When Sr Dolores Walsh returned to Tullamore in the early 1970s to take over as principal of the Sacred Heart School she brought with her a wealth of ideas influenced by her years in California.
The Sacred Heart School (or SHS as it has always been known by its pupils past and present) is believed to have been the first school in the country to introduce a Student Council, a concept that did not become the norm nationally until 1998.
The 50th anniversary of the Student Council in the SHS was the perfect opportunity to celebrate a concept that was decades ahead of its time and to mark the school’s role “at the heart of education, at the heart of the community,” so it was decided to publish a book.
Initial meetings were enthusiastic and optimistic and as time marched on it became obvious it was going to be more than a labour of love and was going to be a publication of some heft as contributions began to pour in.
The book’s coordinator Jacinta Gallagher Carroll cajoled and persuaded past pupils from the 1970s through to 2023 to put pen to paper and recall their Student Council and SHS experiences. The contributions varied from succinct recollections to albums of newspaper cuttings to poems and sometimes poignant essays.
-
Sr Dolores Walsh and Student empowerment at the Sacred Heart, Tullamore. Recalling fifty years in a new book. Blog No 531, 11th Oct 2023
-
Paul Burke-Kennedy, architect. An Appreciation by Fergal MacCabe. Blog N0 530, 8th Oct 2023
The co-founder of one of Ireland’s most successful architectural practices, Paul Burke-Kennedy died at his home in Booterstown Co. Dublin on 28 September 2023. Born in Tullamore in 1935, Paul’s father Gerry Burke-Kennedy was the popular manager of the Hibernian Bank (now part of Bank of Ireland) in the 1950s, well known for his hunting, horse racing and golfing enthusiasms and who, in later years, raised his family in the apartment above the bank premises on Bridge Street, Tullamore.
Gerry Burke Kennedy, popular bank manager in Tullamore in the 1950s and had worked in Tullamore in the 1930s, living on High Street. He was a prominent member of the new Tullamore Rugby Club (founded in 1937). Paul studied architecture in University College Dublin and soon after graduation together with Joseph Kidney formed the practice Kidney Burke Kennedy which was later joined by Des Doyle. Paul’s designs were rooted in his awareness and respect for urban context and contemporary Scandinavian design. The firm became notable from the 1960s onward for its innovative housing development in Dublin’s Ringsend, the impressive first stage of the Dublin Docklands development together with hotels for the Jury’s Group and the Conrad and many office developments including the Harcourt Centre and Earlsfort Centre and the Tallaght Town Centre.
(more…)
-
Offaly Heritage 12: a new book of essays on the history of County Offaly to be published Friday 6 October at a public event at Offaly History Centre. A contribution to the Decade of Centenaries. Blog No 529, 4th Oct 2023
It was 2003 when the first issue of Offaly Heritage was published. Just twenty years later the twelfth book of essays will be issued by Offaly History on 6 October 2023 at the Offaly History Centre at 6 p.m. and launched by a son of Tullamore, Terry Clavin. Terry is a distinguished historian who works with the Royal Irish Academy and has contributed over 400 biographies to the Academy’s Dictionary of Irish Biography. This is now available online and is a tremendous resource with about 11,000 biographies and eleven published volumes in the main series with a significant number of ancillary publications.
Offaly Heritage 12 is another bumper issue with over 500 pages and very much on a par in quality with the issues since no. 9 was published in 2016. It is a tremendous achievement and, no doubt, benefits from the support of the programme for the Decade of Centenaries and Offaly County Council.
For this issue there was a team of editors – Michael Byrne, Dr Mary Jane Fox, Dr Ciarán McCabe, Dr Ciarán Reilly, Lisa Shortall. Obituaries Editor: Kevin Corrigan.
The shell of the county courthouse, July 1922 The essays in section one reflect the ongoing research in Offaly into aspect of life in Ireland 100 years ago as we come to the end of the Decade of Commemoration (1912–1923). The essays reflect the changing nature of society in Offaly at that time, particularly during the years 1920 to 1923 and readers will enjoy contributions as varied as the end of the Wakely family of Rhode; the final years of the Leinster Regiment at Birr; the Protestant minority in Offaly during the revolutionary period; the courts of assize in King’s County in the years 1914–21; the burning of Tullamore courthouse, jail and barracks in 1922; the story of Belgian refugees in Portarlington, and Offaly claimants in 1916.
A series of short lives are presented in this volume, as they were in Offaly 11 and includes entries on individuals as diverse as J.L. Stirling, Averil Deverell, Middleton Biddulph, Robert Goodbody and volunteer Sean Barry.
(more…)
-
Bro Pat Guidera of the Jesuit college, Tullabeg, Tullamore recalls his role in the War of Independence and the Civil War, Mountrath and Johnswell, Kilkenny. A contribution to the Decade of Centenaries. Blog N0 528, 30th Sept 2023
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 shopping in Tullamore and carrying the large carton of cigarettes in the town for his colleagues in the college
Pat Guidera was born in Mountrath in 1900 and died in 1992. The family saw lean times in his early years in the town. Here he talks about his time with the IRA from 1919 and with the Republicans in the Civil War, 1922–23. Some Tullabeg Jesuits provided support services to the old IRA in the War of Independence, especially after the attack on Clara barracks. That was long before Bro. Guidera arrived.
(more…)
-
Visualizing Tullamore and its unique architectural character – A new Capriccio. By Fergal MacCabe. Blog No 527, 27th Sept 2023
An Image in my head
As the town changes and my own perceptions and values alter, the visual image of Tullamore that I hold in my head is continually refined.
Little by little I have begun to realise that buildings which I dismissed as mundane are more important than I had first considered, while others which I once revered are now probably not all that good after all. There is also the fear that several much-loved landmarks I believed timeless may soon disappear.
My visits to the town have become more infrequent and I find that when I try to summon up its civic character in my mind in order to make a drawing, it tends to coalesce into an amalgam in which some buildings and landscapes take centre stage while others recede. In this capriccio I have tried to corral my memories into an ensemble which has some underlying unity, but inevitably selection distorts scale and some of the juxtapositions may seem overly bizarre.
Of late, three particular parts of the town have begun to take a hold of my imagination – two real and one imaginary. The stretch of Cormac Street from the railway station to O’Moore Street gets better on each revisit while O’Connor Square is at last beginning to reveal its potential to be one of the finest urban spaces in the country. On the other hand, the Harbour is as inaccessible and decaying as it ever was. Its unknowable future has always fascinated me – as I’m sure it does many.
(more…)
-
History of transport – a County Offaly, Ireland perspective: bogs, canals, rail, steam and petrol fuelled motors. By Sylvia Turner. A contribution to the Decade of Centenaries. Blog No 526, 23rd Sept 2023
As evidence of the climate crisis increases across the world, the need to find alternative forms of energy to fossil fuels has intensified. According to the Sustainable Energy Authority, Ireland imports a little over 70% of the energy used with the EU average, being 58%. Ireland’s. Transport accounts for the most demand, with over 95% of transport energy coming from fossil fuels. Other than environmental factors, being dependent on importation of fossil fuels has led to concern about energy security due to the geo-political climate, specifically today, the Russian Ukraine War.
As a country without its own oil and a limited supply of gas and coal, peat has historically been an important fossil fuel for Ireland, providing it with some energy self-sufficiency.(Geological Survey Ireland) In recent decades, however, there is growing recognition that burning peat for fuel is not sustainable as not only is it a highly carbon inefficient fuel, intact peatlands are an efficient carbon sink, whereas damaged peatlands are a major source of greenhouse gas emissions. “. . . Ireland has more than half the European Union’s remaining area of a type of peatland known as raised bog, one of the world’s rarest habitats and, scientists say, the most effective land form on earth for sequestering carbon . . (New York Times 4 October 2022)
(more…)
-
The Law of the Innocents, Birr 697 AD. By Jim Houlihan. Blog No 525, 20th Sept 2023
In a time of war in eastern Europe and the coming to an end of the Decade of Centenaries period in Ireland, 1912–23 with the cessation of the civil war, here we today publish the second of two blogs on the protection of innocent people in times of strife. The article is by Jim Houlihan and on Monday 25 Sept. Dr Houlihan will give a lecture on Adomnán’s Law of the Innocents-Birr 697 AD. at Offaly History Centre, Bury Quay, Tullamore (and online) at 8 p.m. More details of his talk and online booking for Zoom see our FB post @offalyhistory. Our thanks to John Dolan for the first article and to Jim Houlihan for this article and his forthcoming talk.
Early in the summer of the year 697, probably in May, a great assembly of kings, bishops and abbots, along with their followers and servants, took place in Birr. It was a joint meeting of kings (rígdál) and of church leaders (synod). They came together to proclaim a law for the protection of women, children, clerics and other people who did not bear arms, in times of conflict. The law was called Cáin Adomnáin or the ‘Law of the Innocents’ (Lex Innocentium) and later referred to in a poem as the ‘Great Law of Bir
(more…)
-
After the Break. By Terry Adams. Blog No 524, 16th Sept 2023.
It was cold, dark and rainy that November 2017 night as we left the Embassy. My mood did not fit the weather. The warm glow of a job well done wrapped itself around my stomach and spread out to envelop my whole being. It was all hard to believe that my scribbling had brought me here.
I had started to write to commemorate my father way back in 1976, a few poems to inscribe his memory onto paper. The first one was printed in the Midland Tribune on the anniversary of his death in 1977. I was delighted to see my words in print, a feeling that persists to this day! I returned to my university and thought no more about it until I fell in love. That led to more poems, some I laugh at now but some I’m glad I wrote and, who knows, some may even have had an impact on my future wife.
So forty years later there I was sitting in a restaurant with two of my sisters and one of my daughters, all of whom had flown over for the big event. My wife and other two daughters were abroad, unavailable. The conversation floated by me a little as my mind was back in the embassy room with the Irish Tricolour and the European blue flag forming a backdrop to my poems. The whole situation was a little surreal.
The words from that beautiful, sad, song by Tommy Sands, ‘There were Roses’, floated unbidden into my mind. ‘It’s little then we realized the tragedy in store’. Now, I admit, ‘tragedy’ may be a little strong, thankfully, to describe the events that were shortly to unfold.
Five months after my uplifting evening in the Irish Embassy I found myself in the less salubrious surroundings of a psychiatric ward here in Luxembourg city. A crash due to depression had stolen up on me and twisted my mind into such a state that I needed hospitalization. For two weeks I wondered what had happened, how could I exchange the Irish Embassy for a psychiatric bed in a matter of months? How had this happened? What exactly had happened?
(more…)
-
The 1923 General Election in Laois-Offaly: Cumann na nGaedheal papers in Offaly Archives. An Offaly History contribution to the Decade of Centenaries. By Michael Byrne. Blog No 523, 13th Sept 2023
In the last blog we noted that the August 1923 General Election in Laois-Offaly was remarkably peaceful given that the civil war had only ended in May. Offaly was still strong in support for the Republicans as was clear from the fact they gained two seats, but, of course, were committed to not entering the Dáil. Labour’s William Davin continued to have a strong vote but not nearly so much as in June 1922. Tullamore’ Patrick Egan gained a seat on Labour transfers. Egan polled only 9 per cent of the first preferences.[1] In Laois-Offaly the Republicans outpolled Cumann na nGaedheal, but the latter won the by-election of 1926 created by the disqualification of Republican John or Séan McGuinness.[2] Overall Cumann na nGaedheal secured 38.9 per cent of the 1923 vote as to anti-Treaty Sinn Féin’s 27.4 per cent.[3] The Sinn Féin vote was secured in difficult circumstances with many still in prison or in hiding. As Joe Lee recorded the outcome was a resounding success for anti-Treaty Sinn Féin and a loss for Labour. Cumann na nGaedheal secured 63 seats, but that was a gain of only five in a Dáil enlarged from 128 to 153 seats. This was the election in which the franchise was extended to all women over the age of 21, thereby expanding the electorate from 1.37 million in 1918 to 1.72 million in 1923.
(more…)
-
The Synod of Birr, 697AD. By John Dolan. Blog No 522, 9th Sept 2023
In a time of war in eastern Europe, and the coming to an end of the Decade of Centenaries period in Ireland, 1912–23 with the cessation of the civil war here, we today publish the first of two blogs on the protection of innocent people in times of strife. The first article is by John Dolan and on 23 September that by Jim Houlihan. On Monday 25 Sept. Dr Jim Houlihan will give a lecture on Adomnán’s Law of the Innocents-Birr 697 AD at Offaly History Centre, Bury Quay, Tullamore (and online) at 8 p.m. More details of his talk in our September newsletter which will be posted online soon. Our thanks to John Dolan for this article.
There was an extraordinary Synod held in Birr in 697AD. This synod was called by Adomnán, abbot of Iona, who arrived in Birr with the princes of church and state and who produced an edict that fundamentally challenged the way warfare was carried out in Ireland and beyond.
(more…)
offalyhistoryblog 