I have been lucky in my life to have the opportunity to work with dedicated, thoughtful, and driven activists. Men and women who endured hardship, loss, and imprisonment. Experiences that would have broken most people. They continue to work day in and day out to build a new and united Ireland.
I am sure you have met similar people in your life. Those who struggled for change, respect, and justice, or to keep their families afloat and their heads above water. The true heroes in our lives.
When times were tough, a colleague would remind us that we were engaged in “struggle”, and it was called that because it was hard work! Nothing of value ever comes easy. It is the nature of struggle that we face hardships and setbacks which must be overcome. Motivation is maintained by keeping one eye on the present, one on the goal, and remembering to celebrate small victories along the way.
This week, those of us working for unity and the building of a 32-county Irish Republic had reason to celebrate: the inauguration of Catherine Connolly as Uachtarán na hÉireann (Irish President).
She was elected with a massive majority over the Irish government candidate. Sinn Féin, along with all of the opposition parties, supported her campaign.
In her inauguration speech, she reiterated the major themes of her campaign that would now be the priorities for her time in office. She sought to define a new Irish Republic of equal citizens that was united, modern, and inclusive, infused with the strength of Irish culture and experience. It was a speech for our times and stood in stark contrast to the “keep things as they are” vision of the Irish government as it lurches from crisis to crisis of its own making.
In a section on Irish Unity, she referenced Article 3 of the Constitution, which sets out the firm wish of the Irish nation to have a united Ireland and is committed to working to that end with the consent of the people north and south. Looking over her shoulder and nodding in agreement was the former leader of Fine Gael and Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar. Ministers in today’s government sat stony-faced.
The new President has an expansive view of the Irish Nation, acknowledging the role of the diaspora in sharing and celebrating Irish Culture. She recognised her own family members who had travelled home from Canada and the USA.
Irish Culture is going through a renaissance. In Ireland, our language, sports, arts, and music have never been stronger. Connolly previously shared the story of how, as an adult, she learnt Irish, and how it is central to her and the Irish identity. The promotion of the language will be a priority for her presidency.
No doubt President Connolly will face many challenges as she works alongside a government with no vision and opposing priorities and policies. But this week, we celebrate her election as we keep an eye on the bigger picture.
In the words of the new Uachtarán na hÉireann, “I believe that the President should be a unifying presence—a steady hand, yes, but also a catalyst for change reflecting our desire for a Republic that lives up to its name.”
Have a great weekend
Ciarán
Ciarán Quinn is the Sinn Féin Representative to North America
A house set ablaze in Ballymena as trouble erupted in town
Viewpoint
Wed 11 Jun 2025 at 05:00
The PSNI has been warning for months that it takes just one major incident to expose the deficit in resources to safely police Northern Ireland.
Events in Ballymena demonstrate that some policing demands simply cannot be planned for in advance.
Northern Ireland has a serious problem with violence against women and girls. That is not opinion but fact, borne out in statistics that show we have some of the worst rates of domestic abuse and femicide in Europe.
People are right to be angry when it comes to the protection of women and girls.
The issue is a societal one, a hangover from our troubled past, a symptom of a violently armed patriarchy.
Protecting women requires a shift in societal attitudes, from early years education to proper policing and justice.
It requires the promotion of positive male role models, not the Andrew Tate-style online agitators.
Two 14-year-olds have been charged, while a third is still being sought.
That the suspects are the children of migrants was revealed by court reports that confirmed that they required a Romanian interpreter.
The media is greatly restricted in what it can report in live cases, particularly those involving juveniles.
But there is no getting away from the fact that many of those who landed in Ballymena on Monday, determined to engage in violence, would not have been there only for the nationality of the suspects.
The family members who organised a protest following the weekend attack did so in good faith. But the reality is, when people are called onto the streets, the results can be unpredictable.
Within hours of the call for a peaceful protest, social media pages linked to far-right organisations were urging people to travel to the town.
The result was violence on a scale not seen there for years, with injuries to police officers and homes destroyed by fire and vandalism.
In 2018, when Britain First leader Paul Golding arrived in Ballymena making false allegations about the allocation of housing, he was sent packing by the good people of that town.
The false narrative about an ‘invasion’ of foreign migrants was, at the time, challenged by the DUP’s Paul Frew, who used facts to debunk myths.
Mr Frew produced figures from the Northern Ireland Housing Executive showing that of all the properties allocated in the preceding 12 months, 2.5% were allocated to ‘Persons from Abroad’.
Following Monday’s violence, it is for politicians to follow that lead and show leadership, to help calm rather than inflame tensions.
Captured after the failed 1798 uprising, Tone was formally sentenced on November 10 with execution set for November 12. Denied his request to die as a soldier, he later died in custody after his throat was cut in circumstances that remain debated as suicide or murder.
As one of the most influential leaders in Ireland’s struggle against British rule, Tone’s vision of a united, independent Ireland continues to resonate more than two centuries later. His life, writings, and tragic death have secured his legacy as a martyr and a national hero in the story of Ireland’s fight for self-determination.
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The father of Irish republicanism was born the son of a prosperous coach-maker in Dublin. Here we take a look at his early life. Theobald Wolfe Tone, leader of the 1798 Irish Rebellion, is probably best remembered for his tragic and gruesome death, but here we look at his early life, including a love story.
For his involvement, Wolfe Tone was arrested and said in court that he was determined “by frank and open war to procure the separation” of Ireland and England.
Following his conviction, Tone requested to be shot as a soldier would. He was denied, and on November 10, 1798, he was sentenced to be hanged on November 12.
However, before he could be hanged, Tone’s neck was slit either by a suicide attempt or at the hands of British soldiers; it remains unclear. The revolutionary died on November 19, 1798, and is buried in Bodenstown, County Kildare.
Below is a look at Wolfe Tone’s early life, courtesy of FindMyPast.
There’s an extraordinary love story hidden in the pages of one of Findmypast’s Irish record sets, the Dublin Registers and Records collection. A story about passion, loyalty, and patriotic sacrifice for one of Ireland’s most memorable heroes.
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Wolfe Tone (Getty Images)
More than 260 years after his birth, he is still heralded as a leading Irish revolutionary figure and one of the founding members of the United Irishmen, as well as being a leader of the 1798 Rebellion but his own extraordinary love story is sometimes forgotten.
In the summer of 1785, the 22-year-old Theobald Wolfe Tone married a draper’s daughter, Martha Witherington. She was only 16. Theobald rechristened his wife Matilda. They were married by curate Edward Ryan on July 21 as you can see in the Marriage Entries from the Registers of the Parishes St. Andrew, St. Anne, St. Audoen, & St. Bride 1632-1800. The marriage would not be long-lived, but Matilda would make sure that her husband’s name was remembered for generations to come.
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Wolfe Tone was one of the key figures in the United Irishmen rebellion of 1798. Born in Dublin in 1763, his family was descended from French Huguenot settlers to Ireland. The son of a coach-maker who kept a farm near Sallins, County Kildare, Wolfe Tone studied law at Trinity College Dublin before going into politics.
The United Irishmen were inspired by the revolutions in France and America to fight for an Ireland free from English rule where Catholics, Protestants, and dissenters lived together in peace. Wolfe Tone appealed to the French to aid Ireland in her fight and set sail with a French fleet to bring men and arms to Ireland in 1796, but storms, indecisiveness, and poor seamanship prevented a successful landing.
The rebellion finally arrived in the summer of 1798. On May 24, rebels attempted to take Dublin and the surrounding counties but were quickly suppressed. The rebellion spread to Wicklow, Antrim, Down, Wexford, Kilkenny, and Meath but was unsuccessful. Wolfe Tone was captured in Buncrana in Donegal in October 1798. He was executed in the Provost’s Prison in Dublin not far from where he was born.
In the aftermath of the fighting, the British authorities offered compensation to those who remained loyal to the crown who had suffered damage to their property in the fighting. They also offered special terms for those who surrendered willingly. You can find a list of names of both those who applied for compensation and those who surrendered in Findmypast’s 1798 Claimants and Surrenders records.
The authorities came down hard on those who had fought against them and sometimes took great efforts to secure a conviction. You can see evidence of one attempt at stacking the deck in Findmypast’s England and Wales, Crime, Prisons and Punishment collection.
Contained in the miscellaneous criminal books of National Archives reference HO 130 is the case of Rex vs O’Cioghly and others. Father James O’Coighly was a United Irishman from Loughgall in County Armagh. The records show the selection of the jury for his trial, with panelists obviously selected based on their political sympathies. One man was rejected for being clearly sympathetic to the United Irishmen’s cause.
Matilda Tone left Ireland after her husband was executed. She was only 23 and the mother of a young son. She moved to France and then on to America. It was there, in 1826, that she saw to the publication of her husband’s autobiography and correspondence. Matilda worked to keep her husband’s legacy alive until her death in 1849.
Despite the acquittal of Soldier F, campaigners are as determined as ever to get justice for the 14 people who died.
EAMONN MCCANN
When the crack-crack of the rifles came from the bottom of Rossville Street, my first reaction was not of fear or panic but bewilderment.
What? Why were they firing?
We had been here before and thought we knew the drill. Bricks and petrol bombs versus baton rounds and CS gas. Occasionally a nasty injury or arrest. But not this.
As the gunfire continued, we flung ourselves down. I hauled myself along the gutter on my knees and elbows. Craning my head to look around, I saw a man — only 17, as it turned out — running pellmell, trying to hurdle a low barricade, then stiffening and crumpling.
By the morning, the Bogside was silent. People gathered at corners and in doorways, asking each other: “Did you hear one of them was that young fellow Kelly from Creggan Heights?”
By now, everybody knew the names of the 13 people who had been killed. Another would die four months later from gunshot injuries.
Last week, Soldier F, the only one of the Bloody Sunday shooters who was still under indictment, walked free from court. It did not come as a surprise. On Friday, a crowd of a couple of hundred stood at Free Derry Wall, carrying black flags and telling one another that, no matter what anybody thought, we were going to keep on.
This persistence is the aspect of Bloody Sunday that sometimes still confuses and frustrates well-meaning people with good hearts who wish nothing but comfort and ease for the families of the victims.
But again, why Bloody Sunday? There were more people killed in the Birmingham pub bombings of 1974. More in the Dublin-Monaghan bombings of 1975. More in the explosion in McGurk’s Bar on the New Lodge Road in Belfast the month before Bloody Sunday. And so on.
Bloody Sunday — January 30, 1972 — was very different. It didn’t happen on a lonely road at the dead of night or in the sudden eruption of death into a pub. It happened in broad daylight, watched at close quarters by thousands of people who had gathered at the end of a civil rights march.
Before the gunsmoke had dispersed from the area, we knew the truth.
In the aftermath, a tidal wave of solidarity with the Bogside swamped the South. Protests against the massacre packed every city centre. Shops, factories, offices and schools emptied. Gatherings of all sorts were cancelled. Buses and trains came to a standstill. Dublin, Cork and Shannon airports closed.
On February 2, the British embassy on Merrion Square was burned down in what one newspaper described as “the biggest demonstration the Republic has seen in a generation”.
A deluge of dignitaries descended on Derry for the funerals. These included 14 members of the government, President Éamon de Valera’s personal representative, 32 backbench TDs, 17 senators, the mayors of Dublin, Cork, Limerick, Waterford, Kilkenny, Galway, Sligo, Clonmel and Wexford, the general secretary of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, the president of the GAA, archbishops, bishops, serried ranks of priests and other notables of one sort or another.
Many relatives of the dead couldn’t get into the Creggan church.
“Let this wee girl in, her father is one of them,” I remember hearing.
But in the Dáil debate the next day, the emphasis was not on a need to hold Britain to account, but to deflect the anger that the British army’s actions had given rise to.
Taoiseach Jack Lynch, referring to the embassy fire, spoke of “men who, under the cloak of patriotism, sought to overthrow the institutions of the State… The institutions of this state will be upheld without fear or favour. The laws will continue to be enforced. Those who seek to usurp the functions of government will meet with no toleration”.
Bloody Sunday didn’t fit into the approved narrative of Catholics and Protestants at daggers-drawn while the British authorities strove to keep the peace. Getting the slaughter in Derry off the agenda was a high priority for both the Dublin and London governments.
The UK’s Saville Inquiry was to be another means of delivering the goods. Thousands gathered in Derry’s Guildhall Square to watch the live feed from the House of Commons on a giant screen as the inquiry’s findings were delivered in June 2011. David Cameron’s phrase “unjustified and unjustifiable” triggered a thunderclap of joy. The square was transformed into a sea of shining faces.
But the then British prime minister couldn’t have used that phrase if those indicted by Saville for involvement in the killings had included, for example, Michael Jackson, second-in-command of the paratroopers on the day, who had since risen through the ranks to become boss of the Parachute Regiment, commander of the British army on the Rhine, Nato chief in Kosovo, then chief of the general staff — Britain’s top soldier.
Jackson had been on Rossville Street throughout the 17 minutes of shooting. Testifying to Saville in April, 2003, he claimed not to have seen any of the shooting. Nor did he mention having compiled the list of the shots that had been fired, which was to be used by British political and military spokespersons around the world to explain the slaughter.
If Saville had gone where the evidence ought to have led him and reported that the man then at the apex of Britain’s armed forces had concocted lies to cover up unjustified and unjustifiable killing and then perjured himself, the political impact in Derry and elsewhere would have been very different.
Cameron would not have been able to denounce the shooters while maintaining that the reputation of the British army itself remained unsullied.
The fact so many politicians and commentators in Ireland swallowed Saville’s version of events testifies to their anxiety to put Bloody Sunday behind them and get on with “reconciliation” with the British ruling class and avoiding awkward truths.
It was squaddies who were put in the frame for the massacre. But nobody who matters to people who matter suffered any discomfort. Saville didn’t tell the full truth.
