Also reviewed here.

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Published by Irish Academic Press, Newbridge 2026

ISBN: 9781788551816

Reviewer: John Dorney

The first census of the Irish Free State took place one hundred years ago. It was collected by some 2,000 members of the Garda, the new police force, the data sifted by 83 clerks and collated by way of punch cards attached to each form and counted by machines. It had now been released to the public in digital form for the first time, following previous digital releases of the censes of 1901 and 1911.

This book, a handsome, illustrated volume, edited by Orlaith McBride and John Gibney, is a collection of essays on the census and the Irish society it explored. There are no less than twenty three separate essays, on a wide range of topics, though most are short and quite easy to digest.

A great feature of modern Irish history writing, facilitated by the ongoing digitisation of various sources, has been the concentration of the micro; a particular page in a census, a particular file in the Military Pension collection and so forth. Some of the contributions here follow this model with pieces on individual streets and villages in Galway, Dublin and Clare, a workhouse in Cavan and so on. And while this gives valuable human colour and insight, this reviewer got most from those entries which collated the data and explained the general trends the information in the census showed.

The population of the 26 county Irish state was found to be 2.9 million, a continued fall, of about five per cent, since the last census of 1911. Myram Nyhan Grey records that before the 1926 census the Irish state had established that 1.8 million Irish born people were residing in other countries, principally in the United States, Britain and the Dominions of the British Empire.

It had always been the objective of Irish nationalists to arrest the exodus of people from Ireland, ongoing since the mid nineteenth century. The results of the 1926 census must, then, have come as a disappointment, even so soon after independence in 1922. Nyhan Grey shows that the official reaction to the continued decline in the population revealed by the 1926 census was denial that ongoing emigration was the cause. They preferred citing instead the population losses caused by the First World War, the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918-19 and the withdrawal of the British military and administrative staff after 1922 (together accounting for well over 100,000 people).

It is notable that deaths in Ireland’s owned armed conflicts from 1916-23 had, by contrast, a negligible effect on the population profile. Research elsewhere has estimated these at no more than 5,000 deaths in total across the island.

Interestingly, the census found slightly more men than women in the Irish Free State; 50 to 49 per cent, a pattern most unusual in Europe. This was likely the result of asymmetric emigration, in which young women left the country in somewhat greater numbers than men.

Marriages took place surprisingly late in life in 1926 and we find that 72 per cent of men and over 50 per cent of women aged 25-35 found in the census were unmarried. This was probably the result of an ongoing pattern of post famine inheritance of farms in rural Ireland, in which the eldest son had to wait until the death of his father before he inherited farm and was seen as eligible to marry.

There are some modern resonances here. Delaying marriage, which today is commonly attributed to the difficulty in buying a home, is nothing new. Additionally in those days many more people than today entered the celibate Catholic orders, removing them from eligibility for marriage. The difference in birth rate between now and then seems to be attributable, as Lindsay Earner Byrne notes here, not so much to earlier marriage as to the fertility of early twentieth century couples once they were married.

Indeed the largest cohort of the Irish population (29 per cent) was aged 14 or under in 1926, compared to just under 40 in the 2022 census. This shows the high birth rate of one hundred years ago, but high emigration plus the effects of war and disease meant that society in the Free State lacked the ‘bulge’ of young adults it should have shown.

Some 70 per cent of the population was rural and over 50 per cent worked in agriculture, as  Gregory Walls shows, in one of the four chapters he contributes. The exception was the city of Dublin, which by 1926 had nearly half a million inhabitants and was still growing. It is worth recalling that this underlined the quite marked contrast between life experience in Dublin and the mostly rural ‘country’ until quite recently.

Partition had lopped off a great swathe of the island’s urban working class into another jurisdiction. Manufacturing employed just 14 per cent of the population south of the border and the number of domestic servants was in decline, driven, in part, by the decline of the Big House and also by the advances in household technology, especially in refrigeration.

Housing was, apparently, recorded as being better in the Irish Free State than Scotland but worse than in Northern Ireland considerably worse than in England or Wales. Ruth McManus shows that overcrowding was endemic in urban areas, especially in Dublin, but also in places like Limerick, Waterford, Sligo and Cork  and was actually getting worse, in 1926, before the large schemes of public housing of the 1930s were started.

The equivalent Northern Ireland census was lost, apparently pulped during the Second World War, so no direct comparison is available between the two states in 1926 Ireland. However, what is clear is that both had a distinct ethno-religious identity and in the case of the southern state at least, demographic changes post 1922 greatly reinforced this.

The Free State in 1926 showed a major drop in its Protestant population, of 32 per cent since 1911, only party explained by the withdrawal of the British Army and civil administration. Andy Bielenberg restates his thesis that lethal violence against Protestants, while it existed in the revolutionary years, was not a major cause for the Protestant exodus, citing instead low birth rates, losses in the First World War and other factors. Though he does surmise that ‘general apprehension among the minority’ about their future in a Catholic and nationalist-dominated state must also have been a factor in some leaving for Northern Ireland or Britain.

Dublin’s Protestant bourgeoisie emerged mostly unscathed from the revolutionary years, indeed they comprised a hugely disproportionate share of business owners and upper professionals in 1926. The Protestant farming population, surprisingly, given their vulnerability to political or agrarian violence during the revolutionary years, actually grew, we learn in Bielenberg’s chapter. Surprisingly also, we learn, the major drop in Protestant population, apart from those employed by the police or military, was in working class urban Protestants. We may speculate on why this was, the loss of ancillary occupations associated with the British Army perhaps? Loss of privileged position in certain trades? We must await further research for answers.

At the other end of the social scale, Terence Dooley highlights the position of the gentry, formerly the ruling class, or ‘Protestant Ascendancy’ but now by 1926 a largely powerless relic. Many had left permanently for Britian. Their estates had shrunk through various land acts, their rental incomes were greatly reduced and some of their great houses had been burned in 1920-23 and had disappeared altogether by the 1926 census.

Indeed one is struck by the homogeneity of the Free State’s population. John Gibney finds himself struck by the presence of foreign-born people across the country. While this may confound some readers’ expectation that the state’s population would be 100% Irish-born and Catholic, in fact the state was about 92% Catholic we learn and up to 97% Irish born. Of those born elsewhere, the vast majority were from Britain, with only a handful born outside the English-speaking world. Only 13,000 people were registered as non-Christian, of whom just under a third were comprised of the state’s small Jewish community.

The contrast with today’s Ireland is striking. In the 2022 census, some 20 per cent of the population was foreign born, in a population of over five million, and both the population and percentage of foreign born residents has increased hugely in the years since then.

Eighteen per cent of people registered in the 1926 census could speak Irish but only 1% filled out their census forms in that language. Cormac Ó Gráda and Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh show that this was partly because of overcounting in Gaeltacht areas, some of which were transitioning to English speaking, but also because many Irish speakers were illiterate. In either case though, it boded ill for the stated aim of the new state which was to revive Irish as the primary language of the country.

This book is an attractive, accessible and nicely illustrated volume that will greatly help to contextualise the 1926 census for who find themselves perusing it. It also contains much of interest for those looking more broadly to understand Irish society of one hundred years ago.

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A royal arrival in a west of Ireland town became a test of the Free State’s authority, exposing the strain between local welcome and national unease. By Emma Ryan.

Princess Mary’s visit to her husband, Viscount Henry Lascelles’s Portumna estate in October 1928, is remembered as one of the more remarkable episodes in the County Galway town’s twentieth-century history.

As the only daughter of British King George V and Queen Mary, her presence carried a significance beyond a private family visit.

The visit unfolded within the unsettled political landscape of the early Irish Free State. It was the first time a member of the British monarchy had visited since Independence in 1922. Though intended as a private stay, nothing involving such high-profile figures could remain private for long. This was to prove problematic.

The visit brought together several unresolved tensions at once: the legacy of landlordism, the authority of the new Free State, and the place of the monarchy in a country that had only recently broken from British rule. In Portumna, it was welcomed with genuine enthusiasm. Nationally, however, it was more sensitive. For the government, it required careful handling in an area still marked by the legacy of landlord-tenant conflict. Even before the couple arrived, the older divisions surfaced again.

Locals were already familiar with Lord Lascelles, who in 1916 had inherited the Clanricarde estate valued at £2.5 million from his great-uncle, Hubert de Burgh-Canning, 2nd Marquess and 15th Earl of Clanricarde. His grandmother, Elizabeth, had been the Earl’s sister. ‘Lucky Lascelles’, they called him. By then, much of the estate had already been broken up through Congested Districts Board acquisition, part of the wider transfer of land from landlords to tenants, though the demesne, the working farm, and some tenanted lands were retained.

The 14th Earl of Clanricarde died in 1874. The 15th Earl, who succeeded him, was an absentee landlord, living in rented rooms in London for almost four decades and the estate bore the mark of that long absence.  When Lord inherited in 1916, his own life was centred at Harewood House in Yorkshire, the principal seat of the Lascelles family. He inherited an estate with a history that still formed part of the atmosphere of the area.

He inherited the weight of that past and that would not easily be erased. Lord Clanricarde was one of the most notorious landlords, whose neglect and punitive actions had brought great distress to the tenantry. The estate had long stood as one of the most contentious landlord holdings in the west of Ireland, and the struggles associated with it helped to galvanise Land League agitation in the region.

The inheritance came to him in April 1916, while he was serving at the front in the First World War, afterward as a Major in the 1st Battalion of the Grenadier Guards. It was also the same month as the Easter Rising, placing the beginning of his relationship with Portumna at a time of global war and upheaval at home.

He first visited in November of that year, his left arm injured. He acknowledged, “during the war, we cannot make any very definite plans for the future”. He spoke as though the war alone stood in the way of his plans. There is little sign that he grasped how much Ireland had changed, or how contested the old landlord assumptions had become.

Commentary shows that the tensions surrounding the 1928 visit had been building for years. As early as 1924, British observers reacted cautiously to the idea that Princess Mary might establish a summer home at Portumna, noting that the associations of the place were “not altogether agreeable”.

Yet there was a counter-hope according to the British press, that a popular princess might bring “blessings in a region where only curses used to prevail.”  The legacy of Hubert de Burgh-Canning, a byword for absentee landlordism and a bleak past, was widely understood. To place a member of the royal family in that landscape was to place royalty into a history not yet settled.

The 1924 discussion suggests that she came to see the castle in the context of its possible future as an Irish home. That idea had been part of Lascelles’s ambitions from the moment he inherited the estate. Portumna Castle had stood as a ruin since a devastating fire in 1826. Built in the early seventeenth century, it was one of the earliest Renaissance style houses in Ireland.

In 1917, Lord Lascelles had plans drawn up to rebuild the Castle as a part-time residence. During the visit, press reports suggested that it might one day serve as a residence for his son George. Had the plans gone ahead, a grandson of King George V would have occupied the castle. In that sense, the Crown that had once underpinned Clanricarde power might briefly have come full circle. Press coverage seized on this possibility.

However, after the war in 1919, the estimated rebuilding costs had risen by about 125 per cent on the pre-war estimates. His architect, John Bilson, advised that restoring the castle for anything like £30,000 original estimates was no longer possible.

His life also changed dramatically when in 1922 he married Princess Mary and established a London base at Chesterfield House, while later, after succeeding to the title, substantial resources were directed towards the renovation of Harewood House to suit their life as Earl and Countess.

What appeared possible in 1917 belonged to another time. By 1928, the question was no longer whether Portumna Castle could be rebuilt, but whether such a project still made sense. If the future of the castle remained uncertain, his arrival in Portumna was anything but.

When Lord Lascelles first came to Portumna in 1916, an elaborate reception was organised. The town was illuminated, bonfires lit the streets, and a torchlight procession, accompanied by a brass and reed band playing Come Back to Erin, a song of return and belonging, escorted him from the bridge. At the entrance to the demesne, a banner was raised bearing the inscription: “De Burgo, 1215; Lascelles, 1916.”

He was presented with a formal illuminated address couched in a language of deference, invoking ancestry and loyalty. It invited him to take his place among them as “our leader, partner and friend”, and declared that “a new era has dawned for all of us”. He responded in kind, speaking of his wish to return, to spend time “amongst them,” and to spend at least part of the year at Portumna. The organisers hoped for practical results and later argued that it had done so: rent reductions, relief of arrears, employment, fuel for the poor, and pensions. These gave substance to the optimism that surrounded the reception.

His arrival was treated as a civic occasion in a county known for sharp political and religious divisions. Reports noted that, despite this, people of different denominations joined in receiving him. It was a deliberate act of civic unity in a highly charged political climate.

Not everyone saw it that way. In a country still marked by political strain, there was discomfort at the scale of the welcome and at what it seemed to represent. Critics described the “previous regime” in terms of “plunderers and oppressors” and referred to “schemes of wholesale extermination,” expressing shock that Catholic clergy and nationalist representatives would take part in such an occasion, so soon after independence.

Yet that reaction only underlines the significance of what happened in Portumna. James Cosgrave MP, who had often clashed with the late Lord Clanricarde, publicly supported the reception and later made clear that events had justified that course as they had succeeded in what they set out to do, secure rent reductions and pensions for estate workers. For him, and for others locally, it was a case of tenant welfare taking precedence over political .

This was not the first twentieth-century fire on the estate. On June 18^th, 1921, during the War of Independence, the so-called ‘new’ Castle, built in 1867, was destroyed, amid the wider pattern of country house burnings. At the Galway Quarter Session,  Lord Lascelles claimed of £200,000 in compensation, but the court was ruled the fire accidental as malice could not be proved.

So, when, in the early hours of October 1928, petrol was poured through a window at the Dowager House, a residence within the estate grounds, and the attached stable yard was set on fire, it belonged to a longer history.

“Please try and stop Princess Mary coming to I.F.S. Too dangerous.”

Prior to Princess Mary’s journey to Ireland, a telegram carrying the above stark warning was sent from an unknown man in Kingstown to King George V, triggering a chain of official communications that passed through the highest levels of the Irish Free State and the British government.

King George V, the Dominions Office, Free State premier W. T. Cosgrave, senior civil servants, and the upper ranks of the Garda Síochána were all drawn into the question of Princess Mary’s safety.

It exposed the Irish Free State to a direct test of its capacity to maintain order under exceptional political and diplomatic pressure. At stake was the safety of the monarch’s daughter, and was therefore a matter not only of hospitality, but of diplomacy.

A commentary in republican newspaper An Phoblacht reminded readers that Portumna Castle had come to Lord Lascelles through the Clanricarde inheritance, remarking: “The Western peasantry have memories of the Clanricarde – they should need no reminders on that score.”

Yet the house where Princess Mary was to stay remained unsecured, even though her household had already been in residence for nearly two weeks. That exposure became brutally clear on the night of October 4^th, two days before the couple arrived, when the stable and coach house buildings were burnt and the centre of gravity shifted in an instant, from household preparations to state security. Despite the warning telegram and the arson attack, the visit went ahead.

The attack centred on the stable yard near the North Gate. Petrol had been poured through a kitchen window but failed to ignite inside because the flagged stone floor prevented the fire from taking hold. The adjoining coach houses and stables were burned to the ground. By the time Princess Mary arrived, the arson had already made concern for her safety acute. Security arrangements appear to have intensified rapidly after the fire.

Detectives from the Garda Criminal Investigation Department (CID) arrived, and senior intelligence officer David Neligan became . Neligan had served during the War of Independence as an IRA intelligence agent within Dublin Castle, secretly passing intelligence to Michael Collins.

During the Civil War he worked in Free State military intelligence, which he ultaimtely commanded, and in the post 1923 period headed the Garda detective branch. His involvement shows that the matter had reached the highest level of state security.

In hindsight, the estate should have been secured as soon as the Princess’s household staff arrived. Instead, the response gathered urgency only after the danger had already declared itself.

Three men were later charged, but the case was withdrawn for lack of evidence. The act was widely interpreted as politically motivated, understood as a strike against the presence of royalty in the new state and, for some, against the landlord system they represented.

In an interview, Lord Lascelles made it known that he and Princess Mary deeply regretted if their visit had caused suffering. They expressed hope that ‘no vindictive action’ would follow. His response suggested a wish to restore calm, perhaps shaped by concern for his shy royal bride and by the knowledge that the outside world, including his father-in-law, was watching.

Whatever calm he displayed at the time, his later claim against Galway and North Tipperary County Councils for £1,000 following the destruction of the stables suggests a less forgiving later response. The sum itself was minuscule when measured against the scale of his inherited wealth, which makes the claim all the more telling. While in Portumna, he presented himself as a benevolent and public-spirited landlord, willing to support local causes and anxious to steady the atmosphere after the fire.

Lord Lascelles had a habit of trying to recover losses from the locality.  After the ‘new’ Castle burned in 1921, he unsuccessfully pursued a claim of £200,000 through the courts. Yet once back at a remove, the older instinct reasserted itself in the £1,000 claim, where the damage was again treated as something that might be answered for by the locality.

In Portumna, the response to the fire was swift and empathic. The attack was condemned by community leaders and by both church leaders, described as a “stain on the honour of the parish”. Yet the visit went ahead with heightened security and a change of travel plans from train to motorcar.

Arrival and First Impressions

The steamer Lady Limerick came into the North Wall at 9 a.m. on Saturday, October 6^th, to a crowd of about 500, with some reported to be waving Union Jacks. Before travelling west, the couple breakfasted in the city and called at the former Viceregal Lodge in the Phoenix Park.

She had been to the Phoenix Park in 1911 as a fourteen-year-old with her father; nothing then could have hinted at the path that would later bring her back to Ireland, and onward to Portumna Castle.

That afternoon, an Armstrong Siddeley car swept through the gates of Portumna Castle. Nearly three hundred people lined the avenue, cheering as the Princess “inclined her head in thanks” and Lord Lascelles “raised his trilby in salute”. The excited community met them with the fire still fresh in everyone’s mind.

Contemporary reports observed that Princess Mary would have been the first member of the Royal family in any reign to possess a home in Ireland. Coverage differed sharply on either side of the Irish Sea. British newspapers leaned into the romance of the occasion. Irish coverage was more cautious and layered, and the idea of a British princess taking even seasonal residence there was difficult to accept in some quarters. While local reports reflected warmth, national commentary carried a sharper edge, returning to the legacy of Clanricarde and the tensions that still lingered beneath the surface.

As if time had been suspended, on Sunday, accompanied by detectives and her lady-in-waiting, the Hon. Miss Kenyon-Slaney, Princess Mary and Lord Lascelles followed the path of his ancestors and entered the Church of Ireland via the private Yew Walk, taking their seats in the Clanricarde gallery unused since 1874. In an extraordinary moment, the congregation rose to sing “God Save the King”.

The press enjoyed reporting on the smaller details that showed a human touch. Caught in a sudden shower, the couple took shelter in the cottage of an estate worker, where Princess Mary stood by the turf fire and shook hands with his son. It was a small, unguarded moment quickly reported and widely repeated.

Lord Lascelles spoke of plans for the estate and its future, including developing a stud farm. This is the kind of development that local people hoped for in an economy marked by high unemployment and emigration.  In quieter moments, the couple visited local schools, where children sang in Irish, part of a new cultural language taking shape in the Free State.

Princess Mary had clearly won local people over, described as shy beside her tall, self-assured husband, together they came across as easy, personable, and genuinely at home in Portumna.

The Princess and the Post Box.

On Monday, the couple walked through Portumna, and thousands had flocked to the town. A remarkable photo survives: Princess Mary walking down the main street, the men lifting their hats in greeting, a gesture of respect that now feels almost from another world, and which captures something of the inherent contradictions at the heart of that week.

At the post office, these contradictions came into sharper focus. She passed a post box still bearing the ‘GR’ cipher of her father’s reign, painted over in green.

After independence, Ireland began to rebrand itself, trying to reclaim a national identity. Part of that rebranding used the colour green to portray an ideal of purity and simplicity rooted in rural Ireland. The Emerald Isle. Out of economy and practicality, the post boxes were not replaced; instead, they had been repainted, the old royal insignia covered but not erased. Yet here was the King’s daughter, walking through a newly independent state, passing her own father’s cipher to a rapturous welcome.

Was it ironic? Certainly.

Did she notice? Almost certainly.

Eventually the week of welcomes and headlines was over, Princess Mary and Viscount Lascelles left Portumna. For several days, the town had been swept into a rare excitement, the culmination of months, if not years, of preparation, and of optimism that had gathered around the castle and its future.

Before leaving, Lord Lascelles spoke of the pleasure their stay had given him and his wife, and his hope to return in the near future.  As the couple left on such happy terms, there were expectations of return, of renewal, and of what that connection might yet bring.

Security remained tight on their departure. Colonel David Neligan, Chief of the Free State Detective Force, together with officers of the CID. They travelled to Cloughjordan railway station, where they boarded the train north, continuing via Dublin to Belfast, where Princess Mary and Viscount Lascelles resumed official royal duties on behalf of the Crown. The same couple, on the same day, on the same island, moved through two jurisdictions.

They remained in Belfast until Saturday, 13 October, when, following the Lord Mayor’s Reception at Belfast City Hall and other official engagements, they departed for London, bringing the Irish trip to its close.

Conclusion – The Consequences for Portumna

When Lord Lascelles mentioned the possibility of returning the following summer, later correspondence shows that this intention was genuine. On 10 August 1929, Lascelles wrote to Lord Granard, Senator Bernard Forbes, regarding the practical arrangements required for a return to Portumna.

As he put it: “I must send over a decent housekeeper and housemaid for Princess Mary, and the moment they go over, the bad news is broadcast all over the place.” Granard referred the matter to the office of W. T. Cosgrave, President of the Executive Council. In a reply dated 14 August, Cosgrave acknowledged that preparations would “alert rumours in the locality.”

His frustration was evident. Without privacy, security could not be guaranteed, and the IFS were clearly not going to bear the cost of sustained protection.

That frustration was understandable, but an Irish holiday home at that juncture was a case of wrong time, wrong place.

In 1929, on the death of his father, Lord Lascelles became the 6^th Earl of Harewood. They moved into Harewood House in 1930 and their position in England changed and with it any real likelihood of Portumna becoming a regular centre of their lives.

Alongside this, by the late 1930s, government policy under de Valera favoured agricultural production and self-sufficiency, and large estates were expected either to adapt or to retreat. Lascelles did both. In 1938, he entered a ten-year scheme that shifted the estate towards tillage, aligned with the wheat drive, forgave arrears, and reduced his financial exposure. The earlier ambition to rebuild the castle gave way to a more practical settlement. The estate was no longer being prepared for residence but reorganised for exit. As one later press report put it, he was effectively being encouraged to “cut Ireland,” and he did so.

After his death in 1947, the final stages of transfer followed quickly. Within a year, tenants were enabled to purchase their holdings, while the demesne and woodland passed into state hands through the Forestry Commission. This marked a shift from a town existing to support a castle to a castle belonging to the town.

Local effort, together with the OPW from the 1960s onwards, restored Portumna Castle, as private ownership gave way to public stewardship. It is now recognised as one of the most important surviving Renaissance castles in Ireland.

In the end, the bulk of the inheritance that passed from Lord Clanricarde to Lord Lascelles flowed onward to his son George. The estate’s story folded back towards royalty, its wealth absorbed into the Harewood estate, as if the inheritance had found its way back to where it began. The Clanricardes secured their lands in 1543 by aligning with the crown under surrender and regrant, a decision that allowed them to endure for four centuries. When the line ended and Hubert decided to leave the fortune to Lascelles, what had been preserved for generations passed back to the royal family.

The weight of the visit lies in its many layers. The IFS was being tested, managing an occasion that carried political and diplomatic meaning. At the same time, there was unease, seen in the arson and the memory of landlord conflict that had never fully disappeared. Alongside that stood a small town that had waited a long time for something to change, for investment, for the chance that the Castle might rise again. And within it all, there was Lord Lascelles himself, returning to an estate he had inherited unexpectedly, wanting to show it to his wife. He inherited during a global war, returned with plans, and encountered a country that was itself being remade.

All of these strands came together in one place. For a few days, Portumna held them .

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Sources

1. Midland Counties Advertiser, December 21, 1916.

2. Leinster Reporter, November 5, 1921.

3. The Irish Times, November 5, 1921.

4. Yorkshire Post and Leeds Intelligencer, March 10, 1923.

5. Western Mail, October 27, 1924.

6. Yorkshire Post and Leeds Intelligencer, October 5, 1928.

7. Yorkshire Post and Leeds Intelligencer, October 8, 1928.

8. Sheffield Daily Telegraph, October 8, 1928.

9. Sheffield Independent, October 10, 1928.

10. Belfast News-Letter, December 6, 1937.

11. Western Morning News, April 21, 1938.

12. Yorkshire Evening Post, June 20, 1938.

13. Department of the Taoiseach files, “Women in 20th-century Ireland, 1922–1966: sources,” finding aid database, National Archives of Ireland, Dublin.
14. I  am grateful to Stephen Nevin for sharing his notes and for the insight and perspective he brought to this research.

Reviewer John Dorney

Published by Merrion Press, Kildare 2026

ISBN: 9781785375842

Gerard Shannon has followed up his successful biography of IRA leader Liam Lynch with one of fellow anti-Treaty martyr Rory O’Connor.

Unlike Lynch, O’Connor has been the subject of relatively little scholarly attention up to now, being mainly known for his leading role in the occupation of the Four Courts in April 1922 that helped to start the Civil War, and for his execution at the hands of the Irish Free State in December of that year.

Shannon tries to fill in some of the gaps on O’Connor’s life in this book, with mixed results. It appears that O’Connor did not leave a great deal behind in the way of personal papers or letters. Although the IRA of the era had a mania for paperwork, writing down far more than was prudent for an underground organisation, Rory O’Connor does not seem to have been particularly prolific in this regard either.

Perhaps it was as well. As Shannon shows, O’Connor’s most famous foray into public relations was a disaster. In a notorious press conference of March 1922 he informed the press that the IRA intended to disavow the authority of the Irish parliament, the Dail. When asked if this meant there would be a military dictatorship, O’Connor flippantly remarked ‘you can take it that way if you want’. Which has variously been interpreted as arrogant militarism or even incipient fascism.

Shannon persuasively argues that it was more in the line of an exasperated, abrasive, remark from O’Connor, when he was questioned on a half-thought-out policy rather than a truly malevolent agenda on his part. This did not, however, limit the damage it did to the anti-Treaty cause, the possibility of healing the rift over the Treaty, or the slide towards Civil War in the spring of 1922.

Leaving aside O’Connor’s most notorious faux pas, which has been well documented in the past, we do learn a good deal that is new about O’Connor in this book. What emerges tells us some interesting things about Ireland’s revolutionary elite of that era.

O’Connor was the offspring of a one-generation-old Catholic upper middle class.  His father was a solicitor with the Congested Districts Board, the British government’s land reform body in Ireland. He was expensively educated at Catholic private schools and at University College Dublin. Ernie O’Malley, O’Connor’s contemporary and fellow IRA officer, came from an identical background, and both grew up in Dublin’s Victorian suburbs. Another with a similar background was Kevin O’Higgins, son of a doctor from Laois, with whom O’Connor would develop a relationship whose tragedy was of Shakespearean proportions.

In his student life in Dublin, O’Connor demonstrated nationalism, which was the norm, but not radicalism of any sort. Qualifying as a civil engineer he left for Canada in 1911, working in the expanding railways there, before returning to Ireland in 1914.

O’Connor’s sojourn in Canada is one of the more interesting episodes of the book. He found the English speaking Canadians and Americans uncouth and prone to violence, ‘a beastly vulgar lot of thugs’ he called them in a letter home. He was more impressed with the French speaking Catholics of Montreal, and approvingly noted that the city also had a large Irish Catholic community. He was struck by the unfamiliar multi-culturalism of Canada but doesn’t seem to have harboured particular prejudices against the ‘white, yellow and black races’ that he encountered.

His career on the Canadian railroads was fairly unremarkable. It seems his job was simply to inspect rail track with a team of labourers, in order to fix any potential breaks or faults. He had no particular career progression there, but on his return to Dublin managed to secure, no doubt through family and other contacts, a job as civil engineer in charge of the city’s paving section.

It cannot be said that O’Connor’s life had been very remarkable up to this point. But on his return to Dublin he seems to have had a Damascene conversion to Irish separatism. This was not instantaneous, Shannon records that on his return to Ireland he was still a Home Ruler who supported Irish participation in the Great War. But within a few months he had been sworn into the Irish Republican Brotherhood and was on the road to armed rebellion in 1916.

There is little indication of how this happened. Shannon attributes it to his close friendship with the Plunkett family, like O’Connor an upper middle-class family but one much more imbued with radical nationalism. One of them would be executed for his role in the 1916 Rising, another would be the first man elected under what became the Sinn Fein party in 1917 and another still would join O’Connor in Free State imprisonment during the Civil War.

It is sadly a recurring feature among Irish Republicans of that era, that their mental pathways, sudden conversions and commitments to political militancy are so poorly documented and explained. Frustration often results from trying to explain their motivations, and so it is with Rory O’Connor. There is little to explain why he took the paths he did.

This is not the fault of biographers such as Shannon as much as the people themselves, who did such a poor job of explaining themselves. It is possible, perhaps, to say that Irish nationalist political culture was so pervasive, its narratives and goals so familiar to those within its reach, that militancy was seen as simply assertive action to achieve what every sensible person was deemed to want. Certainly, everyone within the Irish Catholic community that is, and no further explanation of elaboration of goals was really felt necessary by militants of the cause.

Some few, such as Arthur Griffith or James Connolly, had laid out their rationale for rejecting British rule and elaborated more or less worked out plans for the future – though they could be as diverse as Griffith’s mercantile, protectionist Dual Monarchy or Connolly’s socialist Workers’ Republic. But they were the exception, and Rory O’Connor was no exception to this rule. He never laid out his own motivations or visions for a future Ireland.

Reading between the lines a little, however, and delving into interest rather than ideology, one could argue that to men of O’Connor’s class, Irish independence removed the roadblocks to their advancement as a state forming elite, which British rule would always frustrate. But this tells us little of why some were willing to sacrifice their lives for this, while others were not. Or why some, perhaps the majority, were prepared to accept accommodations with the British Empire, while others, of an identical social background, never would. O’Connor after 1916 was one of the latter, for reasons he never quite articulated.

Shannon’s book admirably documents O’Connor’s activities but does not explain them better than O’Connor himself could.

O’Connor the revolutionary soldier had a mixed career. He was wounded in 1916 while carrying messages between rebel garrisons. The bullets that wounded him on the corner of Stephen’s Green and Grafton Street in Dublin may have been a case of ‘friendly fire’ fired by a rebel sniper ensconced in the Royal College of Surgeons, though it is uncertain who was firing at him. His wounding meant that he escaped interment and was one of the leading figures in the reinvigoration of the separatist, or as it now became, republican movement in 1917-18.

He rose to become IRA Director of Engineering, responsible for the direction of the guerrilla army in sabotage and explosives, as well as coordinating IRA sabotage operations in Britain. His career as a civil engineer helps to explain this, but many in the IRA were not particularly impressed with his performance. Shannon uncovers a range of hostile commentary from within the IRA. One IRA officer Joe Lawless found him ‘peculiarly solemn and unsmiling’ another, Tom McMahon thought he was ‘no revolutionary mind and no calibre of GHQ officer… ineffective, indecisive, slow’. And another, Ernie O’Malley, decried his failure to develop new bombs or mortars for the organisation.

O’Connor was arrested in January 1921 by the British and interned at Rath Camp at the Curragh Kildare. He successfully escaped from there in March of that year, but again appears to have made few friends among his fellow prisoners. Shannon quotes Lawless again who opposed O’Connor as camp commandant and blamed his escape for sabotaging a mass escape planned by other prisoners.

One of the few figures in the republican movement who did appreciate Rory O’Connor was Kevin O’Higgins, at that point a senior figure in the underground republican Department of local government. O’Higgins thought that OConnor was ‘sublime’. The two developed such as close friendship at this time that O’Connor was asked to be best man at O’Higgins’ wedding in October 1921. The two seemed to have a lot in common, from social background to dry satirical sense of humour.

Where they parted ways, of course, was over the Anglo-Irish Treaty which was signed in December 1921. O’Higgins would go on to be one of its leading supporters while O’Connor came to national prominence as an outspoken opponent.

Once again though, we run into problems of interpretation. Shannon reveals that O’Connor was at first ambivalent about the Treaty, arguing for a time Michael Collins’ line that it was a step in the right direction, but later became militantly against it. The Treaty was of course a painful compromise for Irish Republicans, but O’Connor’s opposition to this was not well articulated. He simply stated that Ireland should never voluntarily enter the British Empire, that the Irish Republic existed and that the IRA would defend it. As a member of IRA GHQ Staff he was one of the most senior commanders to reject the Treaty.

How this would be translated into concrete political advances he never seems to have worked out, nor how it could be squared with the majority popular support that Michael Collins managed to rally for the Treaty. The contradictions led to his ill-judged outburst at the press conference of March 1922, referred to above.

Nor were his anti-Treaty colleagues particularly impressed with him. Liam Lynch despaired of O’Connor’s belligerency. Peadar O’Donnell is quoted by Shannon as saying that O’Connor ‘hadn’t the brains of a flea’. Not a very ringing endorsement.

But there was no real plan for dictatorship on O’Connor’s part. Instead, one unplanned escalation ran into another, culminating in the end, in Civil War.

Disavowal of the Dail at the IRA Convention of March 1922 led to mutually hostile pro and anti-Treaty garrisons taking over barracks and other public buildings from the departing British in the spring of 1922. The pro-Treaty occupation of Dublin’s barracks led to O’Connor’s faction occupying Dublin’s Four Courts as a base in response. Finally in June 1922, the assassination of Field Marshal  Henry Wilson by IRA men of undetermined allegiance and resulting British pressure, caused the Provisional government to open fire on the Four Courts in late June.

O’Connor will always be associated with these events, but in truth his control over them was loose. He did not even militarily command the Four Courts garrison during the two day siege there. Afterwards in captivity he nursed his grudges for the outbreak of Civil War and passed the time playing chess with his cell mates.

His last act came with the notorious executions of December 8 1922.

The Provisional, soon to be Free State, government had embarked upon  a series of executions of republican prisoners in November 1922. When in retaliation the IRA assassinated popular pro-Treaty TD Sean Hales, the government decided to execute summarily the four most senior anti-Treatyites in its custody, one of whom was Rory O’Connor. Famously, in the cabinet that approved this reprisal, entirely illegal, as Shannon correctly points out, was O’Connor’s friend Kevin O’Higgins. ‘Great Heavens’ he was to exclaim in the Dail when accused of personal vindictiveness, ‘one of these men was a friend of mine’.

Rory OConnor’s life was therefore snuffed out, just before his fortieth year, before he had a chance to construct his version of events, in writing or otherwise. The manner of his death meant he would forever be a republican martyr, but the details of his life were little known over the decades since. Gerard Shannon’s new biography is an admirable attempt to change that fact, even of much of O’Connor’s internal life may always remain a mystery.

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By Emma Ryan

Ballinasloe is a market town in east Galway whose October Horse Fair helped make it one of the more prosperous towns in the west of Ireland. The town grew around a strategic crossing point on the River Suck and, by the early nineteenth century, lay at the heart of the Le Poer Trench estate, with the earls of Clancarty investing in its streets, markets and public buildings.

Today, if you turn off Ballinasloe’s Main Street, you step into what feels like a leftover space: narrow passages, old stonework, a sense of being behind the town rather than in the centre of it. It is easy to pass by without a second thought. Yet for roughly a century, these spaces were home to hundreds of people.

Ballinasloe’s lanes, once teeming with people going about their daily business, were abandoned almost a century ago and most of their houses have since been demolished. From the early nineteenth century until the 1930s, a web of back lanes threaded between the town’s main streets. Today only fragments survive; for many years they lived on mainly in old maps, street names and local lore. The people who lived in these places were families whose labour supported the local economy, yet their homes lay tucked out of sight behind the town’s respectable facades.

The families who lived in the lanes were not marginal to the town’s story, even if their homes were physically tucked away. They were at the heart of its labouring life, raising children, caring for older relatives, and sustaining the town’s streets, shops and fairs from dwellings that sat just beyond the main thoroughfares. The contrast between their economic importance and the invisibility of their living conditions runs through the documentary record.

Apart from 1901 and 1911 censuses, there are no sources that provide accurate numbers of how many people lived in the lanes. While a map associated with Griffith’s Valuation numbers the dwellings in the various lanes and provides the corresponding names of the heads of household, dependents are not listed. Out of the nine lanes examined, there were 153 houses occupied in 1901 with 631 occupants. In 1911, 162 houses were occupied with 697 occupants.

Origins of the lanes

Ballinasloe’s lanes have received little attention in local history. The first comprehensive study of Ballinasloe’s history, Patrick Egan’s The Parish of Ballinasloe, notes how its population almost doubled from 1824 to 1931.

Declan Kelly’s A Moment’s Memory attributes this largely to the presence of the Le Poer Trench family (the earls of Clancarty), the granting of generous leases for the construction of ‘good houses and places of business’, and the economic contribution of the annual October Fair.

Cartographic evidence, in the form of Larkin’s 1819 Grand Jury Map of Galway and the 1842 Ordnance Survey (OS) six-inch map, suggests that many of the lanes were constructed sometime between 1809 and the early 1830s. (Figure 1 shows the location of the various lanes listed in Table 1 in Appendix).

By the time the Ordnance Survey was underway in the mid-1830s, however, the dwellings in areas such as Rutledge’s and Piper’s lanes were clearly marked. Interestingly, some of the names by which these lanes were commonly known are not recorded in the 1842 OS map, despite being of the same configuration as on the 25-inch OS map of 1890–1913. This may indicate that they had not been formally named in their earlier years or that the surveyors did not consider them important enough to record their actual names.

With the boom created by the annual fair, most of Ballinasloe’s main streets were built between 1783 and 1819. That building campaign needed a large supply of labour and domestic servants. The lanes were probably laid out quickly during these years to house those workers and their families.

Mac Lochlainn notes that the lanes were believed to derive their names from the families that dwelled at their entrances, or ‘some of them may have been because of activities that took place within them’. Kelly has also pieced together a catalogue of local street names not recorded on earlier maps and has traced their origins to church and chapel activities.

One example relates to the Primitive Methodist congregation, which occupied a chapel at the northern entrance to the lane; while Woodslip was believed to be the location where slips of wood were hewn and shaped for the construction of barrels.

It has also been suggested that Paradise Row was a name that was bestowed sardonically as the residents looked out on both St Michael’s Catholic Church and the Primitive Methodist chapel, structures directed towards the concept of Christian salvation. In most instances, the lanes appear to have been named after the people who built them or the businesses at each entrance. Reeves’ Lane, for instance, got its name from a business premises, which was owned by Robert William Reeves (1817–1871). Ivers’ Lane was named after William Ivers (1805–1885), who had a business at the entrance, and Hopson’s Lane after James Hopson (1778–1864), who had a boot-making business.

Official and Newspaper Reports

Official reports and local newspapers give us the first outside views of life in Ballinasloe’s lanes. They show how landlords and officials described conditions there – and how those descriptions were challenged by clergy and residents who knew the lanes more closely.

The 1836 report of the commissioners who were appointed to investigate the conditions of the Irish poor took evidence from, among many others, Ballinasloe’s principal landlord, Richard Le Poer Trench, 2nd earl of Clancarty, who was listed among the ‘landowners who built and sustain constant housing’.

Though most of the lanes were constructed in his time as earl, he was unable to state what rents were being paid for ‘cabins’. He opined that on ‘my estate, the cabins generally are comfortable, clean, and supplied with beds, and comfortable bedding’. One doubts that he ever stood in a cabin like that, and he would hardly have had as many opportunities to visit his tenants as the parish priest, Fr Laurence Dillon, who gave contrasting evidence, stating that the dwellings of tenants were ‘very badly furnished’.

One of the earliest newspaper references to Ballinasloe’s lanes dates from late 1847, when a writer to the local Western Star expressed concern at the fact that cholera was spreading rapidly. The following month the same newspaper noted that the ‘bye-ways and back-passages of our town are much neglected.

At a meeting in May 1848 of Ballinasloe Town Commissioners, which had been established in 1841, Captain Dyer, who was in attendance of his official services as ‘inspector of nuisances’, complained that having visited several of the lanes he had serious concerns about the standard of the living conditions he found there. One of the commissioners took umbrage at his remarks, stating that the town was ‘as clean as could be seen anywhere’, while another commissioner said Dyer had no business visiting the lanes.

There was clearly an unwillingness to acknowledge the conditions people were forced to live in, let alone an inclination to deal with them. In April 1849, the Western News noted that the commissioners had visited all parts of the town and found it ‘creditably clean’. They had, however, given notice to some residents of Tea Lane, Piper’s Lane, Harbour Lane and Paradise Row to ensure their houses were ‘properly cleansed’ and had noted that Paradise Row, ‘which was always so filthy, was now extremely clean and the houses beautifully whitewashed’.

Bolger’s Lane came in for criticism for the ‘state of filth … often detrimental to the health of the community’, with one commissioner expressing the view ‘that lane will always be so’. The main problem identified for Bolger’s Lane was the dumping of ‘nuisance’ along the public way during the night.

The commissioners were still raising the issue of the state of Ballinasloe’s ‘back lanes’ in the mid-1860s and the necessity for the ‘Sanitary Committee lately appointed to do its job in ensuring the cleanliness of these areas’. The main concern was the spread of infectious disease, though the commissioners congratulated themselves on Ballinasloe’s freedom from contagion, having distributed lime for use by the general public.

By the late 1870s, the sanitary condition of Ballinasloe’s lanes was still causing concern. The Board of Guardians considered a letter from a man named O’Connor about Agricultural Lane (now Emmet Avenue), which he described as ‘unsafe and unfit for human habitation’. The medical officer, Dr Patrick Horne, was accused of neglecting his duty, while conditions in Tea Lane, Paradise Row and nearby Ivers’ Lane were said to be similar. O’Connor argued that the officers responsible for public health ‘were not acquainted with the lanes’, a suggestion confirmed by others from Ballinasloe.

Ivers’ Lane does not feature in the 1850s Griffith’s Valuation, indicating it was not then occupied, but a local newspaper reference from 1879 mentions that ‘William Ivers of Ballinasloe writes that there are no  “huts” in his yard and that the cottages on his premises are quite weatherproof and comfortable’. It is likely that Ivers’ Lane became a residential area in the late 1860s or sometime in the 1870s and it is known that it had been used previously as a yard for mail coaches.

In November 1883, the Dublin Daily Express reported on the ‘shocking condition of Ballinasloe’ and the subsequent sanitary officer was called on to resign. Thirteen years later, the Western Star noted that the ‘filthy condition’ of Piper’s and Harbour lanes was discussed by the Town Commissioners with a recommendation to serve notices on the landlord.

In March 1900, a special meeting of Ballinasloe Urban District Council (UDC), which replaced the Town Commissioners in 1899, was convened to discuss the fact that there were ‘no fewer than 100 houses in the town in which there is no sanitary accommodation’. Fifteen years later, the local East Galway Democrat was highly critical of the UDC and the ‘housing question’, noting that:

‘Such a length of time has elapsed since we first heard that a number of the dens, we could not call them houses, in the lanes of Ballinasloe were to be closed, and we have so often heard this repeated that we have to remind the Urban Council that a certain hot spot is paved with good intentions’.

The editor went on to say that abandoned houses were being occupied by others and suggested that the UDC ‘make a clean sweep of one after another, of those wigwams, which should really just be saturated with petroleum and a match put to them’. Six months earlier, the same newspaper had called for the closing of the ‘misnamed Paradise Row’.

In April 1915, it was reported that the UDC was taking measures to close houses in Piper’s and Wilson’s (formerly Rutledge’s) lanes. It was also decided that the houses in Paradise Row were ‘unfit for human habitation’. By 1919, officials had identified 95 houses in the various lanes as no longer suitable to live in. Despite this, Paradise Row was still occupied by 1928, when flooding was so bad that some residents had to ‘stand on chairs to leave their houses to get onto the lane’.

It was not until 1932, when a sub-committee recommended to the UDC the clearance of many of the lanes, that there appeared to be a determination to ensure that the issue was dealt with definitively. It was also noted that a lack of funding and lack of powers to clear the areas had hindered the work and that the new Housing Act would expedite matters.

Employment and Survival Strategies

Records for 1901 and 1911 show a community where almost every household contributed labour to the town around them. Patterns like these were common in Irish market towns, but the lanes of Ballinasloe are well documented and allow us to see them in close detail.

In 1901, 145 out of 154 lane households recorded at least one occupation among their members; by 1911, the proportion had risen to 99 per cent. The only house that appears without a listed occupation is one where the head of household was blind, yet local memory remembers him as a piper who performed and entertained, so even that doorway held a working life.

Families in the lanes depended on work for survival. Wages were modest and rent still fell due, so every possible earner played a part. The home itself became a small economic unit where beds, floor space and time all contributed. The census returns show people arranging their lives carefully to ensure the survival of the family unit.

Women’s contribution stands out very clearly. In 1901, 43 per cent of married women in the lanes held specified occupations – in other words, they went out to work. Among widowed and single women, the figure rises higher again to 82 per cent in 1901 and 85 per cent in 1911. Many worked in domestic service, cooking and cleaning; others appear as charwomen, seamstresses or dealers in fish, fruit and other goods. Their wages, small as they may have been, formed a vital strand in household income, especially where illness, widowhood or irregular work affected a man’s earnings.

Male heads of household appear in a range of roles across the town. About 28 per cent held a trade. Many more worked as general labourers or general servants, hired wherever extra hands were needed: at the fair, at the railway, in shops and yards, or on nearby farms. Their work underpinned the daily life and commercial success of Ballinasloe.

Young people also stepped into this world of work at an early age. The legal age to leave school was fourteen, and many went to work as soon as they could. In 1901, adolescents between fourteen and seventeen with recorded occupations lived in 15.5 per cent of lane households; by 1911, the figure had risen to 19 per cent. These teenagers stand in the census as servants, apprentices and assistants, their small wages helping to support parents, grandparents and younger siblings.

Inside the dwellings, families used space as carefully as they used time and labour. One important strategy lay in taking in lodgers. Some lane households did so in 1901, and by 1911 the number had increased. A bed, or even a corner of a crowded room, became a resource that could be exchanged for cash. The decision to share such confined spaces with outsiders says a great deal about the pressure on household budgets and the value placed on every possible shilling. It also shows families’ ability to adapt and make shrewd decisions in the absence of a welfare state to guide or support them.

Taken together, these figures reveal a clear pattern. The lanes housed a population deeply woven into the town’s working life, most of them in hard, poorly paid or unskilled jobs, and they relied on cooperation inside families and between neighbours to get by. Their homes lay in cramped and difficult conditions, yet the energy and effort recorded in the census returns give a strong sense of dignity and determination running through daily life in Ballinasloe’s lanes.

Spatial Analysis of the Lanes

The census returns give totals and room counts, and the old Ordnance Survey maps add shape. Together they show how families in Ballinasloe’s lanes lived very close to each other.

Maps help us picture what this meant on the ground. In Paradise Row, there was very little space between the front doors and the backs of the houses facing Market Square; a few steps from the threshold brought a resident face to face with a wall. Light and air came in thin strips, and inside the ground floor offered little more than a small rectangle in which families had to fit beds, table, fire, storage and movement.

Other lanes show a different kind of adaptation. In Rutledge’s Lane, houses that once had one or two rooms were later all recorded as one-room dwellings. The most plausible reading is that families removed dividing walls inside the houses to create single, larger rooms, even though the census then counted each dwelling as “one room”. Families gained a more workable living space in exchange for an official description that suggested the opposite.

Piper’s Lane shows similar patterns, with families altering their houses over time, perhaps learning from each other’s experiments in making difficult spaces more liveable. In Ivers’ Lane, families occupied former coach-yard buildings that originally served as storage. The footprint in each dwelling was a little larger there, though the overall feel of the lane still reflected close-packed walls and shared yards. My thanks to Gavin Treacy, quantity surveyor, who supplied measurements from the OS maps.

Decades later, the same pressure on space could be seen in Boulger’s Lane. In 1935, ten families still lived there, with most houses containing one room and a kitchen. There was no sanitation in these houses, and “the one room upstairs” – reached by a ladder – was still common. That “one room upstairs” was almost certainly the loft space created by earlier families in search of an extra bed.

These details describe more than bricks and mortar. They reveal daily routines shaped by tight spaces: meals eaten shoulder to shoulder, beds shared by several children, illness managed in rooms with little air, arguments and laughter carrying clearly through thin walls. They also show constant small acts of adjustment, from building lofts to knocking down partitions, as families in Ballinasloe’s lanes tried to create a little more room for themselves within the limits they faced.

Migration between Lanes and Overcrowding

Over time, within these small rooms and cramped yards, households grew. Overcrowding was already a serious concern at the start of the century. In 1901, one-third of the houses in the lanes were counted as overcrowded under the census definition of more than two people per room; by 1911, over 37 per cent of houses fell into that category. In those conditions, every extra square metre mattered. A loft, an enlarged room or a slightly larger house could transform everyday life for a family with several children and working adults.

The census returns suggest that families in the lanes moved more often than the street names might imply. Between 1901 and 1911, households appear and disappear from the records of Paradise Row, Hopson’s, Piper’s, Rutledge’s and other lanes in a way that points to careful choices. Parents weighed up room numbers, rent, access to work, neighbours and small advantages such as a view towards fields or a slightly wider yard. Movement within the town formed part of how families managed limited options.

On Paradise Row, only one of the twelve families recorded there in 1901 still lived on the row in 1911, and even that family had moved to a different house within the lane. Across the lanes as a whole, around 90 per cent of families moved elsewhere between each census, indicating that occupancy of particular lanes was impermanent and that people moved to what they may have perceived as cheaper or marginally better circumstances. Overcrowding likely also played a part in decisions to seek alternative accommodation in lanes with larger dwellings.

Communal Spaces

Outside the front doors, space for children to move and play varied greatly from lane to lane. The ends of Piper’s and Rutledge’s opened out into fields, so children who walked the length of the lane stepped into open ground. Boulger’s and Reeves’ Lane had some shared space at the rear. Ivers’ Lane had very little communal space at all, despite housing a large number of children. Paradise Row faced straight onto the backs of houses a few metres away, though the Market Square lay just beyond the entrance, which must have helped.

In everyday life, children likely walked or ran to these wider spaces, but the area immediately outside many front doors remained enclosed and overshadowed. The geography of each lane shaped the kind of play, sociability and neighbourly contact that could unfold there.

The End of the Lanes

By the mid-1930s, the death knell had been sounded for many of the lane buildings. In 1935, the Council effectively proposed evacuating several of them. The previous year, the Connacht Tribune reported on the near completion of forty-one new houses at St Brendan’s Terrace in Poolboy and described living conditions in the lanes that these houses were meant to replace.

The new state was formed in 1922, but housing reform moved slowly and real change did not come until the early 1930s. Under the 1933 Housing Act, Ballinasloe Urban District Council secured funding for new homes. The first new council estate opened in 1934 with forty-one houses, and a second followed in 1936 with sixty more. For tenants, these schemes marked a shift away from privately owned lane houses into publicly built homes with more space and security. Families moved from houses that still contained a kitchen and one upstairs room, reached by a ladder and without sanitary facilities, into new houses with separate rooms, proper services and much more light. The difference would have felt immediate and profound.

In April 1936, when Dr John Dignan, bishop of Clonfert, visited to bless the newly built council houses, the UDC chairman, Michael Connolly, stated that the 1933 Housing Act was ‘one of the greatest Acts passed by any government’. His words echo the pride many people felt in seeing Ballinasloe offer modern, well-planned homes to families who had spent generations in cramped conditions close to the town centre while supporting the local economy.

Conclusion

Newspaper reports show that sanitary conditions in the lanes occupied the minds of the authorities in Ballinasloe from the very beginning, but that there was no concerted effort to tackle the problem until well into the twentieth century.
That 156 dwellings were deemed unfit for human habitation in 1933 is striking when we consider that Ballinasloe had been renowned for at least two centuries for its annual fair and commercial success. This seems even more notable because successive earls of Clancarty lived locally and were not absentee landlords. It appears that the authorities, despite various resolutions earlier in the twentieth century, were not prepared to take on local landlords, nor were they inclined to do anything that added a penny to the bill faced by local ratepayers.

Despite landlords’ apparent lack of investment in these properties, people continued to occupy the houses in the lanes even as the population within them increased. The material examined shows that life in Ballinasloe’s lanes must have been challenging for the generations of families who lived there, especially as they were so poorly served by the authorities who had it within their power to improve their living conditions.

For a long time, the lives lived in Ballinasloe’s lanes stayed at the edge of the story. The growth of social and family history has encouraged us to look again at sources that were always there – censuses, maps, valuation records, sanitary reports – and to read them for what they say about ordinary working-class families. When we do, the lanes and their residents take their place in both local and national history. Their strength and resourcefulness in the face of neglect come into clearer view, and it becomes easier to see how the story of Ballinasloe’s lanes forms part of a much wider history of working-class life in Ireland.

Sources:

Patrick K. Egan, The Parish of Ballinasloe: Its History from the Earliest Times to the Present Day (Dublin: Clonmore & Reynolds, 1960).

Tadhg Mac Lochlainn, Ballinasloe, Inniu agus Inné: A Story of a Community over the Past 300 Years, 2nd ed. (Galway, 1993).

Declan Kelly, A Moment’s Memory, Vol. 1: A Personal and Historical Reflection on Creagh National School and District (Ballinasloe, 2014).

Declan Kelly, Between the Lines of History: People of Ballinasloe (Ballinasloe, 1999).

Declan Kelly, ‘Whistling Past the Colonial Graveyard: Why the 1916 Rising Failed to Resonate in Ballinasloe,’ in Marie Mannion (ed.), Centenary Reflections on the 1916 Rising: Galway County Perspectives (Galway County Council, 2016), pp. 197–211.

Declan Kelly, ‘Asleep in the Deep,’ in Ballinasloe and District Remembers Those Who Served in WW1 (Galway, 2018), pp. 353–67.

Noel Farrell, Exploring Family Origins in Ballinasloe Town (Longford, 1998), pp. 43–48.

Damian Mac Con Uladh, “The names on our streets.” Ballinasloe Life 10, no. 5 (2020): 58–59.

Eugenio F. Biagini and Mary E. Daly (eds), The Cambridge Social History of Modern Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).

British Parliamentary Papers, Poor Inquiry (Ireland), Appendix: E.H.C., 1836(32), supplement 5–6.

Galway County Council Archives, Ballinasloe Town Commissioners, Minutes BTC1–10.

Ordnance Survey 6-inch map of Ballinasloe, c.1842.

Newspapers:

Western Star, 18 Dec 1847; 15 Jan 1848; 27 May 1848; 14 Apr 1849; 25 Mar 1865; 8 Nov 1896.
Western News, 14 Apr 1849.
Irish Times, 6 Dec 1877.
Freeman’s Journal, 15 Sep 1879.
Dublin Daily Express, 8 Nov 1883.
Belfast Newsletter, 3 Jul 1907.
East Galway Democrat, 16 May 1914; 23 Jan 1915; 3 Apr 1915; 5 Jul 1919.
Connacht Tribune, 10 Nov 1928; 2 Apr 1932; 8 Jul 1933; 9 Jun 1934; 23 Nov 1935; 18 Apr 1936; 4 Jan 1947.
Offaly Independent, 30 Nov 1935.
Westmeath Independent, 14 Dec 1935; 9 Mar 1963; 1 Feb 1985.

Emma Ryan (Dec. 2025)
Emma is an independent writer and social historian from Portumna, Co. Galway. This article is based on her MA dissertation in History of the Family at the University of Limerick.

Appendix

Building insights into the lanes from documentary sources

Nine lanes are examined in this article and are set out in Table 1 in alphabetical order. The spellings of their names are those used on Ordnance Survey maps.

Table 1. Ballinasloe’s residential lanes

Producer: Jamie Goldrick, Editor: Ronan Anthony Fox.

PushPull Media (2025)

Reviewer: Brian Hanley

There was a widespread misconception in Ireland about supporters of Irish Northern Aid, or Noraid as it was better known. It was often presumed that the typical Noraid activist was invariably of distant Irish ancestry, raised on tales of famine and exile and steeped in embarrassing shamrock-soaked sentimentality. They had certainly never been to Ireland but were still prepared to fund the IRA’s armed struggle to the tune of millions every year. These long-distance IRA supporters were at best misguided, at worst ghouls, who revelled in death and destruction in a place they had never been to.

Unfortunately, some of the commentary on this excellent two-part documentary rehashed these cliches, reflecting more about the reviewers prejudices than the programme itself (Ed Power in the Irish Times never missing the opportunity to grind the same axe).

The reality about Noraid and indeed Irish America, was always far more complex than these stereotypes. Most of Noraid’s key activists, in the early days at least, were Irish, with a significant number from Northern Ireland. Some of them, then, had more personal experience of the conflict than many of their critics here. Others were as well, if not better informed, than many of their critics.

Noraid and Irish America shown on RTE during July helps correct these narratives. It is refreshing in presenting complex issues in an accessible way. Unfortunately this is less and less the norm, with documentaries being commissioned on the basis of the lowest common denominator. Indeed those commissioning TV programmes seem to assume that viewers are not capable of understanding complexity. That there were two episodes of the also meant that issues could be looked in more detail than usual.

New York was the focus of ‘Anti-Treaty City’, while ‘From Whitey to the White House’ examined gunrunning from Boston. (The ‘Whitey’ being gangster James Bulger).

The programmes were stylish and evocative, with a well-chosen soundtrack; you don’t often find Ruefrex and Odyssey on the same playlist (but you should). There were engaging interviewees, ranging from leading Noraid figures like Martin Galvin, to Boston criminal Patrick Nee, IRA volunteer John Crawley and activists John McDonagh and Brigid Brannigan.

There were vivid reminders of the differences between America and Ireland in those decades.  The contrast between the impossibly glamorous (and dangerous) New York and Dublin, let alone Fenit and Bundoran, was vast. Indeed the social and cultural distance between America and Ireland seemed far greater than today.

That context is also important for understanding how Noraid was viewed at the time, north and south. The 1970s were a period in which a generally benign view of America was replaced by cynicism and suspicion in southern Ireland. There were widely accepted stereotypes of Irish Americans as brash and ignorant or in some cases, conservative and racist. This in part accounts for some of the hostility to Noraid, a hostility, which it should be emphasised, extended far beyond caricature Dublin 4 revisionists. The documentary did note the impact of IRA actions, such as the Harrods bombing of 1984, on American opinion. Indeed, as in southern Ireland, Americans tended to react more negatively to IRA actions in Britain than in the North.

As the documentary illustrated, Noraid activists were well aware of the difficulties this caused, but criticism of the IRA could not be expressed publicly. So watching Martin Galvin explain Noraid’s position in 2025 is substantially different from hearing it delivered, in what often seemed to be a hectoring tone, in 1985. (One of those I spoke to about the programme described the Noraid leader as ‘charismatic’ which I’m not sure even his biggest fans thought during the 1980s).

While a major advantage for Noraid was that it was not covered by Section 31 censorship, this was something of a double-edged sword for republicans, in my opinion at least. Many of those who enjoyed the programme expressed the view that at least these Irish Americans cared about northern nationalists.  This was in marked comparison to perceived southern indifference.

But seeing the south’s reactions in terms of moral failure ultimately ignores important contexts. The most important of these was an ongoing armed struggle that regularly delivered disasters and which, for a variety of reasons, lacked popular backing south of the border.

Naturally enough not every issue could be dealt with in depth. There was passing reference to the fact that much of the money spent on arms in America was coming from Ireland, rather than the other way around. That tensions sometimes existed been Irish republicans and their American supporters could have been explored too. No doubt many northern nationalists were often delighted to meet Americans interested in their plight. But there were also complaints that the IRA sometimes took unnecessary risks to impress these visitors.

While the Gardai were outraged that the NYPD Emerald Society Pipe Band participated in a hunger strike commemoration, some left-wing republicans also wondered why they were marching with cops. Bernadette McAliskey suggested that the poverty in nationalist areas would have shocked Noraid supporters but that might not always have been the case. Those activists who worked as police officers would have seen living conditions in New York far worse than those in Belfast or Derry.

That Noraid was engaged in a constant propaganda battle with British and Irish diplomats, as well as mainstream Irish America, was conveyed to an extent. The British government put huge resources into the propaganda war in America. Their influence waxed and waned, as was illustrated by two clips of New York Mayor Ed Koch. In one, from the early 1980s, Koch repeated Noraid’s slogan ‘England get out of Ireland’; in another, from later in the decade, he denounced the IRA as ‘terrorists.’

While Noraid’s fundraising role, and the more subterranean activities of gunrunners are what draw most attention, a great deal of the group’s focus was on countering (much better funded and resourced) state narratives. That they managed to do this was perhaps among their biggest achievements. Noraid saw themselves as part of the tradition of centuries of Irish activism in America, but the organisation numbered perhaps 5,000 in the 1980s, in comparison to the over one million people who supported Irish republican causes between 1919-21.

The vast majority of Irish Americans never contributed a dollar to Noraid, nor voted for a politician on the basis of their views on Ireland. Most of the mainstream American politicians who identified with Noraid were not Irish American; the big names there such as Ted Kennedy or Tip O’Neill were much more likely to support the Dublin government’s positions. The programme left me wanting to know more about Noraid in other parts of the US and to hear more from its rank and file activists. It would have been interesting to see it in the context of the wave of interest in white ethnic identity that swept the US in the 1970s, in the wake of civil rights and Black Power.

How Irish republicans in Boston navigated the violent protests over school busing for example, would make a fascinating documentary, as would the crossover between the New Left and some Irish activists in the same period. An examination of the transnational causes stressed or played down by Noraid would also have been interesting. But this a brilliant documentary that provides a fascinating snapshot of a significant activist group in an important time and place. It is a pity that RTE are not prepared to commission more like it.

Brian Hanley.

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Cathal Brennan and John Dorney interview historian Spencer Jones on the Boer War in South Africa of 1899-1902. First broadcast on the Irish History Show. 

The Boer War was the British Empire’s crushing of the Afrikaaner Republics in South Africa. It was a war that affected Ireland profoundly, with Irish contingents on both sides. The far more numerous Irish on the British side, numbering over 45,000, suffered nearly 2,000 dead, while a smaller contingent, opposed to British imperialism, numbering 2-400 fought with the Boers.

We discuss the uniqueness of South Africa and the Boer Republics and the British advance across South Africa throughout the nineteenth century, culminating in the Boer War. We go on to talk about the war itself, with its initial British reverses and subsquent long drawn out and vicious guerrilla war. The war had a major social and political legacy for South Africa, but also on politics in Britain and in Ireland.

Spencer Jones is a historian at the University of Wolverhampton, author of many books on military history including From Boer War to World War, Tactical Reform of the British Army 1902-1914 . He also hosts the podcasts No so Quiet on the Western Front and Military History Plus.

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Interview with Gareth Prendergast by John Dorney and Cathal Brennan on his book ‘Clear Hold Build’ How the Free State won the Irish Civil War.

First broadcast on the Irish History Show.

Gareth Prendergast is a serving Colonel in the Irish Defence Forces and holder of Phd from University College Cork.

See also a review of the book here.

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John Dorney and Cathal Brennan speak to Vincent Altman O’Connor and Neil Davison about Albert Altman, the possible real life inspiration for James Joyce’s character Leopold Bloom. First broadcast on the Irish History Show.

Albert Altman was a Dublin businessman and politician. Born into a Jewish family in 1853 as Albert Liebes Lascar Altman in what was then Prussian ruled Poland, he immigrated to Dublin as a young child. The family developed a salt business on Dublin quays, hence Altman’s nickname in the city; ‘Altman the Saltman’.

Like Bloom, James Joyce’s character, in his famous novel Ulysses, Altman’s father died by suicide and like Bloom, Altman married an Irish Catholic woman, Susan O’Reilly from Cork (though after he death from cancer he remarried a Belfast Protestant Victoria Corbett).

Altman himself developed sympathies for Irish nationalism and was active in the Irish National League from the 1880s and later the United Irish League (UIL).

He was elected to Dublin Corporation as a UIL candidate in 1901, campaigning against corruption and for the taking fo the tramway system into public ownership. He was part of a group who refused to welcome the British King Edward VII to Dublin in 1903. He died shortly afterwards from side effects of diabetes.

We discuss his life and times and parallels with the fictional character Bloom, with Joyce scholar Neil Davison of Oregan State University and Vincent Altman O’Connor, a descendant of Albert Altman.

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Cathal Brennan and John Dorney discuss the trace war between Ireland and Britain in the 1930s. First broadcast on the Irish History Show.

See also our article on this topic here. 

The Fianna Fail government that won the eelction of 1932 refused to pay the Land Annuities owed to Britain under the Anglo Irish Treaty.

The British for their part hoped to oust the de Valera government by economic pressure and placed a series of heavy tarrifs on Irish agricultural goods imported to Britain.

This sparked off a trade war that was only settled in 1938, when de Valera agreed to pay a tenth of the annuities and Britain handed back to Ireland the three naval bases they had retained since 1922.

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