Panels

JOHN DORNEY

John Dorney is the editor of The Irish Story website. He is the author of Peace After the Final Battle 1912-1924: The Story of the Irish Revolution and The Civil War in Dublin: The Fight for the Irish Capital 1922-24.

THOMAS EARLS FITZGERALD

Dr Thomas Earls FitzGerald holds a Royal Irish Academy Decade of Centenaries bursary for research into political developments in County Kerry in the post-Civil War period. He has previously held postdoctoral fellowships from Trinity College Dublin and the Ireland-Canada University Foundation at Concordia University, Montreal. His first book, Combatants and Civilians in Revolutionary Ireland 1918-1923, which focuses on County Kerry, was published by the Routledge Press in 2021.

LIZ GILLIS

Historian and author, Liz Gillis, is from the Liberties in Dublin. She is the author of six books about the Irish revolution including The Fall of Dublin, Women of the Irish Revolution, The Hales Brothers and the Irish Revolution and May 25: The Burning of the Custom House 1921. She has worked as a researcher on numerous publications, television and radio documentaries covering the period.

Liz is the Historian in Residence for Dublin South County Council for the Decade of Centenaries. She lectures at Champlain College, Dublin, and has also worked as a researcher for The History Show on RTE Radio 1. She was a historical consultant for the new Custom House Visitor Centre and was a curatorial assistant in RTE, specialising in researching the Easter Rising, and a tour guide for many years in Kilmainham Gaol. In 2018, she was a recipient of the Lord Mayor’s Award for her contribution to history.

RICHARD MCELLIGOTT

Dr Richard McElligott is lecturer in Modern and Irish History in the Department of Business and Humanities, Dundalk IT. A native of Stacks Mountain, Kilflynn, Co Kerry, Richard has taught and published widely on the history of the Irish revolutionary era, Irish cultural nationalism and Irish sport. His is the author of Forging a Kingdom: The GAA in Kerry, 1884-1934 (2013). Other recent publications include: ‘“Every Interest Being Catered For”: Clubs, Societies and Associational Life in Kerry, 1880-1914’, in Kerry: History and Society (2020) and ‘“Boys Indifferent to the Manly Sports of their Race”: Nationalism and Children’s Sport in Ireland, 1880-1920’, in Irish Studies Review (2019).

ORSON MCMAHON

Orson McMahon is a PhD candidate at Leiden University in the Netherlands. His area of interest is civil war violence and his PhD research is a study of the forms and dynamics of interpersonal violence across a number of counties during the Irish Civil War. In 2020, he completed a research Master’s at Leiden under the supervision of Dr Joost Augusteijn and Professor Isabelle Duyvesteyn, which looked at this very question but in the singular geographical unit of County Kerry. His current research will look at the degree to which the findings of his research in County Kerry compare across other units of varying intensities.

DAITHÍ Ó CORRÁIN

A native of Killorglin, Dr Daithí Ó Corráin is a historian in the School of History and
Geography at Dublin City University. He has published widely on the Irish Revolution, 1912-
1923 and Irish Catholicism. He is the author of Rendering to God and Caesar: the Irish churches and the two states in Ireland, 1949-73 (2006) and chapters on Irish Catholicism in the Cambridge History of Ireland (2018), as well as the forthcoming Oxford History of British and Irish Catholicism (2023) and Oxford Handbook of Religion in Ireland (2023).
He is co-editor, with Professor Marian Lyons, of the acclaimed The Irish Revolution, 1912-23 series of county histories published by Four Courts Press. He is co-author, with Eunan O’Halpin, of the landmark The Dead of the Irish Revolution (2020). His latest book is Cathal Brugha: ‘an indomitable spirit’ (2022), which is co-authored with Gerard Hanley.

CÉCILE CHEMIN

Cécile Chemin is Senior Archivist at the Military Archives of Ireland and Director of the Military Service (1916-1923) Pensions Collection Project. The MSP Collection is the largest archive collection in existence covering the revolutionary period and contains the claims for service, wounds, disability and dependency lodged by those who took part in the events from the 1916 Rising to the end of the Civil War in 1923, and their dependents. The Project has so far catalogued and made available 113,500 files. 45,750 files have been digitised and are now fully downloadable online (www.militaryarchives.ie). In total, the Project has so far made available close to 2.5 million pages of archival material online.

LAURA MCATACKNEY

Laura McAtackney is a Professor in the Radical Humanities Laboratory and Archaeology at University College Cork, Ireland, and the Department of Archaeology and Heritage Studies at Aarhus University, Denmark. She is a Docent in Contemporary Historical Archaeology at the University of Oulu, Finland.

Amongst many interests, her research focuses on material-based approaches to understanding historical political imprisonment in Ireland and the lived experience of post-conflict Northern Ireland. She is currently the PI of an Independent Research Fund Denmark Project Enduring Materialities of Colonialism: temporality, spatiality and memory on St Croix, USVI (EMoC) (2019-2024), a Co-I on the EU-Interreg project ARCHAEOBALT (2018-2023), and is part of the OPEN HEART CITY collective working with Magdalene Laundries in Ireland.

HELENE O’KEEFFE

Tralee-born Dr Helene O’Keeffe is a historian and project manager based in the School of History, University College Cork. A regular contributor to media and documentaries about the Irish revolutionary period, her book, To Speak of Easter Week: Family Memoires of the Irish Revolution,was published in 2015. She also acted as researcher on the award-winning Atlas of the Irish Revolution (CUP 2017) and is currently coordinating a series of public engagement projects based on the Atlas. Her new publication on Robert Emmet in Irish nationalist history and memory is forthcoming in 2023.

KIERAN MCNULTY

Kieran McNulty, who is originally from Birmingham, England, graduated with a BA (Hons) in history from the University of Portsmouth, and with an MA in history from NUI Maynooth. He has had several articles published on the working-class history of Kerry, 1913-23. A resident of Tralee, Kieran is active in social movements in his community, including campaigning on workers’ rights and for greater resources for the HSE mental health services in Kerry.

HELEN O’CARROLL

Helen O’Carroll is a native of Tralee, Co. Kerry. A graduate of University College Dublin, she holds an MA in History (1990) and a Diploma in Arts Administration (1991). She has been involved in heritage projects in Kerry for over thirty years and has been Curator of Kerry County Museum since 2000, where she has produced a number of large-scale, award-winning exhibitions, among them ‘Casement in Kerry: A Revolutionary Journey’, which was officially opened by President Michael D. Higgins on 21 April 2016.

FIONNUALA WALSH

Dr Fionnuala Walsh is Assistant Professor of Modern Irish History in University College Dublin. She previously completed her PhD and Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship in Trinity College Dublin. Her first book, Irish Women and the Great War, was published by Cambridge University Press, in 2020. It was awarded the NUI Publication Prize for Irish History in 2021. Dr Walsh is the secretary of the Women’s History Association of Ireland. Her current research explores people’s everyday experiences in the Irish revolution and the legacies of the conflict for families. 

GEMMA CLARK

Born in Manchester and educated at the University of Oxford, Dr Gemma Clark previously held a postdoctoral fellowship in Irish Studies at UNSW Sydney, and is currently Senior Lecturer in British and Irish History at the University of Exeter. Since her first book, Everyday Violence in the Irish Civil War (Cambridge University Press, 2014), Gemma has published on sectarianism, gender-based violence, and arson, in outlets including The Irish Times, Irish Historical Studies, Atlas of the Irish Revolution, and Ireland 1922. Gemma is currently writing a global history of arson and has received British Academy funding for a related project – “Exporting Arson: Incendiarism as Protest in the Global Irish Diaspora”.

MARY MCAULIFFE

Dr Mary McAuliffe is a historian and Director of the Gender Studies Programme at UCD. She holds a PhD from the School of History and Humanities, Trinity College Dublin. Her latest publications include, as co-editor with Miriam Haughton and Emilie Pine, Legacies of the Magdalen Laundries; Commemoration, Gender, and the Postcolonial Carceral State, and as sole author, Margaret Skinnider: a biography. She was co-editor of Sexual Politics in Modern Ireland and, with Bridget McAuliffe and Owen O’Shea, Kerry 1916: Histories and Legacies of the Easter Rising. She is currently working on a book on gendered and sexual violence during the Irish revolutionary period, 1919-1923, to be published in late 2023. She is a past President of the Women’s History Association of Ireland and is currently a member of the Humanities Institute, UCD.

MARGARET WARD

Dr Margaret Ward is Honorary Senior Lecturer in History at Queen’s University Belfast. She has a PhD from the University of the West of England and an Honorary Doctor of Laws from the University of Ulster, for her contribution to advancing women’s equality. Amongst her many publications are Maud Gonne: a life; Hanna Sheehy Skeffington: suffragette and Sinn Féiner, her memoirs and political writings; Fearless Woman: Hanna Sheehy Skeffington, feminism and the Irish Revolution. Her pioneering book, Unmanageable Revolutionaries, women and Irish nationalism, first published in 1983, was re-published in a revised and updated edition by Arlen House in 2021. 

SÍOBHRA AIKEN

Dr Síobhra Aiken is a lecturer in the Department of Irish and Celtic Studies at Queen’s University Belfast and has published widely on the social and cultural history of twentieth-century Ireland. A former Fulbright Scholar, her publications include the monograph, Spiritual Wounds: Trauma, Testimony and the Irish Civil War (Irish Academic Press, 2022), and the edited volumes The Men Will Talk to Me: Ernie O’Malley’s Interviews with the Northern Divisions (Merrion Press, 2018) and An Chuid Eile Díom Féin: Aistí le Máirtín Ó Direáin (Cló Iar-Chonnacht, 2018).

She is the 2022 O’Donnell Fellow at the University of Melbourne and is currently researching the emigration of Irish revolutionaries to Australia. 

TOMÁS MAC CONMARA

Tomás Mac Conmara is an award-winning oral historian and author from County Clare. In 2016, he was commended by President of Ireland, Michael D. Higgins, as one of seven recipients who have made outstanding contributions to culture over the last 100 years, for a Comhaltas Forógra na Cásca Centenary Award. He has published six books including his 20-year collection work, The Time of the Tans and The Scariff Martyrs, War, Murder and Memory in East Clare.  

OWEN O’SHEA

From Milltown, Co. Kerry, Owen O’Shea is a historian and author of several books on history and politics in his native county. A former press adviser to the Labour Party and a journalist for many years, he is the author of No Middle Path: The Civil War in Kerry (Merrion Press, 2022). Other books include Ballymacandy: the Story of a Kerry Ambush (Merrion Press, 2021) and Heirs to the Kingdom: Kerry’s Political Dynasties (O’Brien Press, 2011) and, as co-author with Gordon Revington, A Century of Politics in the Kingdom: A County Kerry Compendium (Merrion Press, 2018). He was co-editor of a history of Kerry and the Easter Rising in 2016 with Bridget McAuliffe and Dr Mary McAuliffe.

He works as Media, Communications and Customer Relations Officer with Kerry County Council and is an Irish Research Council-funded PhD student at University College Dublin, researching electioneering and politics in Kerry in the decade after the Civil War. See www.owenoshea.ie