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.

Gustave Doyle was born in Wexford and has spent much of his adult life walking the ridgelines and woodland paths of the county whose history he writes about. A graduate of University College Cork with a longstanding interest in the revolutionary period of the 1790s and the agrarian politics of post-Union Ireland, he came to James Corcoran's story through a combination of local knowledge and a conviction that the conventional historiography of 1798 had consistently undervalued its most enduring chapter. He has written widely on Irish republican history and the social history of rural Leinster, and regards the post-rebellion guerrilla period as the key to understanding how the United Irish tradition was transmitted to subsequent generations. The Last Insurgent is his most ambitious work to date.