Denis Taaffe
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Denis Taaffe or Dennis Taafe, who also wrote under the pseudonym Julius Vindex (bapt. 1759, Clogher, County Louth; d. 1813, Dublin) was an Irish political writer.
Educated in Franciscan colleges, Taaffe was ordained a Roman Catholic priest in 1782, but had converted to the Church of Ireland by 1788. He was soon trying to scrape a living as a tutor and pamphleteer. A supporter of the French Revolution and the United Irishmen, Taaffe claimed to have fought in the Irish Rebellion of 1798. He edited a patriotic newspaper, The Shamroc, and his pamphlets against the 1800 Act of Union saw him arrested for seditious libel in 1799. He was a founder member and first secretary of the Gaelic Society of Dublin in 1806, established to research and revive traditions of Irish literature.[1]
[edit] Works
- The probability, causes, and consequences of a union between Great Britain and Ireland, 1798
- Vindication of the Irish nation, 1802
- An impartial history of Ireland from the period of the English invasion to the present time, 4 vols., 1809–11. Available at Internet Archive
[edit] References
- ^ John Thomas Gilbert, A history of the city of Dublin, 1854, p. 96
- Murray Smith, ‘Taaffe, Denis (bap. 1759, d. 1813)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, accessed 21 Dec 2007
[edit] External links
- Works by or about Denis Taaffe in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
