offalyhistoryblog

Category: Religion

Fr Paddy Kelly, Tullamore and the Battle of Manila in 1945. By Mairead O’Brien. No 13 in 2025 Anniversaries Series. Blog No 712, 7th may 2025

February marked the 80th anniversary of the Battle of Manila. Fought in the closing months of World War II, the operation to liberate the Philippine capital from Japanese tyranny turned into a massive slaughter of 100,000 non-combatants and the destruction of that beautiful city. Not widely known is that among those killed were five Irish Columban fathers who were based in the parish of Malate in Manila. One of them was Fr. Patrick Kelly from William Street in Tullamore. The others were Regional Superior, Fr. John Henaghan from Louisburgh, Co. Mayo; Fr. John Lalor from Cork; Fr. Peter Fallon from Dunmore, Co. Galway; and Fr. Joseph Monaghan from Banbridge, Co. Down.

On December 8th, 1941, just hours after they bombed Pearl Harbour in Hawaii, Japanese troops invaded the Philippine Islands. The defending forces, under General Douglas MacArthur, consisted of American and Filipino troops. Inexperienced and ill-prepared for battle, they retreated to the Bataan Peninsula, leaving Manila, the capital, undefended. By January 2nd, 1942, an advance column of Japanese soldiers had entered the city. Thus began a brutal three-year occupation of the islands.
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May 7, 2025
Mixing a Bazaar, Religion, Politics, Sport and Song in West Offaly during 1897. By Aidan Doyle. No 2 in the 2025 Offaly Anniversaries Series. Blog No 688, 15th Jan, 2025

Sometimes researching history is like trying to make a jigsaw that’s missing too many pieces. Sometimes, someone throws a few pieces from a different jigsaw in, just to complicate matters even more. This one such story.

New Arrivals in the neat little town

In May 1896 the Midland Tribune reported…

‘Tuesday last was celebrated by great festivity and rejoicing at Ferbane, the occasion being the arrival of four Sisters of the Order of St. Joseph to found a Convent in the neat little town. The nuns came at the invitation of the esteemed Parish Priest, Very Rev. Canon Sheridan who had prepared for their accommodation in the large vacant building beside the Brusna Bridge’

A Priest and his Parish

Canon Patrick Sherdian was a man who got things done, but he liked things done his way. Ordained in 1855 and stationed at Ferbane from 1875 until his death in 1899, the Canon interested himself in every aspect of his parishioners’ lives. His time in Ferbane was occasioned by conflict, be it with some members of the local home rule organisation, the Board of Guardians or his own curates. Nevertheless, his achievements were substantial. In 1894, he led the successful campaign to save the Clara to Banagher Railway branch line. Having built a national school in High Street, he set out to construct the Church of the Immaculate Conception at Ferbane. Work progressed quickly and the Canon set to work on raising the estimated £7,000 required to complete the job. To accomplish this, he organised a massive raffle and a Grand Bazaar to be held on the last week of May in 1897.
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January 15, 2025
The late Girvan McKay/Garbhan MacAoidh, Tullamore. By Declan McSweeney. Blog No 565, 16th Jan 2024

The late Girvan McKay/Garbhan MacAoidh, who died recently at the age of 94, was Presbyterian Minister in Tullamore and Mountmellick from 1983-96 and made a huge contribution to the local community. After retirement, he and his wife Máire continued to reside at Clonminch, Tullamore. A service in his memory was held at the Presbyterian Church, Tullamore on Saturday 13 January 2024.

Our thoughts are with her and their sons Ruairidh, Conall and Somhairle and their families.

He was a distinctive figure within the Presbyterian Church in Ireland (PCI) due to his never having lived in Northern Ireland, in contrast to the great majority of that church’s ministers.
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January 16, 2024
He just walked…. Ireland’s lost people 1850-1950: reflections on the Protestant experience. By Sylvia Turner. Blog No 544, 15th Nov 2023

Ireland has been associated with the loss of its people through migration for centuries. The analyses by the Central Statistics Office identifies that the famine of 1845 – 52 led to a peak in migration and changed the country’s demographic, political, and cultural landscape. Related themes of endemic poverty and religious intolerance were reasons why others left Ireland’s shores trying to find a better life. Literacy rates in 1841 were 47% but by 1911 had risen to 88%. Limited literacy hindered emigrants maintaining contact. Migration could mean that when someone left, they were gone for good and it was unlikely they would ever again speak to or see friends or family back home. Apart from emigration, Irish demographic anomalies, such as late marriage and large families led to people being dislocated from their families. The age gap between parents, particularly fathers, and children was frequently such that being orphaned in childhood was common. Often, there was also a large age gap between older and younger siblings, with the latter hardly knowing brothers or sisters who had left home or emigrated while they were still in infancy. [i]

This context helps me to understand a phrase my mother used when she reminisced about her family life with three sisters and parents, growing up in the Midlands as workers at the ‘big houses’. They would join friends and listen to fiddle playing in the evening occasionally. When I asked her about someone she had described and what happened to them, she would sometimes say ‘Oh, he just walked’ often adding ‘it was very common then’.
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November 15, 2023
St Catherine’s Church, 1815-2015: central to the heritage of Tullamore. By Michael Byrne. Blog No 521, 6th Sept 2023

St Catherine’s Church, 1815. This is the second article to mark the successful Heritage Week 2023. The new St Catherine’s Church was designed by Francis Johnston and was built in the Gothic style with a Latin cross plan, side-aisles, a tower in the west and a crypt at the east end for the burial place of the Bury family. Its situation on Hophill makes it an impressive landmark in Tullamore. Hophill is a glacial mound which rises steeply to a height of about fifty feet above the land around it. It is not clear how the mound acquired its name or when. The earliest known reference to the hill occurs in a lease of 1748. There is a local story that the spoil for digging out the new lake at Charleville was used to construct the site for the new church. While this is not true perhaps some materials were used which gave credence to this story. Originally more pointed, the hill is a natural one.
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September 6, 2023
St Catherine’s Church steeped in the early history of Tullamore, 1700s to its completion in 1815. By Michael Byrne. Marking Heritage Week 2023. Blog No 515, 16th August 2023

To mark Heritage Week 2023 we have two articles on St Catherine’s Church, Hop Hill, Tullamore. This week the background from the 1700s to the completion of the new church in 1815. When coming to Tullamore by boat or rail the two most prominent sites to greet the visitor are the spire of the Catholic church completed in 1906 and that of St Catherine’s church, built on the mound known as Hop Hill and completed in August 1815.

We take the presence of the Cof I churches of St Catherine’s, Clara, Shinrone, Geashill, Edenderry and St Brendan’s in Birr (to name a few) for granted. The upkeep is great and the contributors few. More will need to be done to structure support for the upkeep of these buildings.

A Francis Johnston plan with the burial crypt of c. 1808-10. Courtesy of the Irish Architectural Archive

Hop Hill site a brave choice

The Hop Hill site was a brave choice as there was work to be done to make it suitable for building and the adjoining ground was soft and prone to flood, especially in the years before the two Brosna drainage schemes of 1850 and 1950. The Tullamore town landlord, Charles William Bury (1764-1835), had reserved the large distillery plot (now the Granary apartments in Market Square) for a church, from about 1800 to 1806. In the latter year then rector, Ponsonby Gouldsbury, and the vestry opted for the Hop Hill site and the new church was largely completed in August 1815. Soon after the old church off Church Street, erected in 1726, was demolished and the site of the church and, possibly an adjoining graveyard, were used for the Shambles or meat market and the remaining land incorporated into the new Market Square or Corn Market. The new Bachelors Walk was worked on from about 1812 as an attractive avenue to the new church from the High Street and from the town’s owner’s new residence, Charleville Castle. The architect for the church was Francis Johnston and for the new avenue, or Bachelors Walk was John Claudius Loudon, the distinguished landscape architect and designer of demesnes.

The young Charles William Bury when aged 28 and just seven years into his estate. He married in 1798 and died in 1835. His best years were up to the completion of the castle. He contributed about £4,000 of the £8,000 it cost to build St Catherine’s.
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August 16, 2023
The ‘Second Reformation’ and Catholic-Protestant relations in pre-Famine Ireland’ with a case study of the Crotty Schism in Birr. By Ciarán McCabe. Blog No 477, 1st April 2023

On 24 October 1822, the newly-appointed Church of Ireland archbishop of Dublin, William Magee (1766-1831) delivered a sermon (a charge) in St Patrick’s Cathedral, calling for a greater and more zealous endeavour to evangelise among the Irish Catholics. While Protestant evangelicals and missionaries had been active throughout Ireland since the late eighteenth century, Magee’s sermon is seen as significant in returning acute religious controversy to the Irish public sphere.

The ‘Second Reformation’ initiated by Magee was marked by:

An exhibition charting the development of the ‘Second Reformation’, one of the most significant periods of nineteenth-century Ireland, is currently running in Birr Library and is open to the public. Furthermore, a public lecture by Dr Ciarán McCabe (QUB) in Birr Library on Wednesday 5 April (at 6.30pm) will discuss the ‘Second Reformation’ (including the infamous Birr Crotty Schism) and the development of the exhibition.
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April 1, 2023
Bro Pat Guidera S.J. recalls his time in Tullabeg, Rahan from 1948 to 1990 – no 1. Contributed by Offaly History. Blog No 452, 31st Dec 2022

Brother Pat Guidera S.J. (born 1900, died 1992) was a familiar figure in Tullamore over a period of forty-two years from his transfer to Tullabeg College in 1948 up to its closure in 1990. Today the old college is falling to ruin. Many will recall its very good order up to the 1990s and thereafter it was used in part as a nursing home. Brother Guidera wrote a short ‘Story of my life’ in 1991 and this is an extract from that now very scarce memoir – of which there is a copy in Offaly Archives (courtesy of the Irish Jesuit Archives). The college was opened in 1818 and several volumes have been published on its history but few as intimate as that of Bro. Guidera. His memoir is interesting also for the marked distinctions in the religious orders between those fully ordained and those who were effectively providing support services in the college or convent. Brother Guidera was a carpenter cum painter and many will remember him carrying the usual large carton of cigarettes in the town for his colleagues in the college. His recollections of life in the Rahan area show the value of personal histories so why not give it a go.
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December 31, 2022
‘It will last for centuries’: St. Joseph’s Convent, Tullamore. By Fergal MacCabe. Blog No 442, 26th Nov 2022

Fergal MacCabe

In 1840, the scaffolding began to come down to reveal the new convent and school of the Sisters of Mercy on Bury Quay, today Convent Road.

With the building of the County Gaol in 1830, the County Courthouse in 1835 and the Union Workhouse in 1839-41, Tullamore was rapidly acquiring substantial civic and social buildings which were adding to its prestige and promoting its new role as the capital of King’s County.

But as yet, no buildings of a religious or educational nature which might contribute equally significantly to the architectural character of the town centre had emerged. The Catholic chapel of 1802 on its backland site off Harbour Street was a relatively modest structure without a frontage presence onto a main street. Charleville School built in 1811 at the junction of Henry Street and Church Street exhibited a well-mannered but unassuming appearance. Though a most impressive structure, the siting of Francis Johnston’s St Catherine’s on Hop Hill rendered it remote from the daily life of the town.
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November 26, 2022
O’Connor Square, Tullamore, 1700s to 2020: a story in pictures of an evolving streetscape over 300 years. Blog No 410, 17th August 2022

A PowerPoint presentation narrated by Michael Byrne explores the identities of O’Connor Square, Tullamore as part of a project to know and appreciate our distinctive town centres. This Streetscape project is in partnership with Offaly County Council and part funded by the Heritage Council.

The Making of O’Connor Square, Tullamore since the 1700s: the buildings, business and people

O’Connor Square is Tullamore’s most impressive open space and the gradual development of this area into its principal square is reflected in its fine houses, market house and the variety of names it has had. Despite the course of building for over some fifty years, from 1740 to 1790, it has a uniformity of scale even with the much later vocational school of 1936–37, now the Tullamore Library. In 1713 this area was simply known as the Market Place and, with the opening of one-third of the square in 2019 to pedestrian access only, is now enjoying a comeback to its original function as a meeting place, albeit now to barter ideas and stories and not agricultural produce. Our thanks to the Heritage Council and Offaly County Council for supporting this project and rejuvenation of the square. A special thanks to Fergal MacCabe for his watercolours that bring out so much of what is wonderful about townlife.

Take a look at the video below for more about Tullamore’s meeting place and prime residential location for so long.

Tomorrow, we look at Castle Street, Birr over 400 years of history in that one street.

August 17, 2022