Features

A sexual revolution in the west of Ireland?

Few places suffered more severely from a combination of eviction and famine than Kilrush and its surrounding districts in the mid-nineteenth century. Only Skibbereen in south-west Cork and a few other parishes in the west of Ireland are likely to have experienced a comparable degree of human misery. But Kilrush has a further claim on … Read more

A church ‘in decline’? The pre-Reformation Irish Church

Our understanding of the Church in Ireland before the Tudor reformations has long been distorted by a paradigm that insisted that it was ‘in decline’. Historians conventionally trawled through the records of centuries to find instances of pluralism, absenteeism, concubinage, simony and other disorders, without putting that evidence into context or offering any assessment as … Read more