Download or read book The War of Independence in Kildare written by James Durney and published by Mercier Press Ltd. This book was released on 2013-07-08 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Kildare IRA was heavily outnumbered by crown forces and had neither the manpower nor weaponry to seriously challenge them. With about 300 activists in County Kildare, and only about a third of them ready to take to the field at one time, they faced nearly 6,000 troops and hundreds of police and Black and Tans. However, the county was an important axis for intelligence gathering and communications to the south and west, and it is here Kildare made its greatest impact. The open flat plains of Kildare militated against ambushes, while its proximity to the capital also inhibited the Kildare Volunteers. Nevertheless there was a strong revolutionary element in the county. The book looks at the group of Volunteers who followed the railway track into Dublin to partake in the 1916 Rising and details attacks at Greenhills, Maynooth and Barrowhouse. The author also examines the Rath internment camp in the Curragh, reaction in the county to the Truce and Treaty, and the eventual split in the republican movement in the lead up to civil war. This comprehensive account will be a valuable addition to literature on this formative period in Ireland's history.
Download or read book Kildare written by Seamus Cullen and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first comprehensive single volume history of County Kildare during the Irish Revolution of 1912-23. A noted garrison county, the concentration of British military personnel in Kildare was the highest in Ireland, and the Curragh was the most extensive military camp in the country. A military presence continued after the British withdrawal in 1922 when the network of military barracks passed to the National army. Based on rigorous research of British and Irish archives, this study charts the fortunes of home rule in Kildare during which the county was at the centre of the significant Curragh incident in 1914. It explains the slow development of the Irish Volunteers and the position of the local unionist community vis-a-vis home rule. Attention is drawn to the key role played by British army units from Kildare in suppressing the 1916 Rising, as well as the post-Rising development of Sinn Fein and concomitant decline of the Irish Parliamentary Party. This study challenges the depiction of Kildare as a 'quiet county' during the War of Independence by highlighting the pivotal role it played in the intelligence war and the county's strategic communications importance for both Crown forces and republicans. During the Civil War period Kildare was to the forefront of national events with the evacuation of the British army, which had a major negative impact on the local economy, and the utilization of military barracks as prisons by the Irish government. Politically, the Irish Revolution in Kildare did not see an ultimate triumph for republicanism in any form. While the emergence of Labour was notable during the Irish Revolution, nevertheless after 1923 Kildare returned to its Redmondite roots, though under a pro-Treaty label.
Download or read book Interned written by James Durney and published by Mercier Press Ltd. This book was released on 2019-07-19 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the War of Independence, faced with an armed insurrection it couldn't stop, the British government introduced increasingly harsh penalties for suspected republicans, including internment without trial. This led to the incarceration of thousands of men in camps around the country, including the Rath and Hare Park Camps at the Curragh in County Kildare. Interned is the first book to tell the story of the men who were held in the Curragh internment camps, which housed republicans from all over Ireland. Faced with harsh conditions, unforgiving guards and inadequate and often inedible food, the prisoners maintained their defiance of the British regime and took whatever chances they could to defy their gaolers, including a number of escapes. The most audacious of these was in September 1921, during the Truce period, when sixty men escaped through a tunnel. This unique book is the first to investigate the Curragh Internment Camps, which housed thousands of republicans from all over Ireland. It contains a list of names and addresses of some 1,500 internees, which will be fascinating to their descendants and those interested in local history, as well as an exploration and details of the 1921 escape, which was one of the largest and most successful IRA escape in history.
Download or read book The Civil War in Kildare written by James Durney and published by . This book was released on 2011-06 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Civil War left a more violent mark on Kildare than the War of Independence had. As a garrison county with military barracks situated on the main Cork and Limerick roads in Naas, Newbridge, the Curragh and Kildare town, it had a low level of republican military activity. By the Truce of 1921, however, Kildare's two IRA battalions had evolved into quite efficient military units. Forty-three people in or from Co. Kildare died during 1922-3, while only fifteen people died in the 1916-21 period as a result of hostilities. Kildare had one of the highest numbers of IRA volunteers executed during the war - eight - and the largest single execution - in December 1922 when seven men from the Rathbride column were executed at the Curragh. Fifteen National Army soldiers were killed in ambushes in the county, yet only three RIC men died. Two internment camps - Tintown and Newbridge - housed nearly 3,000 prisoners in 1922-3, while the Rath Camp held 1,200. The internment camps were the scene of mass hunger strikes and mass jail-breaks and the escape from Newbridge is the biggest in republican prison folklore, with 112 prisoners getting away. Includes the full untold story of the Rathbride column when 7 out of 10 arrested were executed in 1922 while other prisoners in Kerry caught in the same circumstances were reprieved.
Download or read book Kilkenny written by Eoin Swithin Walsh and published by Merrion Press. This book was released on 2018-08-13 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Veteran IRA leader Ernie O’Malley criticised County Kilkenny as being ‘slack’ during the War of Independence, but this fascinating new study of the period, by historian Eoin Swithin Walsh, challenges that view and reveals that Kilkenny was truly at the forefront of the struggle for Irish freedom. No Kilkenny citizen escaped the revolutionary era untouched, especially during the turmoil that followed the Easter Rising of 1916, the upheaval of the War of Independence and the tumultuous Civil War. Key personalities, revolutionary organisations and dramatic events in Kilkenny illuminate the country-wide struggle. Not to be forgotten, the lives of the ‘ordinary’ men and women of the county are explored, emphasising a life beyond politics and conflict. The listing of Kilkenny fatalities during the War of Independence is examined and, for the first time, combatants and civilians who died during the Truce and the Civil War are recorded, revealing an even more deadly conflict than previously believed. Presenting a complete history of the county in the opening decades of the twentieth century – including the use of previously unseen archival material – Kilkenny: In Times of Revolution, 1900–1923 is an indispensable contribution to the literature on the turbulent birth of the Irish nation.
Download or read book The Treaty written by Gretchen Friemann and published by Merrion Press. This book was released on 2021-11-10 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Florence and Josephine O Donoghue s War of Independence written by Florence O'Donoghue and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Historian and IRA leader Florence O'Donoghue describes his experiences as head of intelligence in Cork city during the Irish War of Independence (1919-1921). He candidly assesses the leaders of this period, including Tomas MacCurtain, Sean O'Hegarty, Terence MacSwiney and Michael Collins and critically examines the evolution of the Irish Volunteer citizen-soldiers. He also details his wife Josephine's role as the top IRA spy in Cork's British Army headquarters, working for the rebels in exchange for the return of her eldest son, lost in a bitter custody battle with her in-laws. After O'Donoghue kidnapped the child and reunited him with his mother, the two collaborators eventually fell in love and were secretly married in the spring of 1921. Forty years later, the couple presented their story to their children in order to explain the family secret that had haunted their domestic lives. The first part of the book is O'Donoghue's and his wife's account of their activities in the Anglo-Irish War, written in 1961; the second part is composed of 47 letters in diary form, written by O'Donoghue to his wife while he was 'on the run' during the last ten weeks of the Anglo-Irish War, from May to July 1921. They provide a rare snapshot of the daily life of fugitive IRA guerrillas.
Download or read book County Louth and the Irish Revolution written by Donal Hall and published by Irish Academic Press. This book was released on 2017-04-10 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: County Louth and the Irish Revolution, 1912–1923 explores the local activism of the IRA and how revolution was experienced by rural and urban labourers, RIC men, republican women, cultural activists, and Big House families. Events were increasingly shaped for all these groups by the developing reality of partition, transforming a marginal county into a borderland and creating a zone of new violence and banditry. The expert contributors to the first-ever local history of the county during this period bring to light a wealth of fascinating stories that will appeal to the general public and historians alike. Critically, these stories reveal new findings about the early military skirmishes in County Louth by republican figures such as Seán MacEntee and Frank Aiken; the controversial sectarian massacre at Altnaveigh; and how the Civil War made a fiery battlefield of Dundalk and Drogheda. County Louth and the Irish Revolution, 1912–1923 documents the complexity of the local experience as the national revolution merged with long-established antagonisms and traditions, the effects of which have shaped the county ever since.
Download or read book Emmet Dalton written by Sean Boyne and published by Merrion Press. This book was released on 2014-11-01 with total page 507 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first-ever biography of Emmet Dalton, an American-born Dubliner, Home Ruler and later Republican, whose extraordinary military career as a British officer, IRA leader and General in the Free State army brought him from Flanders to Beal na Bláth. A decorated hero of the Battle of the Somme, he returned from the war with the rank of Captain and transferred his military expertise to the now rampant IRA, serving as Director of Training, and greatly impressing Michael Collins with his extraordinary daring and nerve. Soon befriending Collins and becoming his close confidante, he accompanied him to the Treaty talks in London in 1921, and in the Civil War that followed Dalton oversaw the bombardment of the Four Courts, personally manning an 18-pounder artillery gun. He then masterminded and led the audacious seaborne landings and successful recapture of Cork City and Munster Republic from Anti-Treaty forces, but was ultimately traumatised when Collins died in his arms at Beal na Bláith. In his expansive biography, Sean Boyne vividly portrays Dalton's experiences and the vital role he played in the politics and wars that created the independent Irish state. Dalton was the first Senate Clerk and he became a pioneer of the Irish film world, founding Ardmore film studios and establishing the Irish Film industry. An attractive and high-achieving figure in Irish life in war and peace, Dalton's heroism allowed him to live his many lives to the full, and this compelling biography does justice to a figure who will captivate all those interested in modern Irish history and the birth of the state.
Download or read book Ballymacandy written by Owen O'Shea and published by Merrion Press. This book was released on 2021-05-05 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On 1 June 1921, at the height of Ireland’s War of Independence, a cycling patrol of members of the RIC was ambushed by members of the IRA at Ballymacandy, between Milltown and Castlemaine in County Kerry. After an hour of fighting, four police officers lay dead and another died a day later, among them a father of nine children. The group of IRA assailants included some of the most high-profile figures in Ireland’s ‘Tan War’, men like Dan Keating, Jack Flynn, Dan Mulvihill, Billy Myles and Johnny Connor, but also lesser-known figures, including members of the local Cumann na mBan. Their actions were condemned from the pulpit and an official enquiry tried to discredit the local doctor who tended to the dying men. This book comes on the centenary of an ambush that continues to resonate in its community and in a county in which the battle with Crown forces was more virulent and violent than most. Drawing on newly published witness statements and previously unpublished official records, Ballymacandy details what happened the five men who died and those who led the attack against them and sets the incident against the backdrop of the wider revolutionary struggle in the county.
Download or read book War and Revolution in the West of Ireland written by Conor McNamara and published by Irish Academic Press. This book was released on 2018-03-12 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The period 1913–22 witnessed extraordinary upheaval in Irish society. The Easter Rising of 1916 facilitated the emergence of new revolutionary forces and the eruption of guerrilla warfare. In Galway and elsewhere in the west, the new realities wrought by World War One saw the emergence of a younger generation of impatient revolutionaries. In 1916, Liam Mellows led his Irish Volunteers in a Rising in east Galway and up to 650 rebels took up defensive positions at Moyode Castle. From the western shores of Connemara to market towns such as Athenry, Tuam and Galway, local communities were subject to unprecedented use of terror by the Crown Forces. Meanwhile, conflict over land, an enduring grievance of the poor, threatened to overwhelm parts of Galway with sustained land seizures and cattle drives by the rural population. War and Revolution in the West of Ireland: Galway, 1913–1922 provides fascinating insights into the revolutionary activities of the ordinary men and women who participated in the struggle for independence. In this compelling new account, Galway historian Conor McNamara unravels the complex web of identity and allegiance that characterised the west of Ireland, exploring the enduring legacy of a remarkable and contested era.
Download or read book Kildare Barracks written by Mark McLoughlin and published by Merrion Press. This book was released on 2014 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the military life and experiences of the gunners stationed in Ireland's Kildare Barracks over the course of almost 100 years while it was under both British and Irish military commands. Built in 1901 to train British artillery brigades for service in the Boer War, and closed in 1998, the barracks provides an exceptional spotlight for the local history of County Kildare and the military history of 20th-century Ireland. Through numerous personal histories, the book reflects upon the importance of the barracks in shaping the activity and development of the county. These tales - both informative and touching - provide a means of examining landmarks in Irish and international 20th-century history, including the Curragh Mutiny, World War I, the Irish War of Independence, the Irish Civil War and the Emergency - while telling the story of a national military institution and the personnel who passed through. The fascinating personal histories offer poignant reflections on those who served at the barracks.
Download or read book A Military History of Ireland written by Thomas Bartlett and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1997-10-09 with total page 596 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a major, collaborative study of organised military activity and its broad impact on Ireland over the last thousand years or so, from the middle of the first millennium AD to modern times. It integrates the best recent scholarship in military history into its social and political context to provide a comprehensive treatment of the Irish military experience. The eighteen chronologically-organised chapters are written by leading scholars each of whom is an authority on the period in question. Drawing the whole work together is a wide-ranging introductory essay on the 'Irish military tradition' which explores the relationship of Irish society and politics with militarism and military affairs. The text is illustrated throughout by over 120 pictures and maps.
Download or read book Domhnall Ua Buachalla written by Adhamhnan O' Suilleabhain and published by Merrion Press. This book was released on 2015 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the overdue biography of Domhnall Ua Buachalla - a cultural nationalist, Gaelic Leaguer, and friend of Padraig Pearse - who became an Irish Volunteer leader in North Kildare, arming the men of Maynooth and leading them on foot to the General Post Office on Easter Monday, 1916, where they took their orders from James Connolly and Patrick Pearse. Following internment in Frongoch jail for eight months, Ua Buachalla returned to a resounding success in the 1918 General Election and gained a seat in the First Dail for North Kildare, which he held until 1932. Following his involvement in the War of Independence, he was later arrested near Kilcock for his anti-Treaty activities during the Civil War and jailed in Dundalk, but escaped when Frank Aiken dynamited the jail and freed all the prisoners. In 1932, after Eamon de Valera dismissed James McNeill, it was Domhnall Ua Buachalla he turned to as the one man he trusted as his new Governor-General, and to implement his plan to see the Oath of Allegiance to the British Crown abolished. A controversial choice and an anathema to Domhnall ua Buachalla's political beliefs, he nonetheless accepted this crucial role. Ua Buachalla then retired from public life, although years later he accepted de Valera's invitation to be a member of the Council of State. Domhnall Ua Buachalla died in 1963, at the age of 97; a man of great courage and unquenchable resolve. This hitherto neglected figure lived his life for his country and his untold story is now brought center stage in a remarkable biography and history of modern Irish politics. It is a fascinating history of one man's courage and the journey from rebel to high office in turbulent times. [Subject: Biography, Irish Studies, Political History]
Download or read book Kilmichael written by Eve Morrison and published by Merrion Press. This book was released on 2022-04-26 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Kilmichael Ambush of 28 November 1920 was and remains one of the most famous, successful – and uniquely controversial – IRA attacks of the Irish War of Independence. This book is the first comprehensive account of both the ambush and the intense debates that followed. It explores the events, memory and historiography of the ambush, from 1920 to the present day, within a wider framework of interwar European events, global ‘memory wars’ and current scholarship relating to Irish, British, oral and military history. Kilmichael: The Life and Afterlife of an Ambush features extensive archival research, including the late Peter Hart’s papers, as well as many other new sources from British and Irish archives, and previously unavailable oral history interviews with Kilmichael veterans. There has always been more than one version of Kilmichael. Tom Barry’s account certainly became the dominant one after the publication of Guerilla Days in Ireland in 1949, but it was always shadowed and contested by others, and in this book, Eve Morrison meticulously reconstructs both ‘British’ and ‘Irish’ perspectives on this momentous and much-debated attack.
Download or read book The Northern IRA and the Early Years of Partition 1920 1922 written by Robert John Lynch and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The years 1920-22 constituted a period of unprecedented conflict and political change in Ireland. It began with the onset of the most brutal phase of the War of Independence and culminated in the effective military defeat of the Republican IRA in the Civil War. Occurring alongside these dramatic changes in the south and west of Ireland was a far more fundamental conflict in the north-east, a period of brutal sectarian violence which marked the early years of partition and the establishment of Northern Ireland. Almost uniquely the IRA in the six counties were involved in every one of these conflicts and yet, it can be argued, was on the fringe of all of them. The period 1920-22 saw the evolution of the organisation from peripheral curiosity during the War of independence to an idealistic symbol for those wishing to resolve the fundamental divisions within the Sinn Fein movement which developed in the first six months of 1922. The story of the Northern IRA's collapse in the autumn of that year demonstrated dramatically the true nature of the organisation and how it was their relationship to the various protagonists in these conflicts, rather than their unceasing but fruitless war against partition, that defined its contribution to the Irish revolution.
Download or read book The Civil War in Dublin written by John Dorney and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While the Irish Civil War first erupted in Dublin, playing out through the seizure and eventual recapture of the Four Courts, it quickly swept over the entire country. In The Civil War in Dublin, John Dorney extends his study of Dublin beyond the Four Courts surrender, delivering shocking revelations of calculated violence and splits within the pro-Treaty armed forces. Dorney's exacting research, using primary sources and newly available eyewitness testimonies from both sides of the conflict, provides insight into how the entire city of Dublin operated under conditions of disorder and bloodshed: how civilians and guerrilla fighters controlled the streets, how female insurgents operated alongside their male counterparts, how the patterns of IRA violence and National Army counter-insurgency alternated, and-for the first time-how the pro-Treaty 'Murder Gang' emerged from Michael Collins' IRA Intelligence Department, 'the Squad', with devastating and ruthless effect. The Civil War in Dublin brings the chaos of life in the city of Dublin to life through meticulous detail, and it reveals unsettling truths about the extreme actions taken by a burgeoning Irish Free State and its Anti-Treaty opponents. [Subject: Irish Studies, History, Military History, Dublin]
