What do the IRA and the submarine have in common? That's not a riddle, really, or if it is a riddle it's not one with a joke for an answer. The answer is--as military historians know, but most of the rest of us do not thanks to the broad devaluation of military history these days--John Philip Holland.

Holland was born in 1840 in County Clare, Ireland, just in time for the famine. He spoke Irish at home and learned English at the local national school. He was an inventor--and a revolutionary, an active member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, which is the IRA's historical parent organization. Working with his fellow Fenians, Holland came up with a plan to attack British ships from underwater, via a submarine/torpedo arrangement. Funded by both the Irish revolutionary movement and the U.S. Navy, Holland spent decades working on his design, and finally came up with a workable one in 1897. The U.S. Navy bought the design, which was eventually also adopted by England and Japan. The submarine changed the course of war, and, by extension, twentieth-century global history. Holland didn't live to see that happen, though -- he died in 1914, just as World War I was beginning.

The close connection between Holland's republican imagination--which, like those of many of his countrymen, ran readily to violence--and his technological genius can be seen in the name he gave to his first prototype: Fenian Ram.