The gradual dismantling of the Penal Laws in the later eighteenth century fostered a modest spate of chapel-building across Ireland. Emancipation under the Catholic Relief Act of 1829, however, encouraged an accelerated building programme celebrating the liberated status of the Catholic Church. More often than not, each new church was a communal effort combining fundraising … Read more
The first celebrated victory of the ‘Gentlemen of Ireland’ over the English at cricket was in a match played on Monday and Tuesday 26–27 May 1862 at Lord’s, the headquarters of the MCC and universally known as the home of cricket. Because the opposition was an ‘MCC Club and Ground’ team it cannot be considered … Read more
Sometime in the mid-1820s tenants on the Mahon estate at Ahascragh in north County Galway wrote to their landlord, begging him not to evict them: ‘Pray pity your poor people who always did and always will pay their rents well, better drown us than turn us off, for there is no place for us anywhere. … Read more
Landed estate papers allow us to examine the lives of ordinary rural people in times of economic turmoil, and rentals, in particular, enable us to analyse the struggles of those on the margins of society, endeavouring to pay their rent and desperately trying to hold on to the small patches of potato ground on which … Read more
The minute books of municipal corporations, while not quite reflecting the views of the humbler citizen, capture the affairs that trouble those with their hands on the levers of power and an eye on the concerns of their ratepayers. The minute books of the town commissioners of New Ross, Co. Wexford, survive from 1685. They … Read more