Claims of ‘foreign funding’ of anti-amendment campaign

There were claims by some pro-amendment activists that the anti-amendment campaigners were being funded by foreign forces determined to undermine Ireland’s status as the protector of traditional Christian values. Far from this being the case, Andrew remembered how tight the budgets were and the lack of resources available to the activists:

Most vicious and refractory girls’the reformatories at Ballinasloe and Monaghan

‘Ulster Reformatory School for Catholic Girls, Monaghan’—originally Spark’s Lake brewery, purchased for the St Louis nuns by Charles Bianconi. (St Louis convent archive, Monaghan)
‘Ulster Reformatory School for Catholic Girls, Monaghan’—originally Spark’s Lake brewery, purchased for the St Louis nuns by Charles Bianconi. (St Louis convent archive, Monaghan)

On 2 July 1883, fifteen-year-old Bridget Carroll arrived at the Spark’s Lake reformatory in Monaghan to serve the remainder of a sentence that had been imposed on her four years earlier. She had been tried at Loughrea petty sessions in September 1879 on a charge that she ‘Did threaten to stab Anne Flynn’. She was found guilty and sentenced to a short term of imprisonment, followed by five years in a reformatory in Ballinasloe. This reformatory, which had been her home for nearly four years, was now closing, and she had made the long journey to Monaghan to serve out her sentence under the supervision of the St Louis sisters.

Read more

Richard Cantillon —the father of economics

Kerryman Richard Cantillon was born in the 1680s to a Hiberno-Norman landowning family from Ballyheigue. The family fought alongside James II, to whom they were related, during the Williamite War and were consequently dispossessed of their lands. Nevertheless, Cantillon’s landed gentry origins were to leave a lasting impression on his work, and his experiences in … Read more