Brian Hanley
speaker
1,140 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 16 Sep
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 — 3 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 2.
Appearances
Irish History Podcast · The Rise of the Provisional IRA: Conspiracy vs Reality · 16 Sep 2026
podcast
When in actual fact it was complex and messy and it was the late 1960s, and people in Ireland were interested in what was going on elsewhere.
And the government did feel
it's its kind of credentials were a little bit threatened by this, you know, upheavals in the north and and what it might do to the south as well.
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.
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