#1 Entrepreneurship: Ballyheigue’s Richard Cantillon

Image: by Nicolas de Largillière, c. 1730, France (Wikimedia Commons) [There is no confirmed portrait of Cantillon, but Mark Thornton has posited that this could be him.]

Nearly three hundred years ago in his c. 1730 economics book Essai sur la nature du commerce en général, Kerry-born Richard Cantillon defined entrepreneur (from the French verb entreprendre) to be much as we now know it when he said that entrepreneurs were “non-fixed income earners who pay known costs of production but earn uncertain incomes, due to the speculative nature of pandering to an unknown demand for their product”. He was a successful banker and merchant who had become a French citizen around 1708. His debtors chased him until his death, and he died in his London home during a fire in 1734, but it is also believed that he was possibly murdered or maybe even escaped. His granddaughter Henrietta married Denis Daly, MP for Galway.

#2 Saline, Medical Cannabis: Limerick’s Brooke O’Shaughnessy

Image: by Benjamin Hudson, c. 1840s to 1850s, England (Public Domain)

Limerick-born William Brooke O’Shaughnessy’s most vital contribution was the invention of the concept behind modern intravenous fluid and electrolyte-replacement therapy during the cholera epidemic of the 1830s, when he came up with the idea of saline injections for rehydration. Brooke O’Shaughnessy is also credited with the first scientific framework for the medical use of cannabis in the late 1830s. While he was in India during the 1850s, Brooke O’Shaughnessy invented a more rugged telegraph system compared to the systems developed in Europe and America and that could survive India’s more extreme nature conditions at the time (weather and wildlife). He was married three times, his second wife being from Curragh, County Clare.

#3 Stokes Lens, Fluorescence: Skreen’s George Stokes

Image: 1860, England (Smithsonian)

Polymath George Gabriel Stokes was born in Skreen, in between Sligo and Ballina. He is known for defining a variety of laws and equations that govern fluid dynamics during the 1840s and 1850s, as well as naming the phenomenon of fluorescence and being an early pioneer in spectroscopy, influencing friend Lord Kelvin amongst others. He also invented a special lens (now called the Stokes lens) used to detect astigmatism of the eye, and improved a device for measuring sunshine hours (now known as the Campbell–Stokes recorder).

#4 Homo neanderthalensis: William King

Image: c. 1860s to 1880s, Ireland or England (Public Domain)

William King was an Anglo-Irish geologist and professor of geology and mineralogy at QCG. He was born in England, and his family would have been from Galway – Edward King, a 17th century bishop of Elphin, was an ancestor of his according to the DIB. In the late 1860s, he discredited the theory that Eozoon canadense, the so-called dawn animal of Canada was organic, but was in fact crystalline and not the fossil of an extinct organism. Before that, he had determined that the remains found in a Neanderthal cave were of a species different from modern humans or Homo sapiens, and he named them Homo neanderthalensis. It was only in the late 19th to early 20th centuries that his discovery became fully accepted, after he had died in 1886.

#5 GLUAS and KLUAS: Galway and Salthill Tramway and the Lartigue Monorail

Images: c. 1879 to 1914, Shop Street, Galway and 1880 to 1900, Ballybunion, County Kerry (NLI/Old Ireland in Colour and NLI/Old Ireland in Colour)

At its peak in 1920, Ireland had 5,630 km of rail track. Now there is about half of that. We forget how innovative Ireland was in terms of train infrastructure, with the 3.6 km Galway and Salthill tramway, the 14.4 km Ballybunion-Listowel Lartigue monorail which was developed by the Toulouse-born engineer Charles Lartigue, the 79 km Galway-Clifden railway, the 85 km West Clare railway, and more. The Lartigue Monorail ran for 36 years from 1888, and it had a few idiosyncrasies in terms of balancing and switching tracks. The Galway and Salthill tramway ran for nearly 39 years.

#6 Kylemore’s Micro Hydroelectric Generator: Mitchell Henry

Images: 1880s to 1890s (Breslin Archive/Old Ireland in Colour and Kylemore Abbey)

Mitchell Henry from Manchester was the man who bought the Kylemore estate from the Blakes and built Kylemore Castle in the 1860s. He also reclaimed much land in the area, built schools, and was the Galway MP for 15 years until 1885. In 1893, Kylemore was electrified by Mitchell Henry using a hydroelectric generator – a turbine turned by water from Lough Touther that was connected to a Crompton dynamo – and that was installed in Kylemore’s hydroelectric house by electrical engineer and inventor John Charles Howell of England (see also Crompton-Howell). It was one of the first houses in UKGBI to be electrified, and it was used until the late fifties when the area was connected to the national grid. We also know that Mitchell Henry was a keen photographer with his own photographic dark room. That might even be him in the photo on the left!

#7 Valentia’s Transatlantic Telegraph Cable Station and Kelvin

Images: 1900s, Ireland and Scotland (NLI and Wikimedia Commons/Old Ireland in Colour)

The Valentia Transatlantic Cable Station in County Kerry, served as the eastern terminus for the first successful transatlantic telegraph cables, first laid in 1858, with a new cable in 1866. Connecting to the western terminus Newfoundland, the station reduced Europe-to-North America communication times from weeks to minutes. The first message sent was “Directors of Atlantic Telegraph Company, Great Britain, to Directors in America:—Europe and America are united by telegraph. Glory to God in the highest; on earth peace, good will towards men.” The project’s success relied on Belfast-born physicist William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin), a consulting engineer on the expeditions. He determined that standard telegraph receivers were too insensitive to detect the weak electrical signals traveling across the Atlantic. To solve this, Thomson invented a mirror galvanometer to amplify the faint incoming electrical pulses. He had many clashes during the project with another scientist called Whitehouse who was eventually dismissed.

#8 Electron: George Johnstone Stoney, Professor of Physics at QCG

Images: 1900s and c. 1910, England (NPG x26566 and Wikimedia Commons)

George Johnstone Stoney was an Irish physicist primarily recognised for introducing the term “electron” in 1891 to define the fundamental unit of electrical charge. Born in Clareen, County Offaly, he served as Professor of Natural Philosophy (Physics) at Queen’s College Galway from 1852 to 1857, and later as Secretary of the Queen’s University of Ireland. After a restructuring of the university system, he served as the Superintendent of Civil Service Examinations in Ireland from 1882 until his retirement in 1893, all the while continuing with his physics research. Stoney’s two daughters, Edith Anne Stoney and Florence Ada Stoney, both became significant pioneers in the early fields of medical physics (first female in the world) and radiology (first female in the UK), in particular for X-ray imaging during World War I. Stoney himself was an advocate of third-level education for women, moving to London after his retirement to support his daughters’ university education. He died in England in 1911, and his ashes are buried in Dundrum. A plaque dedicated to Stoney and the electron is located in the University of Galway’s Concourse.

#9 Submarine: Liscannor’s John Philip Holland

Image: 1905, USA (Wikimedia Commons/Old Ireland in Colour)

John Philip Holland was a submarine engineer born 1841 in Liscannor, County Clare. After working on the concept of small submarines while teaching in Drogheda, he moved to America in 1873. The Holland submarine was the first to be adopted by the USA, the UK, and Japan. He was recognised for his invention globally, for example, in 1910, Emperor Meiji awarded Holland the Order of the Rising Sun for his contribution to the Japanese naval victory over Russia.

#10 Marconi Transmitting Station at Clifden 

Image: c. 1907 to 1914, Derrigimlagh, Connemara (NLI/Old Ireland in Colour)

In 1901, the Italian-Irish inventor Guglielmo Marconi received the first transatlantic radio transmission using a kite-supported antenna in Newfoundland, originally sent from Cornwall. Marconi’s mother, Annie Jameson, was granddaughter of John Jameson, founder of the Jameson Whiskey Distillery. Two Marconi wireless stations established in County Galway were central to early transatlantic communication. The Clifden station, located at Derrygimlagh Bog, opened in 1907 as half of the world’s first commercial transatlantic wireless telegraphy facility, transmitting messages across the ocean to Nova Scotia. It even had its own peat-fired power plant and the so-called Marconi Railway over the bog: two famous travellers on it were Alcock and Brown. To manage increasing message volumes and minimise interference, a supplementary receiving station was built in nearby Letterfrack at the Industrial School in 1911, allowing Clifden to operate primarily as a transmitter in a duplex setup with Letterfrack until 1917. The Clifden station was damaged by republicans during the Irish Civil War in 1922, and it closed shortly after.

#11 Alexander Anderson and Emily Anderson of UCG

Images: 1909, Anderson Lab, The Quadrangle, University College Galway and c. 1900, Galway (University of Galway Library Archives/Old Ireland in Colour and University of Galway Library Archives)

Alexander Anderson was born in County Derry in 1858, was appointed Professor of Natural Philosophy at Queen’s College Galway in 1885, became President in 1899, oversaw the transition to UCG in 1908, and retired in 1934. He was the inventor of an important electronic instrumentation circuit, now called the Anderson Bridge, used for measuring inductance. Last year, his invention was recognised as an IEEE Milestone during a ceremony at the University of Galway’s Alice Perry Engineering Building. The image above is the “Anderson” Physics Laboratory in the Quadrangle in 1909, with Anderson himself in the centre back of the photograph. Anderson was also one of the earliest academics to publish on black holes, writing in 1920 in relation to a shrinking sun that “there will come a time when it will be shrouded in darkness, not because it has no light to emit, but because its gravitational field will become impermeable to light“.

His daughter Emily Anderson, born at Taylor’s Hill, Galway in 1891, was a brilliant linguist who became the first person to hold the chair of German at University College Galway in 1917, where she modernised the curriculum before pursuing a parallel career in intelligence. Recruited during WWI, she became a cryptanalyst for the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) established in 1919. During WWII, she served at Bletchley Park and headed the Italian military section in Cairo, where her success in breaking Italian ciphers directly contributed to British military victories in Libya and Ethiopia. Parallel to her secret life, she was well known for her scholarly work on classical composers. She edited and translated definitive, multi-volume collections of the letters of Mozart and Beethoven, using her codebreaking skills to decipher Beethoven’s notoriously difficult handwriting and restore text previously censored/omitted by other scholars.

#12 The Gyroscopic Monorail and Steerable Torpedo: Castlebar’s Louis Brennan

Image: 1909, New York, USA (Library of Congress/Old Ireland in Colour)

Born in Castlebar, and moving to Australia as a boy with his parents, Irish-Australian Louis Brennan was an engineer and inventor of a gyroscopic monorail as shown, as well as of an experimental helicopter, but he is most famous for inventing the first practical steerable torpedo or guided missile. Unveiled at the 1910 Japan-British Exhibition in London, his monorail carried 50 passengers, ran at 32 km/h on a circular track, and won both the Grand Prize and Churchill’s attention.

#13 Wellpark’s Alice Perry, First UKGBI Female Graduate of Engineering

Images: 1908 and c. 1910 to 1912, England (LSE Library and Internet Archive)

Alice Jacqueline Perry was an Irish civil engineer, feminist and poet recognised as the first woman in Ireland and Great Britain to graduate with an engineering degree. She earned her civil engineering qualification with first-class honours from Queen’s College Galway in 1906. The Perry sisters Alice, Molly and Nettie were also actively involved in the suffrage campaign in Galway. Following her father’s death, also in 1906, she was appointed as the temporary County Surveyor for Galway County Council, making her the first woman to hold this position in Ireland. After serving in this role for several months, she relocated to London in 1908, where she spent the remainder of her professional career working as a factory inspector for the Home Office. The Alice Perry Engineering Building in Galway is named in her honour. The photograph on the left above appeared online just 16 days ago, shared by the LSE Library.

#14 First Non-Stop Transatlantic Flight: Alcock and Brown

Image: 15th June 1919, Dublin (RTÉ Archives/Old Ireland in Colour)

This photograph was taken in Dawson Street, Dublin later in the day after Brown on the left and Alcock on the right had just made the first non-stop transatlantic flight. They flew a modified Vickers Vimy, a British World War I heavy bomber, from Newfoundland in Canada to Derrygimlagh, Clifden in County Galway. Alcock is holding his mascot Lucky Jim, with Brown’s mascot Twinkletoes shown between them. Brown is wearing a light blue-grey RAF lieutenant’s uniform of the time, with a British War Medal ribbon awarded to service personnel from World War I.

#15 Golden Gate Bridge’s Name: Loughill’s Michael O’Shaughnessy

Image: 7 July 1923, Hetch Hetchy, California (UC Berkeley Library)

Michael Maurice or MM O’Shaughnessy was a Civil Engineering graduate from the University in the 1880s. As City Engineer of San Francisco, he practically rebuilt and modernised the city itself, but he also commissioned a number of massive projects including the Golden Gate Bridge (as well as giving it its name, after the Golden Gate strait) and the Hetch Hetchy water supply and power project, where the O’Shaughnessy Dam from this photograph is located. It was often joked that the MM stood for More Money as he had to go back to the public for more funds to complete the project. There is also an O’Shaughnessy Boulevard in San Francisco, as well as the 50 metre O’Shaughnessy Bridge for pedestrians and cyclists opened at the University of Galway in 2012.

#16 McLaughlin, Rishworth and the Hydro Station at Ardnacrusha

Images: Late 1920s, Shannon, County Clare (Breslin Archive and ESB Archives)

In the 1920s, UCG engineering graduate and assistant lecturer Thomas McLaughlin conceived of a hydroelectric scheme for the River Shannon, supported by his former PhD supervisor, Tuam’s Frank Sharman Rishworth. Rishworth championed its technical feasibility and became chief engineer on secondment from his role as Professor of Civil Engineering. Their collaboration culminated in the 1929 completion of the Ardnacrusha Hydroelectric Power Station. By damming and diverting the river’s flow, this single facility initially generated enough electricity to power the entire Irish Free State, establishing the foundation for Ireland’s national power grid. But there’s a link to Kylemore above, as McLaughlin had come out to see the hydroelectric house in 1922 (the Benedictine Nuns put him up overnight due to a thunder and lightning storm), and he was inspired by this visit and his work around that time for German company Siemens-Schuckert in Berlin to harness water power for the electrification of the Irish Free State.

#17 Aviation Record Breaker: Knockaderry’s Lady Mary Heath

Image: 1928, Soesterberg, The Netherlands (Netherlands Institute for Military History/Old Ireland in Colour)

Born Sophie Mary Peirce-Evans in Knockaderry, County Limerick, Lady Mary Heath was an Irish aviator who set numerous international aviation records during the 1920s. She became the first woman to hold a commercial flying license in Britain and the first woman to make a parachute jump from an airplane (landing in/during a Hereford football match). Her most notable achievement occurred in 1928 when she completed the first solo flight by any pilot in an open-cockpit aircraft from Cape Town to London. Although a severe crash at the 1929 National Air Races in Cleveland, Ohio effectively ended her flying career and led to a decline in her health, she returned to Ireland to work for Iona National Airways and bought out its brief successor company, Dublin Air Ferries. She also helped set up various flying clubs including the National Irish Junior Aviation Club.

#18 Electricity in Gases: Galway’s JSE Townsend

Image: c. 1940, England (Royal Society)

Born in Galway, Nobel nominee and physicist John Sealy Edward (JSE) Townsend fundamentally advanced our understanding of electrical conduction in gases. He developed the theory of ionisation by collision, now known as the Townsend avalanche or Townsend discharge, which provided the theoretical foundation for measuring and detecting radiation using devices like proportional counters and the Geiger-Müller tubes found in Geiger counters. He brought together his extensive research in a 1915 book, Electricity in Gases. During World War I, he changed direction to carry out wireless radio research for the Royal Naval Air Service, later publishing the book Electricity and Radio Transmission in 1943. His wife was one of the Lamberts of Castle Ellen in County Galway. He played tennis until he was 70, and died at the age of 88.

#19 Creeslough’s Kay McNulty Mauchly Antonelli, ENIAC Programmer and Subroutine Originator

Images: c. 1942 to 1945 and 1945, Moore School of Electrical Engineering, University of Pennsylvania (Wikimedia Commons and Wikimedia Commons)

Born in Creeslough, County Donegal, Kathleen “Kay” McNulty Mauchly Antonelli was an Irish-American mathematician and one of six original female programmers of the ENIAC, the world’s first general-purpose electronic computer. She moved to Philadelphia as a toddler and grew up in an Irish-speaking household. Hired by the US Army in 1942 as a manual “computer” during World War II, she initially calculated ballistics trajectories for artillery firing tables by hand, using paper and a mechanical desk calculator called a differential analyser, before being selected to automate these complex differential equations on the newly developed ENIAC machine in 1945: ENIAC stands for Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer. Because modern programming languages did not yet exist, Antonelli and her colleagues physically programmed the computer by manually routing many cables and setting thousands of switches to dictate the logical sequence of calculations. Her pioneering work included helping to invent subroutines, a core of modern programming, although her contributions remained largely uncredited for decades until the 1980s.

#20 Pioneering Aviator and Trainer: Achill’s Nancy Corrigan

Images: 1948, Cleveland, USA (Cleveland Public Library/Old Ireland in Colour and Cleveland Public Library/Old Ireland in Colour)

Pioneering Irish aviator Nancy Corrigan emigrated from Achill to Cleveland, Ohio in the 1920s. She made her first solo flight in 1932 after less than five hours of flight training. In order to fund her flying career, she became a model in New York. She bought her own plane and became only the second woman in the USA to obtain a commercial pilot’s license. During World War II, working at Spartan College, she was the first woman to train male air cadets – they would go on to become combat pilots. As head of the Aeronautics Department at Stephens College, she supervised many women in their flight programs, with not one failed test. Eimear Healy, who produced a documentary on Corrigan, states, “Throughout the course of her career, Nancy obtained virtually every aviation certificate known at the time.” As a commercial pilot, she logged 600,000 flight miles, before retiring in the 1960s.

#21 External Examiner at UCG: JRR Tolkien

Image: 1954, Gregans Castle, County Clare (Wikimedia Commons)

Between the late 1940s and late 1950s, JRR Tolkien regularly visited Ireland to serve as an external examiner for the English Department at University College Galway. During these academic trips, he spent considerable time exploring the karst terrain of the Burren in County Clare, frequently staying at Gregans Castle Hotel. This distinct geological region, as well as nearby Connemara, is widely cited as an influence on his world-building for Middle-earth. Specifically, local and literary theories suggest that Pollnagollum near my hometown of Fanore, the longest cave in Ireland, and whose Irish name translates as “cave of the rock dove”, directly inspired or reinforced the naming of his famous character Gollum in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

#22 Duty-Free Shopping: Brendan O’Regan

Images: 1958, Shannon, County Clare (University of Limerick Special Collections and Archives)

Born in County Clare, Brendan O’Regan was a businessman and public servant who established the world’s first duty-free shop at Shannon Airport in 1947. Recognising the commercial potential of transatlantic passengers stopping to refuel in Ireland, he successfully lobbied the Irish government to pass legislation exempting transit travellers from standard taxes and customs duties. This pioneering concept began as a small kiosk selling untaxed local souvenirs and quickly expanded to include alcoholic and luxury items. O’Regan’s retail model was highly successful and subsequently adopted by airports worldwide (and by Irish-American Chuck Feeney’s DFS Group), and he later expanded on this economic concept by establishing the Shannon Free Zone, the world’s first modern free-trade zone. He also founded the Shannon College of Hotel Management in 1951, now part of the University of Galway.

#23 Macrovision: John Ryan

Image: c. 2000, Ireland (John Ryan)

Tipperary engineer and former University College Galway physics student John Oliver Ryan is the inventor of Macrovision, the global standard for analog video copy protection. After leaving university, Ryan worked as an electronic engineer in RTÉ, Yorkshire Television, and Ampex. In 1983, he co-founded the successful Silicon Valley-based technology company Macrovision Corporation (later Rovi, TiVo and Xperi), which was later listed on the NASDAQ. Ryan patented a technology to prevent the unauthorised duplication of commercial videocassettes. His system inserted specialised electrical pulses into the video signal that were invisible on standard televisions but disrupted the recording circuitry of VCRs, resulting in distorted, unwatchable copies. Rapidly adopted by major Hollywood studios, Ryan’s invention was ultimately embedded in billions of VHS tapes and DVD players worldwide. He has over 70 patents in TV camera design and video encryption. He has also written a fascinating book on what is scientifically possible in terms of time travel (only into the future, folks!) called It’s Really About Time, and is a big fan of science fiction, like myself.

#24 Avermectin: Ramelton’s William Campbell

Image: 2015, Stockholm (Wikimedia Commons)

Born in Ramelton, County Donegal, biologist William Campbell was co-awarded the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his role in discovering the anti-parasitic compound avermectin. While working at the Merck Institute for Therapeutic Research in the 1970s, Campbell acquired a unique soil bacteria culture from Japanese microbiologist Satoshi Ōmura and demonstrated its high efficacy against parasitic roundworms. According to the Nobel Prize, “the S. [Streptomyces] avermectinius organism discovered by Satoshi in a single sample of Japanese soil remains the only avermectin-producing organism ever found, meaning that single organism has been the sole source of industrial production ever since.” Campbell subsequently helped direct the purification and chemical modification of this compound to create ivermectin, a highly potent and safe derivative. This development provided a treatment that has drastically reduced the global incidence of devastating parasitic infections, most notably river blindness and lymphatic filariasis, with subsequent applications in animal health. Campbell is also a poet and a painter.

#25 First Female Professor at the RCSI: Galway’s Ethna Gaffney

Image: Date Unknown, Ireland (Wikimedia Commons)

Born in Galway in 1920, scientist Ethna Gaffney (daughter of UCG Professor of Surgery Michael O’Malley, descendants of the 16th century pirate queen Gráinne Mhaol) made history as the first female professor at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland (RCSI). After earning a Bachelor of Science from University College Galway in 1940, setting up Ireland’s first Diploma in Dietetics in 1944, and completing a PhD in Biochemistry from University College Dublin in 1945, she temporarily left academia after marrying in 1947. Following the sudden death of her husband in a 1952 plane crash, Gaffney returned to the workforce to support her young family, officially joining the RCSI staff as a lecturer in 1954. In 1961, she was appointed as the Professor of Chemistry and Physics and Director of the Department, a role she held until her retirement in 1987.

#26 Our First Potential Astronaut: Ballina’s Norah Patten

Image: 2024, USA (Norah Patten)

Norah Patten is an Irish aeronautical engineer and researcher who is set to become the first person from Ireland to travel to space as part of a research mission. Born in Ballina, County Mayo, she earned her PhD in Aeronautical Engineering from the University of Limerick, and has spent years preparing for spaceflight through high‑G training, commercial spacesuit testing and evaluation, and microgravity research efforts. In June 2024, the International Institute for Astronautical Sciences (IIAS) announced that Patten had been selected as a crew member for the IIAS‑02 research mission. Expected to fly this year on Virgin Galactic’s new Delta‑class spacecraft during its first year of commercial service, the suborbital flight will see Patten and her crew mates conduct biomedical and fluid‑related research experiments in microgravity.

There are so many more innovative people connected to the Wild Atlantic Way that we could have included here – QCG’s Sir Joseph Larmor (Larmor formula, Larmor precession, time dilation); QCG’s AG Melville (scientist known for his work on the dodo); Templecrone’s Maude Delap (marine biologist, the first person to breed jellyfish in captivity); Galway’s Sheila Tinney (first Irish woman to be awarded a PhD in mathematics); Killala’s Kathleen Lynn (first female doctor at the Eye and Ear and founder of St Ultan’s Children’s Hospital); or Cornish electronic musician Aphex Twin, Limerick-born to Welsh parents (his music overtook Taylor Swift for monthly YouTube streams in January, and in 2016, he had 12-year old Dubliner Ryan Wyer direct his music video) – but we know that you too will have some more amazing suggestions, which we look forward to hearing about in the comments below.

John Breslin is an Established Professor of Electronic Engineering at the University of Galway’s School of Engineering, where he lectures in Technology and Agricultural Innovation & Entrepreneurship (TechInnovate – AgInnovate). He is a Principal Investigator with the Insight Research Ireland Centre for Data Analytics and on the SustAIn Research Ireland Frontiers for the Future Programme.

Kevin introduced me to the woman, who I will simply call C as I have not asked for permission to share her name. C had been very ill about a year and a half ago, and after having surgery to address the issue, her brain was seriously affected and she had to recuperate in bed over many weeks and months. She was unable to function normally, carry out simple tasks, concentrate or focus properly, read (which was extremely difficult for her as she loved to read), and so on.

Her daughter brought her a photo book as a gift. She told her: “Mom, I think you’re going to love this. There are lots of photographs of people in here who look like they could be related to us!”, saying this because of their Irish ancestry. C picked up the book, and pretty much fell into the imagery. She pored over the photos of faces and places every day, spending hours and hours looking at it over the course of the next month. She told me that the book, which sat on her bedside table during all that time, was a key part of her recuperation.

C made an amazing recovery, and when I met her yesterday evening with Kevin, you would never have guessed that she had been so seriously ill relatively recently. She and her husband K were very excited to come to Ireland to do the West of Ireland tour with Kevin. Two days ago, as part of their itinerary, the group visited the beautiful Kylemore Abbey. Coincidentally, I had told Kevin in February about our forthcoming Old Ireland in Colour exhibition at Kylemore, and he was happy to tell his group when they reached Fordham Hall that he would be meeting the co-creator of the exhibition the next evening. When C and her husband walked up the steps into the exhibition hall, C said: “I know these photos!”

As you can probably guess by now, the book that C’s daughter had given her for her recovery was Old Ireland in Colour, co-authored by myself and my colleague Dr Sarah-Anne Buckley from the University of Galway. I was, of course, stunned but so delighted to hear about its powerful and beneficial impact on C, and thanked her for telling me about her amazing and inspirational story. “No, thank you!”, said both C and her husband in unison.

I proceeded to tell them another story about a family member of a long-time professional colleague in the US, who was uncommunicative and unresponsive, but who was also given the Old Ireland in Colour book, and they picked it up to intently focus on a different colourised photograph every day. It led me to wonder if there could be a repeatable pattern to these cases, with the books as a potential form of therapy in similar situations. In another related but unexpected use of the books, Old Ireland in Colour is being used in reminiscence therapy for the elderly in some hospitals, since connecting people to past memories can help them to form better connections to the present.

The small-world network characteristics of Ireland and the Irish always amazes me. I often tell people, if you could take one of those huge blank white walls in a room and draw out the graph of everyone you know and get all of them to draw out who else they know and how they are all linked together, it would be so interesting to view and explore. There are people like Kevin with huge networks, places like Kylemore with half a million visitors a year, and other things we can point to that act as super connectors. More generally, we know that everything is connected in some way or another.

On this 80th anniversary of VE Day, I can, for example, make a tenuous link to the man who made the famous victory speech that day by remarking that Winston Churchill was present when the issue of my 2nd great-grandmother’s (Frances Casey) old age pension was raised in the House of Commons in 1910 by Clare MP Willie Redmond (I discovered this record some years ago through the University of Galway Library). Her own grandson: my grandfather Jack Casey, his wife: my grandmother Maura, and their sons: my uncles, were some of the people that Kevin O’Hara met with during his 3000 km trek around Ireland in 1979, and his stay with them was recounted as a chapter in his book. It would be so interesting to hear about the various faces and places mentioned in Kevin’s book almost fifty years later.

I serendipitously came across Kevin’s book a few years ago through the power of the internet, and it turned out that Kevin had read our Old Ireland in Colour book as his aunt had her own copy. Kevin himself has a written a number of articles that have featured on IrishCentral, and another Irish small world story was featured on IrishCentral in 2021 when local super connector Mary Rodgers of the PorterShed sent a copy of Old Ireland in Colour to her brother in New York, whose friend saw it online and recognised his mother as one of the children in the 1946 cover image.

I am sure you all have your own fascinating Irish network stories… I look forward to hearing more of them!

Úsáidí

Roimhe seo, labhair muid faoi blockchain a úsáid chun táirgí iomlána a rianú, chomh maith le táirgí le go leor comhábhair a rianú nuair atá siad ag teacht ó thíortha éagsúla. Go háirithe san slabhra soláthair bia, óna dteastaíonn uait a fheiceáil cad as a tháinig an bia nó na amhábhair bia, is féidir é a úsáid le haghaidh seo. Toisc go mbaineann blockchain le taifead a choinneáil ar idirbhearta a bhaineann le rud éigin a bhfuil luach aige, is féidir linn inrianaitheacht [traceability] a choinneáil don rud sin ar ais go dtí a fhoinse. (Bhí mé ag léamh le déanaí go mbeidh Parmigiano Reggiano ag úsáid blockchain don inrianaitheacht agus chun dul i ngleic le cáis chalaoiseacha.)

Tá usáidí go gineareálta i slabhraí soláthair eile, agus don talamhaíocht, le gluaiseacht drugaí le haghaidh ainmhithe agus antaibheathaigh [antibiotics]. Chomh maith le sin, tá úsáidí ann maidir le gluaiseacht doiciméad tábhachtach, mar shampla, taifid chúirte a thrasnaíonn dlínsí [jurisdictions], agus taifid úinéireachta.

Le haghaidh tíolacadh de gníomhais [conveyancing of deeds] a bhaineann le talamh nó píosa maoin [property], b’fhéidir gur mhaith leat bunáit [provenance] an phíosa talún nó maoine sin a fheiceáil. Tá sé tábhachtach go mbeadh a fhios agat cé leis iad na píosaí talún/maoine chun aon díospóidí á réiteach, ach go minic, bíonn sé costasach fianaise úinéireachta [evidence of ownership] a chruthú. Dá bhféadfadh sé a bheith níos saoire agus níos trédhearcaí an bhunáitíocht sin agus rian na húinéireachta a fháil le blockchain (i dtaifead doaistrithe), beidh custaiméirí níos sásta, is féidir leis na dlíodóirí agus leo siúd atá páirteach san tíolacadh níos mó a dhéanamh níos éifeachtaí, agus beidh a mbonn cliant níos sásta freisin leis an tsábháil ama a d’fhéadfadh teacht as.

An teic

Ar thaobh na teicneolaíochta, braitheann blockchain ar meicníochtaí comhthola [consensus mechanisms] mar chruthúnas oibre [proof of work] nó cruthúnas ar leas [proof of stake], chun idirbhearta a bhailíochtú [validate], agus ar stóráil faisnéise díláraithe [decentralised] ar go leor ríomhairí na bpáirtithe leasmhara: monaróirí, dáileoirí, miondíoltóirí, tomhaltóirí, 7rl. 

Go bunúsach, stórálann na páirtithe an chóip chéanna den fhaisnéis a bhaineann leis na idirbhearta, agus déantar í a nuashonrú go comhuaineach [simultaneously] nuair a tharlaíonn athrú ar an bhfaisnéis sin. So, tá gach éinne in ann na hidirbhearta nuashonrú a fheiceáil. Níl sé chomh héasca calaois a dhéanamh, mar níl aon phointe teipe amháin ann, agus má chuireann ionsaí mailíseach [malicious attack] isteach ar chóip amháin den blockchain, beidh an athrú idir é agus na cóipeanna eile le fáil go láithreach, agus beidh sé níos tapúla chun aon fhadhb a fheiceáil mar sin.

Agus cad faoi Bitcoin?

Cé go bhfuil baint ag blockchain le Bitcoin in intinn an phobail don chuid is mó, tá sé níos cruinne a thuiscint gurbh é Bitcoin ach cur i bhfeidhm amháin den blockchain. Tá go leor feidhmithe eile le fáil, mar atá feicthe againn. Úsáideann Bitcoin an teicneolaíocht bhunúsach chéanna, ach tá an tidirbheart sin thart ar cryptocurrency (an rud a mbaineann luach leis), agus chomh maith le bailíochtú idirbheart, is é an mianadóireacht [mining] an próiseas (dian ar acmhainní agus ar fhuinneamh) ina gcuirtear Bitcoin nua i gcúrsaíocht.

Mí-bhuntáistí and buntáistí

Is é ceann de na mí-bhuntáistí le haghaidh glacadh an teichneolaíocht, mar bhíonn sé deacair i gcónaí ar dtús daoine agus eagraíochtaí a aistriú chuig teicneolaíocht nua a úsáid, go dtí go dtuigeann siad na buntáistí éagsúla nó an coigilteas [savings] atá le fáil.

Freisin, is trí roinnt modhanna ríomhaireachtúla a dhéanann cryptocurrencies cosúil le Bitcoin an mianadóireacht, agus a ghineann nó a chruthaíonn siad airgeadra: rud ar a dtugtar cruthúnas (rian nó comhartha) oibre. Teastaíonn sé cumhacht ríomhaireachta agus mar sin cumhacht leictreachas don obair seo a dhéanamh. Is fadhb mór é sin don Bitcoin, ach tá cruthúnais eile ann is féidir a úsáid ina ionad sin agus a ídíonn [consume] níos lú fuinnimh: m.sh., cruthúnas ar leas, in úsáid ag ETH/Ethereum.

Faoi na buntáistí nó an tionchar fiú, aistrithe earraí nó airgid níos saoire agus níos tapúla le blockchain. I slabhra soláthair, m.sh., is féidir le blockchain cabhrú le costais idirbheart a ísliú, próisis a bhrostú, agus slándáil agus muinín a sholáthar ar feadh an tslabhra.

Le córais díláraithe nach dtagann as a chéile ag pointe amháin teipe, is é sin an fath go bhfuil an blockchain níos sábháilte agus níos cosanta chun taifid idirbheartaíochta a bhainistiú.

Bhí Anupa de Silva ag déanamh taighde le Subhasis Thakur agus liomsa i VistaMilk ar phrótacail íocaíochta do shlabhraí soláthair le haghaidh fíoraitheoirí neamhspleácha sonraí [independent data verifiers]. Tá sé deacair do thomhaltóirí bheith cinnte faoi cháilíocht an bhia má thagann na sonraí cáilíochta ó bhonneagar Idirlíon na Rudaí Nithiúla [IoT infrastructure] atá á mbainistiú ag an bhfeirmeoir céanna a tháirgeann an bia. Úsáidtear fíoraitheoirí neamhspleácha sonraí a bhfuil a mbonneagar féin acu chun na sonraí cáilíochta a fháil, agus déantar iad a chúiteamh i gcomhthráth [compensate in parallel] le haon íocaíocht a sheoltar don táirge bia.

So, céard é, go díreach?

Bhfuel, ar dtús, ba mhaith liom a rá go bhfuil sé tábhachtach a chur in iúl go bhfuil an blockchain dírithe go háirithe ar idirbhearta [transactions]: mar shampla, tá rud éigin ag teastáil uaim atá agat, nó teastaíonn rud eile uait atá agam. Is teicneolaíocht stórála faisnéise é an blockchain do na sonraí faoi na hidirbhearta sin. Tá idirbhearta ag tarlú i ngach áit, gach lá. Tá gá d’eagraíocht taifead a choinneáil de shonraí an idirbhirt idir roinnt páirtithe.

Is maith liom an ráiteas a ndearna Ginny Rometti ó IBM (bhí sí mar phríomh-fheidhmeannach [CEO] le IBM, agus tar éis sin cathaoirleach na heagraíochta) nuair a deir sí: “Déanfaidh blockchain le haghaidh idirbhearta an méid a rinne an tIdirlíon mar fhaisnéis”. 

Rinne an tIdirlíon, nó an Web níos cruinne, faisnéis i bhfad níos oscailte agus níos éasca le fáil – agus níos trédhearcaí [transparent] freisin. Ar an mbealach chéanna, cabhraíonn blockchain chun na hidirbhearta a bheith níos oscailte, níos trédhearcaí, agus chomh maith le sin, dochorraithe [immutable] nó do-athraithe freisin. Réitíonn sé sin fadhbanna áirithe le hidirbhearta. Dá bhrí sin, tá sé mar aidhm ag an blockchain na hidirbhearta a dhéanamh níos cosanta, níos cuntasaí agus níos sábháilte freisin.

Cad iad na fadhbanna seo?

Mar tá sé dírithe ar idirbhearta, tá orainn smaoineamh ar na fadhbanna a bhaineann le idirbheart ag an am seo. Ar dtús, smaoineamh ar idirbheart tipiciúil sa talmhaíocht, le go leor eagraíochtaí i gceist, agus le duine atá mar idirghabhálach [intermediary] nó daoine idirghabhálaí ina measc. Mar shampla, tá tarracóir á cheannach agam ón Fhrainc toisc go bhfuil siad níos saoire anois, agus tá níos mó bealaí farraige go dtí an Fhrainc tar éis Brexit.

Ar dtús, tá ledger nó a mhórleabhar féin ag an díoltóir sa Fhrainc faoin tarracóir sin. Tá a mórleabhar féin freisin ag gníomhaireacht rialtas na Fhrainc le sonraí an tarracóir. Tá mórleabhar eile ag an iompróir a thugann an tarracóir isteach go hÉirinn, mar aon le gníomhaireachtaí custaim, le haghaidh clárúcháin feithicle, agus mar sin de. Agus ansin faighim féin an tarracóir, le mo shonraí nua féin curtha faoi. 

Ar feadh na slabhra, tá aistriú agus malartú faisnéise idir na heintitis éagsúla ar siúl. Le hidirbheart den sórt sin, is féidir go leor earráidí [errors] – earráidí daonna nó ríomhaire, mar tá go leor ríomhairí agus páipéir sna meascán – a tharlaíonn ar feadh na slí nó an slabhra. Tharlaíonn siad trí thimpiste, trí aistriúcháin, nó d’aon ghnó, go calaoiseach [fraudulently].

Ach dá mbeadh mórleabhar comhroinnte agus dochorraithe againn, ceann a bhféadfadh gach duine a fheiceáil agus páirt a ghlacadh ann, d’fhéadfaimis na hearráidí agus na calaoisí sin a laghdú, agus díospóidí á réiteach. Agus sin é prionsabal den blockchain – mórleabhar roinnte idir na geallsealbhóirí [stakeholders] faoi na hidirbhearta sin.

Anois, déan smaoineamh ar tháirge déiríochta [dairy product] a bhfuil go leor comhpháirteanna comhdhéanta [constituent components or ingredients] aige. Tá táirgí meadhg [whey] ag foirmle bainne naíonán, ach chomh maith le sin tá ola, lachtós (a allmhairítear [imported] go minic), ⁊rl. B’fhéidir gur mhaith leat – ní hamháin an táirge iomlán – ach na comhábhair go léir a rianú óna bhfoinsí leis an blockchain, go háirithe nuair a mbíonn siad ag teacht ó sholáthraithe thar lear.

Sa dara cuid, labhróidh mé níos mó faoi chuid de na húsáidí, na buntáistí agus na míbhuntáistí a bhaineann le blockchain. Tá ár dtaighdeoir VistaMilk Anupa Shyamlal tar éis PhD a chríochnú faoi mhaoirseacht Subhasis Thakur agus mé féin, agus bhí sé ag déanamh taighde ar íocaíochtaí agus slabhraí soláthair [supply chains], ag baint úsáide as blockchain.

So you want to get started with building your Irish family tree? Here are some initial tips from someone who has recently used (mostly) online tools to link back five or six generations…

Software

Firstly, I’d recommend getting a desktop application for storing your findings! There are various mobile apps that link into the big services like Ancestry, MyHeritage, FindMyPast and FamilySearch, but this kind of thing is difficult to manage successfully on a phone or tablet. Personally, I use MacFamilyTree (paid). Also, Gramps is a great, free Open Source multi-platform (Windows, Mac, Linux) programme for managing your family tree. It can be used to create the tree itself, generate websites, reports, charts, and more to share with others in your family. It also exports/imports to/from the GEDCOM format for exchanging genealogical data. You can install add-ons to have more fancy chart views and other features. Download it from https://gramps-project.org

Civil records

A starting point

To get started, try looking for your grandparents’ or great-grandparent’s marriage records at the excellent, free and CAPTCHA-protected Irish civil records resource https://irishgenealogy.ie and have fun working your way back through their parents’ BMD (birth, marriage, death) records. You can find out what your great-great-grandparents died from: eek! Once you are ‘in’ the early 20th century, you can cross reference with census data (more on this later). You can also follow this guide to change the colour of visited links, e.g. to bright red or green, so that you can remember what records you’ve already seen.

Searching

Be imaginative in terms of the name variants you use in keyword searches as recording was sometimes incorrectly done (I found a Bryan registered as a Bernard in a marriage record). You could try searching for surnames only, or variants of surnames (trying variations like O’Donnell, ODonnell, O Donnell and Donnell may yield the required record eventually). Wildcards are also an option, and you can read this excellent article by John Grenham for more (his book “Tracing Your Irish Ancestors” is also highly recommended). You will likely need to know the SR District/Reg Area to help filter results (SR stands for Superintendent Registrar): examples are Fermoy, Roscrea, Tuam, etc. You can also use the advanced search to specify extra options like mother’s surname, etc. where available.

Coverage

The date ranges for the indexes (i.e. the basic metadata) on this site are: births from 1864 to 1923; marriages from 1845 (COI) or 1864 (RC) to 1948; and deaths from 1864 to 1973. Note that somewhere between 15% and 30% of civil registrations may never have been recorded in the first place depending on the region, so don’t be surprised if there is a gap or three in the records. You may be able to fill some of these gaps through church records. Full registry images (with more detail than the indexes) are available for the following years: births from 1864 to 1923 (same as the indexes); marriages from 1864 to 1948; and deaths from 1878 to 1973.

Some details of what you can expect to find

For births, you can see the parents’ names (including the mother’s maiden name), occupation of the father, and a witness/informant who is often a relative. For marriages, you can see both individuals’ ages (unless maddeningly listed as “[of] full age”) and occupations, fathers’ names and occupations, and sometimes information on whether the fathers are alive or deceased (if not included they could be living or not). Deaths include the cause of death and whether the cause was verified (medically certified) or not, along with a witness who again may be related.

What’s not online?

Another year of records (extending to 1923, 1948 and 1973 for BMD respectively) were released in 2024. Images for marriages going further back to 1845 (COI) and deaths back to 1864 are currently being worked on by the team. It should be noted that when looking through indexes online, the records that show a lot of metadata in the search results are often ones that have no associated scanned image, and the ones with less metadata shown initially will potentially have an image. However, even if no image is online (yet!), you can request a photocopy of the register entry/image from the GRO (General Register Office) in person at their office (see below), or by using this form via post (or fax!). Some 1916 rising leader records (Pearse, Ceannt, etc.) are unavailable, perhaps as they were later amended.

The GRO

If you go to the GRO office on Werburgh Street in Dublin, you will see a big Research Room with desks and walls of index books for BMD records, with pay as you go (€2, limited to five years of indexes in one BMD category) or pay per day (€20, for all you can eat data!) rates to access these indexes. You then pay the standard €4 rate to get a photocopy of individual register entries you have identified. Having the year, quarter (if applicable), volume and page number in the register will be of help in speeding up retrieval. Sometimes the year and Group Registration ID will be given in the (online) index instead, and this can be provided. The main tip here is that if you can come prepared and bring this precise reference information with you from the online index, you may not have to consult and pay for access to the physical indexes/books at all.

Census

Coverage

As you may know, the 19th century censuses either perished in an infamous 1922 fire or were mistakenly shredded on government orders (since copies were assumed to have been made, but weren’t). However, complete censuses for 1901 and 1911 are available. You should find all or nearly all ancestors living at those times. Of the 49 instances of ancestors I should have expected to find in the censuses, I found 47. You can browse by townland or search by name. Again, be imaginative in terms of spellings, for names and townlands. You may also be lucky if a relative applied for a pension in the early 20th century and filed a census search. Scans of some of these 1851 census search application forms are available, annotated with the results found (if any). I found about six or seven ancestors listed on these searches. The later 1926 census will also be made available in April 2026: I am really looking forward to this because one of my ancestors came from Mayo, but I have no idea where exactly she was from. In the 1926 census, one of the data fields was their birthplace, including the name of the parish.

Some details of what’s in there

1911 records include additional information not found in the 1901 census, such as years married and number of children born/living. The years married entry can help with finding civil or church marriage records (usually from the parish of the bride), but again be flexible as the number of years specified may not be exact. Some sites like Donegal Genealogy have taken these census records and annotated families/townlands with additional useful information.

Church records

Roman Catholic

The National Library of Ireland has digitised older (20th century) microfilm scans of various baptism and marriage records from Catholic parishes. Coverage really depends on what had survived in the various parishes (from when records started/were kept) and how much of that was actually captured on microfilm. These scans can be browsed at http://registers.nli.ie/, but text searches can be performed on transcribed data at FindMyPast.ie, once you register for free and log in to the site. Some county-specific websites like the Clare Library Genealogy page have easily accessible transcriptions or Excel files of many of these church registers, donated by superstar volunteers. There are some areas of concern in relation to uncaptured records nationally, as described here. Also try rootsireland.ie (subscription).

Other resources

Big sites

There are lots of paid sites like Ancestry.com, MyHeritage.com, FindMyPast.com and the free FamilySearch.org (LDS) where people build their own trees. They can be good, with photos and details you may never have seen elsewhere, but also can suffer from a fair bit of noise and erroneous assumptions so it is very much a case of buyer beware. They are worth browsing at least to get a start on your trees, or try out their free trials.

Old newspapers

Irish Newspaper Archives (https://irishnewsarchive.com) is a subscription site with a large range of old Irish newspaper articles. Some universities and colleges have a site license if you have access to same. The British Newspaper Archive is also subscription only (https://britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/), but you can still glean quite a bit of useful information from searches on family members or townlands without clicking into the full articles. At least, you can gather the basics for later (paid) research. For some reason, using O Donnell or O’Donnell can display the text or not from matching articles (probably an erroneous escaping of the search string).

Military archives

Did your ancestor serve in the IRA or Cumann na mBan or related military organisation from 1916 to 1923? Check the Military Archives for any pensions or medals awarded at http://www.militaryarchives.ie/en/genealogy or go to their Reading Room to consult full applications for any relatives found. I found over 100 pages including scanned letters and envelopes linked to one of my ancestor’s pensions through their amazing online service.

Emigrants

Did you have a relative who emigrated or travelled to the US? Try the Ellis Island passenger search or earlier records from Castle Garden, and see if they recorded hair and eye colours. You may also find information on your ancestors from their children who emigrated to the US or Australia or elsewhere, through passenger manifests, marriages or death records in those countries (I confirmed an ancestor’s maiden name through both an Australian marriage and death record).

Other registers and court records

FindMyPast (paid) has an eclectic collection of images from dog licence books, petty session (court) order books, electoral registers, landed estate court rentals and valuation office records from the 19th century. You may even find applications from evicted tenants from the late 19th or early 20th century. Some libraries (Galway City and County, for example) and colleges/universities have on-site access to FindMyPast. You may be able to find out what type of dog(s) your great-great-grandfather owned without actually knowing when they themselves (your ancestor!) were born or when they died.

Land valuations

The Tithe Applotments can be useful to confirm a (usually male) ancestor in the 1820s and 1830s. See also if they pop up again in Griffith’s Valuation 25 years later. The Ask About Ireland subsite at http://askaboutireland.ie/griffith-valuation/ allows you to also overlay a map from that time on top of a modern Google Map, so if you know that your ancestors have always lived in a particular house or area, you can trace back to who lived in that house or area in the 1850s (potentially a relative).

Ireland Reaching Out

“John! You should also be using the Ireland Reaching Out website http://www.irelandxo.com — huge amount of #free #irishgenealogy advice there from volunteers worldwide — especially if you are tracing abroad! #irelandxo” — https://twitter.com/MikeFeerick/status/1131593892627918849

Tips and tricks

Saving record files

I use a unique key with a combination of the letters F (female) and M (male) to store downloaded PDFs or JPGs of various records. For example, “MFM Casey, John Birth Record.pdf” is my (I’m the first M) mother’s father’s birth record. I realise that the M and F can also be confused with mother and father, but once you learn, you learn. So far, this makes it easy for me to find stuff. This is known as the atree or Binary Ahnentafel method.

Old photos

If you have any old black and white photos of your ancestors, you might try the wonderful DeOldify deep learning framework to colourise them quickly and effectively. For geeks, you can use the Google Colab interface here (see this tutorial) and for non-geeks, try the paid services from MyHeritage In Color (DeOldify), colorizeimages.com and Palette.fm.

One more thing…

…as Steve Jobs used to say! I’ve created a reusable spreadsheet to capture the essentials of your family tree. This includes you and five generations prior (1+2+4+8+16+32=63 people). I’ve colour coded rows corresponding to the ancestors of your grandparents. It is available here http://bit.ly/ancestrytree (shrunk and copied below) and can provide a bird’s eye view of what you do and do not have in terms of your core ancestry records. The gaps become clearly visible when it is filled in. You could add more rows if more ancestors are ‘available’, or more columns for Tithe Applotments, Griffith’s Valuation, etc.

Famed soldier in the United Irishmen Miles Byrne refers in his Memoirs to a tract of wetlands bought by a Mrs Doyle Lawless near Carcassonne. In fact, he alludes to a link between her and Napoleon, when he says: “We have no Bonaparte [there in Ireland] to encourage and protect us, as Mrs Lawless had at Carcassonne”. Who was this Irish woman, and how did she end up draining the marsh near Carcassonne? Thanks to the extensive work of Christophe Monié, an amateur historian and genealogist from nearby Aigues-Vives, we now know much more about the family of Mary-Anne Lawless (neé Coppinger), a widow from Dublin who received a Gold Medal from King Louis XVIII for her agricultural work.

Mary-Anne and the Marsh of Marseillette

There had been various proposals in the past to drain the saltwater marsh of Marseillette, including Notes on the Draining of the Marsh of Marseillette in 1790 by an unknown author, and proposals from French revolutionary Jean-Pierre Fabre de l’Aude in 1792. However, the book Cartulary and Archives of the Municipalities of the Ancient Diocese and of the Administrative Borough of Carcassonne states that: “The material success in draining the march of Marseillette can be attributed to an Irishwoman (Mrs Lawless), who, after having acquired the marsh of Marseillette, in 1801, from third parties who had themselves acquired it from the national domain, for about 10 years, drained and cultivated it, but with insufficient capital. This lady, her heirs, and their successors, did not find fortune in this laudable but difficult enterprise.”

Interestingly, there is a double Irish link with the prior owners, associates Howard and Wilkins. From County Antrim, John Tennent, who went by the pseudonym of Thomas Howard, had trained with a Coleraine merchant, but became a United Irishman and French soldier. There is a portrait of him from c. 1810 in the Ulster Museum. The other owner, a Scottish legal advocate called Thomas Wilson, and whose alias was Theodore Wilkins, later married Matilda, who was the widow of Irish revolutionary Theobald Wolfe Tone. Wilson was a friend of Tone and his wife. Police files in the Archives Nationales record that Wilson went to Carcassonne in March 1798 to purchase “national goods”, which were properties confiscated during the French Revolution.

There seem to have been a number of connections between the Lawless family and the United Irishmen, with Mary-Anne sending 22,800 francs from Carcassonne to Thomas Markey in 1814. Markey, Captain John Tennent, and others like General William Lawless are often mentioned together by Miles Byrne and in other records. A further link to Valentine Lawless (also a distant cousin of General William Lawless) is referred to later.

Lawless bought 1000 hectares (half) of the land from the two associates in 1801, and the final two quarters on 18th and 22nd May 1804, totalling 2000 hectares. She obtained authorisation to establish her residence in France one week later, the 29th May 1804.

The main draining work started in 1804, with a deadline of 1808, and additional aqueducts were built and others widened to help with the draining. The land area was described as being 7 km in diameter in one direction. Speaking for the government, Montalivet, the general director for bridges and roads, said that “the pond of Marseillette has disappeared: rich harvests grow where we could once see but its waters”.

The results were impressive, but there was still work to do according to a 1808 engineer’s report (more detail given in 1839 by Desalles), with some of the land in quite good condition, and other parts still too saline and only suitable for “salicor” like glasswort. 24 farms for smallholders were said to have been created on the land (the map shows 20), with produce including wheat, oats, barley and fodder (“paumelle” or spring barley). The same book also describes some minor boundary line disputes with neighbours. 

For her work, Mrs Lawless was awarded a Gold Medal by King Louis XVIII in 1820, which was presented to her in 1821 by the Interim Prefect of Aude.

Mary-Anne Lawless died in Pau on 21st September 1838 with outstanding debts on the land, and with various expropriation attempts by the mortgage bank to seize the property. Her daughter also fought a number of cases in relation to the property. Caisse Hypothécaire acquired the lands at auction for 1.2 million francs in 1844. After the sale, Maria-Frances again endeavoured in court to retrieve rent that she claimed was due to her.

Later produce from the lands, even to this day, has included rice, fruit (apples) and wine.

The Lawless Family

Mary-Anne’s husband was John Lawless, a woollen draper and carpet manufacturer on High Street and later Dame Street, who was an associate (perhaps relative) of Nicholas Lawless, father of United Irishman Valentine Lawless. 

They had a son named Doyle in 1787. A daughter Henrietta was born in 1789, but we believe she may have died young. In 1790, their daughter Maria-Frances Lawless was born. Another son Richard was born in 1793. There was also a half-sister Anne, from John’s previous marriage to a Mary Thunder, and we have found out that Anne was born in 1770 and was married in 1792. 

John disappeared from the Wilson’s [Dublin] Directory in 1796, and was replaced by his wife Mary-Anne in the directory, according to WJ Fitzpatrick in his book on Valentine Lawless. According to John’s will from 1793, he died on the 27th May 1795, with children Anne, Doyle, Frances and Richard mentioned.

Mary-Anne and family moved to France in 1801 with three children on 20th November 1801 according to a French Who’s Who. We can assume that these three were Doyle, Maria-Frances and Richard, as all three lived in France, and assuming that Henrietta had died beforehand. They lived in Paris first and likely in Carcassonne from 1804.

When Maria-Frances married Marquis de Bausset in 1810, the family lived at the quarter called Carrée des Marchands or Merchants Square in Carcassonne, which was between Rue Mage (now Rue de Verdun) and Rue Mercière (now Rue Barbes), extending from the Poor Clare Convent, later Pierre Grassalio’s house (and whose windows can now been seen in La Cité) to “La Place”. Richard Lawless died in 1812, at which time the family lived at rue de la Mairie, now rue Aimé Ramond, in a Mr Devoisin’s house.

Maria-Frances Lawless, Marquise de Bausset

Maria-Frances was born to John Lawless and Mary-Anne Lawless (née Coppinger) in Dublin in 1790, and baptised with godparents from the Lawless and Coppinger families. While her family may have been wealthy, there still has been some debate as to how she ended up marrying someone in Napoleon’s circle.

According to the book Historical Gallery of Contemporaries, her husband, the Baron de Bausset was “a nephew of the Bishop of Alais [later Cardinal Louis-François de Bausset], and was a chamberlain to Napoleon and one of the prefects of his palace”. His full name was Baron Louis-François-Joseph de Bausset-Roquefort of Sauvain (Hérault). The Historical Gallery of Contemporaries said that: “The Baron de Bausset, who had no personal fortune, but obtained, in 1810, from Napoleon, several shares in the Languedoc Canal [du Midi], and in the newspaper Journal of the Empire. […] The Baron de Bausset married, around this time, Miss Lawless, Irish, enjoying a considerable fortune or endowment, via her mother who had a concession made to her, by the Imperial Government, for the marsh of Marseillette, near Carcassonne.”

They married in 1810, and had two children, Marie-Louise, born in Paris in 1812, and Louis-François-Joseph, born in Carcassonne in 1814. In what can only be described as fodder for a motion picture, persistent rumours in Sauvian over the years were that Napoleon had exchanged his daughter (to become Marie-Louise) for the son of the Baussets, in order to have a male heir! The Marquis spent a lot of time with Napoleon and he also wrote Private Memoirs of the Court of Napoleon. He died in 1831 at the age of 61.

Having been involved in multiple unsuccessful court cases regarding rent from the marsh, then-Carcassonne resident Maria-Frances was shown to have a fiery temperament when she appeared before the Carcassonne Tribunal in 1847 for multiple instances of contempt and assault against two magistrates, Vice-President Lacombe and Judge Maraval. As well as calling both prevaricators in public, she was reported to have hit and spit at Maraval in his own home. Maraval had been involved in a case the previous year between her son and a Toulouse tailor, and also in a number of the cases regarding the rent from the marsh. The court read out a statement on her behalf, but she was sentenced to five years in prison (one year after appeal). She later wrote from prison to Queen Marie-Amélie seeking a pardon, but it is unknown if the letter was actually sent or her request granted.

In a tragic end, her daughter Marie-Louise de Bausset was murdered by her husband François Sicard in 1852. She had three children. Her mother had been opposed to the marriage, and the children’s grandmother Mary-Anne Lawless had also changed her will multiple times due to disputes with Sicard. Sicard was not imprisoned long, if at all, and died in 1854.

Doyle Lawless

We have some more details about the brother Doyle who was born in Dublin in 1787, thanks to an 1826 court case covered in The Court Spectator.

The article describes the aforementioned purchase by Mrs Lawless in some detail, although some of the facts differ slightly from those above. It says that Mrs Lawless was widowed in 1793, and that she left Ireland in 1801 for Carcassonne with just two children: her son and her daughter, both of them were minors. She is said to have bought several buildings near Carcassonne, including the marsh, which she had drained. 

She sent her son [Doyle] to Prytanée National Military School [of Saint-Cyr] to study in November 1801. Entry to the school was reserved for “orphan” sons of those lost in combat, although admission to the school would normally be for French nationals. It seems that John Lawless was eligible as having given service to Napoleon by opposing their common enemy, England.

On leaving school, he returned to Carcassonne to help his mother with their agricultural enterprise. He would have acquired residency as a minor via his mother (soon after her own) on 8th June 1804, and he also declared residency on 22th December 1812 at the Town Hall in Carcassonne. 

In 1812, he is said to be living with his mother, and then carries out service with the National Guard. He then moved to 12 rue d’Artois in Paris in 1816, where he lived until he was arrested in 1818. On 4th February that year, he was imprisoned in Sainte-Pélagie due to unpaid debts. His creditors were named as Lannes, Mangin, Mrs Petit-Jean d’Inville, and Casanove.

In court in 1826, a case on his behalf claimed he should have been released after five years, given that he was a foreign national but also a legal French resident. Doyle’s lawyer made a strong case with all the necessary facts regarding the dates that residency would have been acquired, and the court decided that he should be released.
A later case involving debts to Auguste Cazanove of Sète (we assume this is the same Casanove as above) was held in November 1838, where Doyle revoked any inheritance claim to the marsh of Marseillette to Cazanove. After that, there are few mentions of Doyle Lawless. He died on 13 May 1857 (recorded as Doyle Lowles), and according to the Daily Burial Registers of Parisian Cemeteries, he was buried the next day at Montmartre.

Part of the Irish Brigade, Dillon’s Regiment was brought from Ireland to France in 1690 by Count Arthur Dillon (1670-1733) during the Williamite War. However, the Dillons originally came from France: Henri de Léon of Brittany arrived in Ireland some 500 years earlier with the Normans and Prince John. Dillon gentry spread throughout Ireland, from Drumraney to Clonbrock. Over the centuries in France, the Irish-French Dillons were famed for their military successes, but some also suffered spectacular downfalls during the French Revolution. We will describe some of these famous Dillons in France, and also in Languedoc where they had both a religious (Narbonne) and a military (Carcassonne) presence for some time.

Count Arthur Dillon

Arthur Dillon (1670-1733) was the son of Theobald Dillon (died 1691), a great-grandson of the 1st Viscount Dillon, and Mary Talbot, daughter of Sir Henry Talbot. Both his parents died during the Williamite War in 1691: his father fell at the Battle of Aughrim, and his mother was accidentally killed by a bomb just a few weeks later during the Siege of Limerick.

He brought Dillon’s Regiment to France via Brest in 1690 as its colonel when he was just 20 years old, as part of the 5,400-strong Irish Brigade during the Williamite War. Dillon and his regiment fought in Roussillon and Catalonia during the Nine Years’ War, and they had a key role in the capture of Barcelona. He later fought in – amongst other places – Italy, Germany, and back in Spain again. Louis XIV made him Count Dillon in 1711. Arthur led Dillon’s Regiment until his retirement in 1730, and died in Saint-Germain in 1733.

From 1730 to 1747, there were multiple changes in “colonel proprietor”, all sons of Count Arthur Dillon: Charles (who died in 1741), Henry (who resigned as colonel proprietor in 1743), James (who died in 1745), and Edward (who died in 1747). From 1747 onwards, the regiment remained without a Dillon as colonel proprietor for some 20 years.

Arthur’s son Henry could not leave his English estates without endangering them, so Louis XIV kept the regiment in the Dillon name, and appointed various interim colonels (with Henry as absentee colonel proprietor) until Henry’s son (Count Arthur’s grandson) Arthur could take over in 1767.

Archbishop Arthur Richard Dillon

An Irish-French Dillon was quite [in]famous in the Languedoc region. The fifth of Count Arthur Dillon’s sons, Arthur Richard Dillon had been Bishop of Evreux, Archbishop of Toulouse, and since 1763, he was Archbishop of Narbonne (as primate of the ecclesiastical region of Gallia Narbonensis and ex officio president of the states of Languedoc). This would have included Carcassonne during the time that Dillon’s Regiment visited in 1763 and 1764.

Described as visionary and enterprising, he was more devoted to infrastructural rather than spiritual development: promoting buildings (including the cathedral he was eventually buried in), bridges, canals (in particular, the Junction Canal connecting the Canal du Midi to the Canal de la Robine), roads, harbours, creating science professorships in Montpellier and Toulouse, and trying to reduce poverty in Narbonne and the region. Both cours Dillon (a road in Toulouse) and quai Dillon (in Narbonne) are named in his honour. 

However, also said to be more of an “​​Irish squire of the ‘Castle Rackrent’ days rather than a dignified ecclesiastic”, he lived with his niece (the daughter of his own sister Laura) and reputed lover Madame de Rothe in a scandalous arrangement for that or any time. “He was devoted to hunting, and swore consumedly, though he set his face against such practices in the inferior clergy”, according to WF Prideaux in Notes and Queries.

After the civil constitution of the clergy was adopted in 1790, there was an unsuccessful proposal to move the episcopal seat for the Aude department from Narbonne to Carcassonne, but in any case Dillon refused to accept this new constitution. He was exiled, and later died and was buried in London in 1806, with his body being eventually returned to Narbonne Cathedral over 200 years later in 2007, and his dentures remaining in England!

General Theobald Dillon

Dublin-born Theobald Hyacinthe Dillon (1745–1792), son of banker Thomas Dillon Hussey (Château de Chevaux in La Ferté-Saint-Aubin) and Marie Hussey from Meath, entered  Dillon’s Regiment as a cadet in 1760 or 1762, and progressed in rank over the next 30 years to become colonel commandant in Dillon’s Regiment in 1788 (although he had taken over the regiment in 1780 from distant cousin Arthur Dillon), and a general in 1791. 

Theobald’s family were descendants of Catherine Dillon, a sister of the 1st Viscount Dillon, and were also related further back through half-siblings Thomas and Edmund Dillon, making him a distant cousin of General Arthur Dillon. He has been misidentified in various places as a brother or first cousin of General Arthur Dillon, whose own brother Theobald died in infancy, and Arthur did not have an uncle named Thomas. 

Theobald Hyacinthe Dillon had an elder brother called Edward Patrick Joseph Dillon Hussey, who is possibly the Edward Dillon mentioned in records visiting a masonic lodge in Carcassonne during 1763, before a visit of his younger brother (“cadet”) Theobald Dillon.

Theobald was attacked by his own troops, incorrectly believing themselves to be betrayed by him, and he died in 1792 (an event that was the subject of various paintings and engravings and also captured in this report).

“Le Beau” Edward Dillon

[Charles] Edward Dillon (1750-1839), who was born in Bordeaux and known as “le beau Dillon”, became a second colonel in Dillon’s Regiment. 

His father was Robert Dillon, Lord of Terrefort, also known for the Château Dillon winery, and whose brother was Thomas Dillon Hussey. His mother was Mary Dicconson of Wrightington. He was known to be a favourite of Queen Marie Antoinette.

Edward was an uncle of the writer Adèle d’Osmond, Comtesse de Boigne, whose mother was Edward’s sister Eléonore. Another brother was Robert William who fought in the American War of Independence.

Some biographies have conflated Edward with his first cousin Theobald (1745–1792). This is also addressed in Notes and Queries by WF Prideaux. In fact, Edward did have an older brother called Theobald (1747-1819), which adds to the confusion. (There are just so many Arthurs, Theobalds and Edwards!)

General Arthur Dillon

It was the first Arthur’s grandson, also named Arthur Dillon (1750–1794) and a nephew of the Archbishop of Narbonne, who took over the regiment in 1767 after joining as a cadet at the age of 15.

He later went on to lead the brigade in the American Revolutionary War (from 1777 to 1783, during which time Dillon Rhum also came about), and then again during the French Revolutionary Wars. After his tenure, Dillon’s Regiment was nationalised in 1791, and became the 87th Regiment of Infantry.

He is reputed to have saved Paris (and therefore France) from the Austrians in 1792 at the Battle of Valmy. Unfortunately, Arthur Dillon himself was guillotined as a royalist during the Reign of Terror in 1794, shouting “vive le roi” before he died.

Marquise de La Tour du Pin

General Arthur’s daughter Henrietta-Lucy Dillon (called Lucie, later Marquise de La Tour du Pin), by his first wife and first cousin once removed Thérèse-Lucy de Rothe (lady-in-waiting to Marie Antoinette, daughter of the aforementioned Madame de Rothe, and granddaughter of Arthur’s aunt Laura), was a writer who became famous for her memoirs titled Recollections of the Revolution and the Empire.

Lucie, who was also a grandniece (via Arthur) and a great-grandniece (via Madame de Rothe) of the aforementioned Archbishop Arthur Richard Dillon, had some ‘interesting’ comments to make about his household in her memoirs, when she lived with her grandmother and mother: “I saw things which might have been expected to warp my mind”.

Her half-sister Fanny, by Arthur’s second wife, [Anne] Laure de Girardin de Montgérald (a cousin of Empress Joséphine), was an aristocrat who later married to Napoleon’s aide-de-camp Henri Gatien Bertrand, and was present at Napoleon’s death in 1821.

More Dillons

Mistakenly described as a grandson of Arthur, the similarly named Arthur Marie Dillon (1834-1922), son of Pierre Dillon (whose own father was Jacques, not Arthur) and Marie Adele Poidevin, was a friend of and fellow exilee with General Ernest Boulanger, later dying on Berder Island in Morbihan, Brittany which he himself had bought.

The Dillon military legacy continued into the 20th century, with Weygand speaking of another English general called Dillon, then on the staff of World War I Commander-in-Chief Ferdinand Foch, in an encounter with [Dillon’s] 87th Regiment in 1918. This is likely the 19th Viscount Dillon, Brigadier Eric Dillon, Irish peer and British army officer. 
An article on The Noble Line of the Dillons, Irish Swordsmen of France was written in 1989 by Renagh Holohan of the Irish Times, and is worth a read.

Did you know that over 260 years ago, Caserne Laperrine, the large military barracks beside Les Jacobins and originally built from 1709 to 1735, was once host to a battalion of Irish soldiers, part of Dillon’s Regiment from 1763 to 1764? Amongst them were many famous officers in the regiment, including some of the extended Dillon family and James O’Moran, at the time a sous-lieutenant and eventually a general. Building on earlier research carried out by the late Pierre Costeplane, we provide additional evidence that points to the possible presence in Carcassonne of Theobald Dillon, later a general who was famously assassinated by his own soldiers at Lille in 1792.

What Was Dillon’s Regiment?

During a period of peace in France, Caserne Laperrine, then the Royal Barracks of Carcassonne, hosted a battalion from Dillon’s Regiment for 6½ months, from 16th September 1763 to 31st March 1764. A battalion is about 1000 soldiers, and this battalion is reported to have had 13 companies, including a company of grenadiers. So that would have been a lot of former Irish stationed in Carcassonne. But what was Dillon’s Regiment, and where did it get its name?

The Dillon line associated with this regiment stretches back to Irish Catholic gentry primarily from the Midlands (Westmeath) and the West (Roscommon, Galway), and before that to Sir Henry Dillon (Henri de Léon) of Brittany who came with the Normans to Ireland in 1185, as Prince (later King) John’s secretary. Dillon’s Regiment was established in 1688 in Ireland for the Jacobites by the 7th Viscount Dillon, Theobald Dillon (d. 1691), a great-grandson of the 1st Viscount Dillon (d. 1625; as an aside, his daughters Cecily and Eleanor co-founded the Irish Poor Clares with others in 1629). 

Theobald’s son Count Arthur Dillon (1670-1733) brought the regiment to France in 1690 as part of the Irish Brigade during the Williamite War, with his sons leading it from 1730 until 1747, but the brigade then remained without a Dillon as colonel proprietor for 20 years, including during its time at Carcassonne.

Do We Know Which of the Irish Were in Carcassonne?

Around the time of the brigade arriving from Montpellier to Carcassonne in 1763, the 1763 edition of Roussel’s Military State of France lists a Sheldon as Second Colonel/Brigadier (likely François-Raphaël Sheldon, son of Dominic Sheldon, and cousin to Arthur’s wife Christina Sheldon, a maid of honour to Queen Mary of Modena of England, Scotland and Ireland). In the 1764 edition of the same book, some very Irish names are listed as officers under then Colonel Commandant Sheldon: Lieutenant-Colonel Nihell (de Nihel, a variant of O’Neill), Major O’Connor, Aide-Major White (Captain), Sous­-Aide-Major MacDermott, and Treasurer MacKinay (this treasurer function was suppressed in 1764). In the 1765 edition, a promoted Lieutenant-Colonel O’Connor appears to have replaced Nihell in 1764 (also confirmed here), and his own place has been taken by a Major Bourke, which gives us six names who would have been present in Carcassonne. [O’Connor became colonel commandant in 1766.]

Coincidentally in 1763, the youngest son of Arthur Dillon, Arthur Richard Dillon, was appointed Archbishop of Narbonne (this archdiocese included the diocese of Carcassonne).

During this period, officers often visited the lodge of “Perfect Truth” (one of a number of lodges in Carcassonne) in the Freemason Orient of Carcassonne, and there are various records found by Pierre Costeplane in his excellent article The Irish in Carcassonne which lists at least 10 additional names of those Irish officers who frequented the lodge. Some of these names can also be found associated with Dillon’s Regiment in various editions of Roussel’s Military State of France, but also in the History of the 87th Line Infantry Regiment. In advance, it is useful to learn (as I did) that the three levels of Freemasonry are apprentice, companion, and master:

1. On 30th October 1763, Jacques Moran came as a prelude to many other officers and members of Dillon’s Regiment. This is likely the same Elphin-born James (Jacques) O’Moran, who grew up in Morin-la-Montagne, and had a long military career in the Americas and Europe, rising to general, but who was guillotined by the Revolutionary Tribunal in 1794.
2. The first of those others listed was an Edward Dillon, received as an apprentice on 6th November 1763. He is likely an elder brother of Theobald Dillon who visits later, and less likely to be their cousin le beau Dillon since he would have been just 13 (but who also had a three-years-older brother called Theobald!). This Edward Dillon was conferred as a master on 29th December. That was quick – what about companion level?! Unfortunately, we have no confirmed record of an Edward [Patrick Joseph Dillon Hussey] serving as of yet. Another Colonel Edward Dillon is mentioned fighting in Grenada in 1779, however we believe this to be “le beau” instead.
3. Next were officers O’Berin…
4. … and MacDermott (possibly the same listed by Roussel above), who were received as apprentices on 20th November and quickly became companions on 27th November. Also, on 1st January 1764, [Baron] O’Berin and MacDermott were made masters.
5. Henry O’Hagen was also received as an apprentice on 27th November, as a companion on 11th December, and a master on 1st January.
6. A certain Kelly, already initiated, visited with the also already-initiated Jacques Moran on 11th December.
7. Anselme [de] Nugent was received as an apprentice on 11th December, as a companion (and a member of the “Perfect Truth” lodge) on 27th December, and then as a master on 29th December; his name is mentioned in records here and here.
8. O’Connor visited on 27th December as well, and is said to be “venerable” which is what French masons sometimes use as a term for their masters. He is listed in lodge records as a lieutenant-colonel, but by Roussel in 1764 as a major. This discrepancy in rank is noted by Costeplane, but is explained by a promotion by 1764, also reflected in the 1765 edition of Roussel.
9. Another officer, Bernard Magennis or McGuinness, was received as an apprentice on 27th December, and as a companion on 1st January.
10. O’Brien from Berwick’s Regiment, already accepted as a mason in Dublin, also visited on 1st January and immediately became a master.
11. Next up is “cadet” (which as well as a rank can also be interpreted as younger brother in French) Theobald Dillon (probably a brother of the aforementioned Edward), who was received as an apprentice on 1st January, granted the rank of companion on request from Moran, and made a master on the same day! A banquet was held at the ‘daughter’ lodge “Perfect Harmony” in the Orient of Carcassonne in honour of [Theobald] Dillon, no doubt to benefit from the honour of having a member or members of the illustrious Dillon family in its ranks. We believe this is the future General Theobald Dillon (1745–1792), as he became a cadet in the regiment between 1760 and 1762, and he also had an elder brother named Edward. One minor complication here is that biographical records show him as having been promoted from cadet to sous-lieutenant in August 1763, although there may have been a delay in formalising this. Also, if we interpret cadet as being the term used for a second-born son, that links Theobald to Edward. An added element of confusion is that Costeplane conflates Theobald with distant cousin Charles Dillon (1745–1813), a grandson of Count Arthur Dillon born in the same year, describing him as the elder brother of future General Arthur Dillon (1750–1794), but that Arthur did not have a brother called Edward or Theobald.
12. Perhaps because of all of the above admissions, there was some local opposition to a proposal on 5th February to admit yet another officer from Dillon’s Regiment, Barthélemy Lynchagan. After quite some back and forth, including verbal support from his colleague McGuinness, it was accepted by a majority vote, with a later upgrade to companion carried out on 19th February. A proposal on 18th March to move him to masters level was postponed and not confirmed in writing before the regiment left Carcassonne at the end of the month.

Franco-Irish Military Connections by Genet-Rouffiac and Murphy (and in turn Irish Brigades Abroad by McGarry) references a 2003 lecture by Pierre Costeplane, saying that “officers who were masons could temporarily join local lodges”, and that “eighteen officers, including Theobald Dillon, [had] come ‘knocking as masons’ to the door of a respectable lodge known as ‘Saint Jean de la parfaite vérité’ in Carcassonne”.

Unfortunately for Carcassonne, Dillon’s Regiment left for Alais (Alès) at the end of March 1764, and no regiment immediately replaced them during what was a period of extreme turbulence for the city, when there were fever outbreaks, grain shortages in Italy and Spain, bread price rises, looting of wheat and corn, as well as other public threats and violence. The city’s councillors wrote to the military headquarters in Montpellier, seemingly to no avail, asking for “at least four companies from some regiment or another, to put us within reach of maintaining good order and public tranquillity”.

A later connection between the region and the (then-nationalised) 87th Regiment was in 1803 when the regiment is recorded as having received a large detachment of conscripts from Aude. We can perhaps imagine that many of these would have been from Carcassonne.

Carcassonne has neolithic origins, but likely owes its original oppidum (town) name of Carsac (later Carcaso) to the Gauls, a Celtic people. The Irish journalist Seamus MacCall laments in a 1938 Irish Press article that “Carcassonne is still a Celtic city, and in Carcassonne is Tara, Cruachan, Cashel, and the rest, just as they might have been”. Irish, Anglo-Irish, and Anglo-Normans from Ireland have been popping in and out of Carcassonne for centuries: some who were good, and others who were unfortunately very, very bad… Here are some of the Ireland-Carcassonne links we have uncovered recently.

Serial conqueror Hugh de Lacy, 1st Earl of Ulster, appears in records as Ugues de Lasis or Hugues des Arcis as the one tasked with “cutting off the head of the dragon”, in other words Carcassonne, before its fall in 1209 during the Albigensian Crusade, although this appearance has been debated. However, de Lacy does appear again in Carcassonne in 1211, when he advises Simon de Montfort not to undergo a siege at Carcassonne and be trapped, but rather to transfer into a weaker castle (Casto Nova, or Castèl Nau d’Arri in Occitan) and thereafter come out and attack the besieging enemy. The book From Carrickfergus to Carcassonne: The Epic Deeds of Hugh de Lacy During the Albigensian Crusade edited by Duffy, O’Keeffe and Picard gives a lot more of the context to this story.

A Fr Thady Daly (b. 1656) was ordained as a priest in Carcassonne in 1686 by the Bishop of Carcassonne, Louis-Joseph de Grignan. He later became parish priest of Killeedy and Killagholehane, County Limerick, and lived in Banemore, Ashford in 1704.

We have written a longer article to follow on the Irish Dillon’s Regiment in Carcassonne in 1763, and also another on some of the prominent Dillons in France during the 18th and 19th centuries.

We have also written an article to follow about Irish woman Mary-Anne Lawless who in 1801 acquired and later drained the marshes at Marseillette, paving the way for crop growth in the area. Her daughter Maria-Frances married the Marquis de Bausset. Lawless bought the land from United Irishman John Tennent and Scottish Thomas Wilson, future second husband of (United Irishmen leader) Wolfe Tone’s widow Matilda.

The Bishop of Carcassonne Joseph-Julien de Saint-Rome Gualy wrote a letter to his parishioners, including elements of an encyclical from Pope Pius IX, to ask for prayers, alms and relief for Ireland in 1847 during the Great Famine, stating in stark terms that “Ireland was a vast tomb, in which thousands of unfortunate people were being buried every day, cut down by fever and famine”.

On 17th October 1897, Sister Mary Bridgit (Nora O’Sullivan of Adrigole, Skibbereen) made her final vows in the Convent of Carmelites, Carcassonne. In the sermon, a Carcassonne priest spoke of “the friendly relations which always subsisted between France and Ireland, of the deep debt of gratitude his countrymen still owed the latter country, and how in many days of disaster and defeat, the sons of the Emerald Isle had saved their forces from annihilation, and oft times crowned their banners with victory and glory.”

From Aude to Ireland, Ireland’s most famous French restaurant of the 20th century was established by the Saint-Julia-de-Bec-born Michel and François Jammet, whose mother was from a famous hatmaking family, the Bourrels of Quillan, Espèraza and Carcassonne.

The writer Lord Dunsany (Eddie Plunkett) brought readers to a fantasy version of Carcassonne in a short story written for his book A Dreamer’s Tales in 1910. The book is considered to have been a major influence on Tolkien, Lovecraft, Le Guin, and others.

Carcassonne-born journalist Simone Téry visited Ireland multiple times in the 1920s to report for newspapers on the War of Independence and the Civil War, writing two books on Ireland in the process (In Ireland: From the War of Independence to the Civil War (1914-1923) and The Island of Bards: Notes on Contemporary Irish Literature). “Téry is reputed to have been the only journalist, French or otherwise, to have ever interviewed [Michael] Collins”, and was a good friend of George Russell (Æ), according to Oliver O’Hanlon. Her father was teaching philosophy in Carcassonne during the time she was born.

Famed Irish sculptor Gabriel Hayes, a pupil of Seán Keating, visited various art centres and galleries in Languedoc including Carcassonne during the 1920s. She is also known as the creator of some 1971 coins in Ireland: the halfpenny, penny and two pence.

In 1933, 49-year-old pilgrim Seaghan E. Campbell from The Whins, Killiney walked for three months after departing from Ireland, through England, France (through Carcassonne) and into Italy (via Ventimiglia) towards Rome, walking the portion from Dublin to Lourdes barefoot.

Fortunat Strowski, Carcassonne-born professor of French literary history at the Sorbonne, came to UCC to give a guest lecture in 1934. Fortunat Joseph Strowski de Robkowa was born at 22 rue Armagnac.

It is reported in the Irish Times on 15th March 1940 that Carcassonne had as its fire chief a commandant by the name of Conroy. Any more information would be appreciated!

And during World War II, after hearing from Mayor Albert Tomey in November 1940 about the near famine conditions that were being experienced in Carcassonne and also the forced end of their school-feeding programme in both crèches and nursery schools, the Corkwoman Mary Elmes helped organise 50 days worth of food with the Quakers to be sent to children there, as described in Clodagh Finn’s biography of Elmes A Time to Risk All. Various letters between Mary Elmes and the Academy of Carcassonne as well as the Belgian Red Cross of Carcassonne regarding Belgian refugees, can be found in records in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Archives. According to Finn, and based on files in these records (box 1, folder 7, page 59), a local newspaper wrote an account of this generosity, giving thanks to the Quakers and to Mary Elmes in particular, and Mayor Tomey was said to be “profoundly touched” by the efforts.

Henri Jean Paul Manassero was born to Jean and Paule (Guiraud) Manassero in Carcassonne on 2nd July 1932. He married Moya Corrigan on 7th July 1962. He was General Manager of the Royal Hibernian Hotel, Dublin from 1963 to 1969, as well as President of the Irish Hotel and Restaurant Managers Association in 1969. The Irish Times in 1972 refers to “the very able Frenchman who became more Irish than the Irish (and married an Irish girl)”. He had an extensive hotel management career in Europe and the USA, including the Hotel Pierre in New York, and was awarded the French National Order of Merit (Chevalier) in 1985. He died in Nice on 28th September 2000 and he was buried in Limoux.

Introduction

The year is 50 BC. Gaul is entirely occupied by the Romans. Well not entirely! One small village of indomitable Gauls still holds out against the invaders. And life is not easy for the Roman legionaries who garrison the fortified camps of Totorum, Aquarium, Laudanum and Compendium…

And especially so given that one of those indomitable Gauls is the legendary fictional French hero Astérix [Verdaguer, 1988], who has fought many battles and defeated numerous opponents (including many Romans) since he first appeared on the comics scene in 1959… But may he have met his match in this historical interpretation? Can his magic potion save him and his friends from being analytically dissected for the purposes of this article? We shall see… 

Before Astérix

The Astérix series was co-created by Alberto Aleandro Uderzo (1927 – 2020), a French comic book artist and scriptwriter [Wikipedia Uderzo, -], and René Goscinny (1926 – 1977), a French comic editor and writer [Wikipedia Goscinny, -]. 

Both of Astérix’s creators, Albert Uderzo and René Goscinny, knew something of being a stranger in a strange land, with Uderzo’s family having come from Italy and the Goscinny family originally from Poland. 

Perhaps Astérix et al.’s far flung adventures around the world (and poking fun at those crazy Romans) are less of a surprise in this context…

Albert Uderzo was to be named after his predeceased brother Albert, but his father’s strong Italian accent meant that the French registry office only heard ‘Alberto’ when he meant ‘Albert’, and they registered him as Alberto instead. As Uderzo said:

I once asked [my father]: “Why did you give me an Italian first name, considering we live in France?” His reply was typical for him: “I didn’t try to register you as Alberto, but instead as Alberto.” It was hopeless. Without noticing it, my father pronounced ‘Albert’ the Italian way. [Uderzo et al., 1985]

Goscinny had also spent many years in Argentina where he grew up, but he lived for some time in the United States. He is also known for a prolific amount of writing work including his creations Le Petit Nicolas and Iznogoud, and from when he joined Belgian cartoonist Morris to work on the Lucky Luke series for many years.

Goscinny and Uderzo met in the latter’s Paris apartment to come up with an idea for a comic book that they hoped would entertain the growing market of teenage bande dessinée readers. They looked for inspiration in the different epochs of French history as was taught to them in school, gradually seizing on the time of the Gauls as being the perfect setting for their new series [Dandridge, 2008] and that would liberally mine cultural references and identities from both historical and present (at the time) French and European society [Mutta, 2016].

The resulting series abounded in contemporary cultural references, literary allusions, anachronisms, satire, and caricature. Don Quixote, James Bond, the Beatles, Jacques Lacan, the Statue of Liberty, Louis XIV, William Tell, Zorro, the Moulin Rouge, Napoleon the First, the M1 motorway, Jacques Chirac, and Cole Porter’s ‘I Love Paris in the Springtime’ all made appearances in Astérix, as did textual or visual references to the cultural masterpieces of Fellini, Shakespeare, Pagnol, Rembrandt, Rodin, Géricault, Hugo, and Bruegel. [Dandridge, 2008]

1959-1968

And so it was that in 1959, the comic strip Astérix was launched on an unsuspecting French public. It was the year that the French Fourth Republic was replaced by the Fifth Republic, with Charles de Gaulle beginning as President on the 8th of January 1959 and taking the reins from René Coty. It was de Gaulle, of course, who had led Free France against Nazi Germany some 15 years earlier.

Neither Uderzo (who at 12 was too young to fight) or Goscinny (also too young, and who was still living in Argentina at the time), had an active part in World War II, but they would almost certainly have felt its effects as did most of the world. (Also at the age of 12, Uderzo’s parents discovered that he was colour blind. For his later artwork, he got around this by applying labels to indicate what colours he wanted to be used.) [Wikipedia Uderzo, -]

Uderzo’s brother Bruno fought in the war for France and survived, and Goscinny (whose family were Jewish) later joined the French Army in 1946.

Something of a parallel can be seen, therefore, in the tale of the small Gaulish village that resisted the Roman imperial forces who had control of much of Europe in 50 BC (Figure 1), just as the Third Reich occupied much of Europe and France in the prior decade, with the themes of resistance, occupation and collaboration seen throughout.

In the 1963 comic Astérix and the Banquet, the fifth in the series, Astérix bets Caesar’s inspector general that he and Obélix will be able to escape a stockade erected around their village by the occupation army, and collect regional food and drinks from around Gaul for a banquet. Many of the towns and cities they visit on their culinary ‘Tour de France’ happen to be those found on various map of Nazi-occupied France [Kalita, 2014].

The collaborators Unpatriotix and Uptotrix may be in the minority of the Gauls, but there are clearly echoes of Vichy here [Roll-Pickering, 2017]. We also have the ‘Resistance Movement’ appearing in Lugdunum (the later site of Lyon), no doubt a reference to the French resistance that was active in Lyon during World War II.

In 1960s France, scientists René Dumont [Wikipedia Dumont, -] and Philippe Lebreton  [Wikipedia Lebreton, -] were two of the most prominent environmental voices to be heard in the circles of media and politics, highlighting the world’s environmental plight at the time, growing pollution issues, and even globalisation, with Dumont being one of the first French people to explain its consequences.

Coming at the very beginning of the 1960s, the second Astérix volume Astérix and the Golden Sickle references pollution and traffic in another sign that it was somehow ahead of its time in terms of addressing issues of note.

As mentioned earlier, the creators of Astérix were fond of referencing not just current French and European society, but also many historical references, including their 1966 reworking (Figure 2a) of Géricault’s famous French painting The Raft of the Medusa (Figure 2b).

1969-1978

It was at the 1968 Mexico City Olympic Games that athlete doping reared its ugly head for the first time. Bronze-winning Swedish athlete Hans-Gunnar Liljenwall was found to have taken ethanol during the modern pentathlon event [Wikipedia Doping Olympic, -]. The number of athletes found to have taken illegal substances jumped from that one in 1968 to seven in the 1972 Munich Olympic Games, which coincidentally was the period during which Astérix at the Olympic Games had first appeared in serial form in 1968 and then later in a single volume in 1972.

The comic is a thinly-veiled satire on the use of performance-enhancing drugs by sportspeople at that time (and still of relevance today). 1960s France had already seen a number of doping scandals in relation to the Tour de France, with cyclists refusing and failing tests over the years [Wikipedia Doping Tour, -]. Jacques Anquetil, the five-time Tour de France winning French cyclist in the 1950s and 1960s, had openly admitted to doping in 1971 [Mason, 2012].

Tying back into popular culture of the time, 1970’s Astérix in Switzerland also had a reference to the 1969 Satyricon, a film by famed Italian filmmaker Federico Fellini.

1979-1988

One of the most seismic events in Europe during the late 20th century was the fall of the Berlin Wall in France’s neighbour Germany during 1989. Earlier that decade, Uderzo, who by now was writing on his own following the untimely death of Goscinny during a routine stress test at his doctor’s in 1977, produced a thinly veiled metaphor for (and condemnation of) the Berlin Wall in 1980’s Astérix and the Great Divide, under the guise of a Romeo and Juliet-inspired tale.

In this comic, a ditch built between the warring tribes in a small Gaulish village represents an inversion of the structure which was still separating East and West Berlin at the time. The latest panel of the comic has the following conversation between two of the characters [Uderzo, 1980], again alluding to the perceived ludicrousness of the wall:

“All that about the Great Divide really does sound most improbable.”

“Yes…

It was so ridiculous I daresay future generations will never believe a word of it!”

1989-1998

Unfortunately, Uderzo’s treatment of feminism in Astérix and the Secret Weapon is less flattering and less sensitive than the earlier satires of war and strife in Europe. The 1991 comic parodies feminism and gender equality, and Uderzo’s sexist treatment of women in the book will almost certainly upset many readers today. 

Thankfully, developments in France during the 1990s as regards feminism and equality were slowly progressing, building on the previous decade’s improvements including the 1983 law that was passed against sexism, the reform of a father’s sole power over children’s property in 1985, and other legal reforms giving women equal rights and responsibilities in marriage (and later in PACS) [Martin and Théry, 2001].

The Court of Cassation authorised the prosecution of spouses for sexual assault after a landmark case in 1990, and in 1994 a French law was passed that criminalised all marital rape (overriding loopholes in the 1810 French Penal Code) [Wikipedia Feminism France, -].

Workplace sexual harassment was made a legal offence in 1992, and “Le Manifeste des Dix [Pour La Parité]” was published in L’Express newspaper in 1996 by both left and right-wing politicians as a manifesto for the equal representation of women in the French political arena [Barzach et al., 1996].

1999-2008

Only two volumes of Astérix were published during this period, although there were four Astérix and Obélix movies produced including three live action ones with Gérard Depardieu.

2005’s Astérix and the Falling Sky was Uderzo’s last volume. While it was the first to contain science fiction elements (aliens), it was also seen as a satire of the earlier 2003 invasion of Iraq by the United States and its allies on the premise of removing the country’s (unconfirmed) weapons of mass destruction. The aliens have also been described as a “heavy-handed attempt to parody American cultural imperialism” [Schofield, 2009].

2008-Present

Writer Jean-Yves Ferri and illustrator Didier Conrad took over production of the Astérix series from Uderzo in 2013. To date, they have produced four volumes (one every two years).

In 2015’s Astérix and the Missing Scroll (which was also the last volume to be translated into English by long-time translator Anthea Bell), there are a whole slew of characters that allude to events of the time around whistleblowing and document leaks. The character Bigdhata is almost certainly a reference to whistleblowers Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning. The newsmonger Confoundtheirpolitix somewhat resembles Julian Assange, and was apparently almost called Wikilix [France 24, 2015]. Assange had also petitioned the French government to grant him refugee status in 2015 via an open letter to François Hollande in Le Monde.

Making up somewhat for its earlier poor depictions of female characters, in 2019 Astérix featured the first female hero in its 60-year span with the new character Adrenaline in Astérix and the Chieftain’s Daughter. Adrenaline is a rebellious teenager who is the daughter of Gaulish chief Vercingetorix. When questioned by a reporter, Ferri and Conrad said that any similarities between Adrenaline and environmental activist Greta Thunberg were purely by chance [Nandi, 2019]. Illustrator Conrad also declared:

We didn’t want to develop a character who would be based on her seductive side as we usually do with female characters in Astérix. Most of the time they are young attractive women who seduce Obelix and their role stops there.

The same comic also features a caricature of popular French-Armenian singer Charles Aznavour who had died the previous year.

Conclusion

Like many popular books, movies and TV shows, comics often feature cultural references and historical figures that may sometimes go over one’s head, and certainly can go over the heads of some younger readers. As we have seen in this article, Astérix is full of historical references to events of the time, relevant to the decades during which the various volumes were published. We can see these comics as reflections of the world as observed by Uderzo and Goscinny, a practice that has been continued by their successors, and I am sure, this will continue well into the future by the later custodians of Astérix and his friends in Gaul.

References

1. [Barzach et al., 1996] Michèle Barzach, Frédérique Bredin, Edith Cresson, Hélène Gisserot, Catherine Lalumière, Véronique Neiertz, Monique Pelletier, Yvette Roudy, Catherine Tasca, Simone Veil, “Le Manifeste des Dix”, L’Express, 1996. https://www.lexpress.fr/actualite/politique/le-manifeste-des-dix_492498.html  
2. [Chandrasekharan and Dippold, -] Sudhakar Thaths Chandrasekharan and Ron Dippold, “Astérix Annotations” website, retrieved 4th May 2021. http://asterix.openscroll.org/ 
3. [Dandridge, 2008] Eliza Bourque Dandridge, “Producing Popularity: The Success in France of the Comics Series ‘Astérix le Gaulois’”, MA Thesis, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA, USA, 2008.
4. [France 24, 2015] France 24, “Astérix to Team Up with Assange-Like Character in New Comic”, 2015. https://www.france24.com/en/20151013-france-new-comic-asterix-missing-scroll-hit-stores-october 
5. [Kalita, 2014] Jyotishman Kalita, “Historicising Astérix and Obelix: A Case for Graphic Literature”, Delhi University, 2014. http://ijellh.com/papers/2014/November/16-142-150-november-2014.pdf 
6. [Martin and Théry, 2001] Claude Martin, Irène Théry, “The PACS and Marriage and Cohabitation in France”, International Journal of Law, Policy and the Family, Oxford University Press (OUP), vol. 14, no. 3, pp.135-158, 2001. https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-00199963/document
7. [Matson, 2012] John Matson, “When-if Ever-Was Cycling Drug-Free?” Scientific American, 2012. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/when-if-ever-was-cycling-drug-free 
8. [Mutta, 2016] Maarit Mutta, “The Astérix Series: Gallic Identity In A Nutshell?”, Scandinavian Journal of Comic Art, vol. 3, no. 1, 2016.
9. [Nandi, 2019] Sonali Nandi, “Meet Adrenaline: Astérix gets first female hero in 60-year history”, The Guardian, 2019. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/oct/24/meet-adrenaline-asterix-gets-first-female-hero-in-60-year-history 
10. [Rivière, -] Stéphane Rivière, “Astérix Le Gaulois” website, retrieved 4th May 2021. http://www.mage.fst.uha.fr/asterix/
11. [Roll-Pickering, 2017] Tim Roll-Pickering, “Astérix and the Banquet by René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo – Volume 5”, The 9th Art Form, 2017. https:// ninthartform.blogspot.com/2017/09/asterix-and-banquet-by-rene-goscinny.html 
12. [Schofield, 2009] Hugh Schofield, “Should Astérix Hang Up His Sword?”, BBC News, 2009. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8319196.stm 
13. [Uderzo, 1980], “Astérix and the Great Divide”, 1980. https://archive.org/details/25AstérixAndTheGreatDivide_201805/page/n43/mode/2up 
14. [Uderzo et al., 1985] Albert Uderzo, Christian Philippsen, Bernard De Venteronne, “Uderzo: de Flamberge à Astérix”, Les Editions Albert René, 1985.
15. [Verdaguer, 1988] Pierre Verdaguer, “Le Héros National et Ses Dédoublements dans San-Antonio et Astérix”, The French Review, vol. 61, no. 3, pp. 605-616, 1988. https://www.jstor.org/stable/393846?seq=1 
16. [Wikipedia Doping Olympic, -] Wikipedia, “Doping at the Olympic Games” article, retrieved 4th May 2021. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doping_at_the_Olympic_Games
17. [Wikipedia Doping Tour, -] Wikipedia, “Doping at the Tour de France” article, retrieved 4th May 2021. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doping_at_the_Tour_de_France 
18. [Wikipedia Dumont, -] Wikipedia, “René Dumont” article, retrieved 4th May 2021. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%C3%A9_Dumont 
19. [Wikipedia Feminism France, -] Wikipedia, “Feminism in France” article, retrieved 4th May 2021. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminism_in_France 
20. [Wikipedia Goscinny, -] Wikipedia, “René Goscinny” article, retrieved 4th May 2021. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%C3%A9_Goscinny 
21. [Wikipedia Lebreton, -] Wikipédia (en français), “Philippe Lebreton” article, retrieved 4th May 2021. https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippe_Lebreton 
22. [Wikipedia Uderzo, -] Wikipedia, “Albert Uderzo” article, retrieved 4th May 2021. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Uderzo