9.45 am – Saturday 21st September, 2019
Field Trip to King House and Boyle Abbey
On Saturday, 21 September, the Society will travel to Boyle on its latest field trip. A bus is available, which leaves at 9.45am from the Fair Green car park opposite the Sheraton Hotel. To book a place, email athlonehistory@gmail.com.
King House Boyle
Tuesday, 30 April, at 8.30pm in the Wineport Lodge, Athlone
Talk by Dr Michael Heney
Charles Haughey and Neil Blaney in 1970 (photograph from RTÉ Archives)
Summary The lecture will explain how new research on the 1970 Arms Crisis challenges the conventional view of events in 1969-70. In a revisionist approach, it will suggest that the roles played by Jack Lynch and Charles Haughey, in particular, have been poorly understood in the literature and often misrepresented. It will indicate how freshly discovered documentation supports an alternative take on both the general Arms Crisis and the arms trials. It will consider whether Jack Lynch was an innocent victim or a culprit in 1970 and will also consider why the evidence supports the theory that the arms trials should never have taken place as they did, if at all.
Speaker A former investigative journalist and television producer with RTÉ, Michael Heney recently completed a Ph.D. programme at University College Dublin under the supervision of Diarmaid Ferriter, Professor of Modern Irish History. His thesis is entitled ‘Unresolved Aspects of the 1970 Arms Crisis: Revisiting the Roles Played by Jack Lynch, Charles Haughey and James Gibbons’. It was preceded in 2014 by a Masters dissertation, ‘Colonel Michael Hefferon and the 1970 Arms Crisis’, also under Professor Ferriter. A book based on his research – described by those familiar with it as ‘ground-breaking and important’ – is due to be published, probably next Spring to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the Arms Crisis, under the title: ‘Arms Crisis: Unlocking the Myths of 1970’.
Michael, while with RTÉ Television, produced and presented two Prime Time documentaries on the Arms Crisis: ‘Evidence of the Colonel’; and ‘Secret Orders’ based on the State Papers for 1970, which were released in January 2001 to the National Archives. Earlier in his career, he worked for the Irish Times (1967-72), where he wrote mainly on education, and for RTÉ Radio (1972-77) as presenter of ‘The News at 1.30’, ‘This Week’ and ‘World Report’. His work for television from 1977 to 2010 involved a number of award-winning investigations for ‘Today Tonight’, ‘Wednesday Report’ ‘Tuesday File’ and ‘Prime Time Investigates’.
Wednesday, 27 March, at 8.15pm in the Sheraton Hotel, Athlone
Talk by Dr Kieran O’Conor
Rindoon Castle (Roscommon County Council)
Summary The elements that make up the archaeological complex at Rindoon, Co. Roscommon, consist of a hospital, town wall, house platforms, church, castle, quays, windmill, fishponds and a possible deer-park, all mostly dating to the thirteenth century. The remains there are considered one of the finest examples of a deserted medieval town in Ireland or Britain. Dr O’Conor’s lecture tells the story of Rindoon, examining its origin, heyday and decline, by analysing the archaeological and historical evidence for the site.
Speaker Kieran O’Conor is a graduate of University College, Dublin (UCD) and has a PhD from University College Cardiff, Wales. He worked for much of the 1990s with the Archaeological Survey Branch of the National Monuments Service (Dúchas – The Heritage Service) in Counties Roscommon, Sligo, Longford, Westmeath and Wexford. In 1996, he excavated Carlow Castle as part of his work for the latter institution. He has taken part in excavations and field surveys in England, Wales, mainland Greece and Crete. He was appointed a research fellow at the Discovery Programme in 1997 and was then made director of Medieval Rural Settlement project there in early 1999.
Dr O’Conor joined the staff of NUI, Galway in September 2000. His research interests include castles, medieval rural settlement, high medieval Gaelic Ireland and medieval landscapes. He has published widely on these subjects and is also English-language editor of the international peer-reviewed journal Chateau Gaillard. He served as a Council member on the Heritage Council between 2012 and 2016. Dr O’Conor has been very successful in linking his research to heritage tourism initiatives in County Roscommon.
Wednesday, 6 March, at 8.15pm in Lough Ree Yacht Club
Talk by Dr Roseanne Schot
A scene from the modern ‘Fire Celebration’ held each May on Uisneach (copyright Dr Ciarán McDonnell)
Summary The Hill of Uisneach, Co. Westmeath, is celebrated as the sacred ‘centre’ of Ireland and meeting place of the ancient provinces and is often ranked in early Irish literature with great royal centres like Tara. Uisneach was a place of gathering, ceremony and burial from early prehistory (c. 3000BC) and its sacral significance endured long after the introduction of Christianity, when it became the seat of power of one of early medieval Ireland’s most illustrious royal dynasties, the Clann Cholmáin of Mide. This lecture will explore the history and evolving role of Uisneach through the prism of its landscape, archaeology, associated mythology and early literature, charting the transformation of the hill from pagan sanctuary to seat of Christian kingship during the first millennium AD.
Speaker Dr Roseanne Schot is an archaeologist and director of the Tara Research Project in The Discovery Programme, Dublin. She is a graduate of NUI Galway, where her PhD research as an Irish Research Council scholar focused on the cultic and royal landscape of Uisneach, on which she has written extensively. She has maintained an active role in research and fieldwork at Uisneach and recently completed the first phase of a conservation plan for the hill, funded by the Heritage Council and the Department of Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht. She is a former research associate and part-time lecturer in archaeology at NUI Galway and has collaborated on a wide range of research projects in Ireland and Europe. She is co-editor of the book Landscapes of cult and kingship (2011) and is currently working on a book detailing the important discoveries and insights generated by archaeological survey and scholarship at Tara over the past two decades.
Tuesday, 12 February, at 8.15pm in the Officers’ Mess, Custume Barracks
Talk by Dr Kate O’Malley
Ireland, India and Empire
Summary In the aftermath of the Easter Rising and the Irish Revolution, the Irish struggle for independence was watched closely by nationalists in other parts of the British Empire, most notably India. Indian nationalists such as Gandhi, Nehru and Bose took an interest in Ireland, and nationalists in Ireland took an interest in India. This lecture will look at three revolutionary women, all friends, all veterans of the post-1916 independence struggle: Maud Gonne MacBride, Charlotte Despard and Mollie Woods. These women encouraged Indo-Irish collaboration in the hope that each side could learn from their respective experiences. They were agitators who attempted to add an aspect of global finesse to local nationalist politics and they successfully established their own tailor-made organisation in the shape of the Indian Irish Independence League. This talk will shed light on some lesser known aspects of Irish and Indian history between the World Wars, and on the significance of the Irish revolution within the wider history of the British Empire.
Speaker Dr Kate O’Malley is a historian with the Royal Irish Academy and a graduate of Trinity College, Dublin (BA, PhD). She has written extensively on Indo-Irish relations and her book ‘Ireland, India and Empire’ was published by Manchester University Press in 2008. Her research interests encompass Irish diplomatic and political history, twentieth century Indian history, British imperial history and British decolonisation. She is an occasional lecturer at Trinity College, Dublin and Secretary of the Royal Irish Academy’s Standing Committee on International Affairs. She is also a member of the Social Sciences Committee.
Tuesday, 22 January, at 8.15pm in the Sheraton Hotel, Athlone
Talk by Dr Lara Cassidy
Summary Over the past six years the emerging field of ancient genomics has revolutionized our understanding of human prehistory. Novel DNA sequencing technologies have rendered the genomes of ancient humans as accessible as those from modern individuals, providing researchers with an unprecedented view of the genetic profiles of prehistoric populations.
Excavated near Belfast in 1855, the bones of this farmer had lain in a Neolithic tomb chamber for 5,000 years. Her DNA has now been sequenced. (Daniel Bradley, TCD)
The similarities and differences between these groups and their modern day counterparts have allowed geneticists to build a new demographic scaffold of European history, within which Ireland provides a key reference point. It is now understood that the island was a geographical terminus for two mass migrations into Europe. The first marks the beginning of the Neolithic period, where older hunter-gatherer groups were replaced by new farming societies, whose genetic origins lie in Anatolia, a major cradle of agriculture. These first farmers were the builders of many famous megalithic monuments still visible across Ireland today. The second major population influx occurred during the Copper and Early Bronze Ages, when a distinct genetic ancestry appears on the island, whose homeland lies in the Pontic-Caspian steppe region. This migration is linked to the appearance of new technologies, burial cultures and Indo-European languages in both Europe and Ireland. Dense genomic sampling across these periods of demographic flux allows us to examine the complex interplay between geography and culture in the assimilation of new peoples to the island.
Speaker Dr Cassidy attended secondary school at Our Lady’s Bower and went on to complete an undergraduate degree in Human Genetics at the Smurfit Institute, Trinity College Dublin. She was subsequently awarded a postgraduate scholarship by the Irish Research Council to undertake a PhD in palaeogenomics in the Bradley Lab at the same institute. The main focus of her project was the sequencing and analysis of ancient human genomes from all periods of Ireland’s prehistory in order to study the island’s demographic evolution. The first publication of this work (Cassidy et al. 2016) presented a new demographic scaffold for Ireland, demonstrating that at least three ancestrally distinct Irish populations have existed on the island, whose inhabitation corresponds closely to the Mesolithic, Neolithic and Chalcolithic/Bronze Age eras, with strong population continuity observed from the Bronze Age onwards. Dr Cassidy completed her PhD last year and is now continuing to expand on this project as a postdoctoral researcher in the Bradley lab.
Wednesday, 5 December, at 8.15pm in the Sheraton Hotel, Athlone
Talk by Dr David Doolin
A contemporary, albeit heavily romanticised, version of the ‘Battle of Ridgeway’ in 1866 (Us Library of Congress)
Summary This talk will focus on the 1866 Fenian Brotherhood’s incursions into British North America. It will show that this relatively little known and often derided episode is of greater importance than historians have previously allowed. The Fenian invasion of Canada was a seminal event that exposed the international dimension of the Fenian Brotherhood and the interests of Irish migrants, while it shows how Ireland’s revolutionary past was inextricably tied to American global history and, indeed, U.S. imperial competition with Britain in the North Atlantic. This exploration of the Fenian invasion offers an innovative look at a forgotten past, which challenges many ideas about Irish immigrant assimilation in America, and the international dimensions of Irish revolutionary nationalistism in the 19th Century.
Speaker Dr. David Doolin’s research and teaching covers both Ireland and North America with a focus on the Irish in America, the Fenian Brotherhood, stories of American immigration, as well as aspects of American Empire and America at war. His book Transnational Revolutionaries: The Fenian Invasion of Canada, 1866 was published in 2016, to coincide with the 150th year anniversary of that event and the book was launched by the Lord Mayor of Dublin, Críona Ní Dhálaigh, in the presence of the Canadian Ambassador to Ireland, Kevin Vickers, at Dublin’s Mansion House. Dr. Doolin has taught courses in American, European, and Irish history at University College Dublin (UCD), Maynooth University, and currently for the Arts programme at the Dublin Business School. He previously lived, studied and worked in the United States from 2004 to 2014. He is currently working on a book chapter for a forthcoming anthology to be published towards the end of 2019; his chapter looks at the continuity of Irish American transnational revolutionary intrigue, by exploring connections between the Fenian leadership from the 1860s up through the 1910s.
Wednesday, 14 November, at 8pm in Athlone Public Library
Talk by Prof John Horgan
and
Presentation by Sr Anne Kilroy
Summary Prof Horgan will discuss the life and career of Peter Kilroy, an Athlone journalist. Kilroy was a journalist for nearly fifty years, beginning in 1923 until his death in 1971, at the age of 63.
Peter Kilroy (thanks to Anne Kilroy for photo)
The eldest of eight children, he had to leave formal education after his father’s sudden death in 1922. He joined the Westmeath Independent, reporting on Court proceedings all over the county as well as on church, political, social and sporting events. Five years later, he moved to Dublin to join the staff of a new short-lived Government paper, the Star, before working with the Manchester Herald, Irish Press, and Catholic Standard. At the same time he remained the Irish Correspondent for several agencies and papers abroad: the international News Agency, the New York Journal American and the Melbourne Advocate.
John Horgan will concentrate on Kilroy’s early career as a journalist in newly-independent Ireland. Peter Kilroy kept extensive diaries, which offer a wealth of information on his life and times. These diaries, which will form the basis of the lecture, have recently been transcribed by Peter’s daughter, Anne Kilroy. After the lecture, Anne Kilroy will formally present the diaries to Athlone Public Library.
Speaker Prof John Horgan is emeritus Professor of Journalism at the School of Communications, Dublin City University, and is the author of many books on the media and Irish history, including biographies of Noel Browne, Mary Robinson, and Seán Lemass. Between 2007 and 2014, he was Ireland’s first Press Ombudsman, having earlier worked as a journalist with the Irish Times and the Evening Press, among other publications. In 1977, he was elected to Dáil Éireann for the Labour Party in Dublin County South, a seat he held until 1981. He was a member of Seanad Éireann from 1969 to 1977.
The Society’s lecture programme for 2018-2019 is as follows. Please note that, unless otherwise stated, lectures start at 8.15pm. Venues for some lectures will be decided at a later date:
October, Tuesday 9th (8.15pm)
‘The Burning of the Custom House, 1921’
Elizabeth Gillis (RTÉ)
Officer’s Mess, Custume Barracks
October, Tuesday 30th (8.15pm)
‘From Farm to Table: agriculture and diet in Medieval Ireland’
Dr Margaret Murphy (Carlow College)
The Sheraton Hotel
November, Wednesday 14th (8pm)
‘The early diaries (1922-1934) of Athlone journalist, Peter Kilroy (1907-1971)’
Professor John Horgan (DCU)
Lecture Hall, Aidan Heavey Library
December, Wednesday 5th (8.15pm)
‘The Fenian Invasion of Canada, 1866’
Dr David Doolin (UCD)
The Sheraton Hotel
January, Tuesday 22nd (8.15pm)
‘A Genomic History of Ireland: how ancient DNA has
revolutionised our understanding of the past’
Dr Lara Cassidy (Smurfit Institute of Genetics, TCD)
The Sheraton Hotel
February, Tuesday 12th (8.15pm)
‘Irish Revolutionary Women and the Wider World’
Dr Kate O’Malley (Royal Irish Academy)
Location – TBC
March, Tue 5th or Wed 6th (8.15pm)
‘From Cult Centre to Royal Centre: monuments, myths
and other revelations at Uisneach’
Dr Roseanne Schot (The Discovery Programme)
Location – TBC
March, Tue 26th or Wed 27th (8.15pm)
‘Rindoon Castle and Deserted Medieval Town’
Dr Kieran O’Conor (NUI, Galway)
Location – TBC
April, Tue 30th or May, Wed 1st (8.30pm)
The Billy English Memorial Lecture
Speaker and Subject to be Confirmed
Wineport Lodge, Athlone
Tuesday, 30 October, at 8.15pm in the Sheraton Hotel, Athlone
Summary This talk will examine the variety of sources that can be used to reconstruct diet and farming practices in Ireland. Dr Murphy will explore patterns of food production and consumption in early medieval Ireland and will analyse the impact of the Anglo-Normans after their arrival.
Agriculture and Settlement in Ireland
Also, Dr Murphy will show how different farming regimes promoted specific settlement types and how the demands of the market could stimulate agricultural production. The lecture will conclude with a study of the processing and transport of foodstuffs, as well as their preparation for the table.
Speaker Dr Margaret Murphy is a medieval historian, who specialises in the social and economic history of late medieval Ireland.
She is co-author of the book The Dublin Region in the Middle Ages and co-editor of the collection Agriculture and Settlement in Ireland.
The Old Athlone Society 