These photographs were taken on the R659, close to and north of Mid Tipperary Co Operative Livestock Mart at Ballycurrane, Thurles, Co. Tipperary. Mid Tipp Mart describes itself as a farmer co-operative, “run by farmers for farmers,” and a major cattle-trading centre serving Tipperary and surrounding counties.
Built into this possibly early 19th-century roadside wall is what appears to be a stone stile; a simple arrangement of projecting stones that allowed a person to climb over a boundary without opening a gate. Such features were practical, durable and stock-proof. They belonged to a world of footpaths, fields, fairs, churchyards, wells and farm boundaries, where people moved on foot through a working rural landscape.
A stone stile near Mid Tipperary Co Operative Livestock Mart at Ballycurrane, Thurles, Co. Tipperary.
The wall itself cannot be dated from the above photographs alone, but its rough stone construction, weathering, lichens and traces of whitewash suggest considerable age. The projecting step stones are the key detail. They were not decorative, but functional, forming a small built-in ladder through the boundary.
Stone stiles are recorded elsewhere in Tipperary’s architectural heritage. The National Inventory of Architectural Heritage records a double stile in the boundary wall at Ballingarry Church, dated 1855–1860, and also records a random stone boundary wall “with stile” at Castletown near Coolbaun. These examples show that such modest access points were once a recognised part of the county’s built landscape.
A sadly related loss should also be remembered. On Mill Road, Thurles, a stile confirmed locally to have been built in 1846, at the beginning of the Great Famine period of 1845–1849, once stood as part of the historic landscape associated with the Great Famine now eradicated “Double Ditch.” Local reports on Thurles.info recorded warnings about the need to retain this heritage feature and later reported the destruction of the Great Famine Double Ditch area by Tipperary County Council officials and and Thurles Municipal District elected Councillors. Its loss underlines why surviving small structures like this R659 stile deserve notice before they too are dismissed as ordinary roadside stonework.
No longer in existence, the once rare stone stile; despite numerous warnings, eradicated by Tipperary Co. Council, at the entrance to the now also demolished historic Great Famine Double Ditch.
These stiles also belong to the wider Irish tradition of stone walling. Teagasc notes that Ireland has an estimated 400,000 km of dry stone walls and 210,000 km of stone-earthen banks, while in 2024 Ireland’s dry stone construction tradition was officially inscribed by UNESCO on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.
This little stile on the R659 is easy to pass without noticing. But it may mark an older line of movement: a field path, a local crossing point, or an access route used before cars, marts and modern road traffic changed the rhythm of the countryside. It is a modest feature, but a valuable one; a reminder that heritage is not only found in castles, churches and big houses, but also in the small, practical details built into ordinary walls.
More than a century after the destruction of the Public Record Office of Ireland at the Four Courts, another major piece of Ireland’s lost documentary heritage has been restored to public view.
The Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland has released 194,000 newly digitised historical records, bringing the total number of freely available records on the platform to 544,000. The material spans seven centuries of Irish history and now amounts to around 340 million words of searchable content.
Four Courts in Dublin bombarded on this day June 30th 1922 leading to the destruction of the Public Record Office of Ireland.
The release marks the 104th anniversary of the destruction of the Public Record Office, which was lost on 30 June 1922 during the opening stages of the Irish Civil War. The building, located within the Four Courts complex in Dublin, had housed a vast archive of census material, taxation records, legal papers, land ownership documents and state records dating back to the medieval period.
For generations, the loss was regarded as one of the greatest archival disasters in Irish history. But the Virtual Record Treasury is rebuilding what was lost by tracking down copies, transcripts and related material preserved in archives, libraries and private collections across Ireland and around the world.
The 2026 release includes records ranging from medieval Ireland to the age of revolution and emancipation. Among the new material are records connected to Catholic Emancipation, Ireland’s links with the American Revolution, early local history, State Papers from 1660 to 1715, and documents from the Norman and medieval period.
The project is hosted by Trinity College Dublin and funded by the Department of Culture, Communications and Sport. It brings together more than 100 partner archives, libraries and memory institutions worldwide, including the National Archives of Ireland, the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, The National Archives UK, the Irish Manuscripts Commission and the Library of Trinity College Dublin.
One of the most important developments is the expansion of the VRTI Knowledge Graph for Irish History. This digital research tool now includes more than 15,000 people from Irish history and 3.5 million linked historical facts, allowing users to follow connections between people, places, events and surviving records.
The latest update also adds thousands of historical individuals, including women from the early modern period and figures from the medieval and Norman eras. This gives researchers, students, family historians and the wider public new ways to explore lives that were once buried in fragile, scattered or forgotten documents.
The Virtual Record Treasury is also looking beyond Ireland. A new two-year project, “Journey to Europe: Archives of the Irish in France,” will search French archives for records connected to Irish history, including material on Wolfe Tone, the Irish Brigade, Irish colleges in France and Irish merchants along France’s Atlantic coast.
What was once thought to have vanished in smoke and fire is now being digitally reunited. More than 100 years after records fell from the sky over Dublin, Ireland’s lost archive is being pieced back together — page by page, name by name, and story by story.
An Irish-born U.S. Army sergeant who was killed while helping save his comrades during the Korean War is finally making his last journey home to Co Tipperary after 76 years.
Sergeant Thomas J. “Tom Jo” O’Brien, deceased.
Sergeant Thomas J. “Tom Jo” O’Brien, from Emly, Co. Tipperary was just 23 when he lost his life in North Korea on October 26th, 1950. He had emigrated to New York three years earlier before joining the U.S. Army, serving with Headquarters Battery, 90th Field Artillery Battalion, 25th Infantry Division.
O’Brien was reported missing in action and presumed dead after his unit came under attack from Korean People’s Army forces near the Taeryong River. According to his family, he drew enemy tank fire towards himself, allowing 10 comrades to retreat safely. He was killed by tank fire.
For his courage and service, Sergeant O’Brien was posthumously awarded several honours, including the Bronze Star, Purple Heart, Good Conduct Medal, Korean Service Medal, United Nations Service Medal, National Defence Service Medal and Korean Presidential Unit Citation.
After the war, no body was recovered. Hiwever, in 1954, during Operation GLORY, [latter an American effort to repatriate the remains of United Nations Command casualties from North Korea], North Korea returned remains to the United Nations Command. One set, later buried as an unknown at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu, Hawaii, was believed to possibly be that of Sergeant O’Brien, but identification could not be confirmed at that time.
That changed decades later. In 2018, the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency disinterred the remains for further study. Using modern scientific testing, DNA evidence and circumstantial records, Sergeant O’Brien was formally identified on September 27th, 2024. A rosette was placed beside his name at the Courts of the Missing in Honolulu to show he had been accounted for. His niece Shivaun said the family had promised her late father Michael, Thomas’s brother, that they would continue searching for him and bring him home if he was found. Michael, who died in 2014, had provided DNA to assist the identification effort.
“My father would be elated and pleased that we are finally bringing his brother home,” Shivaun said. “It is bittersweet. We all wish he was alive to witness this.”
Sergeant O’Brien’s mother Sarah, who passed away in 1957, had his name engraved on the family headstone in St Ailbe’s Graveyard in Emly, hoping he would one day be brought home. In 2003, Sergeant O’Brien and 27 other Irish-born men who died while serving in U.S. conflicts were granted posthumous American citizenship. His brother Michael attended that ceremony in Washington, D.C. Sergeant O’Brien’s remains were brought from Hawaii to Los Angeles on June 8th, where they were received by family members before cremation. His relatives are now accompanying him back to Ireland. He will be laid to rest with his family in St Ailbe’s Graveyard in Emly at 3:00pm next Monday. His family said they hope many people from Emly and across Tipperary will attend to honour a young man who left Ireland, served bravely, and is finally coming home.
Every time a vaccine is given, every time an anaesthetic is injected, every time a patient receives insulin, antibiotics, chemotherapy, adrenaline, morphine, or life-saving fluids through a line, there is a quiet piece of Irish history at work and it begins in Co. Dublin.
Long before modern hospitals, vaccination centres, intensive care units, emergency departments, operating theatres, and community clinics became part of everyday life, doctors faced a simple but enormous problem; how could medicine be delivered precisely into the body, beneath the skin, where it could act quickly and effectively? For much of medical history, treatments were limited by the routes available. A patient could swallow a medicine. A substance could be rubbed onto the skin. A wound could be dressed. But getting a measured treatment through the skin and into the tissues, close to the source of pain or disease, was a different challenge entirely.
Dr Francis Rynd, (1801-1861) and his hypodermic hollow needle invention.
That challenge was answered in Ireland. The late Dr Francis Rynd, (1801-1861), an Irish physician and surgeon working at the Meath Hospital in Dublin, developed a hollow needle that made hypodermic injection possible. In 1844, Rynd used his new instrument to treat a woman suffering from severe neuralgia, a crippling nerve pain that had resisted the treatments then available. Rather than relying on medicine taken by mouth, he introduced a pain-relieving solution beneath the skin, close to the affected nerves. The effect was remarkable. A patient who had been suffering intensely finally experienced relief.
It was a small procedure by modern standards, but its consequences were vast. With that act, medicine crossed a threshold. The skin was no longer an almost impenetrable barrier between doctor and disease. The body could now be reached more directly, more precisely, and often more quickly.
Dr Rynd’s newly developed instrument was not the modern disposable syringe we know today. It was a pioneering device, developed at a time when medicine was still learning how to control pain, infection, and dosage. But the principle was revolutionary; a hollow needle could carry fluid into the human body, and from that principle came a medical transformation.
Left -Right:Meath Hospital nurses photographed in 1872 and named as Fever Nurse Ms Hodgens; Night Nurse Ms Spring; Surgical Nurse Ms Murray, and Accident Nurse Ms Brazil.
Today, the hollow needle is so familiar that we often forget how extraordinary it is. It is present at birth, in childhood immunisation, in dental surgeries, in ambulances, in cancer wards, in diabetes care, in blood tests, in epidurals, in emergency medicine, in intensive care, and in operating theatres across the world.
The story became even more powerful during our recent COVID-19 pandemic. When COVID vaccines were developed and rolled out at historic speed, the world focused on the science of messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA), viral vectors, immune response, public health logistics, cold-chain storage, and global vaccine access. All of those mattered enormously. But the final act; the moment science became protection, depended on the needle. Billions of times, in clinics, pharmacies, sports halls, hospitals, GP surgeries, care homes, schools, airports, and temporary vaccination centres, a tiny hollow needle carried a vaccine from vial to arm. That simple delivery system helped protect people from severe illness and death on a scale almost impossible to imagine. Over 13 billion COVID-19 vaccine doses have been administered globally. Each one was a modern event, shaped by cutting-edge immunology, global manufacturing, public health systems, and data science. Yet each one also belonged to a much older story: the story of a Dublin doctor who showed that medicine could be placed directly beneath the skin.
The same is true of countless other vaccines. Measles. Polio. Tetanus. Diphtheria. Influenza. HPV. Hepatitis. Pneumococcal disease. Childhood immunisation programmes across the world depend on the ability to deliver vaccines safely and reliably into the body. The needle is not the whole story of vaccination, but without it modern vaccination would not look the way it does today, and that is why Francis Rynd deserves to be better known.
Ireland has given the world poets, revolutionaries, scientists, teachers, nurses, doctors, inventors, and reformers. Among them stands a Dublin physician whose invention became one of the most important tools in the history of medicine.
While most people know the feeling of a needle; very few know the name Francis Rynd. But his legacy is everywhere. It is in the child receiving a routine vaccine. It is in the older person receiving a seasonal COVID or flu booster. It is in the patient being prepared for surgery. It is in the diabetic injecting insulin. It is in the emergency doctor administering adrenaline. It is in the cancer patient receiving treatment. It is in the drip beside a hospital bed.
A hollow needle may look ordinary. In truth, it is one of the great medical inventions and it began in Ireland and the world should remember the name Dr Francis Rynd.
History does not repeat itself exactly, but it often rhymes in the ways hatred is excused, renamed, or redirected.
In the autumn of 1941, a ravine on the edge of Kyiv became one of the most devastating killing sites of the Holocaust. German forces had occupied the city on September 19th, and within days the Nazi campaign of persecution turned into mass murder. Notices appeared ordering Kyiv’s Jews to report with documents, clothing, money, and valuables. Many believed they were being deported or resettled. Instead, they were being led to Babi Yar.
On September 29th and 30th, Jewish families moved through the city in long, fearful columns. Parents carried children. Elderly people walked beside relatives. Others brought small bundles containing whatever remained of their lives. At the ravine, they were stripped of their possessions and clothing, forced toward the edge in groups, and shot. In only two days, 33,771 Jewish men, women, and children were murdered there, making Babi Yar one of the largest single massacres of the Holocaust.
Section of bodies photographed at the mass grave in Babi Yar, Ukraine, by Soviet researchers, three years later in 1944.
The killing did not end with those two days. During the Nazi occupation, Babi Yar continued to be used as an execution site. Jews who had survived or hidden were later brought there and killed. Soviet prisoners of war, Roma people, resistance members, civilians, and others targeted by the occupiers were also murdered in or near the ravine. What had once been a natural landmark became a mass grave and a symbol of the “Holocaust by bullets,” the campaign of open-air shootings carried out across Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe.
After the war, Babi Yar’s memory was itself subjected to silence. Under Soviet rule, public commemoration often avoided naming the Jewish victims specifically, presenting the dead mainly as Soviet citizens. For survivors, relatives, and historians, this omission deepened the wound. The ravine held not only the bodies of the murdered but also a history that official memory struggled to acknowledge.
Soviet POWs being used by Germany to cover the mass grave after the massacre, on October 1st 1941. Pic: Johannes Hähle.
Today, Babi Yar stands as a place of mourning and warning. Its story reveals how quickly ordinary streets can become routes to destruction when hatred is organised by the state and human beings are reduced to targets. Behind the number 33,771 were families, neighbours, children, workers, students, grandparents, and entire communities whose lives were ended together at the edge of a ravine. To remember Babi Yar is to restore their humanity against the machinery that tried to erase them.
That silence also speaks to the present. History does not repeat itself exactly, but it often rhymes in the ways hatred is excused, renamed, or redirected. Anti-Semitism rarely begins with violence at the edge of a ravine. It begins with language that turns Jews into a collective blame, with suspicion cast over Jewish identity, with the idea that Jewish fear is exaggerated, or that hostility toward Jews can be justified by events elsewhere. In Ireland today, where public feeling about Israel and Gaza is often intense, there must still be a clear moral line; criticism of any government is legitimate, but blaming Irish Jews for the actions of the Israeli state, intimidating Jewish people, distorting Holocaust memory, or treating Jewish belonging as conditional is antisemitism.
To remember Babi Yar is therefore not only to look back at 1941, but to ask what kind of society we are becoming now. The lesson is not that today is the same as then; it is that dehumanisation must be challenged long before it becomes catastrophe. A country can defend Palestinian lives and rights while also defending Jewish safety, dignity, memory, and belonging.
The measure of moral seriousness is whether we can hold both truths at once, refusing to let grief for one people become hatred of another.
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