The shooting of Jack Finlay of D.E. Williams, Tullamore, in a robbery at Lemanaghan, Ballycumber, County Offaly on 12 February 1923. By Jackie Finlay.

My story starts as a small boy growing up in Dillon Street, Tullamore in the 1940s. I remember seeing a cutting from a newspaper which I presumed was from a Tipperary weekly paper. The article covered a report of a feis and sports held in a field at the Golden Vale Hotel in Dundrum Co. Tipperary. It mentioned about the Misses Crummy from Ballydine taking part in the Irish dancing. A small report on the opposite side of the cutting was headed

Shooting near Birr.  Charged at Birr with conspiring in 1923 to kill and killing John Finlay, Tullamore.  Chas and Peter Molloy and Michael Coyne were sent for trial.

What is so unusual about this paper cutting from 1923?

My mother, one of the Misses Crummy mentioned in the article, was now working in Tullamore for T. English & Co. She met and married my father Thomas, brother of John Finlay some ten years later.

Cormac Street, Tullamore: a significant achievement for the planning process, 1786–2020. A contribution to Tullamore 400th and the Historic Towns Initiative to support town regeneration. By Michael Byrne

Cormac Street is somewhat unique in the story of Tullamore street development with its forty houses, two major institutional buildings and a town park. Rarely is a street preserved without blemish with so many elements over a two-hundred-year period. Cormac Street was also the home of the town’s major property developer and rentier Thomas Acres (d. 1836) who built his Acres Hall in 1786 (now the home of Tullamore Municipal Council). To the earl of Charleville and Thomas Acres is due most of the credit for the transformation of a green field site with Kilcruttin Hill and cemetery to the west and the Windmill Hill to the east. Acres could thank the war with France, 1793–1815, for the boost to the local economy that provided him with tenants for the terrace of houses on the east side. The expansion of Tullamore after 1798 due to the Grand Canal connection with Dublin and the Shannon provided the impetus to secure a new county jail (1826–30), county town status in 1832 and to take effect in 1835 with the completion of the county courthouse. War, politics and pride of place all contributed to the mix. The Bury contribution was rounded off when Alfred (later the fifth earl) secured a new railway station at Kilcruttin in place of that at Clonminch in about 1865.

Cormac Street has had the benefit of careful planning in its first hundred years and has managed to survive the excesses of the post 1960 and post 1997 periods of rapid development. The saving of Acres Hall in the 1980s was a significant achievement. What are these elements that contribute to the street and how did it all come about? Here are set out twenty points and probably more could be added.

The District Court in Offaly is 100 years old, January 2023. A contribution from Offaly History to the Decade of Centenaries.

The commencement of the new District Court in Offaly in January 1923 was an inauspicious time to start. The county was caught up in the civil war that it seemed neither side could win. The Free State (National Army) had taken all the cities by August 1922, but the fight was still going on in the hills, especially in the south. Neither Tullamore nor Birr was free of anxiety with shots fired on New Year’s Eve to remind people that the Republicans had not gone away. How could they forget? In January 1923 two men from Kilkenny were executed for possession of arms and robbery. Soon after five National soldiers captured with a body of anti-Government forces were executed –  a courtmartial having found them guilty of treachery. Five from County Offaly were executed in January and early February. In the same month there had been an attack at Raheen in north Offaly  – an ambush while soldiers were going to mass with at least one dead. Some of the neutral IRA were talking about ending the conflict and the press reported that Peadar Bracken ex Brigade officer, Thomas Ua Quinn ex Vice Commdt, and Martin Fleming, ex Brigade staff officer, had called a meeting of pre-truce ex officers of nos 1 and 2 Offaly Brigades IRA at the old Sinn Féin hall regarding the peace movement. Peadar Bracken would know the place well as he was involved in the ‘affray’ in 1916 where ‘the first shot was fired’ in that very hall in William/Columcille street, Tullamore.

Sanders and Christie: two gentlemen of Birr in 1900: a disputed county surveyor’s will worth £30,000. By Michael Byrne

When Richard B. Sanders, the county surveyor (today a county engineer) for King’s County,  died in Cumberland Square, Birr in 1900 he left an estate of the value of £30,000. This would have been enough to build 300 council ‘cottages’ in those days when smaller houses such as those of in Cappaneale, Birr and Davitt Street, Tullamore could be built for £100 each. Sanders was an Antrim man and was born in 1845. He had involved another Birr resident, also from Antrim, the solicitor Archibald Christie, in the making of his will. Albeit in the worst possible way by asking him to be a witness but without having given him any instructions. Both were neighbours in Cumberland Square (as it then was, now Emmet Square). Both of them would have been under the watchful eye of John Wright, the editor of the King’s County Chronicle and resident of Cumberland House. Nearby was the Ormond Club of which we can assume both Christie and Sanders were members and perhaps also of the Birr Masons, then going strong.

The Terror of Tullamore Gaol. By Maurice Egan

Introduction

One hundred and thirty five years ago on Christmas eve 1887, one of the two ‘Heroes of Tullamore’, John Mandeville was released from Tullamore Gaol in wretched physical condition. Mandeville who farmed two hundred acres and was chairman of Mitchelstown Board of Guardians and his fellow Irish National Land League member William O’Brien, born in Mallow, and MP for northeast Cork were imprisoned first at Cork gaol on 31 October and two days later were transferred by train and incarcerated at Tullamore gaol. Earlier on 9 September, after an 8,000-strong demonstration led by John Dillon MP, three estate tenants were shot dead (John Shinnick, Michael Lonergan and John Casey) by police at the town’s courthouse where O’Brien had been brought for trial with Mandeville on charges of incitement at the Kingston Estate under a new Coercion Act. This event became known as the Mitchelstown Massacre. Mandeville, a tall burly man was singled out on instruction for particularly callous and brutal treatment at Tullamore gaol. He died six months after his release and an inquest held to establish the cause of his death concluded it was as a result of his maltreatments at Tullamore gaol. Before he died, he described the gaol conditions in letters to his wife and friend Sydney Halifax.

A tale of two houses: that of Barrack Master Crawford and Revd Dr Wilson, High Street, Tullamore. By Michael Byrne

This article on house numbers GV 43 and GV 44 High Street, Tullamore (Farrelly’s and Mr Price) looks at the family history and the social history surrounding the building and occupation of two of the finest  houses in Tullamore, which for convenience, we can call Barrack Master Crawford’s and Dr Wilson’s. They are numbered (from the valuation associated with Richard Griffith) GV 43 and GV 44 in the printed Griffith valuation of 1854. The study is over the period from the mid-eighteenth century in regard to the Crawford house and from the 1780s in regard to Dr Wilson’s. The plan is to take the architectural assessment of both houses first, based on the work of William Garner, Andrew Tierney and Fergal MacCabe. This will be followed by looking at the building history of each house. The departure of the Crawford family from High Street by 1810 and that of Mrs Wilson in the 1830s facilitated taking the story separately of each house from the 1830s and 1840s up to recent times. The full text of this article will be published in Offaly Heritage 12 later this year.

The burning of Tullamore courthouse, jail and barracks by the anti-Treaty IRA on 20 July 1922. By Michael Byrne.

Contributed by Offaly History to mark the Decade of Centenaries

We saw in previous articles in this series the lead up to the civil war notwithstanding the outcome of the general election in June in which the vote was substantially in favour of supporting the acceptance of the Anglo-Irish Treaty of December 1921. In Laois-Offaly all four pro-Treaty candidates were elected with Labour, who preferred to look at the social rather than the Treaty question securing almost fifty percent of the vote. But among the soldiers of the IRA, particularly in Offaly, there was a reluctance to accept the Treaty outcome. Some were of the view that the people would follow where the military led.

The burning of Tullamore courthouse, jail and the former military barracks (in Barrack Street, now Patrick Street) on 20 July 1922 was one of those momentous historic occasions the impact of which had an almost a numbing effect on the people of Tullamore and the county. The completion of these buildings in 1716, 1830 and 1835 were all major steps in the progress of Tullamore. Now all were destroyed in one night for no tangible military benefit by the departing Republican IRA.

Healthcare in Ireland – pre and post Partition. By Sylvia Turner

Since the early 18^th century public healthcare in Ireland had been funded by  voluntary donations. The first hospitals in Ireland were founded in the 1720s. The dispensary doctor was formally established by legislation in 1805 under an Act of Parliament.  The amount from voluntary donations was matched by county grand juries from local taxation. The Poor Law Act of 1838 improved the distribution of dispensaries and divided Ireland into 130 administrative units known as Poor Law Unions, with their own workhouse, governed by the Poor Law Guardians, who were elected by the local rate payers.

The Poor law unions at the end of the nineteenth century. Courtesy Wiki Commons

The dispensary doctor became the mainstay of healthcare in rural Ireland as many people lived too far from medical help in workhouses. The position of the dispensaries was clarified in the 1851 Medical Charities Act, which introduced a state-funded dispensary system to provide free medical aid to the poor. These were to be funded from local taxation and were subsidised by the Poor Law Commission. To attend the dispensary, a person needed to have a colour-coded ticket, dispensed by the committee. The Poor Law Commission was replaced by the Local Government Board in 1872.

Building Offaly’s courthouses and prisons in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Dr Richard Butler will showcase the building of Offaly’s courthouses and prisons in the years between roughly 1750 and 1850 in a lecture at Offaly History Centre, Bury Quay, Tullamore and via Zoom on Tuesday 12 July 2022. The presentation will place individual buildings in Tullamore, Birr, Daingean and elsewhere in the context of changing political and social events throughout Ireland in these years, highlighting local agendas alongside those of the British administration in Ireland. Illustrated with historic architectural drawings, old and new photographs, the lecture will also highlight schemes that were never built as it traces the ways in which the appearance of Offaly’s towns was transformed in these years by new public architecture. The lecture will incorporate new research on Offaly’s history undertaken in recent years by historians based in the county such as Michael Byrne alongside volumes such as Andrew Tierney’s new Buildings of Ireland guide for Central Leinster and the speaker’s recently published book, Building the Irish Courthouse and Prison: A Political History (Cork University Press, 2020).

The 1922 general election in Laois-Offaly. By Michael Byrne

The 16^th of June 2022 marks two important anniversaries. The first is the centenary of Ulysses, but the second was the all-important vote on the Treaty held on the same day. The outcome in Ireland of the latter event was eagerly awaited. This election was the first to be held in the new Free State, the first held under the PR electoral system, and the first to be contested by the parties which, in modified forms, were to dominate subsequent Irish politics at least up to 2011. The 1918 election has already been the subject of a blog on Offalyhistoryblog and was a clear win in Offaly and the country for Sinn Féin. This blog is part of our contribution to the #decade of centenaries. We plan more over the summer to include the departure of the British army from Offaly barracks, the lead up to the civil war in Offaly, bank robberies, the burning of the county courthouse, jail and barracks, noted personalities in Offaly in 1922. If you wish to help please email us with your suggestions/contribution. info@offalyhistory.com

The 1922 election was a fight out between the pro-treatyites and the Republicans led by de Valera, but the pact between Collins and de Valera came to grief before election day. Some had looked to the Labour Party to stand aside in 1922,  as they had done in 1918, or to vote with the pro-treatyites. Nowhere was the wisdom of Labour going its own way better demonstrated that in the new Laois-Offaly four-seat constituency where William Davin came in as the big winner with more than two quotas. Given its performance in later general elections why did the anti-treatyites not field a candidate? Sean Robbins of Clara had topped the poll in the 1920 county council election and Sinn Féin’s ideologue in Offaly and organiser, T.M. Russell, had come second. Russell, to answer part of the question, had departed the local scene in October 1920 and was in favour of the Treaty. Sean McGuinness, the local IRA battalion commander, was another possible anti-treatyite candidate and he was elected in 1923, but declined to take his seat because of the oath of allegiance. He secured 5,572 votes in 1923.