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Reporting the Tullamore Town Council. By Declan McSweeney. Blog No 511, 9th August 2023

The abolition of Tullamore Town Council in 2014 evoked many memories for me of my years covering that body and its predecessor, Tullamore Urban District Council (UDC) from 1988 to 2007 for the Offaly Express, and for a year and a half before that for the Offaly Independent. I also covered a number of meetings as a freelancer for the Express following my ill-fated return from England.

When I first covered the council, I had the advantage of knowing all the councillors. Six of those early councillors are now deceased – Ernie McGuire and Lar Byrne of Labour, Billy Bracken of Fine Gael (FG), Ann Fox of Fianna Fáil (FF) and independent representatives May Keeley (who, in 1974, was the first woman ever elected as a councillor in Tullamore) and Anne O’Toole.
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August 9, 2023
The Synod of Mag Léna. By John Dolan. Blog No 510, 5th August 2023

This week, in part 2 of his article on Mag Léna, John Dolan covers another split and a far more important event than a battle in Mag Léna. This synod was just one matter in a significant dispute between the Irish or Celtic church and Rome in the 7^th and 8^th centuries.

Background

The expansion of the Christian church out of Jerusalem was based on the infrastructure and administration structures of the Roman Empire. Building Roman roads throughout the empire to assist military and trade movement allowed Christians to expand and base themselves in cities. Christianity was just one religion that was practiced in the empire. Christianity developed in an urban setting with bishops based in cities.

Gildas dates the arrival of Christianity to England by 1^st century. Bede tells us that in 156AD King Lucius of the Britons sought Christian instruction from Pope Eleutherus and that ‘this request was quickly granted, and the Britons received the faith and held it peacefully in all its purity and fullness until the time of Diocletian’. But by 303 – 312AD Diocletian was persecuting Christians in England by blaming them for military failures. By 380AD Christianity was recognised as the official religion of the empire.
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August 5, 2023
The Battle of Mag Léna. By John Dolan. Blog No 509, 2nd August 2023

Mag Léna is of interest for two events that occurred in the early historic period. The first event is the pseudo historic Battle of Mag Léna. The second event was the significant Synod of Mag Léna and the Letter of Cummain, part of the Irish church row with Rome over the dating of Easter.

Both incidents caused a split in Ireland!

What’s in a name?

Mag Léna is mentioned in logainm.ie as Moylena and places it in the parish of Kilbride, Co. Offaly. Mag or Magh translates as a plain or open country, there is no information provided on the meaning of the word Léna. Unusually, there are no additional references other than the basic location details, also this older relic from the original card index system below. A 13^th century manuscript mentions Cath Mhuighe Léana. Magh Léana is mentioned elsewhere. In his Survey Letters we find O’Donovan used a variety of spellings for the name – Moylena, Moyléna, Moyleana, Moleany and Moy-leana.

Logainm index card for Mag Léna.

As usual there are difficulties with the older Gaelic placenames and how they were recorded over time. Today the only memory of the name is in Tullamore, where the Moylena road joins the Clara Road and eventually joins the Rahan Road through Glendaniel.
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August 2, 2023
Offaly evacuated, not a British policeman or soldier now in the county. Tullamore R.I.C. barracks occupied by I.R.A., troops march in with fixed bayonets, headed by St. Enda’s pipers. 7 March 1922. An Offaly History contribution to the Decade of Centenaries. Blog No 508, 29th June 2023

The dismantling of the barrack structure of the British military establishment advanced rapidly in the aftermath of the signing of Anglo-Irish Treaty in December 1921. The great exodus in Offaly began in February 1922. The newly issued Offaly Independent (absent since November 1920 due to its destruction by the British military) was now able to report that

11 March 1922 Offaly Independent

, “They are going with a vengeance,” but now it is the army of occupation, not the natives of the country, that is leaving our shores, going while a great sigh of relief goes up, and no pang of regret is felt at the departure of those who held is in bondage for so long. What a change the front of St. Conleth’s School in Daingean now presents from what it did a short time ago. The front gates are now thrown open for the first time in nearly two years, as when the local police barrack was destroyed the splendid group of houses inside the gates of St. Conleth’s School which had been used for the purpose of housing some of the tradesmen employed in the institution were commandeered and used as a barrack for police and Black and Tans until Wednesday of last week when the evacuation took place. From an early hour on that morning the residents of the barracks were astir and it was easy to see that something out of the common was about to take place. Before long it was evident that the long-wished for hour had come and that the Crown forces were about to clear out, bag and baggage. At mid-day lorries arrived from Edenderry carrying the Black and Tans from that district, and all assembled at the Grand Canal Bridge, Daingean for the final parting. Such musical instruments as accordions, mouthorgans, etc., were produced and the disbanded heroes made the welcome ring to the strains of “Come back to Erin” (we hope they won’t). “It’s a long way to Tipperary”, “You’ll Remember Me”, and other items. The townspeople viewed the scene unmoved and the farewells were not returned. On the following day the members of the old R.I.C. force prepared to leave Daingean, and by Friday not a single policeman was to be seen in the place, while a new force guarded the town (OI, 11 2 1922).

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July 29, 2023
Closing the old Tullamore distillery in 1983. By John Flanagan. Blog No 507, 26th July 2023

Work continues on the Irish Mist Liqueur book to be published by Offaly History with the support of Creative Ireland in October. The book will have 240 photographs and a good quality text by a number of contributors. This product was the first such liqueur in Ireland and employed up to sixty people before its sale to C&C and move to Clonmel in 1985. In this extract from the new book John Flanagan (the production manager up to 1985) looks at the closing of the famous Sally Grove warehouse, no. 13, forty years ago this month. It was located close to where the Central Hotel was built on the new Main Street after 2000. Sally Grove warehouse had great maturing qualities for whiskey and so was the last to go of the old system of maturing in oak casks. Tullamore distillery ceased production in 1954, but with 400,000 gallons in stock it remained open to dispose of that resource. The development of Irish Mist was part of the solution to overstock and helped use up some of the over supply available. That was only the beginning for a product that was uniquely associated with Tullamore and the Williams family.

John Flanagan writes:

The B. Daly & Co Ltd distillery was founded in Tullamore in 1829 and held the licence to distill and warehouse whiskey. Later, Pot Still, Malt and Grain whiskeys were all produced in the distillery. After 1900 the bottling of all the whiskey was done at the Bond Store at Bury Quay, under the Tullamore Dew brand name. ‘Give every man his dew’ was the famous slogan thought up by Daniel E. Williams, the owner of the distillery in succession to Michael Molloy and Bernard Daly. Other brands were bottled too, including a special brand called ‘Private Stock’ for the directors only.
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July 26, 2023
James Weale’s trip to King’s County, Offaly, Ireland in 1829 to meet Kinnitty tenants of the Crown with comments on his visit to Tullamore. By Timothy P. O’Neill. Blog No 506, 22nd July 2023

James Weale was appointed to the position of clerk in charge of Irish land revenue in the Commissioners of Woods, Forests and Land Revenue in 1827. The Commissioners managed the English kings’ estates. His actual position was that of the tenth clerk in the London Office but that did not describe his role in Ireland. Prior to his appointment these lands had been managed by officials in the Treasurer’s Office in Dublin Castle but following the Union of 1800 many Dublin offices were amalgamated with their counterparts in Whitehall. The Woods Commissioners were aware that the lands had been poorly managed in Dublin and were determined to introduce a better administrative structure. Weale continued to live in London but spent some months in Ireland from his first visit in 1826 till he died in Dublin in 1838. Weale had been secretary to Lord Sheffield prior to his appointment as an administrative clerk in the Woods Office in 1810. From 1827 he supervised the sales of many of the Crown’s remaining Irish estates. Further, he was the principal organizer in the few attempts to reform and regenerate life on ailing estates like Kinnitty, King’s County and Kingwilliamstown (now renamed Ballydesmond) in northwest Cork. In his management of these estates, he ran afoul of many of Ireland’s most powerful and influential landowners and encountered opposition from some of the personnel in Dublin Castle who resented the new management from London. Weale’s role in Ireland has been largely misunderstood but mainly ignored.
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July 22, 2023
Gone With the Wind and the Offaly Connection. By Danny Leavy. Blog No 505, 15th July 2023

The 1937 Pulitzer Prize winning book and subsequent Oscar winning movie were set in Clayton and Atlanta, both in Georgia, during the American Civil War and Reconstruction Era. It depicts the struggles of young Scarlett O’Hara, the spoiled daughter of a well-to-do plantation owner, who must use every means at her disposal to claw her way out of poverty following Sherman‘s destructive March to the sea.

The author of Gone with the Wind was Margaret Mitchell. While Margaret Mitchell’s Irish heritage is well known, most of the focus has centered on her maternal great-grandfather, Philip Fitzgerald. It’s believed Philip emigrated from the Fethard area of Tipperary and eventually settled on a plantation near Jonesboro, Georgia; where he had one son and seven daughters with his wife, Elenor McGahan, who was from an Irish Catholic family.
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July 15, 2023
Private John Dargin, Tullamore, County Offaly fought at Waterloo. By Stephen Callaghan. Blog No 504, 12th July 2023

208 years ago, the Battle of Waterloo took place in Belgium. The armies under the command of the Duke of Wellington defeated Napoleon, putting an end to the Napoleonic Wars, which had begun in 1803. To mark the victory and acknowledge the men that fought at the battle, a campaign medal was decided upon by the House of Commons. Rather than given for acts of bravery, it was given to all those involved in the campaign. Similarly, other counties in the coalition issued medals of their own, however the medals issued by the British were named to the recipient, making it possible to trace them. In today’s post, we will look at one of these Waterloo medals, which was awarded to Private John Dargin of the 54^th Regiment of Fo

John Dargin was born near the parish of Kilbride or Tullamore. He enlisted in the British Army on 6 May 1812 and was a labourer. Assuming he would have been around 18 years old at the time of his enlistment, this would place his birth around the 1790s.
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July 12, 2023
The Irish Mist Figurine/ Soldier. By John Flanagan. Blog No 503, 8th

This week we provide an extract from the book to be published in November 2023 on Irish Mist Liqueur, a unique Tullamore-based product for almost forty years. Many homes have the Irish Mist Soldier in pride of place on a dresser so here is some more information about it from John Flanagan, the production manager with Irish Mist for twenty-five years. The book will be published in the autumn. You can email us to reserve a copy for you. No money now thanks. The book has support from Creative Ireland and Offaly County Council.

The Irish Mist ceramic figurine was made by Coronetti, Cunardo, Italy. Each one was individually hand-painted by different artists in the factory. The figurine is a replica of an Irish soldier (officer) in the Austrian army about 1756. The Austrian connection is associated with the founder of the recipe for Irish Mist Liqueur who was Austrian. Irish Mist was known as the Legendary Liqueur.
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July 8, 2023
Declan McSweeney on the Offaly Express. Blog No 502, 30th June 2023

The closure in 2012 of Offaly Express, where I served as a staff reporter from 1988 to 2007, marked the end of an era in local journalism.

When I was a schoolboy, living in Tullamore, the dominant local paper was the Offaly Independent, though the Midland Tribune circulated to a degree from Birr. The growth of Tullamore led to a feeling that a specifically local paper was needed, and in 1978, the Tullamore Tribune was launched, under the editorship of the late Geoff Oakley. He remained in that post until he retired in 1994, when he was succeeded by Ger Scully.

The Offaly Express emerged as a sister paper of the Portlaoise-based Leinster Express, which began to circulate around Tullamore in 1984, though it already had a presence in Edenderry and the eastern half of Offaly. Much of the credit for the Offaly edition must lie with the late Kevin Farrell, who would surely have enjoyed the irony of the fact that his death in July 2012 took place the very day on which the Offaly Express ceased publication and that it had to hold on to report the sad news of his passing.
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June 30, 2023

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