Features
In search of a modern Ireland – the Society of Dublin Painters
On 5 August 1920, a new collective of Irish artists opened their first exhibition at 7 St. Stephen’s Green. The Society of Dublin Painters was comprised of Ireland’s most prominent artists, and this group sought to bring modernism to Ireland, hosting exhibitions until the 1950s. The society’s...
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William Orpen – Ireland’s painter of war and peace
On the 28 June 1919, the peace treaty was signed in the opulent Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles. After six months of negotiations and following four long years of war, it was a settlement that, ultimately, satisfied no one – and its reverberations would be felt across the century...
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Flying into history – Ireland & the story of the first Transatlantic Flight
On 17 December 1903 Orville Wright piloted the world’s first powered airplane in a successful flight. Above a windswept North Carolina beach, Wright flew the plane at a height of 20 feet and for a mere 12 seconds. In all the plane covered a distance of 120 feet in the air. From such...
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De Valera in America
On 1 June 1919, Éamon de Valera, leader of Sinn Féin and President of Dáil Éireann, left his home in Greystones on the first part of an epic journey that would take him back to the country of his birth: the United States. It might seem...
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FEATURE - The Amritsar Massacre, 13 April 1919
In February 1920 in New York, Éamon de Valera was a key note speaker at a ‘Friends of Freedom for India’ gathering in the Central Opera House, which, according to reports, was jammed to the rafters. His talk was titled ‘Ireland and India’, and in it...
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Daylight Saving - the troubled history of Irish time
In March 2019, MEPs voted overwhelmingly to do away with the practice of changing clocks twice a year – by 2021 Daylight Saving time in Ireland will be no more. The vote followed on from research conducted by the European Commission (EC) that included a public consultation. 4.6 million people responded – the...
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LONGREAD: The Democratic Programme and Labour, 1919
It was an unusual time and place for a controversy about the origins of the State to develop: in the middle of the ‘Emergency’, the Second World War, in the Seanad, on a sleepy Thursday afternoon and on the Second Stage of an Appropriations Bill. Indeed, when the...
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Prelude to partition or a republic? The 1918 election in Ireland
Election day was fixed for 14 December 1918, but it took two weeks and a Christmas interval for the votes cast to be actually counted. When they were, on 28 December, the results were at once dramatic and entirely predictable. The near obliteration of the Irish Parliamentary Party and its replacement by Sinn...
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The last to die - Irishmen and the final day of the First World War
The years of World War One, which began in the late summer of 1914, resulted in a tide of men leaving Ireland to fight in various theatres of war. It is estimated that some 210,000 Irishmen joined the war, and that over 35,000 died. The men came from both the catholic and protestant...
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The Prolonged War: Violence & the Reshaping of Europe 1918-1923
Almost exactly 100 years ago, the Great War ended with the defeat of the Central Powers. Their military collapse went hand-in-hand with the disappearance from the map of three vast and centuries-old land empires: the Ottoman, Habsburg and Romanov empires. A fourth, the Hohenzollern Empire, which had become a major land...
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November, 1918: Ireland & the End of the First World War
‘The greatest day in all history’ read the title text on the cinema newsreel and the pictures that followed gave viewers no reason to doubt the veracity of that heady claim. The Pathé footage, silent and flickering, relayed joyous scenes from the streets of Paris, London and...
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Post-war Europe – Nations, States & Collapsing Empires
The First World War brought about the collapse of four multinational empires – the Russian empire in 1917, and then the Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, and German empires in 1918. They collapsed in defeat and revolution. For centuries, these empires had represented the dominant form of political organisation in central and eastern Europe and...
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Exhibiting the First World War
In October 1918, London’s Trafalgar Square was transformed into a facsimile of a battlefield in France. Hoardings painted to look like the scenery of the front surrounded a large area in which trenches were constructed alongside the apparent ruins of a French village. Lamp posts were altered to look...
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Treating the traumatised: Shell-shocked veterans in the Irish Free State
Given the momentous changes that occurred in Irish politics and society during the First World War, it’s easy to overlook the extraordinary ‘Home Front’ efforts across the island between 1914 and 1918, in support of the British army and war effort. Munitions were manufactured in Dublin, Cork, Waterford...
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Remembering the RMS Leinster: the greatest ever loss of life in the Irish Sea
During the second half of the 19th century and the first 18 years of the 20th, the City of Dublin Steam Packet Company (CDSPCo) played an important role in the economic and social history of Kingstown (now Dún Laoghaire) and Holyhead. Twice daily the company’s steamers...
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Commemorating the sinking of the RMS Leinster, 1918-2018
The sinking of the RMS Leinster resulted in the greatest ever loss of life in the Irish Sea and the highest ever death toll on an Irish owned ship. Yet, while mention of the Lusitania sinking will bring a nod of recognition from an Irish listener, reference to the RMS...
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Gaelic Sunday – The GAA v the British Empire
Across the entire span of the decade of centenaries we are in the midst of marking, it is the one event to which Ireland’s largest sporting organisation can lay a legitimate and singular claim. Unlike, say, the 1916 Rising or the subsequent war of independence in which they had...
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The radicalisation of Irish politics & the wartime experiences of front line troops, 1916-1918
During the First World War, two political upheavals significantly worsened the wartime experiences of front line Irish troops: the 1916 Easter Rising and the 1917-1918 anti-conscription crisis. Whereas the short-lived insurrection undeniably impacted on the morale of front line units and added a considerable amount of concerns to their wartime experiences,...
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ANALYSIS: Lá na mBan, 9 June 1918
On 29 June 1918 the Freemans Journal, under the heading ‘Women and the Menace’, published reports of mass meetings of women, which had occurred throughout Ireland from 9 June. The ‘menace’ referred to was conscription, and Irishwomen had come together on 9 June and in subsequent days, in their tens...
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‘HAVE YOU IN IRELAND ALL GONE MAD’ - the 1918 general strike against conscription
An abridged version of this article appeared in Saothar 43, Journal of the Irish Labour History Society, April 2018 There are probably few major events in twentieth century Irish history which have received less attention than the general strike against conscription, although it was the most successful demonstration of workers political power...
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How Ireland was lost in the 1918 conscription crisis
The historian of revolutions Charles Tilly has pointed out that, in general, revolutionary movements find it easier to mobilise popular support against a perceived threat or injustice rather than in favour of a vision or an ideology. Ireland’s revolution offers considerable evidence to sustain this idea. Unionists were...
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A Poet among Politicians – George Russell & the Irish Convention
It was New Year’s Eve and the chairman had been working hard to see if he could save his Convention. He still felt optimistic. The prize was a great one, a beginning of a solution to the Irish problem, but the challenges were dwarfed by what was happening...
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Ulysses' journey - the first sightings of James Joyce’s masterpiece
STATELY, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressing gown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him on the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned: —Introibo ad altare Dei, Halted,...
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John L. Sullivan & the making of an Irish-American sporting legend
Mike Tyson idolised him. Knew his story, admired his ring-craft, his chutzpah. ‘I like his confidence, his arrogance,' he remarked to a reporter from The New York Times more than 70 years after the man himself had died. ‘I like the way he used to say ‘I can...
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Redmond’s place in our national story is as important as any
There is no statue of John Redmond in our capital city. There is no street named after him either. His mentor, the man to whom he stayed loyal while others did not, Parnell, enjoys both. And a square as well. Redmond’s tenure as leader of the Irish Party...
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Classroom Bolsheviks - Pay, Politics & Ireland’s National Teachers
The years leading up to 1918 had seen growing militancy across many sectors of society. Politics had been transformed by militant unionism and separatism, and the years before the outbreak of war had seen the emergence of a more militant labour movement which had led to the counter-attack by the owners...
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ANALYSIS: From U-Boats to Human Sharks – Why we should remember the tragedy of the SS Hare
In the early hours of 14 December 1917, U-62 under Commander Ernst Hashagen saw the lights of a small ship astern off the Kish Bank. It was the Hare carrying a general cargo to Manchester, which had brought the first consignment of urgently needed food supplies to Dublin for workers and their...
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Between armed rebellion and democratic revolution: the Irish Question in 1917
The House of Commons filled with noise and animosity. It was 10 May 1916 and John Dillon, the veteran Irish Parliamentary Party MP, was skilfully skewering the British Government’s response to the events in Dublin over the previous two weeks: the ongoing executions of the rebel leaders of the...
READ THIS FEATURE- In search of a modern Ireland – the Society of Dublin Painters
- William Orpen – Ireland’s painter of war and peace
- Flying into history – Ireland & the story of the first Transatlantic Flight
- De Valera in America
- FEATURE - The Amritsar Massacre, 13 April 1919
- Daylight Saving - the troubled history of Irish time
- LONGREAD: The Democratic Programme and Labour, 1919
- Prelude to partition or a republic? The 1918 election in Ireland
- The last to die - Irishmen and the final day of the First World War
- The Prolonged War: Violence & the Reshaping of Europe 1918-1923
- November, 1918: Ireland & the End of the First World War
- Post-war Europe – Nations, States & Collapsing Empires
- Exhibiting the First World War
- Treating the traumatised: Shell-shocked veterans in the Irish Free State
- Remembering the RMS Leinster: the greatest ever loss of life in the Irish Sea
- Commemorating the sinking of the RMS Leinster, 1918-2018
- Gaelic Sunday – The GAA v the British Empire
- The radicalisation of Irish politics & the wartime experiences of front line troops, 1916-1918
- ANALYSIS: Lá na mBan, 9 June 1918
- ‘HAVE YOU IN IRELAND ALL GONE MAD’ - the 1918 general strike against conscription
- How Ireland was lost in the 1918 conscription crisis
- A Poet among Politicians – George Russell & the Irish Convention
- Ulysses' journey - the first sightings of James Joyce’s masterpiece
- John L. Sullivan & the making of an Irish-American sporting legend
- Redmond’s place in our national story is as important as any
- Classroom Bolsheviks - Pay, Politics & Ireland’s National Teachers
- ANALYSIS: From U-Boats to Human Sharks – Why we should remember the tragedy of the SS Hare
- Between armed rebellion and democratic revolution: the Irish Question in 1917
- In search of a modern Ireland – the Society of Dublin Painters
- William Orpen – Ireland’s painter of war and peace
- Flying into history – Ireland & the story of the first Transatlantic Flight
- De Valera in America
- FEATURE - The Amritsar Massacre, 13 April 1919
- Daylight Saving - the troubled history of Irish time
- LONGREAD: The Democratic Programme and Labour, 1919
- Prelude to partition or a republic? The 1918 election in Ireland
- The last to die - Irishmen and the final day of the First World War
- The Prolonged War: Violence & the Reshaping of Europe 1918-1923
- November, 1918: Ireland & the End of the First World War
- Post-war Europe – Nations, States & Collapsing Empires
- Exhibiting the First World War
- Treating the traumatised: Shell-shocked veterans in the Irish Free State
- Remembering the RMS Leinster: the greatest ever loss of life in the Irish Sea
- Commemorating the sinking of the RMS Leinster, 1918-2018
- Gaelic Sunday – The GAA v the British Empire
- The radicalisation of Irish politics & the wartime experiences of front line troops, 1916-1918
- ANALYSIS: Lá na mBan, 9 June 1918
- ‘HAVE YOU IN IRELAND ALL GONE MAD’ - the 1918 general strike against conscription
- How Ireland was lost in the 1918 conscription crisis
- A Poet among Politicians – George Russell & the Irish Convention
- Ulysses' journey - the first sightings of James Joyce’s masterpiece
- John L. Sullivan & the making of an Irish-American sporting legend
- Redmond’s place in our national story is as important as any
- Classroom Bolsheviks - Pay, Politics & Ireland’s National Teachers
- ANALYSIS: From U-Boats to Human Sharks – Why we should remember the tragedy of the SS Hare
- Between armed rebellion and democratic revolution: the Irish Question in 1917
Century Ireland
The Century Ireland project is an online historical newspaper that tells the story of the events of Irish life a century ago.