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Irish History
Clotworthy Skeffington, Eccentric Earl
Clotworthy Skeffington the Fifth, heir to the Earldom of Massereene, was born on the 28th January 1742 in County Antrim. His impressive name came from John Clotworthy, a son of the High Sheriff of Antrim who backed the right horse during…
Black immigration |The Lives and Travels of Thomas Awishee and John Jea
Thomas Awishee/ Osiat was born in the late seventeenth century, most likely in the Cape Coast, in what is present day Ghana. According to William Smith, surveyor for the Royal African Company in 1726, he was brought to Ireland as a child,…
Out of the Armchairs, Into the Seas
Next time you visit that fine institution that never succumbed to the vagaries of fashion: the Natural History Museum on Dublin’s Merrion Square take a look at the display cabinets that contain the marine exhibits.
Loiter around these…
Father John Creagh, Irish Anti-Semite
John Creagh was born in Limerick City in Ireland in 1870. Limerick was a city of strong cultural divisions - it had traditionally been a fortified English city used to control the surrounding area until the relentless tide of…
James Crouch, aka Theodore Keatinge, False Priest
James Crouch, who would go by half a dozen other names before he died, was probably born in London sometime in the 1830s. His mother died when he was young, around 1845, and his father abandoned him. He may have spent some time with his…
Ireland’s Immigration History | The Many Lives of Sake Dean Mahomet
In 1784, at the age of twenty-five, a man named Sake Dean Mahomet sailed into Cork harbour with his patron, Godfrey Evans Baker. He left behind his life in India, (including fifteen years of service in the East India Company), and…
Ireland’s Immigration History| ‘The Black Siren’ of the 18th Century
Crow Street Theatre, Dublin, in March 1750. The playbill tells of a benefit concert organized "at the particular desire of persons of quality". The whole house is to be illuminated with wax lights, and the performance followed by a grand…
Ireland and Multiculturalism |Our First People of Colour
Twenty-five years ago, Ireland appeared to be a homogeneous place, with white freckled people everywhere. But things have evolved, and this year has seen an increase in media attention on Ireland and multiculturalism. In particular, there's…
Easter 1916 | Writers and fighters
History is set in stone, but people always love to imagine the road not taken. One of the great what-ifs of Irish history is what would have happened if the 1916 leaders hadn’t been executed. A less often posed question is what would the…
Easter 1916 | How Dublin’s Citizens Coped with Hunger During the Rising
Glasnevin Cemetery has, controversially, unveiled a wall of remembrance which lists the names of all those known to have died during the 1916 Rising. Critics claimed it was wrong to include the dead from both sides of the conflict.
But…