Ulster Political Lives, 1886–1921 examines the lives of 50 of Ulster's most significant political figures in the turbulent period from the first Home Rule Bill of 1886 to the foundation of the state of Northern Ireland in 1921. It includes articles on leading figures such as Edward Carson, James Craig and Joseph Devlin, but also on lesser-known but interesting figures such as Margaret Byers, Winifred Carney and George Clark, whose lives are also significant and instructive. It details the lives of unionists and nationalists, loyalists and republicans, but also those who did not fit into such neat categories—socialists, trade unionists and feminists, who often avoided identification with the major political groupings but nonetheless made noteworthy contributions to the creation of Northern Ireland and the shape it took after 1921.
About the Dictionary of Irish Biography: The Dictionary of Irish Biography, a research project of the Royal Irish Academy, is the most comprehensive and authoritative biographical dictionary yet published for Ireland. It comprises over 10,000 lives, which describe and assess the careers of subjects in all fields of endeavour, including politics, law, religion, literature, journalism, architecture, music and the arts, the sciences, medicine, entertainment and sport.
James Quinn is the managing editor of the Dictionary of Irish Biography. The Dictionary of Irish Biography currently contains almost 9,900 'lives' of prominent men and women born in Ireland, and the noteworthy Irish careers of those born outside Ireland. The scope of the dictionary extends from the earliest times to the twenty-first century. It is an indispensable work of reference for scholars, journalists, broadcasters, diplomats, and the general reader interested in Ireland's past or in biography. The online edition is updated twice yearly.
Patrick Maume was born in Cork and is a graduate of University College Cork and Queen's University Belfast. He lived in Northern Ireland almost continuously 1990-2011, and now resides in Dublin. He has taught nineteenth and twentieth-century Irish history at UCD and QUB and politics at QUB. He has been a DIB researcher since 2003 (and briefly in 2001). He has published books on Daniel Corkery and DP Moran, a study of early C20 Irish nationalism, and numerous articles, chapters and edited texts on nineteenth and twentieth-century Ireland.
