Search Results for 'George Robert Fitzgerald'

Last Saturday, May 21, was the 158th anniversary of the opening of the Presbyterian Church on Lower Charles Street, Castlebar. Henry Todd of the firm Todd, Burns and Co of Henry Street Dublin laid the foundation stone on 31 July 1863. He performed a similar service at Roscommon earlier that day. Todd was a generous patron of the Presbyterian Church.

Faction fighting and duelling were common in Mayo well into the 19th century. Duelling with swords or pistols was the preserve of gentleman and military men. On the other hand, faction fights were fought with sticks, clubs, stones, and other instruments of bludgeon by large numbers of people who gathered after Mass or at fairs, patterns, or other events.

In 2019, Eamon Ryan TD suggested reintroducing wolves in rural areas. With wild open spaces, forests, mountains, and a plentiful supply of livestock, Mayo would seem to offer an ideal habitat.

On September 6, 1798, a division of the Leicestershire Militia comprising almost six hundred men under the command of the 5th Duke of Rutland, passed through Newcastle-under-Lyme.

It is somewhat ironic that the building on the Green in Castlebar where the Land League was founded should later bear a name denoting Empire - The Imperial. I sometimes sit on a bench on the Green or the Mall that traverses it and mentally step through the historical significance of what is before me.

‘No person shall suffer death for any offence’ - no, it is not a medieval monarchical decree, it is in fact the first order of the Criminal Justice Act 1990. The Act prohibited capital punishment under all circumstances within the Republic for the first time. The death penalty had remained on the Irish statute books exclusively for the offences of treason and murder, but from 1990 onward those crimes would carry a sentence of life imprisonment. To say the 1990 Act ended centuries of capital punishment in Ireland would be telling only half the story.

During the Georgian era, powerful Protestant families owned large tracts of land throughout County Mayo and the province of Connacht. The Castlebar based Bingham family, together with the descendants of Sir Arthur Gore (1685-1742), formed a family compact or oligarchy through marriage and blood whereby political appointments and other influential positions would be secured among themselves. In an era when marriage was determined by the spirit of collateral calculation, the children of Sir Arthur Gore and Elizabeth Annesley would cement the oligarchy.