Library Forum

Most of the book deals with her life as a nun in France.
There are about fourteen pages at the outset about island life.
The island farmers were relatively prosperous.

Sheila,
The nun was Sister Rose Anne Ginnane
who wrote a book about her experiences

From Coney Island to Paris,
Litho Press, Midleton, 1989

Some decades ago I visited Coney Island in the Fergus estuary
and met a Mr Tom Ginnane still in residence there.
She lived through world war 2 in France

There was also a steady stream of Irish women into French and Belgian [French speaking] convents. Theirs is an unwritten history, difficult to write as the women were do dispersed. In effect they were absorbed into and across the vast French Catholic world in many different religious orders. There i...

At a House of Commons committee in November, 1884 W. H. Sullivan, MP for
county Limerick, stated that the weekly pay of an agricultural labourer was
eight to nine shillings.

The Munster News of July 16, 1884 notes that Bunratty bridge has just been made free of tolls.

Many thanks Sheila, as always.

I was struck by the fact that the Munster News in 1880 seemed a bit more
sympathetic to Land League activity than the Limerick Reporter. Both papers
had a predominantly Catholic readership.

In the 1880s a Counihan was alderman and mayor of Limerick. He was also proprietor of the newspaper the Munster News published in Llmerick at that time. Another was a solicitor. The name Counihan appears on a plaque on the Sarsfield Bridge. Would anyone know? Were the Counihans a Clare family? What ...

Dear Sheila, I return to Dialann Deorai under another aspect. It is its very positive comments on the on the British NHS. With its choice of doctor at his surgery it is away beyond the then extant Irish dispensary system. Mac Amhlaigh explicitly notes that this is much more respectful of the dignity...

Dear Sheila,
There is also the book THE MEN WHO BUILT BRITAIN by Ultan Conway
Wolfhound Press 2001.

For me emigration was a fundamental Irish experience.

Dear Sheila, I return to the topic of the experience of emigration, this time on the side of those who left. In the 1960s a west Clare man was elected to the House of Commons as a Labour MP. His name was Michael O'Halloran. He had arrived in England as an emigrant. And in due course got involved in ...

Dear Sheila, I return to the topic of the experience of emigration, this time on the side of those who left. In the 1960s a west Clare man was elected to the House of Commons as a Labour MP. His name was Michael O'Halloran. He had arrived in England as an emigrant. And in due course got involved in ...

Dear Jimbo,

Thanks for that very rich historical follow up.

Dear Jimbo, For me your post is of considerable historical interest.Here we have a young Clareman from a farming family receiving his secondary education in Belgium. He may have been a junior seminarian, alternatively, the petit seminaire may have enrolled some non seminarians. Whatever be the case,...

Many thanks Sheila. We have one or two similar items in the Limerick Chronicle in the nineteenth century. I did not note the date, but it was 1830s or 1840s. There are descriptions of large crowds of grieving people gathering on the Limerick quayside as an emigrant ship gets underway. For me emigrat...

For the Irish people for centuries emigration has been a major individual and collective experience. Its emotional effect on the people who had to see their children go away, often not to be seen again, must have been profound. Generally their grief must have remained undocumented. There may have be...