Irish History Podcast

Liverpool and New York haunt the story of Irish independence in a way few other places do. Though separated by more than 5,000 kilometres of ocean, both ports were part of a wider Atlantic world in which Ireland occupied a central place.
By the 1920s Liverpool and New York were among the most Irish cities on the planet. Both had been transformed by generations of Irish migration and in both cities Irish politics shaped everyday life.

During the War of Independence, these communities became crucial to the republican movement. Money, weapons, propaganda and people moved through the ports, while IRA networks operated on both sides of the Atlantic. But this was not simply a story of support for Irish independence. In Liverpool and New York, Irish politics were fiercely contested.

Supporters of the Republic organised, fundraised and agitated, while opponents of independence also made their voices heard. Anti-Irish politics, loyalism, class tensions and divisions within the diaspora all shaped how the conflict was understood abroad.

In this episode of Brothers in Pain, Dr Brian Hanley explores the role of Liverpool and New York in the Irish War of Independence, revealing how two great port cities helped shape the revolution, and how Ireland’s struggle in turn reshaped politics across the Atlantic world.

This is the second last episode of Brothers in Pain a groundbreaking Global history of the Irish War of Independence by Dr Brian Hanley
Written, Researched & Narrated by Dr Brian Hanley. Check out Brian's publications here https://www.tcd.ie/history/staff/brian-hanley.php
Producer: Fin Dwyer
Sound: Kate Dunlea
Note from Brian :
In researching these episodes I have been indebted to the work of the following scholars;
Anna Lively, Sam McGrath, Bruce Nelson, Terry Dunne, David Brundage, Niamh Coffey, Gerard Shannon, Maurice Casey, Kelly Anne Reynolds, Chris McNickle, Joe Doyle, Liz Gillis, FM Carroll, Patrick Mannion, Jimmy Yann, Niall Cullen, Pádraig Óg Ó Ruairc, Keith Jeffrey, Arthur Mitchell, John Borgonovo, Kate O’Malley, Michael Doorley, Robin Adams, Kevin Kenny, Fearghal McGarry, Catherine M. Burns, Síobhra Aiken, Patrick J. Mahony, Darragh Gannon, Matthew Pratt Guterl and James R. Barrett.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Ogham is Ireland’s oldest known writing system, dating back more than 1,500 years. If you have ever seen strange lines carved along the edge of an old stone, you may have been looking at ogham.
But what did those marks mean? Who carved them? Were they gravestones, boundary markers, family claims to lands or something else entirely?
In this episode, I speak with ogham expert Dr Nora White about how this ancient writing system worked, where it came from and what it reveals about early Ireland. These short inscriptions preserve some of the earliest evidence of the Irish language, along with names, ancestors, territories and hints of a society changing through migration, Christianity and contact with Britain and the wider world.
Ogham may look simple, but it opens a window onto one of the most fascinating and mysterious periods in Irish history.

Support the show www.patreon.com/irishpodcast

Dr Nora White is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Early Irish at Maynooth University. She
is currently leading a Research Ireland-funded project: Early Medieval Irish Scripts on Stone
(EMISoS). She previously worked on the Ogham in 3D project at the Dublin Institute for Advanced
Studies and subsequently (2021-2025) on the joint Maynooth University and University of Glasgow
OG(H)AM project (https://ogham.glasgow.ac.uk/).
Digital corpus (in progress) of ogham in Ireland and Britain: https://ogham.celt.dias.ie/list

Sound by Kate Dunlea
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

'We are doing this because you are doing it in Ireland'.
These were the words of an IRA volunteer in Manchester explaining attacks in Britain during the Irish War of Independence.
During the conflict, Britain and particularly England became a major battlefield. Britain was not only geographically close to Ireland, it was also home to large Irish communities in many major cities. Between 1919 and 1922, the IRA made sustained efforts to bring the conflict across the Irish Sea, carrying out hundreds of attacks, most of them in England.
This forgotten front of the war included major attacks on the Liverpool docks, the targeting of Black and Tans in Britain and several high-profile incidents, most notably the killing of the British field marshal Sir Henry Wilson.
The war also consumed and divided British politics in a way few other issues did until Brexit nearly a century later. Political parties, trade unions and communities were split over what should happen in Ireland, while massive and sometimes violent demonstrations swept across Britain.

In this episode of Brothers in Pain, a global history of the Irish Revolution, Dr Brian Hanley explores the IRA’s campaign in Britain and how the wider question of Irish independence dominated British politics at the time.

This is the eight episode in the Brothers in Pain Series a groundbreaking Global history of the Irish War of Independence by Dr Brian Hanley

Written, Researched & Narrated by Dr Brian Hanley. Check out Brian's publications here https://www.tcd.ie/history/staff/brian-hanley.php
Producer: Fin Dwyer
Sound: Kate Dunlea

Note from Brian :
In researching these episodes I have been indebted to the work of the following scholars;
Anna Lively, Sam McGrath, Bruce Nelson, Terry Dunne, David Brundage, Niamh Coffey, Gerard Shannon, Maurice Casey, Kelly Anne Reynolds, Chris McNickle, Joe Doyle, Liz Gillis, FM Carroll, Patrick Mannion, Jimmy Yann, Niall Cullen, Pádraig Óg Ó Ruairc, Keith Jeffrey, Arthur Mitchell, John Borgonovo, Kate O’Malley, Michael Doorley, Robin Adams, Kevin Kenny, Fearghal McGarry, Catherine M. Burns, Síobhra Aiken, Patrick J. Mahony, Darragh Gannon, Matthew Pratt Guterl and James R. Barrett.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In August 1882, a brutal mass murder in a remote valley in the west of Ireland shocked the world. At Maamtrasna, a family, the Joyces, were attacked in their home. The victims ranged from a teenage girl to an 80-year-old woman. The police quickly suspected that the killers had been neighbours and even relatives of the Joyce family. However, a motive was elusive. As wider Irish society was shocked by the killings, injustice was followed by injustice.

Indeed, the trials would soon overshadow the crime itself, unfolding into one of the most infamous miscarriages of justice in the legal history of Ireland or the UK. In this episode, Margaret Kelleher joins me to explore this intriguing case. We dig into the dark events that unfolded in Maamtrasna in the summer of 1882 and examine why an innocent man, Myles Joyce, was sent to the gallows after a trial conducted entirely in English, a language he could neither speak nor understand.

The episode reveals what we know happened in Maamtrasna on that fateful night and how perjury and a rush to convict rather than find genuine justice lay at the heart of this intriguing case. This is the story of how a brutal murder in an isolated mountain community ended up having massive political implications, leaving a legacy that continues to reverberate today.

Support the show: Patreon.com/irishpodcast

Margaret's book The Maamtrasna Murders: Language, Life and Death in Nineteenth-Century Ireland is available here https://www.ucdpress.ie/page/detail/the-maamtrasna-murders/?k=9781910820421

My guest is Margaret Kelleher, Professor and Chair of Anglo-Irish Literature and Drama at University College Dublin (research profile: https://people.ucd.ie/margaret.o.kelleher). She is a board member of the Museum of Literature Ireland (https://moli.ie/) and a member of the Royal Irish Academy. Her latest book, Mary and Padraic Colum: Lives and the Dream, is forthcoming from UCD Press in the Autumn of this year. Her monograph Maamtrasna Murders: Language, Life and Death in Nineteenth-Century Ireland (UCD Press, 2018) was awarded the Michael J. Durkan Prize for Books in Language and Culture by the American Conference for Irish Studies in 2019, and in 2020 was shortlisted for the Michel Déon Prize. She was Cullman Center Fellow at New York Public Library from 2022-2023 and Parnell Fellow in Irish Studies at Magdalene College, Cambridge from 2023-2024.

Sound by Kate Dunlea
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A recent hospital visit means there is no new episode this week, but it reminded me of this classic from early 2024! Tune in to find out more

How difficult was life in the Middle Ages? This is something archaeologists and historians have debated for decades. In recent years, new techniques, including genetic analysis, have given us new insights into the lives of our distant ancestors in the Medieval Era. Their findings are unsettling. Life in the Middle Ages was far more difficult than we imagine.

My guest in this episode is Prof. Eileen Murphy from Queen's University Belfast. Eileen has recently published groundbreaking research on daily life in early medieval Ireland, based on her analysis of human remains excavated in Co. Roscommon. In this podcast, she answers all your questions on what life was like.

Eileen shares her discoveries on how people survived in a hard and difficult world. It's not for the faint of heart.
This episode is not suitable for children.

Our interview is based on the book "The Forgotten Cemetery: Excavations at Ranelagh, Co. Roscommon," available for free at https://www.tii.ie/technical-services/archaeology/publications/tii-heritage/.
Eileen is the deputy head of the School of Built & Natural Heritage at Queen's University Belfast: https://www.qub.ac.uk/schools/NBE/.

Sound by Kate Dunlea
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.