offalyhistoryblog

Category: Public Health

Offaly Heritage 13. The 13th issue of the Offaly History Journal is now available and will be launched on 10 December at the Brewery Tap, Tullamore at 5 p.m. Blog No 765, 6th Dec 2025

Offaly Heritage 13. This the 13^th issue of the Offaly History Journal is now available and will be launched on 10 December at the Brewery Tap at 5 p.m. It’s another bumper issue with over 330 pages and well-illustrated, €19 soft and €25 hardback. The issue is dedicated to the late Christy Maye – a great friend to Offaly History. The new book is now available from Offaly History Centre. Midland Books and online at http://www.offalyhistory.com. The new book on The making of O’Connor Square will also be launched at this event. Signed copies will be available on the evening.

Offaly Heritage 13 (2025)

Editors: Michael Byrne, Dr Mary Jane Fox. Obits editor Kevin Corrigan

Introduction by Helen Bracken, President Offaly History

It was 2003 when the first issue of Offaly Heritage was published. Now 22 years on we are publishing our thirteenth volume. With so many other demands it has proved difficult to produce a volume every year. Instead, we prefer to produce a large volume every two years.

Offaly Heritage 13 is another bumper issue and very much on a par in quality with the issues since no. 9 was published in 2016. It is a tremendous achievement and benefits from the pro bono work of the editors and contributors.
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December 6, 2025
Church Street, Tullamore 125 years ago: the ‘families’ (including boarders, lodgers, and assistants in 1901) – at a time of solid fuel cooking, no sewerage, poor lighting and piped water a recent novelty. No. 12 in the 2025 Living in towns series, prepared with the support of the Heritage Council. By Michael Byrne and James O’Brien. Blog No 758, 31st Oct 2025

Did you have old friends or family in Church Street 125 years ago? Probably not. It was a busier trading street 125 ago than it is today. That could be said even sixty years. As to its trade it probably suffered from the introduction of one-way systems and restricted parking in the 1960s. Yet another factor may well have been the closing of the markets in Market Square, and also the decline of the Methodist community in the street. Back in 1901 and further back to the first printed valuation of the mid-1850s it had about 57 rateable units – almost all private houses and shops, but also including Hayes’ Hotel, the Methodist church, the Costello private second-level school, the county infirmary (from 1942 the County Library), Charleville School (until 2006) and the Foresters Hall and Shambles (the meat and veg market).

Church Street is an interesting street to study with a good mix of mostly middle-class housing, good shops and trades, institutions, and good terraces with lots of boarders and lodgers to add novelty.
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October 31, 2025
Local Heritage and Family History Course: Sources and Methods, 24 September to 26 November 2025 (ten sessions of two hours each) at Offaly History Centre, Bury Quay, Tullamore. Blog No 747, 13th Sept 2025

What? The course will give an overview of the sources and methods for the study of the archaeology, community and family history of County Offaly, and how to do research on areas that may interest you in local and family history. Thematic sessions will be delivered by experienced local scholars, who will introduce participants both to physical sources and to online resources. Offaly is taken as the example, but most of the records will have application for the entire country.

When? All talks will be held on Wednesday nights, from 7.30 to 9.30 pm.

Where? Offaly History Centre, Bury Quay, Tullamore, Co. Offaly, R35 Y5V0

Fees? The course fee for all ten sessions is €50, payable to the Offaly Heritage Centre at the time of booking. Please provide your credit or debit card details when booking, or visit the shop Monday–Friday, 9:30 am–4:30 pm.

Alternatively, payment can be made by bank transfer: Best contact us first as only a few places are left.

This course is supported by the Heritage Council and Offaly County Council.
Places are limited to 25 participants, so early booking is strongly advised.

Please call or email us to check availability and make your booking
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September 13, 2025
The Offaly County Hospital Tullamore: The Fruits of Independence. By Fergal MacCabe. No 5 in a series on the paintings and drawings heritage of County Offaly, 1750-2000, explored through the works of artists from or associated with County Offaly. Offaly History Blog No 718, 4th June 2025

In the early days of the Irish Free State two ambitious projects stood out as justifying the struggle for national independence.

In 1925, out of a total national budget of £25 million, the fledgling government bravely invested £5.2 in the Shannon Hydro Electric Scheme. Finished within four years, it ensured a degree of energy autonomy and dramatically improved living conditions, particularly in towns and later in rural areas.

In a second progressive advance the State embarked on a programme to build a modern hospital in every county.
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June 4, 2025
Frances Kelly’s painting in the County Hospital Tullamore. By Fergal MacCabe. No 4 in a series on the paintings and drawings heritage of County Offaly, 1750-2000, explored through the works of artists from or associated with County Offaly. Blog No 711, 30th April 2025

An Impressionable In-Patient

When I was eleven I spent a long Easter weekend in the County Hospital in Tullamore. I don’t know what was wrong with me but it can’t have been anything serious and I remember it as a most enjoyable and stimulating experience.

The nurses and the nuns were kind and caring, the ward was spacious and sunlit with a lovely view across O’Connor Park to the Slieve Blooms, while the food was a lot more varied than I was accustomed to at home. My friends and neighbours visited with gifts of Easter eggs and sweets. I particularly remember getting little furry yellow chicks in one egg and kept them as a souvenir for many years after.

I think that my stay in that icon of Irish Modernist architecture, must have instilled my future love of good buildings but it was the glimpses of the large colourful painting in the entrance hall that really stuck in my mind. In the years to come, when visiting my mother or sick friends, I always stopped for a while to look at it again.

Its installation in the entrance of the new County Hospital, which opened in 1942 and of which the town was so proud, was the inspiration of the architect Michael Scott.

The Scott building Midlands Regional Hospital, Tullamore, erected 1938-42
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April 30, 2025
Michael Scott: his Midland Connections and Networks. By Fergal MacCabe. No 2 in a series on the paintings and drawings heritage of County Offaly, 1750-2000, explored through the works of artists from or associated with County Offaly. Blog No 705, 2nd April 2025

The Murals Bar Cultural life in 1950s Tullamore centred around ‘The Murals’ bar. This was where us local artists, actors, historians and writers drank, clutching our copies of ‘Ulysses’ in its concealing brown paper cover while engaging in fevered and sparkling debates on cubism, existentialism, atonality and Marxism.

I may be exaggerating somewhat, but ‘The Murals’ really was our Deux Magots, our Cafe de Flore. The bar was the meeting place of what passed for an intelligentsia in Tullamore at a time, which, though it is now regarded as restrictive and obscurantist, I remember as stimulating and progressive. Maybe I was lucky.

The attraction of ‘The Murals’ was its design which was quite unlike any of the more traditional pubs of the town which were usually small, dark and poky. With its high ceiling, stripped down design, timber veneering, bright red stools, it was cool and elegant and above all- modern.
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April 2, 2025
Tullamore in the Sixties launch – pictures capturing the period. Blog No 678, 7th Dec 2024

Tullamore in the Sixties was launched to great acclaim on 6 December. Most of the contributors living in Ireland participated in the proceedings with three to five minute talks. The book was launched by architect, town planner and artist Fergal MacCabe. A few of his own watercolours grace the contents of this 450 page book with extensive essays (from 18 writers) and 350 pictures. The book is available from Offaly History Centre, Bury Quay, Tullamore and Midland Books and the pop up at Bridge Centre. It can also be ordered on line.

Some of the contributors to Tullamore in the Sixties

Some of the pictures capture the period:
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December 7, 2024
Tullamore in the Sixties. A new book of essays on Tullamore in an eventful decade, just published. Blog No 674, 29th Nov 2024

This volume of essays brings together the contributions of eighteen people who kept a keen eye on developments in Tullamore in the 1960s. Perhaps none more so than the late Joe Kenny who came to Tullamore in the 1950s as a vocational schoolteacher and was held in high esteem for his sound judgement and abilities as an impartial chairman. In that capacity he was the inaugural president of Tullamore Credit Union in 1963. Fergal MacCabe, as a Tullamore native, with a professional life in architecture and town planning in Dublin, brings a unique contribution by way of his recollections of Tullamore in the 1950s and his review of the first town plan of the 1960s. The same can be said of Vincent Hussey as a planning officer with Offaly County Council with his recollections of Tullamore since the 1960s. Niall Sweeney, an engineer and former Offaly County Manager, takes a close look at the provision of public infrastructure in Tullamore over the period from the 1960s to 2014. The late Jack Taaffe, as town clerk in Tullamore in 1970–72 demonstrates just how underfunded urban authorities were in those years. He went on to become county manager in Westmeath presiding over the progress of the county from 1981 to 1988. Michael Byrne looks at the history of business in Tullamore and sought to cover the principal enterprises of the 1960s in manufacturing, distribution, shopping, entertainment and dancing. Noel Guerin, as a former employee of ‘the bacon factory’, was able to write of a company that employed up to 100 people in Tullamore over forty years and made the name of the town famous for the Tullamore sausage. Ronnie Colton, from his own extensive involvement in the motor business brings a knowledge from the garage floor and sales yard that few others can match.

Miss Savage, a well-loved teacher in the Mercy primary school

Alan Mahon, as the grandson of an innovative cinema proprietor, recalls two cinemas in Tullamore whose cultural contribution is perhaps forgotten now but was all important to the people of Tullamore and district over a period of sixty or seventy years, if one takes it from the commencement of the Foresters cinema (later the Grand Central) in 1914.

Sport, so important to so many, brings us to the essay by Kevin Corrigan who looks at a formative decade leading on to the GAA Senior Football All-Ireland victories in the 1970s. Kevin had the challenging job of reducing to a short essay what could fill twenty books were one to address in detail each of the sporting activities that came to the forefront in the sixties.
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November 29, 2024
Remembering Josephine Warren of ‘Tay’ Lane and Marian Place, Tullamore. By Cecilia Warren with a transcript of a 2006 recording of Josephine Warren talking about life at Tay Lane/officially called O’Connell Street, Tullamore. Blog No 673, 27th Nov 2024

The recording of my mother Josephine was made in 2006 as part of my research on local history and my mother’s interpretation of it. At the time, little did I know the significance that it would have, not just from a local history record perspective but also in a deeply personal context.

Our family connection here in Tullamore began in 1923, when a young Dublin native, Josephine Moore came to work at McCann’s as a housekeeper. This building later became the Tullamore Enterprise board ( now occupied by Jigsaw) Cormac Street. She married William Gorman, a local man. My mother, also called Josephine, was born in 1928. Mum left school aged 14 and she would have been the first to admit that she lacked a proper education. In those unkinder days, walking to school barefoot and being put to clean up in the home economics room by the nuns after the wealthier girls had cooked was all too often a regularity. She would have liked to have had a career as a nurse she often said.
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November 27, 2024
Dietary of Tullamore Workhouse before the Famine, 1842-1845. By JJ Reilly. Blog No 622, 15th June 2024

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 11^th, 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
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June 15, 2024