• He and McGuinness formed a good working relationship, and the Northern Ireland press dubbed them the Chuckle Brothers.
• The Ulster Workers' Council strike ran from 15 to 28 May 1974.
• He sat in the European Parliament from 1979 to 2004 as well as at Westminster.

Sources: CAIN (Ulster University): Biographies of people prominent during the conflict, P; CAIN (Ulster University): Ulster Workers' Council Strike, summary; Wikipedia: Ian Paisley; Wikipedia: Good Friday Agreement

Seán Lemass (Taoiseach 1959 to 1966; died 11 May 1971)

Seán Lemass, Taoiseach, Fianna Fáil Taoiseach · Dublin

Seán Lemass, a veteran of the Rising, the War of Independence and the Civil War, was first elected as a Sinn Féin TD in 1924 and served long terms as Minister for Industry and Commerce. In November 1958 the plan of T. K. Whitaker, the top civil servant at Finance, appeared as the First Programme for Economic Expansion, known as the Grey Book, which Wikipedia says many credit with bringing in foreign investment. Lemass became Taoiseach in 1959 and turned protectionist policies around, moving towards the GATT agreement on tariffs, which Ireland formally joined on 22 December 1967, and applying in 1961 to join the European Economic Community. The application failed, a disappointment he reportedly called his biggest as Taoiseach, and Ireland joined in 1973. On 14 January 1965 he met Terence O'Neill, the Northern Ireland Prime Minister, at Stormont.

How they came to power: He was a founder-member of Fianna Fáil in 1926, served in its governments as Minister for Industry and Commerce and as Tánaiste, and became Taoiseach in 1959.

How it ended: He retired as Taoiseach in 1966 and died on 11 May 1971, two years before Ireland joined the European Communities.

• Whitaker's Programme for Economic Expansion was unusual in being published under a civil servant's name.
• His legacy, in Wikipedia's summary, rests on industrial growth, foreign direct investment and links to Europe.
• He served as Tánaiste in 1945 to 1948, 1951 to 1954 and 1957 to 1959.

Sources: Wikipedia: Seán Lemass; Wikipedia: T. K. Whitaker; RTÉ Archives: Lemass goes to Stormont for historic meeting, 1965; World Trade Organization: GATT members

The Troubles (civil rights march 5 October 1968; Sutton's count of deaths runs 14 July 1969 to 31 December 2001)

The civil rights campaign of the mid-1960s set out Catholic grievances over housing, jobs and electoral practices, while many loyalists felt it was a cover for republicans who wanted to end the state. On 5 October 1968 the RUC used batons on a banned march of about 400 people in Derry, and in 1969 the violence escalated until British troops were deployed. Malcolm Sutton's index on CAIN counts 3,532 deaths from 1969 to 2001, 3,489 of them by 1998, and the book Lost Lives gives 3,720 from 1966 to 2006, 3,635 of them by 1998. Of those killed, 52 per cent were civilians, 32 per cent British security forces and 16 per cent paramilitaries, as summarised by Wikipedia. Sutton's table holds republican groups responsible for 2,058 deaths, loyalist groups for 1,027, British security forces for 366, Irish security forces for 5, and 76 unknown. The worst year was 1972, with 480 deaths.

• Republican and loyalist killings fell on different people: Wikipedia summarises that loyalists caused 48 per cent of civilian deaths, republicans 39 per cent and security forces 10 per cent.
• Both communities buried their dead: loyalist car bombs in Dublin and Monaghan on 17 May 1974 killed 33 civilians and an unborn child, CAIN records, and a Provisional IRA bomb at the Enniskillen Remembrance ceremony on 8 November 1987 killed civilians gathered at the war memorial.
• By community, Sutton counts 1,522 Catholics, 1,288 Protestants and 722 people from outside Northern Ireland among the dead.

Sources: CAIN (Ulster University): Sutton Index of Deaths, summary of organisation; CAIN (Ulster University): Sutton Index of Deaths, summary of religion; CAIN (Ulster University): Civil Rights Campaign, summary; CAIN (Ulster University): Chronology of the Conflict 1974; Wikipedia: The Troubles

John Hume (born 18 January 1937, Derry; SDLP founder 1970; leader 1979 to 2001; Nobel Peace Prize 1998; died 3 August 2020)

John Hume, Nobel laureate, SDLP leader · Derry

John Hume was born into a working-class Catholic family in Derry on 18 January 1937. He came to prominence in the civil rights movement of 1968 and 1969, with a record as a founder of Derry Credit Union and Derry Housing Association. He was elected to Stormont as an independent, and in August 1970 he and five other Stormont MPs formed the Social Democratic and Labour Party, which he led from 1979 to 2001. In January 1988 the priest Alec Reid brought him together with Gerry Adams of Sinn Féin at Clonard Monastery in west Belfast, and they exchanged documents through him. He shared the 1998 Nobel Peace Prize with the Ulster Unionist leader David Trimble for their efforts to find a peaceful solution.

How they rose: He rose through community organising in Derry and the campaign for a university there.

How they died: He lived with dementia in later life and died on 3 August 2020, aged 83.

• He said he wanted to be remembered for his early work as a pioneer of the credit union movement.
• When the new Assembly chose Trimble as First Minister on 1 July 1998, Hume, as leader of the largest nationalist party, was expected to take the Deputy First Minister's post, but he handed it to Seamus Mallon.
• He sat in Westminster from 1983 and in the European Parliament from 1979 to 2004.

Sources: NobelPrize.org: John Hume, biographical; NobelPrize.org: The Nobel Peace Prize 1998; CAIN (Ulster University): Biographies of people prominent during the conflict, H; Wikipedia: John Hume

Mary Robinson (born 21 May 1944, Ballina; senator 1969 to 1989; President 3 December 1990 to 12 September 1997)

Mary Therese Winifred Robinson, née Bourke, President of Ireland and UN human rights chief · Ballina, County Mayo

Mary Robinson was born in Ballina, County Mayo, on 21 May 1944 and became a barrister and Reid Professor of Criminal Law at Trinity College Dublin. As a senator from 1969 to 1989 and as a lawyer she campaigned on liberalising causes, and she was a key figure in the decriminalisation of homosexuality in 1993, the legalisation of contraception and divorce, and women's right to sit on juries. In the 1990 presidential election she ran against Brian Lenihan of Fianna Fáil and Austin Currie of Fine Gael. RTÉ's Brainstorm notes that she took 76.7 per cent of Currie's transfers to outpoll Lenihan. She was inaugurated as seventh President, the first woman in the office, on 3 December 1990, and regularly polled approval ratings above 90 per cent.

How they came to power: She rose through the law, the Senate and a term on Dublin Corporation from 1979 to 1983.

How it ended: She resigned as President on 12 September 1997 to become United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, serving until 2002. She is living.

• She sat on the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Marital Breakdown from 1983 to 1985.
• She was succeeded as president by another woman, Mary McAleese.
• She was a founding member of The Elders, with Nelson Mandela, Graça Machel and Desmond Tutu among others.

Sources: RTÉ Archives: Mary Robinson, first female president, 1990; Wikipedia: Mary Robinson; RTÉ Brainstorm: The winners (and losers) from Irish presidential elections; OHCHR: Past High Commissioners; The Elders: Mary Robinson

Bloody Sunday (30 January 1972; Widgery report 18 April 1972; Saville report 15 June 2010)

On 30 January 1972 between ten and twenty thousand people marched in Derry against internment, in a march organised by the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association. The army stopped it entering the city centre, some young men threw stones in William Street, and soldiers of the Parachute Regiment entered the Bogside on an arrest operation. In about 30 minutes they shot dead 13 men and injured 13 others; one of the injured died four months later, so most accounts now count 14 dead. The soldiers said they had come under gun and bomb attack; marchers and witnesses said none of the victims had weapons. Lord Widgery's inquiry, reported in April 1972, found no fault with the soldiers, and said there was a strong suspicion that some of the dead had been handling weapons. Lord Saville's inquiry, set up in 1998 and published on 15 June 2010, found that the firing was unjustifiable.

• The march protested internment, which ran from 9 August 1971 to 5 December 1975; CAIN records that of 1,981 people detained, 1,874 were Catholic or Republican and 107 Protestant or Loyalist.
• Prime Minister David Cameron formally apologised on behalf of the United Kingdom after the Saville report. A crowd burnt the British embassy in Dublin on 2 February 1972, and CAIN says the killings brought a dramatic rise in support for republicanism and the IRA.
• A former paratrooper known as Soldier F stood trial in 2025 for two murders and five attempted murders and was found not guilty. Some critics in Britain contrasted the £190m Saville inquiry with the lack of any such inquiries into paramilitary killings.

Sources: CAIN (Ulster University): 'Bloody Sunday', summary of main events; GOV.UK: Report of the Bloody Sunday Inquiry; CAIN (Ulster University): Internment, summary; Wikipedia: Bloody Sunday (1972); Wikipedia: Bloody Sunday Inquiry

The 1981 hunger strike (1 March to 3 October 1981; Bobby Sands died 5 May)

Bobby Sands, the IRA's leader in the Maze Prison, refused food on 1 March 1981, the fifth anniversary of the end of special category status. The prisoners wanted political status through five demands, including the right to wear their own clothes and not to do prison work. The IRA leadership outside was reluctant, and the push came from the prisoners. Sands was elected MP for Fermanagh and South Tyrone during the strike and died on 5 May; two other strikers were elected to the Dáil. Wikipedia calls the strike a showdown between the prisoners and Margaret Thatcher. Ten IRA and INLA prisoners had died by the time the strike ended on 3 October, after families said they would ask for medical intervention, and on 6 October James Prior announced changes that met many of the demands.

• The historians Bew and Gillespie say the strike showed republican prisoners accepting suffering rather than simply inflicting it, and by June 1983 Sinn Féin had 13.4 per cent of the Northern vote against the SDLP's 17.9.
• Violence surrounded it: Sutton lists 114 conflict deaths in 1981, and CAIN's chronology records killings during the strike, such as that of the Catholic civilian Liam Canning by the Ulster Freedom Fighters in August.
• The tactic had a long history in Irish republicanism: Terence MacSwiney, Lord Mayor of Cork, died on hunger strike in Brixton in 1920, on day 74.

Sources: CAIN (Ulster University): Hunger Strike 1981, summary; CAIN (Ulster University): Hunger Strike 1981, chronology; CAIN (Ulster University): Sutton Index of Deaths, by year; Wikipedia: 1981 Irish hunger strike

The Celtic Tiger and the crash (boom c. 1995 to 2007; bank guarantee 2008; EU-IMF deal 28 November 2010; recession to 2014)

The phrase Celtic Tiger first appeared in a 1994 Morgan Stanley report by Kevin Gardiner, comparing Ireland with the East Asian Tigers. At the start of the 1990s Ireland was a relatively poor country, but from about 1995 to 2007 foreign direct investment, a low corporation tax rate, an English-speaking and educated workforce and EU membership fed rapid growth. A property bubble followed. In 2008 the government under Brian Cowen guaranteed the banks, and the banks' liabilities then fell on the state. On 28 November 2010 the EU, the IMF and the Irish state agreed an €85 billion programme. GDP contracted by 14 per cent and unemployment reached 14 per cent by 2011, and the recession lasted until 2014.

• The 2011 general election replaced Fianna Fáil, long the dominant party, with a coalition of Fine Gael and Labour, which continued the austerity policies.
• Of the €85 billion, €17.5 billion came from Ireland's own resources.
• In 2015 the economy posted growth of 6.7 per cent, on Wikipedia's figures.

Sources: RTÉ News: Eurozone agrees €85bn deal for Ireland; RTÉ Archives: Taoiseach Brian Cowen justifies the bank guarantee; Wikipedia: Celtic Tiger; Wikipedia: Post-2008 Irish economic downturn

The Good Friday Agreement (signed 10 April 1998; referendums 22 May 1998)

After ceasefires and years of talks, the British and Irish governments and most Northern Ireland parties reached the Agreement on 10 April 1998, Good Friday. It set up a power-sharing Assembly and Executive in Northern Ireland, North-South and British-Irish institutions, and early release of paramilitary prisoners, and it called for decommissioning of weapons. Northern Ireland's constitutional status would change only with the consent of a majority of its people, and the two sides recorded that their political aspirations were different and equally legitimate. In the referendums of 22 May, 71.12 per cent voted yes in Northern Ireland on a turnout of 80.98 per cent, and 94.4 per cent in the Republic on a turnout of about 56 per cent. The DUP was the only major party in the North to oppose it.

• Violence did not stop at once: a Real IRA car bomb in Omagh on 15 August 1998 killed 29 people and injured about 220, the deadliest single incident of the Troubles in Northern Ireland.
• The Assembly has been suspended several times since, including 9 January 2017 to 11 January 2020 and 3 February 2022 to 3 February 2024.
• The talks were chaired by the United States special envoy George J. Mitchell.

Sources: CAIN (Ulster University): The Agreement, full text; CAIN (Ulster University): Referendum in Northern Ireland and Republic of Ireland, 22 May 1998; Wikipedia: Good Friday Agreement; Wikipedia: Omagh bombing; Wikipedia: Northern Ireland Assembly

Referendums and a changing Ireland (22 May 2015; 25 May 2018; 8 March 2024)

Because the Constitution can be changed only by referendum, voters have decided many of the state's social questions directly. On 22 May 2015 they approved same-sex marriage by 62.07 per cent on a turnout of 60.52 per cent, the first time a state had legalised it by popular vote. On 25 May 2018, 66.4 per cent approved the Thirty-sixth Amendment, removing the constitutional ban on abortion, after a debate sharpened by the death of Savita Halappanavar in 2012. President Michael D. Higgins signed it into law on 18 September 2018. On 8 March 2024 two government proposals on the family and on care were heavily defeated, with 67.69 and 73.93 per cent voting No, on a turnout of 44.36 per cent.

• A 1995 Supreme Court judgment bars the government from using public money to fund one side in a referendum campaign.
• The 2024 proposals would have changed the Constitution's wording on the family and on women's life in the home; opinion polls had suggested a significant lead for Yes.
• Because both 2024 bills failed, the Constitution's wording on women's life within the home remains in place.

Sources: Irish Statute Book: Thirty-fourth Amendment of the Constitution Act, 2015; Wikipedia: Thirty-fourth Amendment of the Constitution of Ireland; Wikipedia: Thirty-sixth Amendment of the Constitution of Ireland; Wikipedia: 2024 Irish constitutional referendums; Wikipedia: Referendum Commission

Brexit, Stormont and leaders since (Windsor Framework 27 February 2023; O'Neill First Minister 3 February 2024; Martin Taoiseach 23 January 2025; Connolly elected 25 October 2025)

After Brexit, the Northern Ireland Protocol kept Northern Ireland, unlike the rest of the UK, in the EU single market for goods, creating a de facto Irish Sea trade border, and the Windsor Framework announced on 27 February 2023 adjusted it. The DUP, citing concerns about the Protocol, refused from February 2022 to allow the Assembly to operate. It returned on 3 February 2024, when Sinn Féin's Michelle O'Neill became the first nationalist First Minister, with Emma Little-Pengelly of the DUP as deputy First Minister, the two posts wielding equal power. In the South, the general election of 29 November 2024, called at the request of Taoiseach Simon Harris, left Fianna Fáil with 48 seats and Fine Gael with 38; they formed a coalition with nine independents, and Micheál Martin was appointed Taoiseach on 23 January 2025.

• Catherine Connolly, an independent from Galway, won the presidential election of 24 October 2025 on the first count with 63.36 per cent of the valid votes on a turnout of 45.8 per cent, and was inaugurated as the tenth President of Ireland on 11 November 2025.
• Heather Humphreys of Fine Gael was the other active candidate; Jim Gavin of Fianna Fáil discontinued his campaign on 5 October but stayed on the ballot.
• Her predecessor, Michael D. Higgins, had reached the limit of two seven-year terms.

Sources: RTÉ News: O'Neill pledges to work with unionists for better future; Wikipedia: Windsor Framework; Wikipedia: 2024 Irish general election; Wikipedia: 2025 Irish presidential election; RTÉ News: 'Gamechanger proved to be a gamechanger' - McDonald (Connolly's election)