James Corcoran and the Six-Year War for the Irish Republic

James Corcoran and the Six-Year War for the Irish Republic 

In the summer of 1798, the Irish rebellion that had promised to make the island a republic died on Vinegar Hill. Most survivors went home. James Corcoran went into the woods.

For six extraordinary years, this young man from northern County Wexford sustained the last active armed resistance of the 1798 era from a base in the Killaughrim Woods, raiding government supply lines, recruiting deserters from the Crown's own forces, defeating military expeditions that outnumbered him twelve to one, and refusing every amnesty offer that would have saved his life. When Michael Dwyer surrendered in December 1803, Corcoran stood alone as the last rebel leader of the United Irish generation still in the field. He remained there until February 11, 1804, when an informer's betrayal ended six years of extraordinary survival.

James Corcoran and the Six-Year War for the Irish Republic  reconstructs the full arc of Corcoran's world, the Penal Laws that made rebellion inevitable, the United Irishmen's secular republican dream, the catastrophe of New Ross and Vinegar Hill, and the remarkable guerrilla campaign that followed, drawing on the latest historical scholarship to tell the story of a man whose significance lies not in any military triumph but in what his persistence reveals about political conviction, community solidarity, and the nature of colonial resistance. This is the definitive account of the long 1798: the rebellion that refused to end.