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