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.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 2.
Appearances
The majority of the explosives used by the IRA in Ireland came from mines in Scotland and in Lancashire.
Liverpool, of course, was a key port in terms of smuggling, weapons and equipment to Ireland.
Republican women, some of the coming among, were important again, both in subterranean and in political activity.
The IRA in Britain was a little different socially to the IRA in Ireland.
In Britain the IRA was overwhelmingly working class.
including many skilled and unskilled workers, such as miners and dockers, for example.
Among them were people like Gilbert Barrington, a Labour counsellor on Teeside, who was a public figure and also secretly an IRA officer.
But there was also a public face to Irish Republicanism in Britain.
Sinn Fein remained organized as a political party.
But by nineteen nineteen the Republican movement in Ireland were very conscious of the need for an organisation that would attract a broader base of support for Irish self determination in Britain itself.
The central figure in this was a man called Art O'Brien.
He became vice president of the Irish Self Determination League.
In reality, he was the chief organizer of this organization.
He was a close confidant of Collins and Devalera, a senior figure in the IRB, and also a conduit for contacts with Indian, Egyptian, and other revolutionaries in Britain.
O'Brien was an electrical engineer from a prosperous middle class background.
been born in London, joined the Gaelic League in nineteen hundred, and then the IRB in Sinn Fein after nineteen sixteen.
He was, in many ways, the presiding genius of the Irish movement in Britain.
Indeed, one activist described him as the god of our little world.
O'Brien was central to establishing the public face of republicanism in Britain, and this was the Irish Self Determination League, which was founded in march nineteen nineteen and had about four thousand members by the end of that year.
As the war in Ireland intensified, and as attention was more and more drawn to the struggle for independence, the ISDL grew.
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