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…

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…

By T.S. Flynn

Shattering the Sunny Dream: The Dark Reality of the Irish Diaspora in Australian Fiction and Cinema

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…

Empire, Convicts and First Encounters in Australia's North

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My interest in Fort Dundas began not in an archive but on the Tiwi Islands themselves.

Having worked on the islands, I came to appreciate their distinct character. Although only a short distance from the Northern Territory mainland, the Tiwi Islands…

Irish history is filled with soldiers, revolutionaries, politicians and adventurers. Occasionally, however, a figure emerges who refuses to fit neatly into any single category. Arthur Lynch was one such man. Engineer, scientist, physician, journalist, soldier, author and Member of Parliament, he lived a life of such…