Róisín Meets . . . veteran broadcaster Joe Duffy

On this week's podcast veteran broadcaster Joe Duffy describes how researching his new book on the 1916 Easter Rising became a "total obsession".

Joe Duffy’s three-year trawl through census records and archives has resulted in Children of the Rising.

“Morning noon and night, Christmas day. I’d come off the phone and my wife would say, ‘What are you saying about the kids?’ And I’d say, no, I meant the kids of 1916!”

The obsession arose from the realisation that many of the child victims of 1916 have been forgotten.

“They were never remembered. One part of it is understandable,” he says.

“They were children who died, obviously they didn’t have children, they didn’t have direct descendants.”

The socio-economic realities of the time also played a part, he says.

“It’s wrong to say life was cheap, but a lot more children were born into families, a lot more children were dying and then over time they were just written out of history.

“I discovered families where siblings were subsequently born, they weren’t told about the child that had died.

“There was a tradition in Dublin if a child dies young, which happened a lot, if another child came a long they gave that child the same name as the deceased child.”

Children of the Rising: The Untold Story of the Young Lives Lost During Easter 1916 is available now.

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