By Tim Flynn
As Orangemen, residents, politicians, and police once again face each other at Drumcree, it is worth recalling a largely forgotten scene from June 1914.
Ireland then stood on the brink of civil war. The Ulster Volunteer Force and the…
The History of The Irish...Worldwide
All Blog Posts (3,835)
The Banjo, the Road, and the Stadium Gates: The Nomadic Legend of Pecker Dunne
If you happened to be standing outside Croke Park in Dublin or Semple Stadium in Thurles on a big match day in the 1960s or 70s, you would have heard him long before you saw him. Through the chatter and roar of tens of thousands of hurling and football fans, a unique sound cut through the air: the driving, rhythmic thrum of a five-string banjo…
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Added by T.S.Flynn on October 6, 2026 at 10:30pm — No Comments
The Real Galtee Mountain Boy? Patrick Davern, John Sarsfield Casey and the Making of an Irish Ballad
Few songs are as deeply woven into Ireland's musical and historical imagination as The Galtee Mountain Boy. Written by Patsy O'Halloran and later carried around the world by Christy Moore, the ballad tells the story of a young republican volunteer swept up in the turbulence of revolution, guerrilla war and civil conflict. Moving from Cork…
ContinueAdded by T.S.Flynn on October 6, 2026 at 10:08pm — No Comments
The Twin Mirrors: How Nationalists and Unionists Reimagined the Ireland They Claimed to Inherit
The Twin Mirrors explores how Irish nationalism and Ulster unionism constructed parallel historical narratives between 1880 and 1914. By examining invented traditions, selective memory, political myth-making and the rival legacies of 1916, it argues that both traditions were engaged in the same nation-building project: creating a…
Added by T.S.Flynn on October 6, 2026 at 8:00pm — No Comments
From Cotton Mills to Land League How Michael Davitt Brought Lancashire Trade Unionism to Ireland
The Irish Land War is usually remembered as a struggle between landlords and tenants, led by Charles Stewart Parnell and fought in the fields and villages of rural Ireland. Yet its methods tell a different story. Michael Davitt, the son of evicted Mayo tenants who came of age in the cotton mills of Lancashire, brought the techniques of…
ContinueAdded by T.S.Flynn on October 6, 2026 at 6:07pm — No Comments
From the Greasy Till to the Senate Bench: How Yeats Made His Peace with Politics
By T.S. Flynn
W.B. Yeats spent much of his life mistrusting constitutional nationalism and the men who practised it. Yet the poet who mocked shopkeepers, doubted parliamentarians and wrestled with the legacy of 1916 ultimately found himself helping to build the institutions of the Irish Free State.
For a man who spent much…
ContinueAdded by T.S.Flynn on October 6, 2026 at 3:38pm — No Comments
The Khaki Volunteers: Ireland's Forgotten Nationalists of the Great War
By T.S. Flynn
Editorial Note
The author wishes to acknowledge the assistance of Dr Stephen Sandford, author of Neither Unionist nor Nationalist: The 10th (Irish) Division in the Great War, 1914–1918. Following comments on an earlier draft, Dr Sandford highlighted the need to distinguish more clearly between the…
Added by T.S.Flynn on October 6, 2026 at 1:30pm — No Comments
What Would a Generous United Ireland Look Like?
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…
ContinueAdded by T.S.Flynn on October 5, 2026 at 3:56pm — No Comments
The Memory of the Displaced: The Stories Behind Three Iconic Irish Ballads
By T.S. Flynn
If you walk off the warm pavement of George Street on a Sunday afternoon and step through the doors of Irish Murphy's in the Brisbane CBD, the climate changes instantly. Outside, the city has slowed to a weekend crawl—lazy sunlight hitting the sandstones of the surrounding heritage…
Added by T.S.Flynn on October 4, 2026 at 11:30pm — No Comments
The Salute of Equals: How Redmond and Craig Might Solve the Modern Crisis
Added by T.S.Flynn on October 4, 2026 at 1:39pm — No Comments
The Common Ground of the Centre: Why the Future of Power-Sharing in the North Depends on a ‘Union of People’
By T.S. Flynn
There is an urgent need in modern political commentary to strip away the emotional, tribal battlefield of…
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Added by T.S.Flynn on October 4, 2026 at 1:30pm — No Comments
The Ink and the Archive: Contrasting Say Nothing the Series with Patrick Radden Keefe's Journalism
By T.S. Flynn for The Wild Geese History Site
Image Caption: History leaves behind documents, testimonies, and archives. Drama restores voices, faces, and moments. Say Nothing succeeds because it understands the value of both.
When a masterpiece of narrative…
ContinueAdded by T.S.Flynn on October 3, 2026 at 11:30pm — No Comments
The Ceasefire Generation: Cultural Rebellion and Language Reclamation in Kneecap
To look at modern Irish art through a political lens is to witness a profound generational shift in how republicanism and anti-establishment rebellion are expressed. For decades, creative expression responding to the conflict in Northern Ireland was heavy with the solemnity of trauma,…
Added by T.S.Flynn on October 3, 2026 at 10:46pm — No Comments
THE TRI-COLOUR ON THE MCG: CONOR MCKENNA AND THE FLIGHT OF THE GANDER
By T.S. Flynn
The modern-day Wild Geese do not carry muskets into the service of foreign kings, but they carry a native, kinetic fury. To watch County Tyrone’s Conor McKenna stand triumphant on the turf of the Melbourne Cricket Ground is to witness a rare historical synthesis. Draped proudly in the Irish flag, the…
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Added by T.S.Flynn on October 3, 2026 at 7:14pm — No Comments
The Rise of the "Potato Western": How Black ’47 and Modern Cinema Transformed Irish Historical Trauma
For decades, the historical trauma of 1840s Ireland—the Great Famine—was defined by a profound, almost reverent silence in narrative cinema. The sheer scale of the devastation seemed to resist the confines of a feature-length film, leaving the era largely to academic texts and somber documentaries. That silence was…
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Added by T.S.Flynn on October 3, 2026 at 6:38pm — No Comments
Shattering the Sunny Dream: The Dark Reality of the Irish Diaspora in Australian Fiction and Cinema
Shattering the Sunny Dream: The Dark Reality of the Irish Diaspora in Australian Fiction and Cinema
For generations, the narrative of the Irish diaspora in Australia has been bathed in a warm, southern sun. It is a story often told through the lens of triumphant adaptation: the resilient immigrants who shook off British oppression,…
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Added by T.S.Flynn on October 3, 2026 at 5:30pm — No Comments
Songs of the Exiled: Rebel Music, Cultural Authenticity, and the Irish-Australian Diaspora
By Tim (TS) Flynn
To step inside an Irish pub anywhere in the world is to cross a threshold into a unique, self-contained cultural ecosystem. For the global Irish diaspora, these spaces have long served as more than just places of recreation; they are secular sanctuaries, repositories of memory, and diplomatic…
Added by T.S.Flynn on October 3, 2026 at 3:30pm — No Comments
This Week in the History of the Irish: October 4 - October 10
DOMHNAIGH -- On October 4, 1693, units of the Irish Brigade of France fought in Italy at the battle of Marsaglia. Prince Eugene of Savoy commanded the allies of William of…
Added by The Wild Geese on October 3, 2026 at 1:14pm — No Comments
From Theo to Tim: Tearing Down the Historical Scaffolding of a 2016 Debut
When my inaugural novel emerged in March 2016, it did not bear my rightful name upon the spine. Instead, it surfaced under the nom de plume of Theo Flynn, bearing the title Javelin Man: Ticket of Leave.
To speak with the unreserved candour that our community at The Wild Geese…
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Added by T.S.Flynn on October 2, 2026 at 2:25pm — No Comments
The Architecture of Engagement: Why Brendan Behan’s Borstal Boy Expresses the Pulse of Irish Literature
By Tim Flynn
My recent article, Ulysses and the Burden of Greatness, grew out of reflections on arguments I first weighed during my undergraduate days forty years ago. The core tension has only clarified: James Joyce’s Ulysses, while undeniably a work of immense technical innovation, remains…
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Added by T.S.Flynn on October 2, 2026 at 12:30pm — No Comments
Ulysses and the Burden of Greatness: Reconsidering Joyce's Monument
For more than a century, James Joyce's Ulysses has occupied a near-sacred place in the literary canon. Yet its immense reputation raises an important question: has Joyce's masterpiece expanded the possibilities of fiction, or has its towering influence encouraged critics to prize complexity over connection, innovation over…
ContinueAdded by T.S.Flynn on October 2, 2026 at 12:30am — No Comments
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- From Cotton Mills to Land League How Michael Davitt Brought Lancashire Trade Unionism to Ireland
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