This lecture is based on recent research at the Archives de la Préfecture de Police in Paris and the NLI. It focuses on Frank Byrne, a senior organiser of the Home Rule movement and the Land League who was also a director of the London branch of the Irish Republican Brotherhood and a founder of their radical off-shoot, The Irish National Invincibles. The Invincibles organised and executed the most notorious political assassination of the period, killing the newly appointed Chief Secretary Lord Frederick Cavendish and undersecretary Thomas H. Byrne in the Phoenix Park, Dublin in May 1882. This lecture examines Byrne’s time 'on the run' in France where he was ostensibly evading British justice in a most unusually open manner, shadowing the UK prime minister W.E. Gladstone in the south of France and Paris as a correspondent for a UK wire service. Once arrested his case became a cause celebre for the French left who rallied in support. The lecture will also detail his short spell in custody in France and the failed UK attempt to extradite him from France.

Frank Rynne is a historian of Irish republicanism specialising in the Irish Republican Brotherhood, the Land War and C.S. Parnell. He completed his doctoral thesis on The IRB and the Land War in Cork under the direction of W.E. Vaughan at Trinity College Dublin. He is a senior lecturer at CY Cergy Paris University and a Visiting Research Fellow at TCD.       

This seminar will be hybrid, both in-person at the Institute of Irish Studies, and online via Teams.