Denis Taaffe

Denis Taaffe or Dennis Taafe (bapt. 1759, Clogher, County Louth; d. 1813, Dublin) was an Irish political writer, also known under the pseudonym Julius Vindex.

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]

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

References

1. ^ 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

External links

• Works by or about Denis Taaffe in libraries (WorldCat catalog)

Persondata
Name	Taaffe, Denis
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	1759
Place of birth
Date of death	1813
Place of death