Aug 11, 2021
Considered one of the finest governors of Sri Lanka (Ceylon) in the island’s history, Sir William’s legacy is complicated by the appalling treatment of Tamil labourers, as well as the Gregory Clause in Ireland during the Great Hunger. His wife was the...
Aug 11, 2021
Queen Victoria was the illegitimate daughter of an Irishman. At least that was the sensational claim made in 2003 by A.N. Wilson, one of the most respected historians to specialize in the Victorian Age. Wilson proposed that Victoria was the love child of a romance...
Aug 11, 2021
A veritable Irish desperado if ever there was one, Billy the Kid was born ‘Henry McCarty’, the son of an Irish emigrant, and raised amid the ramshackle tenements of New York’s Lower East Side before he headed off to the Wild West. Become a member of...
Aug 11, 2021
It’s not often that a funeral director buys everyone a drink, but this undertaker had his reasons. As the grateful and mostly Irish mourners supped upon free ale in an Essex pub that hot summer’s afternoon in 1783, the undertaker slipped out the back door. He made his...
Aug 11, 2021
‘I, an Irishman by extraction, was born in the Scottish capital after two separate lines of Irish wanderers came together under one roof’. So remarked the creator of Sherlock Holmes. His mother was Mary Foley from Lismore with strong roots in Kilkenny; his father...
