Brian Hanley
speaker
657 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 12 Jun
Brian Hanley’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 2.
Appearances
Liverpool and New York were both global hubs for Irish revolutionaries during the struggle for independence.
And in both cases, class, ethnicity, race, and religion were all significant factors in how these cities reacted to the Irish struggle and at particular moments how Irish revolutionaries mobilized.
Liverpool was the most important port for communications between Dublin and the United States.
And the European continent.
Paddy Daly, who was the IRA commander in the city, recalled how
The liners plying between Liverpool and New York, especially the White Star and Cunard boats, had Irishmen aboard who were employed to take dispatches from Liverpool for New York.
Scarcely a boat left Liverpool for an Irish, continental or American port, which had not on board one or two Irishmen who were eager to do their part.
Almost all the munitions in the other great cities like Manchester, Newcastle, Birmingham, and Glasgow passed through it.
So Liverpool was very important in terms of smuggling.
arms and equipment to Ireland, but also in terms of smuggling people out of Ireland and to the United States, and also for transatlantic communications.
Liverpool as a city was intimately connected to Dublin, but also connected by trade to Newry, Drahada, Dundalk, and other Irish port towns.
As well as the transatlantic routes, Liverpool was connected to Hamburg and Genoa and elsewhere on the continent.
By the mid eighteen fifties, Liverpool was Europe's premier port for emigration to North America.
Of the five and a half million Europeans who crossed the Atlantic between eighteen sixty and nineteen hundred, almost three quarters of them sailed from Liverpool.
So the Irish, the Scandinavians, the Germans, the Russians, the Poles, Eastern European Jews, and so on all travelled to Liverpool, which gave the city a particular character and made it almost unique, certainly in England.
Liverpool regarded itself as a worldwide city rather than merely a British provincial one.
It was described in the early nineteen hundreds as the most un English of Victorian provincial cities.
The Liverpool critic in eighteen seventy seven asserted that, unlike the dwellers in most English towns, all of us in Liverpool are to a great extent citizens of the world.
For everything around us tells us of far off countries and foreign ways.
The city was very conscious of its difference.
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