(Please note that pre-booking is advisable)

James McConnel is a lecturer at the University of Ulster, Magee. He completed his doctorate in 2002 on the Irish Parliamentary Party before the First World War. He has published articles in Irish Historical Studies, Historical Journal, and Past and Present, and is currently working on a biography of John Redmond.

This paper re-examines the pre-political life and early parliamentary career of John Redmond. It interrogates many of Redmond’s alleged formative influences, thereby not only throwing new light on his early life, but also questioning the received narrative concerning the evolution of ‘Redmondism’. Posthumously presented by friends and foes alike as a ‘gentleman’, this paper will argue that at least before 1900 he was in fact much more of a ‘player’.

Sinead McCoole is the author of a number of books including No Ordinary Women: Irish Female activists in the Revolutionary Years, Guns and Chiffon,  and Hazel: A Life of Lady Lavery. She has also scripted a series of short documentaries: 'The Women of 1916' and also 'Guns and Chiffon' which tells the story of women from 1900-1923. She is currently working on 'Easter Widows: the untold story of the widows of the 1916 leaders.'

This illustrated lecture will outline the role of women in the Rising, the untold stories of the widows of the leaders and how the women escaped imprisoned to become the 'silent army' of the War of Independence.

Charles Townshend is professor of international history at Keele University.  He is the author of many books including Easter 1916: the Irish Rebellion (Penguin, 2005); Terrorism: A very short introduction (Oxford, 2002); The State: Historical and Political Dimensions (Routledge, London 1999); Ireland: the 20th Century. (Arnold, London 1998);  The Oxford Illustrated History of Modern War (Oxford University Press 1997) ;  Making the Peace: Public Order and Public Security in Modern Britain (1993); The British Military Campaign in Ireland.

'The 22nd of April 1916' the will re-examine the events of Easter Saturday, a day which determined the nature of the Easter Rising. It will trace the process that produced Eoin MacNeill's 'countermanding order', issued on Saturday night, cancelling the Irish Volunteers' Easter Day manoeuvres, which were to have been the springboard for the rebellion. It will try to make sense of MacNeill's thinking during the preceding week, when he believed that the Volunteer movement was under threat of mass arrests by the government, and was thought to be prepared to join with the secret 'military committee' in launching armed action. (On the basis of the so-called 'Castle Document' made public on Wednesday, and the expected arrival of Casement and the arms cargo from Germany at Easter weekend.)  By this stage effective control of the Volunteers was being wrested from him.  But what did MacNeill really think the Volunteers should do? Though he was an anti-Redmondite, he was a reluctant one. Did he, and perhaps the mainstream of the Volunteers, remain Home Rulers rather than separatists?

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