On Easter Sunday 2021 I was given the honour of addressing the Irish National Association’s annual gathering at the 1798 monument in Waverley Cemetery. For more than 90 years members, supporters, and friends of the INA have assembled at the monument to commemorate the men and women of 1916. This year marks the 105th anniversary of the Easter Rising, but it is also marks the centenary of the partition of Ireland, that unwanted outcome of the revolution begun in 1916.… Read the rest
Category Archives: History
Expulsion of Hugh Mahon from the Australian Parliament 1920
For Australians, 11 November is a date that resonates in our nation’s history. On that date in 1880 Ned Kelly was hanged, in 1918 it saw the end of the fighting on the Western Front, and in 1975 it was the day on which Governor-General Sir John Kerr dismissed the prime minister, Gough Whitlam. This year marks the centenary of another momentous 11 November, a day unique in the annals of Australian political history.… Read the rest
Irish Elections 2020
On 8 February 2020 the Irish people went to the polls to elect Dáil Éireann, the 160-seat lower house of the Irish parliament. The result was remarkable for two main reasons. Firstly, Sinn Féin, traditionally a fringe-dweller of politics in the Republic of Ireland, had received the highest number of first-preference votes, and with 37 seats was the second largest party.… Read the rest
Aisling 20/20 Vision
The Australian Irish community in Sydney celebrated the St Brigid’s Day Festival in 2020 with readings, music performances and poetry showcasing the historical and cultural contribution of Irish-Australian women in shaping modern Australia.
As part of the celebrations the Aisling Society of Sydney, an Irish-Australian cultural organisation founded in 1955 (http://aislingsociety.org.au) hosted the Aisling 20/20 Vision colloquium at the State Library of New South Wales under the auspices of the Consulate-General of Ireland.… Read the rest
Book Review
The Journal of the Australian Catholic Historical Society (Vol. 40 2019, pp. 173–175) has published a review I wrote on Maureen McKeown’s The Extraordinary Case of Sr Liguori, Leo Press, Downpatrick, 2017. You can read the review here.… Read the rest
Foregrounding Irish Women: ISAANZ Conference
The theme of the 24th ISAANZ Conference in Adelaide in December 2019 was ‘Foregrounding Irish Women’, which provided me with an opportunity to write about three Irish-Australian women whom I had often come across while researching the anti-conscription movement: Agnes Macready, Agnes Murphy and Bella Guerin. What my paper ‘More than Mannix: Irish-Australian women who helped defeat conscription in WW1‘ shows is that each is remarkable, not only because of her contribution to the anti-conscription movement but also because of her talents and the amazing life she lived.… Read the rest
Sectarianism: Did Western Australia avoid the worst of it?
Having written books and articles dealing with sectarianism in early twentieth-century Australia, I have been intrigued by the fact that Western Australia seems to have escaped its worst excesses. A conference in Perth under the auspices of the Archdiocesan Archives Office gave me an opportunity to explore whether that was true and, if so, why.
The conference was held on Holy Thursday 18 April 2019 in collaboration with the Centre for Faith Enrichment to celebrate World Heritage Day.… Read the rest
Researching the Irish in WW1 in Germany
On my recent visit to Ireland to attend the centenary commemorations of the sinking of RMS Leinster (discussed in the post below), I took the opportunity to travel through Germany to research a couple of aspects of the Irish involvement in the First World War. In doing so, I visited the Deutsches U-Boot Museum and archive at Cuxhaven on the North Sea coast to obtain information on the German submarine UB-123 that sank the Leinster and to view the U-Boat memorial at Möltenort near Heikendorf and the naval memorial at Laboe, both on the eastern shore of the Kiel inlet.… Read the rest
RMS Leinster Centenary Commemorations
On 10 October 1918 RMS Leinster, the mailboat from Kingstown (Dún Laoghaire) to Holyhead in Wales, was sunk by a German submarine UB-123 with the loss of 564 lives, the greatest loss of life in a single event in the Irish Sea. At the time the mail boat was carrying 803 persons – 75 crew, 22 postal sorters, 200 civilians and 506 military personnel.… Read the rest
Battle of Saintfield Remembered
On 9 June 1798, during the rebellion in Ireland, a force of about 1000 rebels ambushed and defeated 300 government soldiers under the command of Colonel Granville Stapylton near the town of Saintfield, County Down. To mark the 220th anniversary of the battle the ABC’s Nightlife program devoted its This Week in History segment to the 1798 Rebellion with a discussion between host Sarah Macdonald and myself about the rising and its ‘sequel’ in Australia with the Castle Hill rebellion of 1804.… Read the rest