As the brilliant rays of the morning sun began to flash off the whitewashed adobe wall in Santiago, Cuba, 30-year-old William Albert Charles Ryan reflected that it would be yet another beautiful day on the tropical island he had come to love. He could hear the sweet songs of a few…

The night of November 1, 1920, All Souls Night, was extremely cold in the west of County Waterford. The members of the West Waterford Volunteers flying column huddled along the road at Piltown Cross were not only shivering because of the temperature. Most of them were also trembling slightly as…

Ten IRA volunteers, fighting for their fledgling nation, met their fate more than 80 years ago at the end of a British noose, and until this month lay buried in Mountjoy Prison. Kieron Punch relates each of their stories, starting with 18-year-old Kevin Barry.

In…

There’s many a lonely hearth-stone tonight in wide Mayo,

There’s many a gallant heart content again can never know

But darkest woe and grief for him the saintly true and tried,

Who on the Saxon scaffold that day for freedom died.

         --  From “The Priest of Addergool,” by William Rooney (Founder of…

DOMHNAIGH-- On the morning of Nov. 1, 1920, two masses were celebrated at an altar that 18-year-old IRA member Kevin Barry had constructed in his jail cell in Mountjoy Jail in Dublin. Barry was then led out of his cell by British soldiers and hanged.…

By T.S. Flynn

The debate about Irish unity is too often conducted as if constitutional change were simply an exercise in bookkeeping. We obsess over demographics, opinion polls, electoral trends, and the precise legal threshold of a border poll. We ask whether reunification is mathematically likely, when it might happen, and what…