Irish Volunteer Paddy "Bug" Callaghan and his two comrades stared up the road to the east as the cool, crisp air of February 2, 1921, caused their breath to fog the air around them. The three members of the North Longford Battalion of the Irish Volunteers were tasked with the most critical job of…

Seán Connolly and Leo Carter pushed a table into the corner of the upstairs bedroom of the Lloyd family in Ballymahon, Co. Longford. Carter, who stood 6’ 3”, jumped on the table and began to hack at the roof with an ax. It was just past midnight in the early morning hours of August 20,…

Seán Culhane stood across the street from the Cork & County Club Hotel, an Anglo-Irish social club in Cork City. Culhane, the Intelligence Officer, Cork 1 Brigade of the Irish Volunteers, was watching the door, waiting for a sign from his informer, waiter Ned “Bally” Fitzgerald. It was a…

Softly, gently, "Comrade", he cried

"No longer on earth can I stay

I will never more roam through my own native home

Tipperary so far away"…

Tuesday, May 3, 1921 was a beautiful, sunny day in the nearly treeless Partry Mountains above the town of Tourmakeady, County Mayo, but Tom Maguire was in no condition to enjoy the weather. Maguire, the C/O of the South Mayo Flying Column, from Cross, was lying on his back, bleeding from a…

MÁIRT -- On May 15, 1847, The Syria, the first ship to arrive during what Quebecois would call the 'Summer of Sorrow,' landed at the Canadian quarantine station in the St. Lawrence River, just north of Quebec. The French had called that island 'Grosse Ile,' but since 1847 many have called it…

They sought to wipe the column out,

From east to west, from north to south,

“Till at Crossbarry’s bloody rout

They woke from their day dreaming

Though ten to one they were that day

Our boys were victors in the fray,

And over the hills we marched…

I found this website a while back and was able to note the location of several interesting monuments and find them while I was in Ireland in June. This is by no means all the war memorials in Ireland, far from it, but it's an attempt to catalog them.

The site…

What have you got in your hand?

A green bough.

Where did it first grow?

In America.

Where did it bud?

In France.

Where are you going to plant…

Excellent history site website here from RTÉ & Boston College. From their "about" page:

The Century Ireland project is an online historical newspaper that tells the story of the events of Irish life a century ago.

(left: John Redmond, the leader of the Irish Parliamentary…