Padraig O Fathaigh ( 1879-1976) was a lifelong Gaelic Leaguer and teacher of Irish. Already a prominent member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood and the Irish Volunteers before 1916, O Fathaigh was arrested on Easter Tuesday before he could join forces with Liam Mellows. He spent the next year undergoing penal servitude, the first of four terms of imprisonment between 1916 and 1920. When at liberty he acted as an intelligence officer in South Galway and Mid-Clare, taking part in some minor ambushes. His detailed and thoughtful handwritten recollections of life - on the run- and in prison...

Three times Viceroy, Sir Henry Sidney was a key figure in the Elizabethan conquest of Ireland. Sidney's account of his public career in Ireland, written in the winter of 1582-3, is one of the earliest political memoirs in English literature. It is unique among early memoirs in its size, richness of detail, and apparent fidelity to the factual record.



Composed in plain prose and consciously shorn of decoration and classical allusion, his narrative presents an individual with attitudes and preoccupations at odds with the zealous advocates of military conquest and religious...

Rosamond Stephen (1868-1951) was an Englishwoman who spent most of her life unsuccessfully trying to reconcile Protestants and Catholics in Ireland. The daughter of a theist judge, and niece of Sir Leslie Stephen editor of the -Dictionary of National Biography-, she was received into the Church of Ireland in 1896 and worked as a lay missionary in working-class Belfast. Her attempts to meet, assist and talk politics with Belfast Catholics aroused suspicion in both communities, and her ecumenical quest ended in disillusionment. This selection from her wartime letters to her sisters records her...

Robert McElborough was a Belfast trade unionist of little education, who spent most of his life living in the Sandy Row district and working on the tramways and in the gas industry. An active organizer in two loyalist trade unions, he fought proudly -on the workers- side for wages and conditions as a descendant of an Ulster Scot.



This selection from his autobiography provides a unique record of Protestant working-class life, and a trenchant commentary on the mistreatment of workers by their masters. It also chronicles the tension between English union bosses and Ulster...

Narcissus Marsh (1638-1713) was an English clergyman who spent his later life in Ireland, initially as Provost of Trinity College, Dublin, and ultimately as Archbishop of Armagh. Despised by Jonathan Swift for his pietism and timidity, his achievements as churchman and scholar were impressive. Marsh's recollections, begun in 1690 and continued in diary form up to 1696, are by no means the pious platitudes of a conventional seventeenth-century clergyman. With sometimes startling candour, he recounts dreams and anecdotes revealing his struggle against worldly temptations, his resolute rejection...

Charles Hart (1824-1898) was a Dublin solicitor's son who played a minor part in the Confederate movement in 1848. Influenced by his brother-in-law, John Blake Dillon, he spent the revolutionary months in the United States as a Confederate agent, propagating the Irish cause and meeting American politicians, Irish-Americans and the new crop of 'exiles'. His hitherto unpublished diary gives an intimate picture of the Young Irelanders, news of their failed revolution, and a vivid account of American politics and social mores, and landscape. A highlight was his meeting with Wolfe Tone's widow,...

On May 9, 1830, fourteen year-old Daniel O'Connell Jr., son of the -Liberator, - left his comfortable home in Dublin to attend the Jesuit college at Clongowes Wood in County Kildare. Thus began a three-year correspondence between Danny Jr. and his mother, Mary O'Connell. Bursting with love and affection, illness and death, politics and scandal, these letters allow a brief glimpse at the relationship between mother and son in nineteenth-century Ireland. In addition, this collection documents a portion of an important juncture in the political career of Danny's father Daniel O'Connell. Returned...

In an engaging family memoir, Frank Henderson, who became Commandant of the Second Battalion of Irish Volunteers, reveals the influence of his parents and the Christian Brothers in molding his militancy and pride in Irish culture.