The Collins Press / Biography & autobiography / Historical

Michael Collins

by Anne Dolan & William Murphy – The Collins Press (October 05, 2018)

‘It was the most providential escape yet. It will probably have the effect of making them think that I am even more mysterious than they believe me to be, and that is saying a good deal.’ 

Michael Collins...

Frederick Douglass in Ireland

by Laurence Fenton – The Collins Press (March 04, 2014)

‘When we strove to blot out the stain of slavery and advance the rights of man,’ President Obama declared in Dublin in 2011, ‘we found common cause with your struggle against oppression. Frederick Douglass,...

The Last Blasket King

by Gerald Hayes & Eliza Kane – The Collins Press (April 20, 2015)

The last King of the Great Blasket Island was Pádraig Ó Catháin, known as Peats Mhicí, who served for quarter of a century until his death in 1929. The King helped the islanders navigate through life and...

Captain Francis Crozier

by Michael Smith – The Collins Press (June 12, 2006)

Irishman Francis Crozier was a major figure in nineteenth-century polar exploration. His voyages with Parry, Ross and Franklin lifted the veil from the frozen wastes of the Arctic and Antarctic, paving the way...

Black Cat in the Window

by Liam Ó Murchú – The Collins Press (October 15, 1999)

There is a large floor of broken boards, covered here and there with bit and pieces of broken linoleum. I cannot see the walls or what's above them, but there is a woman at a fire who keeps looking at me, and...

Daniel O'Connell

by Jody Moylan – The Collins Press (April 01, 2016)

Daniel O’Connell – ‘The Liberator’ – lived a big, great and graphic life. Born in Kerry in 1775, he witnessed some of the most pivotal events in European history: the Penal Laws, the French Revolution,...

The GAA v Douglas Hyde

by Cormac Moore – The Collins Press (September 07, 2012)

On 13 November 1938, just months after his inauguration, President Douglas Hyde attended a soccer match between Ireland and Poland. In a passionate reaction, the GAA declared that by attending a ‘foreign game’,...

The Loneliest Boy in the World

by Gearoid Cheaist O Cathain & Patricia Ahern – The Collins Press (May 01, 2014)

* ‘The Loneliest Boy in the World – he has only seagulls as playmates.’ 1949 newspaper article * Gearóid Cheaist Ó Catháin had a unique childhood – he was the last child brought up on the Blasket...

The Secret of Kit Cavenaugh

by Anne Holland – The Collins Press (October 15, 2013)

Christian – ‘Kit’ – Cavenaugh, born in 1667 in Dublin, grew up on a Leixlip farm. A dragoon in the Marlborough Wars, Kit led an adventurous life, courting women, fighting duels and arguing a paternity...

From the Great Blasket to America

by Michael Carney & Gerald Hayes – The Collins Press (April 05, 2013)

Mike Carney was born on the Great Blasket Island in 1920 in that unique, isolated Irish-speaking community. Mike left in 1937 to seek a better future in Dublin and eventually settled in Springfield, Massachusetts,...