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The rebellion of 1798 is the most violent and tragic event in Irish history between the Jacobite wars and the Great Famine. In the space of a few weeks, 30,000 – peasants armed with pikes and pitchforks, defenceless women and children – were cut down, shot, or blown like chaff as they charged up to the mouth of the canon.
The Scullabogue massacre was a mass murder of civilians committed in Scullabogue, near Newbawn, County Wexford, Ireland on 5 June 1798, during the 1798 rebellion.A guarding party of rebels massacred up to 200 [1] noncombatant men, women and children, most of whom were Protestant (there were also about 20 Catholics), who were held prisoner in a barn which was then set alight.
[3] The remainder of the garrison were trapped in the upper floors of the barracks which was set on fire by the rebels, causing them to jump in desperation onto the ground below, where they were summarily executed with pikes. While the rebels suffered no known casualties, c. 140 members of the garrison were killed in the battle. [4]
The outbreak of the rebellion on the night of 23/24 May 1798 led to failed assaults on Ballymore-Eustace, Naas, and Prosperous.As news of the rising spread throughout Kildare, Kilcullen rebels began to mobilise in the ancient hill-top churchyard in the town-land now known as Old Kilcullen.
British losses were initially reported as 3 killed and 16 wounded or missing, [4] but the number of killed alone was later reported as 12. [5] Approximately 500 French and Irish lay dead on the field. 200 Irish prisoners were taken in the mopping-up operations, almost all of whom were later hanged, including Matthew Tone, brother of Wolfe Tone .
By 18 June 1798, a government force led by Gerard Lake and numbering roughly 13,000-strong had surrounded County Wexford and were ready to march into the county and suppress the rebellion. Local United Irishmen commanders issued a call for all rebels in the county to gather at Vinegar Hill to confront Lake's force in a pitched battle .
Henry Joy McCracken (31 August 1767 – 17 July 1798) was an Irish republican executed in Belfast for his part in leading United Irishmen in the Rebellion of 1798.Convinced that the cause of representative government in Ireland could not be advanced under the British Crown, McCracken had sought to forge a revolutionary union between his fellow Presbyterians in Ulster and the country's largely ...
His exploits are commemorated in the famous Irish ballad Kelly the Boy From Killane written by Patrick Joseph McCall (1861–1919). Liam Gaul describes how McCall wrote the song to commemorate the centenary of the 1798 Rebellion, although it was not published in book form until it appeared in McCall's Irish Fireside Songs in 1911. [5]