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After escaping from six years as a slave in Ireland, Patrick wanted only one thing: to go back.
Patrick was born into a well-to-do family in a town somewhere in Roman Britain, perhaps about 410. But however obscure his origins may have been, he was destined to be known everywhere as the man who brought Christianity to Ireland, and in that cause he accepted anything and everything that God asked of him.
John Lynch, exiled to France by Cromwell’s men, lamented the way that Irish was being labelled as a language of sedition.
By 1495 and the reign of Henry VII, attempts to stamp out Irish language and culture in ‘The Pale’, the area of English governance in Ireland, had largely failed. And a good thing too, said Irish priest John Lynch, writing in 1662. Exiled in France thanks to Cromwell’s brutal rampage in Ireland, he decried the politicisation of language by ruling powers.
Lionel of Clarence, Edward III’s younger son, went to Ireland as his Lieutenant in order to stop English expats becoming like the Irish.
In 1366, Edward III’s son Lionel presided over a parliament in Kilkenny in Ireland. The issue was the Pale, the area around Dublin that was under English law, and disturbing reports that many Englishmen had so intermingled with the Irish beyond it that one could hardly tell them apart. Amongst several other Statutes, the English were strictly commanded to keep to their own language and customs.
In 1844, Daniel O’Connell was hauled before a Dublin court to answer charges of seditious conspiracy, and he didn’t stand a chance.
In February 1844, Robert Peel’s Tory Party succeeded in getting Daniel O’Connell MP, the outspoken but peaceful Irish rights activist, convicted by a Dublin jury on eleven charges of ‘seditious conspiracy’. That May, O’Connell was sentenced to a year in gaol; but four months later the sentence was quashed by the House of Lords, in a landmark decision for jury trials throughout the United Kingdom.
In 1846, Daniel O’Connell stood up in the House of Commons to draw attention to the Great Hunger in Ireland, and to plead for a swift response.
Between 1845 and 1851, repeated attacks of potato blight led to the deaths of a million Irishmen from starvation and disease and the emigration of a million more. Had Parliament listened to Irish MP Daniel O’Connell, the worst of the Great Hunger might have been avoided; but that would have required the courage to ease up on the reins of power.
Fursey was a 7th-century Irish monk whose visions of the afterlife made a great impression on St Bede.
Shortly before Lent each year, the Church dedicates one Sunday to reflection on the Last Judgment. For the seventh-century monk Bede, the go-to authority on the matter was Fursey (?597-650), an Irish missionary to the Kingdom of the East Angles just a generation earlier, who had received several visions of the soul’s journey to heaven.
The Dublin to Dun Laoghaire line opened in 1834, and proved a remarkable testimony to the speed of technological progress.
In 1825, the world’s first railway carrying fare-paying public passengers opened, triumphantly tackling the eight-mile stretch between Stockton and Darlington in three hours. Just nine years later, Ireland acquired its own first railway, from Dublin to Dun Laoghaire, and the six-mile journey was over in twenty minutes.