Conway Mill Trust

Irish traditional music goes back at least to the Middle Ages when there were three principal instruments: the harp, bagpipes and the tiompin which is now extinct.

Read Full Post »

On Apr 2, 1878, the despised Wm. Sydney Clements, the Third Earl of Leitrim, was murdered.  Michael McElwee, Neil Shields and Michael Heraghty were convicted of the crime.  There is a poem, titled “The Banks of Mulroy Bay” about the murder, and it can be found in the book “The Fanad Martyrs,” which is in […]

Read Full Post »

The King of Connemara, otherwise known as “Humanity Dick,” founded the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in 1824.  The title of “Humanity Dick” was bestowed on him by King George V.  He had succeeded in getting “The Cruel Treatment of Cattle Act” passed in 1822 which was passed into British law.

Read Full Post »

Apr 2, 1912-“Cathleen ni Houlihan opened at the Abbey Theatre.  It is the best known play of Wm. Butler Yeats.

Read Full Post »

Apr 1, 1919 Eamon De Valers was elected President of the first Dail Eireann.

Read Full Post »

In the 18th Century a secret agrarian society called “The White Boys” made up of the peasants roamed the Irish countryside terrorizing the Protestant landlords in an effort to force them to abandon the lands that had formerly belonged to the Irish people.

Read Full Post »

During the Great Hunger roads were constructed called Roads of Hunger which led to bogs and rocky plateaus constructed not with the purpose of building infrastructure but to avoid interfering with private enterprise.

Read Full Post »

Pope Gregory XVI made a gift of St Valentine’s remains to a Carmelite priest Fr Spratt who was building a church in Dublin in 1825.  The remains were brought to the church and received by the Archbishop.  After Fr Spratt died devotion to the saint waned and the relics sent to a back room to […]

Read Full Post »

The word “boycott” originated in the 19th Century with the Irish peasantry when they rented their lands from absentee landlords who paid an agent to supervise the estate.  One such agent was a wicked Captain Boycott.  The tenants, in order not to break the law by assaulting him, ostracized him and his family, and no […]

Read Full Post »

Around the end of Jan. 3,000 BC, Megalithic farmers arrived in Ireland.  One of their surviving monuments is a megalithic tomb at Newgrange.

Read Full Post »