Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland

PRONI Symposium: Spying on Hibernia

On Thursday, 28 November, the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI), in collaboration with VRTI Research Fellow Dr Tim Murtagh, hosted a one-day symposium on Spying on Hibernia: Intelligence Gathering in Ireland, 1660-1900.  This event, which attracted a sizeable audience of interested researchers and the general public, brought together the work of many Historians to present this important theme which runs through so much of Irish history.

The event was broken into three panels, on the Seventeeth, Eighteenth and Nineteenth centuries respectively.

Dr Neil Johnston, Head of Early Modern Records, The National Archives (UK) | VRTI Co-Investigator on INSPIRE, presents his paper: “Securing Ireland, 1660–1685: State Intelligence in the reign of Charles II”.  Photo courtesy of Joel Herman.

The programme was as follows

PANEL 1: The Seventeenth Century:

Dr Neil Johnston (The National Archives UK, Head of Early Modern Records) – Securing Ireland, 1660–1685: State Intelligence in the reign of Charles II

Dr Eoin Kinsella (Royal Irish Academy, Managing-editor of the Dictionary of Irish Biography) – Acting in plain sight: Catholic agents and double agents in Jacobite and Williamite Ireland

Dr Frances Nolan (University College Dublin, SFI-IRC Pathway Fellow) – Zealous for ‘the Cause’: Irish women as Jacobite agents, 1689-1720

PANEL 2: The Eighteenth Century:

Prof Thomas Bartlett ( University of Aberdeen, Professor Emeritus of Irish History)- Opposing Insurgency: The letters of George Holdcroft, postmaster, Kells, County Meath, to Dublin Castle, 1793-1803

Dr Jonathan Wright (Maynooth University, Lecturer)- The clergyman and the informer: John Cleland, Nicholas Mageean and the gathering of intelligence in late eighteenth-century Saintfield

Ruairí Nolan (Independent Scholar, creator of Ireland and the Age of Revolution newsletter) – Pyrrhic Justice: the success and failure of British Intelligence in the arrest and trial of Revd. William F. Jackson 1794-5

PANEL 3: The Nineteenth Century: 

Hugh Murphy (Maynooth University, PhD and Deputy Librarian) – To discover the origin, nature and extent of the Evil’: distilling truth from fiction in managing unrest in early nineteenth century Ireland

Dr Jay Roszman (University College Cork, Lecturer) – Creating ‘Intelligence’ out of Chaos: Outrage Papers and the Production of Political Knowledge, 1836-1855

Prof William Nolan ( University College Dublin, Emeritus Professor of Geography) – Spies and Informers and the collapse of the Young Ireland movement 1848

Date
Friday, 29 November 2024, 12:00 PM

Author
Jean-Philippe SanGiovanni