Articles

Canon O’Hanlon is best known in Laois for his History of the Queen’s County, a two-volume work outlining the history of County Laois from the earliest times to the 20th century. Expertly researched and annotated, this is an invaluable reference work. Although an academic historian Canon O’Hanlon also valued the folklore of his native county...Read More

Article by James G. Ryan on an interesting item in the De Vesci papers held in the National Library of Ireland, being a list of people who purchased Indian meal from the De Vesci Estate in July 1801Read More

Estate papers are an intriguing mix of the myriad documents generated by a family and their staff in the management of their estate, often over several generations. The contents typically comprise rentals, deeds, letters, staff records, maps and wills. Within this mix of trivia, a document can occasionally be found that illustrates some aspect of...Read More

In recent years the National Library of Ireland took possession of a scrapbook containing documents and newspaper clippings concerning a career in the late-nineteenth century colonial administration of British West Africa. The scrapbook belonged to a man born in Mountrath in November 1842 named John Joseph Crooks. Crooks first landed in what was then known...Read More

On Friday November 9 1973 in the murky darkness of a winter morning stretched out along the road from Dublin to Portlaoise prison was a military operation the likes of which had not been seen since the civil war 50 years before.Read More

On Sunday the 5th of October 1873 Maryborough (now Portlaoise) hosted a rally spoken at by controversy provoking Thomas Mooney. Mooney wrote in the U.S.-based Irish World newspaper. It was then the largest selling publication catering to an Irish-American audience and would become known for its support for the ‘skirmishing’ wing of the Fenian movement.Read More

On the 6th of March 1923 a party of Free State soldiers were lured out of Tralee to their deaths in a booby trap explosion near the village of Knocknagoshel. The vicious retribution their comrades went on to visit upon the enemy guerrillas is well-known to this day. This article tells something of the story...Read More

There is a somewhat curious monument in the court square in Stradbally. Erected ‘In memory of a brave father and two worthy sons’ its curiosity lies in the fact that it commemorates two pro-Treaty victims of the political violence of the 1920s, something which is comparatively rare, and in that it does not mention the...Read More

Some veterans of the Great War came home to war — they put their Royal Irish Constabulary uniforms back on, or they were shot as informers by the Irish Republican Army, or they joined the I.R.A. and provided a much needed leaven of military experience. This article tells the story of some of these men...Read More

John Henry Edge (1841‒1916) was the grandson of John Edge who was a manager of the Newtown colliery for the Grand Canal Company. John Henry spent part of his childhood in Clonbrock House, on the very southern edge of Laois, and part in Wicklow. He became a novelist late in life and published two novels...Read More

In the middle of July 1921 along with the news of the Truce came the news of the last deaths and the last imprisonments.Read More

Between 1937 and 1939 the Irish Folklore Commission collected folklore in primary schools across the Irish Free State. In looking back to the past they were more looking back to the time of the Penal Laws or the Famine, but here and there the more recent revolutionary period could creep in, especially under the rubric...Read More

From 1907 to 1927 the Rev. Dudley Fletcher was the Church of Ireland rector of Coolbanagher. Fletcher gives us a window into the world of southern Unionism, and allows us to say something of Protestants, the Revolution and the Irish Free State.Read More

In 1876 there were twenty-two landed estates in Laois reaching a value of £2,000 or over. Together they contained almost 200,000 acres, roughly half of the county. The final stage in the undoing of this particular concentration of economic and political power took place in the 1910s and 1920sRead More

In 1922 twenty-six counties of Ireland left the United Kingdom, they did not however leave the British Empire. In this article we will explore some Irish, and more specifically Laois, connections with that wider world of the British Empire.Read More

A joint German-Irish flight into aviation history is an article by Teddy Fennelly on Colonel James Fitzmaurice, an aviation pioneer, who grew up in Portlaoise. The article was first published in the Laois Heritage Society Journal. Vol. 4 in 2008Read More

This article is about three ballads current locally in the opening decades of the twentieth century, all of which speak to that time as a period of profound social change.Read More

If one were to ask a Laois person to name somebody famous who hailed from within the county, one name unlikely to feature among the responses would be that of John Kinder Labatt, who was the founder of the world-famous Canadian Labatt Brewing Company in the mid-nineteenth century.Read More

The final dissolution of the six southern Irish infantry regiments of the British Army took place on the 31st of July 1922. They were the Royal Irish Regiment, the Royal Irish Fusiliers, the Connaught Rangers, the Royal Munster Fusiliers, the Royal Dublin Fusiliers and the Leinster Regiment. The flag associated with the Leinster Regiment, the...Read More

At the time of the Truce in 1921 Denis Dwyer was a Volunteer in the D (Luggacurran) company of the 4th Battalion, Laois Brigade, Irish Republican Army and James Kealy a Volunteer in the E (Ballickmoyler) company of the same battalion. A year later Kealy was killed in the Civil War fighting on the Pro-Treaty...Read More

The rumour went like this: on Saturday the 9th of June 1832 the Virgin Mary appeared on the church altar in Charleville, in north county Cork, and left ashes which were the only protection against cholera. The ashes were to be taken to neighbouring houses and placed under the rafters, then the inhabitants of those...Read More

It is often claimed that the men who returned from the Great War were forgotten after they returned to an Ireland which had changed. This is in fact simply not true of the immediate decades after the war, however true it might be for much later decades at the close of the twentieth century. Moreover,...Read More

On the 1st of January 1920, despite it being the fair day, the streets of Maryborough were strangely silent. The silence was not to last. What was missing was motor traffic and not just because there was much less of it then than now. The absence was due to a cessation of all motor driving...Read More

On the 12th of March 1922 there was a cattle drive in the townland of Ballycarnan. Ballycarnan is just south of Portlaoise, to the east of the road to Abbeyleix. The property was then owned by Miss Flora S. Cassan of Sheffield House. In her evidence when making a bid for compensation in 1924 she...Read More

This article is an extract from a forthcoming chapter on the labour movement in Laois which will appear in a collection of essays to be published by Umiskin Press on the provincial working-class experience of the Irish revolution.Read More

In the spring of 1922, there were twelve battalions comprising the soon-to be disbanded six southern Irish regiments of the British Army – four of those battalions were stationed in India and had to return home from there for disbandment – they were the 1st Battalion Leinster Regiment, 1st Battalion Connaught Rangers, 2nd Battalion Royal...Read More

One of the many treasures safeguarded in Laois Libraries’ Local Studies section is a memoir from Timahoe, a memoir which begins in 1913. The work is entitled Timahoe, as I remember 1914 and the memorialist is Jack Quigley, of Ballygormill, Timahoe. This is an undated typed document. The present article offers some extracts from the...Read More

In 1921 the Wolfhill Collieries company was planning an extensive expansion and seeking investment funds through offering shares to the public. Unfortunately, the company went into receivership in the summer of 1925. So this phase of coal-mining in Wolfhill ran between 1910, when efforts to re-start began, and 1925, with receivership and eventual liquidation.Read More

Kathleen Muldowney was one of five Labour candidates nominated for election to Maryborough Town Commission in the local urban and municipal elections of January 1920. Maryborough Town Commission was a layer of local government established in 1855 and was finally wound-up in 2014, by then re-named Portlaoise Town Council.Read More

On January 26th 1922 Maryborough Courthouse resounded to cries of “Up the Republic” from the gallery as a self-described “Republican soldier” was taken from the dock denouncing “the informers of Ballinakill” as he went. The prisoners were Peter Campion, John Campion and Alphonsus O’Hara. The charge was murder. Despite the defiant posturing this speech from...Read More

On 20th January 1921 Thomas Lawless, a 47 year old military veteran and father of seven, was shot dead by a group of 'Black and Tans' in his home on Lyster Lane. Lawless, who had fought for the British Empire abroad, became one of its' victims at home.Read More

Learn how a small newspaper article published a hundred years ago inspired and facilitated a deeper investigation into the revolutionary activities of a family member.Read More

On Sunday the 4th of June 1922 open-air rallies took place in Portlaoise and Rathdowney in support of Labour candidate for the Leix-Offaly constituency, William Davin. In this article we are going to look at Cissie Cahalan — one of the speakers at the rallies and at shop workers more generally. Cissie Cahalan was then...Read More

In the frontline of meeting the challenge of guerrilla insurgency was the Royal Irish Constabulary. The Dead of the Irish Revolution lists five Laois men among the fatal casualties from the ranks of the R.I.C. in the year 1921. They were John Doogue, Michael Quinn, Joseph Hughes, William Walsh and Thomas Dowling.Read More

On Wednesday the 12th of April 1922 there took place a meeting of, what some newspaper reports called, the “Protestant Unionists of Durrow and District”.[1] This assembly was in response to events in the north-east of Ireland and for this reason in this article we’ll have to delve into Belfast for a while before returning...Read More

Following 'The Treaty' the last major evacuation and hand-over was the surrender of Kellyville R.I.C. barracks in Portlaoise on Saturday the 18th of March 1922. In the words of historian Michael Rafter that was “seen by the people as being the end of British rule in the county.” This was the culmination of a series...Read More

The removal of the British Army was perhaps the most profound transformation following the establishment of the Irish Free State. Today we are accustomed to thinking of the role of the British Army in Ireland in terms of repression. Doubtless this was, at times, the case, and certainly the case in the years of the...Read More

The pivotal urban public space in the revolution in Laois was the Market Square, Portlaoise. This was the centre piece for a range of demonstrations and rallies —with the focal point often the sadly no longer present Town Hall. We’ll look at a couple of these mobilisations here.Read More

In this article, and the next couple of articles, we’ll look at how public space and public buildings were used in the revolution or transformed in the revolution and at the role of these places in the story of how Maryborough became Portlaoise.Read More

The Orange Pole in Mountmellick became the Loyalist testament to the suppression of the Nationalist Insurgents in 1798. It was located upon the Market House which was once situated in the centre of the Market Square, which we now know as O’Connell Square.Read More

The Pigotts came to Laois as part of the Plantation of Queen’s County in the 1550s. John Pigott was an English captain who accompanied Thomas Radcliffe, Earl of Sussex, into Queen’s County circa 1558. He came from Salop and was connected to the ancient Pigott family established at Chetwynd Edgmont. For his service John Pigott...Read More

The building which we now know as the Masonic Hall on Church Street was built in 1765 and functioned originally as the first Methodist chapel in the town of Mountmellick. When the Methodist Body moved in 1882 to the Gideon Ousley Memorial Chapel on Market Street (now Parnell Street), the Freemasons of Lodge No.660 took...Read More