There are certain names in Ireland that you can't utter without being greeted with a look of disdain and/or disgust - here are a few of them.
There are certain names in Ireland that you can't utter without being greeted with a look of disdain and/or disgust by those around you thanks to their rather infamous relationships with our country and its bloody history.
Here is IrishCentral's list of the top most-disliked people in Ireland.
Diarmuid Mac Murrough
He invited the English to Ireland in 1169 after losing his throne as King of Leinster. King Henry II took him up on it and the Irish have been trying to get rid of the British ever since.
Oliver Cromwell
Oliver Cromwell.
Cromwell decided to use Ireland as his own killing field to advance his political career in Britain. Murdered and deported tens of thousands of Irish as slaves.
Charles Trevelyan
Britain’s overseer of Ireland during the Great Hunger. He decided that economic policy and ‘not coddling the poor’ was more important than millions starving.
Lord Lucan
The worst landlord in Ireland during the Great Hunger. He turned 10,000 people out of their homes in Ballinrobe in Mayo alone. Thousands starved to death as he ruthlessly cleared the land.
Captain William O’Shea
He decided to divorce Kitty O’Shea despite knowing it would bring down Charles Stewart Parnell, who was on the verge of achieving Home Rule. He was egged on by British interests to do so. Despite the fact that O’Shea and Kitty were separated when she met Parnell, the resulting Victorian-era scandal took down Ireland’s "Uncrowned King."
David Lloyd George
Also known as ‘the Welsh Wizard,’ this British Prime Minister split the Irish delegation during the treaty talks and insisted on Irish partition and keeping his unionist backers happy at all costs.
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Winston Churchill
Winston Churchill
He invented the Black and Tans and was responsible for sending them to Ireland to force the Irish rebellion into surrender.
General Eoin O’Duffy
In the 1930s, he started the Blueshirts, which was the Irish equivalent of the Nazis. He raised a brigade to fight with Franco in the Spanish Civil War and was an admirer of Hitler.
Margaret Thatcher
Margaret Thatcher.
She allowed ten Irish Republican Army (IRA) prisoners, led by Bobby Sands, to starve to death in 1981. The bloody-handed move backfired when Sands was elected as MP and kick-started the Sinn Fein political rise a month before his death.
Colonel Derek Wilford
He was a Parachute Regiment commander in Derry in 1972 when he unleashed the paras to fire on unarmed civilians on Bloody Sunday. 26 people were shot and 14 died. Wilford subsequently became known as “the Butcher of the Bogside.”
* Originally published in 2014, updated in Jan 2024.
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