Once on the edge of the town O’Moore Street, Tullamore was, in the 1800s, known as Windmill Street because of the two windmills erected by the 1720s on the hill south of O’Moore Street The hill (probably the Tulach Mhór giving Tullamore its name) is now obscured by the houses from the courthouse to Spollanstown Road erected after the 1790s. Today O’Moore Street still exhibits some of the mixed residential development that was commonplace before the 1900s and the building of class demarcated suburban housing. Yet O’Moore Street was itself comparatively rural in the early 1800s, but now serves as an artery for traffic to Cloncollog, Clonminch, Killeigh (Mountmellick) and Geashill – with their extensive housing and shopping facilities. In the once undeveloped field opening to Clonminch and Spollanstown the substantial Tullamore Court Hotel was built in 1997. The street has more than a 300-year history it its physical development. The lack of decisions on good planning neglected to be taken in the 1750s continue to impact almost 300 years later and contribute the configuration the street has today.
As darkness fell on the evening of 22 July 1806, the clatter of horses’ hooves and the sharp barking of orders in German temporarily drowned out the moans of wounded men and the confused murmurs of bewildered bystanders. This scene was not a foreign battleground, but the Irish town of Tullamore, in the then King’s County. The casualties resulted from a riotous action between representatives from two widely-separated portions of the domain of George III – Irish militiamen and soldiers of the King’s German Legion, a corps raised from exiled Hanoverians after the fall of the Electorate of Hanover to Napoleon in 1803. These two nationalities were thrown together in the spring of 1806, when units of the Legion were sent to Ireland to serve as garrison troops.
The governance of the Tullamore Poor Law Union began in 1839 with the formation of the Tullamore Board of Guardians (the Board) under the Poor Law Commissioners (P.L.C.) sitting in Dublin. The unions were governed by the 1838 Poor Law Act.[i]
The guiding principles of the Irish Poor Law was the same as that of the 1834 English Poor Law; that the workhouse inmates should be worse fed than those in the district outside the workhouse.[ii] Two days after the first admissions to the Tullamore Workhouse, on June 11th , 1842 the first dietary scale for the workhouse was adopted by the Board and approved three days later.[iii]
The fever hospital of 1846, later the county hospital, 1921-42(more…)
Ted Barrett, one of the pioneers of cruising on the canal, was well aware of its environmental and leisure value. By the late 1960s he was advocating linking the canals with the lakes that might be made from the disused bogs to form a type of Norfolk Broads in Ireland.[1] In this letter of October 1964 he was to show his diplomatic and marketing skills in the course of advocating canal cruising. Barrett was the author of a guide to cruising on the canals.[2] At about the same time as Barrett Harry Egan and Frank Egan of Tullamore had developed a cruiser hire business based at Tullamore Harbour under the name Gay Line Cruisers. Later this was followed by Celtic Canal Cruisers (Mike and Heather Thomas). In fact by mid-1964 things were looking up for the Grand Canal after several years of uncertainty due to the Dublin Corporation proposal to cover over parts of the canal line in Dublin to facilitate sewerage disposal. The IWAI had been formed in 1954 to promote all the waterways but by the 1960s was in the van in protecting the Grand Canal waterway. A branch had been formed in Tullamore with the support of Frank Egan and PV Egan. These men went on to establish Gay Line Cruisers, based in Tullamore, and got involved in boat building. 1964 was also the year in which Brendan Smyth (d. 2021) of Banagher started his Silver Line Cruisers business – now one of the most successful on the Shannon and led by his children Barbara and Morgan. By 1991 up to nine hire cruise firms were offering almost 400 cruisers for self-drive, mostly on the River Shannon.
This is the story of eight new houses built by Tullamore Urban District Council in 1923 in what is now John Dillon Street. Turning into the street from Charleville Road, the first eight houses on the right were built as part of the Provisional Government’s £1 million scheme launch in 1922 in the midst of the Civil War. Opposite them are houses built by the Irish Soldiers and Sailors Land Trust for veterans of World War I. The eight houses may only have made a small dent in Tullamore’s chronically bad housing conditions in the early 20th century, but the circumstances surrounding when and how they were built provide some valuable insights into the history of the town and the country in these turbulent years.
Growing up on Clontarf Road, Tullamore, on the banks of the Grand Canal in the 1950s and 1960s I spent many childhood hours playing beside the canal. This was where my father’s family had lived for generations in East View Terrace before he and several of his siblings had acquired houses in Frank Gibney’s new state-of-the-art housing on Clontarf Road. In early teenage years I took to walking the canal line and ventured to Kilgortin Mill and Rahan, where my mother’s people, my grandfather and uncles and a multiplicity of cousins, lived. Not surprisingly the canal got under my skin if not indeed into my bloodstream.
John Flanagan the well-known builder and advocate for Tullamore and County Offaly died on 9 May 2024. He was the modest man from the Meelaghans, Puttaghan and Bachelors Walk, Tullamore who invested his whole life in making Tullamore a better place for people to live, work, bank and even pray in. In 2018 he was awarded the Offaly Person of the Year Award. John Flanagan was a realist in the Lemass mode. His focus was on getting things done. At the time Lemass came to be Taoiseach in 1959 John Flanagan was just 28 years old. It was ten more years, in 1968-9, before he got his first major break with the purchase of the Tanyard Lane property in Tullamore from the P.&H. Egan liquidator. The Bridge House, also owned by the Egan firm, was bought soon after by Christy Maye, and thirty years on Tullamore had two fine hotels, developed by the new entrepreneurs of the 1960s and 1970s, on lands that had been part of Egan’s extensive portfolio.
The town councils of Tullamore, Birr and that of Edenderry were abolished ten years ago in what some consider was a mistake and a hasty reaction to the calls for pruning in that recessionary period. Here we provides some headlines for significan events since the first council body – the Tullamore Town Commission – was established in 1860. This was followed by the urban council in 1900. We post this blog on the anniversary of the great balloon fire of 10 May 1785.
The line of the Grand canal to Philipstown and Tullamore is the only navigation through this county, and is material advantage to the district, through which it passes. Levels have been taken, and the line laid out for a further extension of this canal to the Shannon, with off branches to Birr and other towns, which is not yet put into execution.
The terminus of the line from Dublin to the Shannon was Tullamore for the years 1798 to 1804 when the link with the Shannon was at last completed. In the 1790s a line to Kilcormac and Birr was considered but on the grounds of expense that along the Brosna was selected.
[175] Ballicowan village is the estate of the [176] Earl of Mountrath, and here are the ruins of a castle, which gives name to the barony. Turf fuel is in plenty, and had on the cheapest terms. . .
Ballycowan castle c. 1958, it took its present configuration in 1626 and was destroyed by the Cromwellians in the early 1650s with the Cootes succeeding to the estate forfeited by the Herberts.
Tullamore is the market for grain, and indeed the produce of many adjoining baronies is sent thither, there being the fairest sale and a good demand amongst the buyers, occasioned principally on account of the many stores, which were established by the Grand Canal extending here, and which divides this barony for some distance. This proves the value of inland navigation and gives the farmer in these distant parts the advantage (as we may say), of bringing Dublin market home to his door.
The bumper volume of essays (list below) in Offaly and the Great War (Offaly History, 2018) can now be accessed free online at www.offalyhistory.com thanks to the Decade of Centenaries. The book of 28 essays is also available in hardcopy from Offaly History for just €20. In all over 50 articles free to download. Go to the Decade of Centenaries on the offalyhistory.com website.
When the great historian and first ‘telly don’ A.J.P. Taylor published his short history of the First World War just in time for the remembrance days of over fifty years ago he wrote that the war reshaped the political order in Europe. That its memorials stood in every town and village and that the real hero of the war was the Unknown Soldier.
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