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