Eyewitness accounts of 1641 Irish rebellion released online

The first-hand testimonies of thousands of people who witnessed the bloody rebellion that paved the way for centuries of sectarian conflict in Ireland have been released online. The unparalleled collection of accounts, which provide graphic details about the massacres and plunder accompanying the Catholic uprising of 1641, will be available for free at www.1641.tcd.ie, giving users the chance to scrutinise their contents in depth for the first time. It follows a painstaking three-year research project in which all 19,000 pages of the original depositions (more than 5,000 separate sworn statements), many of which are almost illegible, were transcribed by a team of researchers, led by the Universities of Cambridge and Aberdeen and Trinity College, Dublin. The project was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, with substantial contributions from the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences and Trinity College, Dublin. Researchers believe that the site's launch will enable historians to understand much more fully what remains one of the least-understood massacres in European history, in which many thousands of men, women and children lost their lives. Experts are still divided over whether the uprising by Irish Catholics in October 1641, which followed decades of simmering tension with English Protestant settlers, was meant to be bloodless, or if violence was always intended. In the event, the rebellion only enjoyed brief and partial success, before it sparked a decade of savage warfare that culminated in Oliver Cromwell's equally brutal conquest which began in 1649 (with the infamous Drogheda Massacre).