By Joe Curran Recent controversies about the costs of the new Children’s Hospital and the control of the National Maternity Hospital highlight the significance of healthcare funding and management. Debates about such matters are not new. Though the reduction of human misery is the shared goal, these debates have incorporated other matters, including finance, hospital … Read more
CARRICKMACROSS, CO. MONAGHAN By Damian Murphy Monalty House is set within a drumlin landscape two miles south of the market town of Carrickmacross, Co. Monaghan. It is the second house to occupy the site. Evidence of the first, ‘a very good Lime & Stone wall house with a small Orchard’, survives in the form … Read more
By Anne Casey On 16 December 1848, fifteen-year-old Catherine McNeill from Roscommon was one of 234 girls to board the Digby, the fifth ship of the Earl Grey scheme to ferry its live cargo of Irish orphan girls to Australia at the height of the Irish Great Hunger. Departing one of Ireland’s worst-hit counties—which … Read more
By Brian Hopkins and Peter McClintock Darver, Co. Louth, 22 December 1799: on this date and in that village Nicholas Joseph Callan was born into a prosperous farming family with a spread of business interests, including brewing. His formal education began at the Presbyterian Dundalk Academy, followed by a stint at Navan Seminary in preparation … Read more
By Laura Fitzachary ‘It must, however, be remembered, when considering their good fortune, that in the day in which they lived beauty was all powerful’ —Francis Gerard, Some celebrated Irish beauties of the last century (1895). Dublin in the mid-eighteenth century had varying degrees of social hierarchy, and the highest level of social standing, or … Read more