Trade unionism has a long history in Laois and Offaly. Local craft workers – like bakersi and smiths – were no doubt members of their respective trade unions but quick searches of general histories of labour rarely find either county – or any of its county towns – in their indices.ii More fruitful would be searches of the histories of teachers – particularly National Teachers – and postal workers where it is known that there were active branches in the counties, although small in number. The Irish Post Office Engineering Union (IPOEU), later Communications Union of Ireland, for example, had …

  Stephen is a solicitor from Australia with a keen interest in convict transportation to Australia and the legal processes in which these were carried out from Ireland up to 1853 when transportation’s ceased. He has recently published this article in the Tasmanian Historical Research Association and has kindly allowed us to publish it here. Some of the cases examined are related to Laois. Click on the PDF link below “Trials in Ireland” to view the article. Trials in Ireland   He has also completed some research on the effects of trauma on convicts, the following link contains some details: http://www.atraumaticbirth.com …

In Notes on the Placenames of County Laoighis, Helen M. Roe, the first county librarian in Laois, suggests Emo or Iomadh means ‘emulation’ or ‘contention’. This observation, I suspect is based on the work of John O’Donovan (1806 – 1861), the Gaelic scholar and antiquarian. In 1824 the Ordnance Survey was established to survey or map the island of Ireland for the purposes of taxation. As part of the work, local place names were corrected and authenticated. In 1830, John O’Donovan was employed as a field-worker, while other field workers worked under his direction. Together, they compiled the Ordnance Survey …

It was William Patrick Ryan (1)  who described the events of Portarlington in 1906 as a battle in chapter 8 of The Pope’s Green Island published six years later. There was no battle of Portarlington in the usual sense of physical combat; rather it was a struggle of authority and outrage following words spoken, or claimed to have been spoken publicly, by Portarlington’s Catholic priest Father Edward O’ Leary(2) , and defended by his curate, Father Martin Brophy (3) to the local Gaelic League. The cause was the Gaelic League’s holding of mixed classes for men and women in the town. A branch had been established in Portarlington in 1904, and …