History - Thurles Information

Centenary Ceremony For Arthur Griffith.

A remembrance ceremony, latter marking the centenary of the death of Arthur Griffith, will take place today, at Leinster House.

Arthur Joseph Griffith was born at No.61 Upper Dominick Street, Dublin, on March 31st, 1871, of distant Welsh lineage. His father had been a printer on ‘The Nation‘ newspaper.

Educated by the Irish Christian Brothers, he became the founder of the Sinn Féin party.

In 1916, rebels seized and took over a number of key locations in Dublin, in what became known as the 1916 Easter Rising. After its defeat, it was widely described both by British politicians and the Irish and British media as the “Sinn Féin rebellion”, even though Sinn Féin had very limited involvement. Griffith would be one of those arrested following the Rising, despite not having taken any part in it.

Arthur Griffith later served as Minister for Home Affairs from 1919 to 1921, and Minister for Foreign Affairs from 1921 to 1922.

In September of 1921, Éamon de Valera, the then Irish President, requested Arthur Griffith, to head as Chairman a delegation of Irish diplomats, invested with the full power of independent action, to negotiate on behalf of the Irish people, with the British government, in the setting up of an Irish Republic.

This delegation set up headquarters in Hans Place, London, and following nearly two months of negotiations, on December 5th, Griffith and the other four delegates decided, in private conversation, to sign a Treaty before recommending same to Dáil Eireann.
Griffith was the member of the treaty delegation seen as most supportive of its eventual outcome.

The Treaty was then ratified by the Dáil by 64 votes to 57, on January 7th 1922. Two days later, Éamon de Valera stood down as president and sought re-election by the Dáil, which he lost by a vote of 60 to 58. Mr Griffith then succeeded Mr de Valera as President of Dáil Éireann.

Despite the Treaty being narrowly approved by the Dáil, a political split would lead to the Irish Civil War. Griffith, at the age of 51 years, sadly died suddenly in August 1922, two months after the outbreak of the civil war. He had been about to leave for his office, shortly before 10:00am on August 12th 1922, when he paused to retie a shoelace and fell, slipping into unconsciousness. He did regained consciousness, but collapsed again with blood coming from his mouth. The cause of his death, was identified as cerebral haemorrhage.

His death came, just ten days before the death of Michael Collins, latter who lost his life following an ambush in Co. Cork; seen then as a double tragedy to befall a fledgling independent Irish State.

Arthur Griffith’s body, four days following his death, was interned in Glasnevin Cemetery.

The idiom “Eaten bread is soon forgotten”, was never truer, as was in his case. His widow had to beg his former colleagues for a pension, saying that he ‘had made them all’. She also considered that his grave plot was too modest and threatened to exhume his body.

It took until 1968 before a plaque was finally attached on his former home, situated at St. Lawrence Road, Clontarf, Dublin.

Journal Of A Tour In Ireland, 1806.

The book entitled “Journal of A tour in Ireland” was written by Sir Richard Colt Hoare, Bart. F.R.S. F.A.S.*, and Published 215 years ago, in 1807.

* Baronet – Fellow Royal Society, – Fellow Antiquarian Society.

The book once graced the library owned by Captain Richard Carden, Esq, Fishmoyne, Drom, Kilfithmone, Thurles, Co. Tipperary; latter Captain of the Tipperary Militia and today remains part of a private Tipperary collection.

Captain Richard Carden:

Captain Richard Carden was the son of Minchin Carden and Lucy Lockwood, and as already stated was born at Fishmoye, Drom, Co. Tipperary, Ireland, c 1760.
He gained the rank of Officer in the 12th Regiment of Dragoons and on May 6th, 1787, he married Jane Blundell (daughter of Very Rev. Dixie Blundell and Elizabeth Ogle) in Co. Limerick.
The couple had one son also named Richard Minchin Carden (latter born July 1st 1799, and died May 11th 1873.)

Richard Carden, the former, passed away on February 7th, 1812, aged 53 years, and is interned in Saint Michan’s Church, Church Street, Dublin 7.
A plaque there bears the inscription:
“Sacred to the memory of Richard Carden Esq of Fishmoyne in the County of Tipperary, who died at his house in Gardiner Street in this city .
Jane Carden relict of the above Richard Carden and daughter of the Very Revd Dr. Blundell Dean of Kildare. Departed this life 22nd of January 1837 in the 73rd year of her age. She was a true Christian a fondly attached wife, the best, the most beloved of parents and a sincere friend.
This tablet is placed here by their only son as a small tribute of his affection and respect. August 1837

Sir Richard Colt Hoare’s Tour.

The tour of parts of Ireland, by the above author, including some areas of Co. Tipperary; had taken place the year before, (1806) and the opening Preface of the book, bears the Latin headline; “Erranti, passimque oculos per cuenta tuenti”, (Translated: “Wandering, keeping his eyes here and there”.), gives us a certain insight into what life was like and how Ireland was viewed by the gentry, some 216 years ago.

Quote from the Preface; “To the traveller, who fond of novelty and information, seeks out those regions, which may either afford reflection for his mind, or employment for his pencil and especially to him, who may be induced to visit the neglected shores of Hibernia*, the following pages are dedicated“.

* In his book ‘Agricola’ or ‘Farmer’, (c.98 CE), Publius Cornelius Tacitus (c.AD 56 – c.120); a Roman historian and politician, latter widely regarded as one of the greatest of Roman historians, referred to Ireland using the name “Hibernia”.
The name “Hibernia” or “Land of Winter”, was used on Irish coins in the 1700s, and more recently on a €2:00 coin, minted in 2016.

Author Sir Richard Colt Hoare continues: “The island of Hibernia (Ireland) still remains unvisited and unknown. And why? Because from the want of books and living information we have been led to suppose the country rude, its inhabitants savage, its paths dangerous. Where we to take a view of the wretched conditions in which the history of Ireland stands, it would not be a matter of astonishment that we should be considered as a people, in a manner unknown to the world, accept what little knowledge of us is communicated by merchants, sea-faring men and a few travellers. While all other nations of Europe have their histories, to inform their own people, as well as foreigners, what they were and what they are.
The love of literature, however, seems to be gaining ground daily in Ireland, as well as in the remote districts of the sister Kingdom; and particularly that class of it which will tend and ultimately to make its provinces more frequent, and better known; which will not only excite the attention of the stranger, but point out natural beauties and curiosities unexplored even by the native.”

We will discuss more details on Sir Richard Colt Hoare’s tour of Tipperary in the coming days.

“The Man From Thurles”- By Irish Author Robert Lynd, 1879-1949.

Readers Notes: An interesting fact about the author Robert Wilson Lynd (Roibéard Ó Floinn – latter a socialist and Irish nationalist), the Irish novelist, short story writer, poet, and literary critic James Joyce and his wife Nora Barnacle, held their wedding lunch at the Lynd’s home, No 5 Keats Grove, Hampstead, north-west London, after getting married at Hampstead Town Hall on July 4th, 1931.

Robert Lynd, from a nationalist point of view, would famously write: “Then came August 1914 and England began a war for the freedom of small nations by postponing the freedom of the only small nation in Europe, which it was within her power to liberate, with the stroke of a pen.”

“The Man From Thurles”

[Extract from the scarce antiquarian book published in 1912, entitled “Rambles In Ireland”, by author Robert Lynd.]

I met the man from Thurles, in Kilkenny, as I was going up to the station from the Imperial Hotel.

He was old and shuffling, a ragged creature that once was a man and now humped from town to town with a spotted red handkerchief in his hand, gathering the needs of his belly from among those things that we others do not require for our dogs.

**The books cover shows the** **coloured drawing *“The Hurler”* by Painter & Journalistic Illustrator Jack B. Yeats**, *(1871-1957)*.

He was as hairy and weather-beaten as a sailor, but he was still like a squeezed and shrivelled sailor. His dark hair and beard were as limp as weed. His eyes, which looks like the eyes of a blind man, with the lids falling down on them as if in deadly weariness, might have belonged to one who had been captured by Algerian pirates in his youth and who had lived in dungeons. He was wearing a tattered ‘wideawake’ * a symbol of homelessness and as he walked, he seemed to put his feet down with uncertainty, like a drunken man.

* ‘Wideawake‘: A broad brimmed, felt, countryman’s hat with a low crown, similar to a slouch hat.

I stopped him to ask whether a church set high amongst gravestones by the side of the road was the Black Friary – I think that was the name of the place.

He made me repeat my question and then in a monotonous voice told me – that I could see for myself – that it was a graveyard in there, mumbling something about Protestants and Catholics both being buried in it – “side-by-side,” – he added for the sake of euphony.

Obviously, he had not heard any question or did not know the answer to it. But that did not matter. I really did not care twopence about the Black Friary.

He went on to say that he was a stranger in Kilkenny and (without ever raising his flyblown eyes) that he had only arrived there that day after a walk of 30 miles.
I asked him what part of the country he was from.
“Thurles,” he said, his voice seeming to come from a fuller chest, as he gave the name of the town in two syllables; “did you ever hear tell of Thurles?
I told him I had been there about a year before.
“It would surprise you” he commented “the difference you would find between the people of Thurles and the people belonging to Kilkenny”.
“How was that”, I asked him.
“Well” he replied, “in Thurles and indeed I might say in all parts of County Tipperary, everybody has a welcome for a stranger”. “For instance”, and he pointed a hand half hidden under a long sleeve at me, “you’re a stranger and”, touching his own coat, “I’m a stranger and if this had to be in the County Tipperary and one of us wanting a bed, we would have no trouble in the world, but to go up to the door of the first house and there would be as big welcome before us as if we had to come with a purse of gold”. “But here”, and his voice grew bitter, “they would prosecute you if you would ask them for as much as a sup of water”.

Suddenly his appearance changed; his bold Jekyll collapsed into a whining Hyde.
“Is that a pólisman I see coming”, he asked, laying his trembling fingers on my arm and steadying his eye to look down the road. “If it’s a pólisman he is, you won’t let him come interfering and ask me questions. You wouldn’t let him do that sir. But in the name of almighty God”, he demanded, battering himself into a kind of rhetorical courage, “what would a pólisman want cross-examining the likes of me? Did I ever steal anything, if it was only taking a turnip out of the field? Did I ever – tell him not to interfere with me!“, he quavered; “tell him not to interfere with me”.

I should not have been surprised if he had put his hand into mine for comfort like a frightened child. He held his breath as the policeman, a bold-boned figure in dark green, trod past. Then he let his breath out again. “They’re tyrants, them fellows”, he said “and the lies they would tell on a poor man might be the meaning of getting him a week or maybe a month in jail, and he after doing nothing at all, but only going quietly from place to place. And thieves and robbers running loose that would murder you on the roadside and no one to say a word”.
“Do you mean tinkers” I asked.
“I do not, then,” he said “I mean soldiers – milishymen”.

I asked him to come into a public house for a bottle of stout, but he said that a bottle of stout would make him light in the head. At length, however, he said he would come and have a glass of ale, if I was sure I could keep the police from annoying him. I gave him my promise and we went in.

“What do I mean?” he said, when I bought him back to the militiamen. “This is what I mean. I had a fine blackthorn stick one time”, he called it a “shtick”- “a shtick I had cut from the hedge with mine own hands and seasoned and polished, and varnished till it was the handsomest stick ever you seen. Well, I was walking along the road in this part of the country one day, when who should meet me but two of these milishymen. ‘Give us baccy’, said one of them – that’s what he called tobacco. ‘I have no tobacco’, said I. ‘You lie’, says he, rising his fist, to threaten me. ‘It’s the truth’, said I, putting up my arm to protect myself”.
He cowered behind his arm and shrank as from a blow at the recollection.
‘If you haven’t tobacco you have money’, said in the milishyman. ‘God knows ‘I have neither money nor tobacco’ says I. And with that he made a rush at me and took the stick off me, and threw me into a bed of nettles and began to beat me with it. ‘Would you have my murder on your souls’ said I; but they only laughed and began searching me to see if I had anything worth stealing. There was nothing but only a few crusts of bread I had tied up in a handkerchief and they took them out and pitch them over the hedge. They would have murdered me I tell you, if they hadn’t heard someone coming.
But that scared them, and they set off down the road.
‘Won’t you leave me my stick’, I called after them. ‘Don’t you see I told you the truth and what use could a rotten ould stick be to the likes of you. And one of them shouted back that I should go to hell for my stick, and he threatened me, if I was to say a word about it, he would find me out and beat me till there wouldn’t be a whole bone left in my body.”

The old man half lifted the glass with his withered arm to his lips and half stooped his withered face to the glass. Having drunk, he wiped his mouth on his sleeve.
“Now wouldn’t you feel lonesome”, he whimpered, his lips against his sleeve “after a stick that you would cut and polished yourself and that you had been used to having with you wherever you went? And many’s a good offer I had to sell that stick. But I would as soon have thought of selling an arrum or a leg. I wouldn’t”, – be paused and his imagination took a leap into great sums – “I wouldn’t have taken a shilling itself for it”.

To him a shilling was something considerable. It represented life for two days; he could exist, he told me on sixpence a day, in a place like Kilkenny. Twopence was the price of a bed in straw on the floor, where the rats ran across you, till you dreamed you had fallen in the middle of a fair and that all the beast were trampling over you. Then in the morning there was a penny for tea, a penny for a slice of bacon, a penny for bread, a halfpenny for sugar and a drop of milk, and a half penny for the loan of a can to make the tea in and a share of the fire. If he had bed and breakfast, he said he did not mind about the rest of the day. He never felt hungry as long as he had his cup of tea in the morning. Sunk to the hovels, though he was, he had the rags of a finer past about him.

He used to be the best slaner, he assured me, in the north of Tipperary.
Did I know what slaning was? It meant cutting turf, and he used to be so good a hand at it that he could earn enough by two or three days’ work to keep him the entire week.

“There’s a man I was at school with in Thurles living in this town”, he went on adding proof to proof of his original respectability, “a rich man, and, what’s more a giving man, and you’ll think it a queer thing, but I have only to walk up to the door and ask if he is in to get all I want to eat and drink and money, too, maybe sixpence into my hand and I going away, to put me a bit along the road. But I wouldn’t go near him”.
“Why was that?” I asked him. He made no sign of having heard me.
“If I was to walk up to his door and he is at his dinner,” he went on like a man describing a vision of Paradise, “he would bring me in and sit me down by his side at the table, and I tell you it would be a table for a feast. There would be roast beef or mutton or a shoulder of lamb or maybe a chicken. There would be ham and” – his imagination seemed to pause on the outer edge of its resources – “all a man could eat and he in a dream”.

“And why do you not go to him?” I asked again.
“I wouldn’t”, he said briefly; and then returned to his vision, “every sort of vegetable there would be on the table – potatoes, and turnips,” – he went over their names in a slow catalogue, dwelling on each as though the very words had magic juices for an empty stomach, “and carrots, and cabbage, and peas, and beans, and parsnips, and curlies * and – and all. I tell you none of the hotels in this city could do better.”

* Curlies – Kale.

“But why don’t you go and see him? I persisted.
He shook his head.
“I wouldn’t” he said helplessly.

There was something puzzling about the old man. It may have been merely his timid and indirect spirit. I doubt if he had the heart to beg – at least openly – either from a lifelong acquaintance or from a stranger.
He was going out of the public house without asking me for a penny.
I stopped him however and put a sixpence in his hand to see him over the night. He peered at it for a moment, and slowly took his hat from his head. Raising his sand-blind eyes, he let them dwell on me. He drew in a long breath as though about to deliver an oration. Then straightened himself into a kind of majesty, he said, with the air of a man uttering the supreme benediction: “You’re the best bloody man I’ve met since I left Thurles”. And having paid me the most magnificent compliment in his power, he put on his hat and wobbled in front of me out of the bar.

THE END

950 Persons To Be Conferred With Irish Citizenship.

The first in-person Citizenship Ceremonies in over two years will be held on Monday, June 20th 2022, in the INEC Arena, Gleneagle Hotel, Muckross Road, Killarney, Co. Kerry.

The ceremonies will be held at 11.00am and 1.30pm with registration for the first ceremony beginning at 10:00am and the second ceremony at 12.30pm on Monday, of the aforementioned date.

Minister for Justice Mrs Helen McEntee TD, together with retired High Court judge Mr Bryan MacMahon and retired District Court judge Mr Paddy McMahon will be presiding over the ceremonies and conferring Irish citizenship on an expected 950 people.

Ireland is a sovereign, independent country and has rules and laws about who is entitled to Irish citizenship.

Most Irish citizens were automatically Irish when they were born. Before January 1st 2005, everyone born on the island of Ireland was an Irish citizen by birth. However, following an amendment to the Constitution of Ireland, citizenship by birth is now no longer an automatic entitlement to everyone born on the island of Ireland.

If you are born abroad, you are entitled to Irish citizenship if your parent was born in Ireland. If your grandparents were born in Ireland, you may also be able to claim citizenship through the Foreign Births Register.

Residents of Ireland who have come from abroad can apply to become Irish citizens, through naturalisation.

Citizens of Ireland are also EU citizens, which means that they can live, work and study in any other EU member state.

Cabinet Approval Granted To Draft Legislation On Jury For Stardust Inquests.

The Minister for Justice, Mrs Helen McEntee has today received Government approval to draft legislative amendments to put in place bespoke supports for jury selection and summoning in the Stardust inquests.

Readers will remember, in 1981, the tragic fire at the Stardust nightclub in Artane, north Co. Dublin, which resulted sadly in the death of 48 people and left some 214 persons injured.

The ages of those who were killed in the fire ranged from 16 to 26, and in 23 cases the deceased were the eldest and sole breadwinner for their families. Most of the dead came from Artane, Kilmore and greater Coolock, and half of the deceased were aged 18 years or younger, with four of the victims aged 16 years and eight aged 17 years.

It is intended that the legislation will be passed before the summer recess and enacted quickly, enabling the Coroner to commence the inquests in line with her proposed timeframe.

This will allow the Dublin Coroner to seek the assistance of the Courts Service in selecting a jury for the Stardust inquests and will allow the jury selection process to operate in a similar way to that civil and criminal court proceedings.

The legislation will also ensure that employers will continue to pay the wages of people summoned to serve on the Stardust inquests jury, similar to provisions for criminal and civil trial juries.

These supports are being provided for by the Minister to address the concerns raised by victims’ families, in recognition that the inquests may span a number of months, while also conscious of the principles underpinning jury service as a civic duty that must be carried out with impartiality and fairness.

These special jury provisions will apply only to the Stardust inquests given the extraordinary circumstances.

The Minister intends that all matters pertaining to coronial law will be considered in the review currently underway in her Department as set out in the Justice Plan 2022.

Following the Cabinet meeting, Minister McEntee said:

“The Government’s decision today allows for the urgent drafting of special provisions relating to the selection and summoning of jurors for the new Stardust Inquests.
In this regard, the Dublin Coroner will be entitled to request the assistance of the Courts Service in selecting and summoning a jury by ballot drawn from the Electoral Register.
I had promised to address the concerns raised, particularly by representatives of the Stardust victims’ families, with regard to the empanelling of a representative jury.
As the Stardust Inquests are anticipated to take some considerable time compared to other inquests, I am also making provision that employers would be required to pay the wages of employees summoned to serve on the Stardust Inquests jury”.