I come from Elphin, County Roscommon, but now live in Shipley, West Yorkshire, with my wife and two children. After completing BA and MA degrees at NUI Galway between 2003 and 2007, I moved north in 2008 to Queen’s University Belfast to do a PhD on the political life of Charles Owen O’Conor (1838-1906), a Catholic landlord and Liberal MP for County Roscommon between 1860 and 1880 who was more commonly known by the honorary Gaelic title ‘the O’Conor Don’.
After completing my PhD in 2012, I taught British and European history at Cardiff, Swansea and Leeds Beckett universities. From 2016-20, I worked in politics, first for a Labour MEP and then for the Labour Party. I have since returned to the ‘unfinished business’ of converting my PhD thesis into a monograph.
Areas of expertise
My research focuses on Catholic culture and politics in Ireland and Britain c.1800-1922, particularly on those upper and middle class Catholics from the landed, business and professional classes who wanted to maintain Ireland’s connection to Britain through the crown, the union and the empire.
My PhD thesis will finally make its appearance in book form this year: Charles Owen O’Conor, ‘the O’Conor Don’: landlordism, liberal Catholicism and unionism in nineteenth-century Ireland (forthcoming, Four Courts Press, 2022). Also forthcoming is an entry on the O’Conor Don for the History of Parliament and the Dictionary of Irish Biography. I am currently working on a journal article on ultramontanism, liberal Catholicism and the Irish university question in the nineteenth century.
My next project aims to look at the English Catholic experience in Ireland and the wider British empire during the nineteenth century through the life of Charles Raleigh Chichester (1830-1891), an English Catholic who served in the British army, married an Irish Catholic, and owned an estate in County Roscommon in the west of Ireland.
Charles Owen O’Conor, ‘the O’Conor Don’: landlordism, liberal Catholicism and unionism in nineteenth-century Ireland (forthcoming, Four Courts Press, 2022).
Book Chapters
‘Catholic Elites and the Irish University Question, 1860-80: European Solutions to an Irish Dilemma’ in Brian Heffernan et al, Life on the Fringe? Ireland and Europe, 1800-1922 (Dublin & Portland, Or., 2012), pp 177-97.
