Could Maine potatoes have relieved Irish hunger in 1925?

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Milton Bronner’s “extensive trip up and down the western counties of Ireland” in February 1925 covered the most forlorn districts of the island at the bleakest time of the year. He came to investigate whether famine had also visited these remote parts of the three-year-old Irish Free State.[1]”Erin Revealed As Suffering Hunger’s Pangs”, Bangor (Maine) Daily Commercial, Feb. 24, 1925. Such a frightening possibility fell within the lifespan of those who remembered the mid-nineteenth century collapse of Ireland’s most important food staple, the potato.

Near Galway, the American journalist entered one of the “usual shanties of this coast—stone walls, badly thatched roof, one room 20 by 10 feet; its door open so light could penetrate; the floor bare, rocky earth.” There, he listened to the lament, “in curious sing-song English,” of Mrs. Bartley Connelly, the mother of eight children:

And the black rain fell. All day and every day. All spring it fell and all summer and all the rest of the year. Always the rain, the dull roar of it. Sorrow and sorrow’s sorrow. The potatoes were washed away or rotted. And the turf melted away with the wetness. No food for the pot. No turf for the fire. Emptiness and blackness in the house. And the children cryin’ because of the hunger and cold.[2]This passage was edited shorter in some newspaper presentations of the story. Bronner reported that Bartley Connelly, the 45-year-old husband and father, was working as a farm laborer and away from … Continue reading

This photo of a mother and two children–not the Connelly family–appeared in newspapers that syndicated Martin Bronner’s 1925 series about privation in the west of Ireland. Waco (Texas) News-Tribune, Feb. 23, 1925.

This was the scene-setter for the first installment of Bronner’s three-part series about privation and poverty in the rural west of Ireland, including a visit to the Aran Islands. The Newspaper Enterprise Association (NEA) syndicated his stories to its more than 400 member publications in the US and Canada.[3]The 1925 Ayer & Son’s directory listed more than 22,000 periodicals in North America and US territories, including 2,465 daily newspapers. It is unclear how many NEA subscribers published … Continue reading February 1925 marked the peak of what has since come to be known as Ireland’s “forgotten famine,” an episode remembered today by a Wikipedia page. The entry cites Irish historian and podcaster Fin Dwyer’s 2014 piece in TheJournal.ie, among other sources.

Milton Bronner in 1922 newspaper advertisement.

Bronner had spent half of his 50 years as a newspaper man, working his way up from reporter to editor of the small daily in Covington, Kentucky, his native state, to NEA’s London-based correspondent since 1920.[4]”Milton Bronner, Reporter Retired Since ’42, Dies After Long Illness”, (Louisville, Ky.) Courier Journal, Jan. 7, 1959. He came to my attention in a 2023 RTÉ piece by Noel Carolan, which focused on international coverage of Ireland’s 1925 food crisis. Bronner’s series and other foreign press forced the Irish government to give more attention to the problem, which it earlier had minimized. It also prompted limited external support to the suffering residents, though nothing near the scale of the American Committee for Relief in Ireland effort of 1921.

As Carolan details, Bronner’s series was more impactful because of the “persuasive photojournalism” that accompanied the narrative. Lighter cameras with faster shutter speeds introduced in the 1920s were beginning to revolutionize news photography.[5]Library of Congress prints and photographs : an illustrated guide. [Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1994], 32. Images of faraway people and places were still a novelty to American newspaper readers a century ago. But the photographer who joined Bronner in the west of Ireland was not named in the newspapers that published these images, at least not those available for review in digital archives. Carolan did not address the mystery photographer. Nothing in Bronner’s 1959 news obituary suggests that he might have taken the photos to supplement his reporting. Readers are encouraged to provide information about the photographer’s identity—perhaps an Irish or British stringer hired for the job.

Bronner’s visit to Mrs. Connelly’s cabin was not his first trip to Ireland. In the summer of 1920 he reported on sectarian riots in Belfast and interviewed Arthur Griffith in Dublin as the war of independence approached a crescendo of violence. After the July 1921 truce he covered the London negotiations between Sinn Féin representatives and the British government that resulted in the Anglo-Irish Treaty of December 1921. Bronner was back in Ireland the following month for the handover of Dublin Castle and other government buildings from British authorities to the new Irish Free State. He interviewed Free State leader Timothy Healy for a series of dispatches at St. Patrick’s Day 1923 as the country struggled to end its civil war. Bronner interviewed Williams Cosgrave in December 1924, just two months before his trip to the western counties.[6]These stories appeared in various US and Canadian newspapers that published NEA’s syndicated content. Search results from Newspapers.com archive.

Bronner was certainly moved by the lilting brogues, “wretched” housing, and barefoot children of Mrs. Connelly and others he met and interviewed. But he was hardly a naïve young reporter, like some of the American correspondents who just a few years earlier had made their first trips to Ireland to cover the revolutionary period. Bronner reported that he had “not heard of a single authenticated death from starvation or from typhus fever” during his travels in the west. Still, he added: “I have marveled that the people survive the hardships of their lives.”

Maine potatoes

Delegation from Maine posed outside the White House on Jan. 31, 1925, after discussing the potato embargo. Library of Congress.

Bronner’s series had particular resonance on the pages of the Bangor (Maine) Daily Commercial. In a front-page sidebar to the correspondent’s first installment, the paper alleged that British government officials had conspired with Canadian growers to block shipments of abundant Maine potatoes from Ireland. The foreigners speciously charged that the Maine spuds were infected with a common potato bug. Shortly before Bronner’s series debuted, a delegation representing Maine potato farmers traveled to Washington to lobby US Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes and President Calvin Coolidge for help to repeal the embargo.

In most newspapers that published Bronner’s series, the first installment opened with these two sentences:

Hunger sits down at table as an unwelcome and bitterly feared guest and Cold keeps him company in thousands of cabin homes today in western Ireland. That is what a partial potato crop failure and peat bog shortage mean for Galway and Donegal and Kerry and Mayo.

In the Daily Commercial, the opening text was amended to read:

Maine potatoes remain in Maine, while hunger sits down at table as an unwelcome and bitterly feared guest and cold keeps him company in thousands of cabin homes today in western Ireland. That is what a potato crop failure and peat bog shortage in Ireland, coupled with the embargo placed by Great Britain on American potatoes, mean for Galway and Donegal and Kerry and Mayo.

The Daily Commercial also denounced “the selfishness of the British government” in a separate editorial. “Our government has done all that it could and pointed out there are more beetles in the Canadian potatoes than in those of Aroostook (County, Maine), but England has persisted. And so there is unnecessary privation in Ireland, much suffering that might have been vastly alleviated.”[7]”Potato Embargo And Real Facts”, Bangor (Maine) Daily Commercial, Feb. 25, 1925.

The alleged embargo was actually part of wider and more longstanding trade problems between the United States, Great Britain and the Irish Free State; complicated in part by the 1920 partition of Northern Ireland. US officials “accepted that most members of the new (Irish) government were inexperienced both from a political and economic perspective, that the Free State was underdeveloped economically and that both industry and agriculture were in a depressed state.”[8]See the “Economic work” subsection, pp 503-526, in Chapter 12 of Bernadette Whelan, United States Foreign Policy and Ireland: From Empire to Independence, 1913-29. [Dublin: Four Courts … Continue reading Most of these problems were resolved over the coming years, but not in time to feed Mrs. Connelly’s family and other desperate residents of Ireland’s impoverished west. The inability to ship Maine potatoes to Ireland does not appear to have gained traction beyond the New England state, based on my search of US and Irish digital newspaper archives.

Other coverage

The Irish government allocated £500,000 for relief and provided 6,000 tons of coal, as Bronner and other news sources reported. An official statement insisted, “The comparison with 1847 is extravagant, and there is no general famine.”[9]”Minimize Irish Famine”, New York Times, Feb. 3, 1925. Opposition leader Eamon de Valera blamed an “English press scare” for distorting the matter, adding that a republican government would have done a better job anticipating the crisis as conditions in the west worsened during the autumn of 1924. [10]”Irish Not Starving, Declare Cosgrave”, New York Times, Feb. 1, 1925. The Gaelic American, ever the watchdog of mainstream press coverage about Ireland, also criticized British papers for exaggerating the story to embarrass the Irish government, but said nothing about Bronner’s series.

This photo also accompanied Bronner’s series in many US newspapers. Note the NEA logo in the bottom right corner, but there is no individual photo credit. It is unclear whether the boy is missing his right leg, if it is in shadow, or bent against the wall behind him.

“The Irish press gives the situation its true proportions and recognizes the efficiency of the government’s effort to meet it,” Chicago Daily News foreign correspondent William H. Brayden reported in a Feb. 7 story syndicated to other US papers. “That the situation is not regarded in Ireland with the same apprehension as abroad is evident from the fact that when the Dáil met this week and the ministers were interrogated on many subjects, no deputy raised any questions about conditions in the west.”[11]”Leader Familiar With Situation”, The Scranton (Pa.) Republican, Feb. 9, 1925.

The Armagh-born Brayden began his career at the Dublin-based Freeman’s Journal, which had folded in December 1924.[12]Felix M. Larkin, “Brayden, William John Henry“, in the online Dictionary of Irish Biography. Later in 1925 he published the pro-government booklet, The Irish Free State: a survey of the newly constructed institutions of the self-governing Irish people, together with a report on Ulster. There, Brayden wrote:

I had heard that this year the farmers were exceptionally hard hit. The cry of famine in Ireland has been uttered in America. I went to Kilkenny expecting to learn something that might confirm these tales of distress.[13]Brayden, Irish Free State … Ulster. [Chicago: Chicago Daily News, 1925], 28. 

Kilkenny was hardly the place to look for food distress in 1925, as Brayden surely knew. Like the government, he downplayed the alleged famine. By summer 1925 improved weather and crop yields had largely resolved the crisis. Brayden wrote of conditions in County Clare:

A few months ago the rain had driven the people to despair of this year’s harvest and to dread another winter as bad as the last. Now the fine weather has completely altered the situation. It is declared in the county that the prospects of a successful season for the farmers have rarely been so bright. In several districts the turf supply was secured and haymaking started by the middle of June on a good crop, while the potato fields are described as in excellent condition.[14]Brayden, Irish Free State, 35.

Ireland’s “famine” of 1925 was soon forgotten.

Brayden died in 1933. Bronner remained in Europe for another 17 years with NEA. He interviewed George Bernard Shaw on his 80th birthday in 1936. The Irish writer told the correspondent: “Why should I let you pick my brain for nothing, when in 10 minutes I can write down what I tell you, sign it, send it to (an editor in America), and get a check for $1,000?”[15]”An 80th Birthday Message From George Bernard Shaw Who Says Proudly ‘Americans Adore Me’ “, The Helena (Mont.) Independent, July 26, 1936. A year later Bronner interviewed de Valera about the Irish Constitution. Bronner retired in 1942 to his native Louisville, Kentucky.

References

References
↑1 ”Erin Revealed As Suffering Hunger’s Pangs”, Bangor (Maine) Daily Commercial, Feb. 24, 1925.
↑2 This passage was edited shorter in some newspaper presentations of the story. Bronner reported that Bartley Connelly, the 45-year-old husband and father, was working as a farm laborer and away from the home at the time of his visit.
↑3 The 1925 Ayer & Son’s directory listed more than 22,000 periodicals in North America and US territories, including 2,465 daily newspapers. It is unclear how many NEA subscribers published Bronner’s series.
↑4 ”Milton Bronner, Reporter Retired Since ’42, Dies After Long Illness”, (Louisville, Ky.) Courier Journal, Jan. 7, 1959.
↑5 Library of Congress prints and photographs : an illustrated guide. [Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1994], 32.
↑6 These stories appeared in various US and Canadian newspapers that published NEA’s syndicated content. Search results from Newspapers.com archive.
↑7 ”Potato Embargo And Real Facts”, Bangor (Maine) Daily Commercial, Feb. 25, 1925.
↑8 See the “Economic work” subsection, pp 503-526, in Chapter 12 of Bernadette Whelan, United States Foreign Policy and Ireland: From Empire to Independence, 1913-29. [Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2006].
↑9 ”Minimize Irish Famine”, New York Times, Feb. 3, 1925.
↑10 ”Irish Not Starving, Declare Cosgrave”, New York Times, Feb. 1, 1925.
↑11 ”Leader Familiar With Situation”, The Scranton (Pa.) Republican, Feb. 9, 1925.
↑12 Felix M. Larkin, “Brayden, William John Henry“, in the online Dictionary of Irish Biography.
↑13 Brayden, Irish Free State … Ulster. [Chicago: Chicago Daily News, 1925], 28.
↑14 Brayden, Irish Free State, 35.
↑15 ”An 80th Birthday Message From George Bernard Shaw Who Says Proudly ‘Americans Adore Me’ “, The Helena (Mont.) Independent, July 26, 1936.

Guest post: ‘Serving the poor of Dublin since 1790’

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Historian Felix M. Larkin, a trustee of the Sick and Indigent Roomkeepers Society, has given the opening Dublin charities & homelessness lecture at Christ Church Cathedral in the Irish capital. Larkin was the Society’s chairman from 2012 to 2016. His lecture is reproduced below the series poster. Consider making a contribution to the Society. MH

We are gathered in what is probably the oldest part of Dublin, just up from Wood Quay and adjacent to Dublin Castle – and if you exit at the back of the cathedral and walk down Lord Edward Street and Cork Hill, past City Hall, the first turn on your right after City Hall is Palace Street, one of Dublin’s shortest streets. No. 2 Palace Street is one of Dublin’s iconic buildings. For nearly 140 years, between 1855 and 1992, it was home to a charitable society with the strangest of names, the Sick and Indigent Roomkeepers Society. The façade of this eighteenth-century building still bears, in deeply incised lettering, the legend ‘Sick & Indigent Roomkeepers Society, founded A.D. 1790’. The Society boasts that it is Dublin’s oldest surviving charity.

First, a word of explanation about our name. ‘Indigent’ means poor, while the word ‘Roomkeepers’ in the eighteenth century referred to tenants, sometimes entire families, who lived in one room of a house – in other words, tenement dwellers. Some people have asked me from time to time if we were a charity for impoverished members of the hospitality industry, innkeepers and the like. But no, ‘Roomkeepers’ in the original meaning of the word were those who lived in one room in a tenement – poor, but not perhaps the poorest of the poor.

As recorded in the History of the City of Dublin, by Warburton, Whitelaw & Walsh, the Society was founded by ‘a few individuals in the middle ranks of life [who], inhabiting a part of the town where the population was poor and crowded, had daily opportunities of knowing that many poor creatures who were unable to dig and ashamed to beg expired of want and were often found dead in the sequestrated garrets and cellars to which they had silently returned’. The part of Dublin referred to was the area of Charles Street West behind Ormond Quay, in the parish of St Michan.

At the inaugural meeting of the Society on the 15 March 1790, the founders – Samuel Rossborough, Laurence Toole and nine others – resolved to form a society ‘to be called the Charitable Society for the Relief of Room-Keepers of all Religious Persuasions in the City of Dublin’. For the first three years, the Society confined its activities to the parish of St Michan and gave relief in the form of potatoes, bread, meal, straw, fuel or money as circumstances dictated. However, according to Warburton, Whitelaw and Walsh, ‘the Charity soon attracted public notice and support’ and it expanded its geographic reach.

Our principal founder, Samuel Rossborough is commemorated by a memorial tablet on the east wall of St Michan’s Church, in Church Street. The original memorial was unfortunately damaged in severe weather and became dislodged from the wall, fell to the ground and broke beyond repair – but, conscious of our long and distinguished history, the Society was determined to restore it. The new memorial, which was fashioned by the sculptor and letter-cutter Tom Glendon, was dedicated by Archdeacon Pierpoint in 2014. It is an exquisite piece of work.

Expanding its activities beyond the parish of St Michan in 1793, the Society re-organised itself into four separate divisions under the direction of a central committee – the Barrack and Rotunda Divisions on the north side of town, and the Workhouse and St. Stephen’s Green Divisions on the south side. Committees of trustees were drawn from residents of each area to be responsible for distributing relief at a local level. The divisional monthly meetings were normally held in local public houses –‘respectable taverns’, as the annual report for 1842 put it – and from 1809 to 1841 the central committee would meet in the Royal Exchange, now City Hall. The Society later used rented premises in Dame Street, and in 1855 purchased the building in Palace Street.

The Society attracted regular subscriptions and some substantial donations from affluent benefactors. Another major source of income was charity sermons. By 1823 charity sermons for the benefit of the Society were arranged bi-annually: one in an Anglican church at the end of April, the other in a Catholic church at the beginning of December. This reflected the non-denominational character of the Society. From the outset (as we have already seen), the Society has been non-denominational; it helps people of all creeds and of none.

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‘Trusk’ shutdown of USAID ripples through Ireland, world

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UPDATE 4:

Fewer than 300 of more than 10,000 USAID employees worldwide still have jobs as the week comes to a close. The lettering above the headquarters entrance seen below has been removed. Responsible media outlets and fact-checkers have detailed many of the falsehoods spread about the agency, but the lies have spread like a wildfire and the damage is done.

‘Trusk’ has “imperiled millions of lives, thousands of American jobs and billions of dollars of investment in American small businesses and farms while severely undermining our national security and global influence — all while authoritarians and extremists celebrate their luck,” former USAID Administrator Samantha Power wrote in a New York Times op-ed.

This is the final update of this post.

UPDATE 3:

USAID offices on Feb. 3, 2025.

The domestic repercussions of “Trusk’s” decision to shutdown USAID are beginning to emerge. American communities could face devastating economic consequences and job losses as agency disbursements to contractors and suppliers slam to a halt. US farmers appear to be especially vulnerable.

“You’re talking about thousands of people here and abroad, American companies that what they do is implement USAID programs,” Dany Bahar, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development, told CNN. “A lot of the money from USAID is helping [foreign] countries grow and develop stronger commercial ties with the US.”

UPDATE 2:

The Irish website Gript.ie has provided some details about the $70,000 “DEI musical” in Ireland citied by the White House as an example of waste at USAID. (The money actually came from the US State Department, not USAID.) “The U.S. The Embassy in Ireland has not yet responded to a request for comment on the funding or confirmed what concert it was spent on,” the website’s Maria Maynes reports. Gript describes itself as “a platform for views which challenge establishment thinking” and concerned about the “headlong rush to the most extreme forms of liberalism.” … USAID has notified its global direct hire workforce that they will be placed on administrative leave effective at the end of this week (Feb. 7, 2025). It is unclear whether or how many employees the agency has in Ireland or Northern Ireland. The Journal.ie reports that Irish aid organizations “have received a flurry of memos from the US State Department since the (USAID) suspension, which have led to confusion and uncertainty about what will happen next.”

St. Patrick’s Day boycott?

Demands for Irish government officials to boycott the annual St. Patrick’s Day visit to America are gathering pace. Trump’s call to “take over” Gaza and transform it into “the Riviera of the Middle East” is a stronger irritant than the USAID shutdown. He made the comment during a visit to Washington by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. People Before Profit’s TD Ruth Coppinger described them as “two psychopaths sitting in front of an open fire in the White House.” The war between Israel and Hamas last year sparked similar demands to skip the annual bowl of shamrocks ceremony. What seems more likely to derail the March visit this year is whether Trump imposes tariffs on Europe or other economic penalties on Ireland.

Demonstrators gathered outside the US Treasury on Feb. 4 to protest billionaire Elon Musk gaining unsupervised access to the agency. A similar protest occurred a day earlier outside the shuttered USAID offices. Washington Monument at left. 

UPDATE 1:

The Irish government is assessing the impact on some of its international aid programs in Africa which are tied to USAID partnership agreements, the Irish Times reports. (See original post below.)  … US Sen. Chis Coons, a Democrat from Delaware and close friend of former President Joe Biden, says dismantling USAID will put Americans in danger. “USAID’s programs, like all our foreign assistance, play a central role in combating extremism, promoting stability and protecting our homeland,” he writes in a Washington Post op-ed. Coons notes that US foreign aid is about 1 percent of the federal budget. … But, the White House has generated click-bait headlines by claiming a $70,000 USAID grant supported a “DEI musical” in Ireland as an example of waste at the agency.

ORIGIONAL POST:

The decision by the US regime of Donald Trump and Elon Musk (“Trusk”) to shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) will have global impacts, including Ireland.

“USAID and Ireland continue to strengthen our partnership to combat global hunger and support shared international development priorities,” the US agency announced Feb. 6, 2024–a year ago this week. That press release is now inaccessible on its shuttered website. A day-after release by the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade announced a new collaboration between the two countries to improve food support to Zambia. That release is still posted.

 

Logo of US and Irish aid programs.

“Perhaps where USAID and the Irish state work most in synch is in Africa managing food security and preparing the region for climate change through provisions to small farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa including Ethiopia where the Irish government was accused of backing an American takeover of the country through support of northern rebels,” The Burkean website in Ireland reported Feb. 2. “Whether the Irish presence in these countries can be sustained post-USAID in a world where China and even Russia can provide more beneficial bilateral relationships arguably with less clauses awaits to be seen.”

The Burkean describes itself as an online publication founded and run by university students in Ireland that seeks to promote free speech and fresh ideas. It features this quote from the Dublin-born statesman and philosopher Edmund Burke: “When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.” 

This is a developing story. As of this posting there is not much coverage in Irish mainstream media about this issue. Most of the attention is focused on Trump’s threatened tariffs. Email subscribers should check markholan.org for updates to this post.

When three American journalists visited Donegal, 1919-1922

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At least three American journalists trekked to the Dungloe village in remote northwest County Donegal during Ireland’s dangerous revolutionary period. They came to interview Patrick Gallagher, who had organized a successful cooperative agricultural society. It was a hopeful news story in the middle of Ireland’s war of independence and civil war.

My story about these three journalists–Ruth Russell of the Chicago Daily News; Savel Zimand of Survey Graphic magazine; and Redfern Mason of the San Francisco Examiner–has just been published at The Irish Story website.

Image from November 1921 issue of Survey Graphic.

Georgetown conference explores US-Irish relations

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I’m closing the live blog. Thanks for following today. MH

Ted Smyth of the University College Dublin Clinton Institute is closing the conference. He disagrees with the view–expressed more than once today–that Joe Biden was the last Irish-American president. Smyth says the conference will return to Georgetown next year. Videos of the first five conferences can be found here. I’m sure today’s sessions will be added soon.

***

The panel is discussing the challenges of making history relevant to contemporary audiences. The characteristics of Irish (or Irish American) audiences is much different than 20 years ago, Stack noted. “We need to grapple with how we talk to our audience,” she said. “They are coming from a different Ireland. It can’t be all shamrocks and shillelaghs.” Ó Dochartaig said there is a need to expand oral history collections that are project focused and scholarship focused. The Irish who immigrated to the US in the 1980s, for example, will not be around in 20 years.

Ó Dochartaigh says the Troubles raised interest in Ireland beyond the Irish-American diaspora, including academia and business interests. He mention the profound swing from President John F. Kennedy’s indifference to Northern Ireland in 1963, when he visited the Republic, to the engagement of his brother, Sen. Edward “Ted” Kennedy, in the 1980s and 1990s, and other politicians in solving the crisis in the North. “The level of involvement was extraordinary.”

Stack notes there was no recruitment of Irish Americans to fight in the 1916 Rising–before the US entered the First World War. The Irish mostly wanted money, she said.

Anbinder says the Famine Irish were not the “poorest of the poor,” and their economic success in America happened more rapidly than scholars previously believed. Some of this narrative come from the Irish themselves, who exaggerating how deep a hole they climbed out of to highlight how much they achieved.

Left to right: Prof. Niall Ó Dochartaigh, University of Galway; Dr. Elizabeth Stack, Director of the American Irish Historical Society; and Prof. Tyler Anbinder, The George Washington University. The moderator at right is Prof. Darragh Gannon, Associate Director of Global Irish Studies, Georgetown University.

The last panel is, “Looking Back, Looking Forward: 100 Years of Irish–US Relations.” In 1924 Irish professor Timothy A. Smiddy became the first foreign minister to represent the Irish Free State in the United States. See my post, ‘Special relationship’ or the fading of the green?

***

Scanlon acknowledge the power of Irish America is “changing … evolving over time.” But strong Irish studies and exchange programs help to maintain the connections. “The power of the relationship since Brexit has became really clear,” she said. Fallon suggested some of the dilution is offset by Ireland playing a larger role in an ever-shrinking world. “And Americans without Irish heritage are visiting Ireland in droves, which contributes to the relationship,” he said.

Ireland is working more directly with state and local economic development groups and private companies rather than US officials. There is about $150 billion in direct foreign investment in the USA from Ireland. … Scanlon said she expects tension over Trump’s effort to make big tech and big pharma companies with operations in Ireland return to the USA. That’s because several of the billionaires who have his ear have interests in Ireland. She did not name anyone.

Both members of Congress agree that Ireland will remain neutral for the short and medium term, as indicated by polling in Ireland. Fallon noted Finland and Ireland have about the same population, 5.5 million. But the former is part of NATO and can ready 800,000 troops. Ireland can’t reach its goal of 11,500.

Scanlon defends post-World War II order that Trump administration appears to be turning from. “It’s much better for our country and for Ireland to protect global security and democracy.” Fallon notes it’s a much different world from 1946, not just US and communist. “Now we live in a very asymmetrical world.” He says NATO will be strengthened if all the members pay their agreed 2 percent of GDP.

Prof. Scott Lucas, University College Dublin Clinton Institute, seated at left, introduces Scanlon, left, and Fallon on video conference.

We’re waiting on the next panel: “The View from Capitol Hill: What Next for the Transatlantic Political Relationship?” with U.S. Reps. Mary Gay Scanlon (D-PA 5th) and Pat Fallon (R-TX 4th).

***

Responding to an audience question, Richardson agreed there is a diminishment of cultural affinity between the US and Ireland. It is not as strong as it was through the twentieth century, especially when so much attention focused on bringing peace to Northern Ireland. “People are well-disposed to Ireland, but not enough to sacrifice or jeopardize their own interests,” she said. “The culture affinity is pretty soft. Ireland will not be able to rely on it in the future like it has in the past.”

Richardson, a Waterford native, said she has an Irish worldview despite not living in the country since completing her undergraduate degree at Trinity College Dublin in 1980. “Catholicism bred internationalism,” she said. “You learn about the world. The nuns taught a notion of equality with others, including the starving children in Africa.” But she has no desire to return to Ireland.

Richardson has praised Ireland from welcoming Ukrainian refugees, as compared to the backlash in the United Kingdom.

On Irish sympathy for the Palestinians, and resulting trouble with Israel. “Ireland as a small victim of colonialism tends to identify with other victims of colonialism,” Richardson said. “Ireland could have a values-based foreign policy because it was a small, poor country. It could afford to take principled positions because it didn’t have to make trade offs. Ireland hasn’t had to pay a price for these positions.” That is likely to change. “I expect the Trump administration to be much less sympathetic to Ireland.”

Ireland will feel more pressure, from the US and from Europe, to shift from its historic neutral stance. “Ireland leaves itself open to criticism of being a free rider,” Richardson said. This especially true when Ireland is running budget surpluses.

“From Trump onward, American presidents will be much less interested in Ireland.” –Dame Louise Richardson, President of the Carnegie Corporation of New York, below left.

Dame Louise Richardson, president of the Carnegie Corporation of New York, at left, with moderator Catherine Lucey of The Wall Street Journal.

Byrne Nason: EU defense spending is up 30 percent since Ukraine was invaded by Russia, and 63 percent of that money is spent in the US. “Ireland believes in the international legal order,” the Irish ambassador said. She emphasized that Ireland is “non-aligned but not neutral,” that an Irish general now chairs the EU military. “We are reviewing their our own security initiatives,” she said. The Irish economic zone includes the surrounding seas and is seven times larger than the island. That maritime profile includes many important transatlantic cables.

Byrne Nason: Trump is a businessman, and the US-EU relationship is big business. She reminds that EU is 27 nations. “Could you imagine 27 US states coming together every day and reaching agreement on sensitive issues? But we (EU) are on the job every day.”

Opening panel (below) is assessing USA-European relations. … Stuart Holliday says a certain degree of panic in Europe is perhaps overstated. “The more Europe strengthens itself the better to have an equal relationship with the United States,” he said. “You can work with this president (Trump) is you can work personally and move quickly.” Also says transatlantic relationships should be expanded to include new players.

Transatlantic Relations at a Crossroads panel, left to right: Stuart Holliday, Director of the Meridian International Center and former Ambassador for Special Political Affairs of the United States to the UN; Geraldine Byrne Nason, Ambassador of Ireland to the United States; and Francisco António Duarte Lopes, Ambassador of Portugal to the United States. Niamh King, Director of Aspen Strategy Group and Aspen Security Forum, the panel moderator, at right.

***

Prof. Cóilín Parsons, director of Global Irish Studies and associate professor at Georgetown, will give opening remarks at noon Eastern.

***

I will be live blogging today (Jan. 29) from Georgetown University’s sixth annual “Bridging the Atlantic” conference. Email subscribers should visit my website for updates after noon Eastern.

Seating has opened inside the Mortara Center For International Studies.

BTA “seeks to spotlight issues of mutual concern” to the USA, Ireland, and the European Union, including transatlantic trade and the ongoing challenges of peace-building in Northern Ireland, according to the conference agenda. The new Trump administration in Washington and coalition government in Dublin are likely to receive plenty of attention.

The conference is presented by Georgetown’s Global Irish Studies Initiative and BMW Center for German and European Studies, in association with the Clinton Institute for American Studies at University College Dublin, Queen’s University Belfast, and the Embassy of Ireland.

When a US magazine devoted a full issue to Ireland

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Thirty-five months after the January 1919 opening of the Irish separatist parliament, and a week before the December 1921 announcement of the Anglo-Irish Treaty, the New York-based Survey Graphic published a special issue devoted to Ireland. “Here for the first time in an American national magazine will be presented a complete survey of the Irish situation as it is today, as well as the plans which many of the prominent Irish thinkers have in mind for the Ireland of tomorrow,” the periodical’s business manager, John Kenderdine, wrote to Irish American activist Frank P. Walsh.[1]Kenderdine to Walsh, Nov. 15, 1921, in Walsh papers, New York Public Library.

Kenderdine offered to discount the magazine’s regular newsstand price of 30 cents per copy by a third to a half, depending on how many extra copies were ordered. He provided Walsh with “rough proofs of the content” subject to final layout and other editorial adjustments.

Walsh, chairman of the American Commission on Irish Independence, replied two days later from his Washington, D.C. office: “I think the idea most timely and the edition a very fine one.” He promised to alert the American Association for the Recognition of the Irish Republic, which Eamon de Valera founded a year earlier in a split with the Friends of Irish Freedom. Walsh said he also would notify Irish leaders but told Kenderdine that he had no role in “the distribution of literature of this character.”[2]Walsh to Kenderdine, Nov. 17, 1921, Walsh papers.

(Continues below image)

Cover of the November 1921 issue of The Survey.

The cover of the magazine posed the question: “What Would the Irish Do With Ireland?” The answers were supplied over 68 pages by nearly a score of writers and artists in the form of essays, poems, drawings, paintings, and photographs. Each name in this alphabetical list of contributors is linked to their page in the issue:

The Survey was first published in 1909 as a journal for social workers and a broader audience of concerned citizens. Paul Underwood Kellogg, the editor, had spent the previous few years leading a groundbreaking investigation of “life and labor” in the Pittsburgh steel district. The Survey Graphic emerged from a series of reconstruction-themed issues published during and after the First World War. These focused on industrial relations, health, education, international relations, housing, race relations, consumer education, and related fields.[3]University of Minnesota Archival Collection Guides, Social Welfare History Archives, Survey Associates records, SW0001.

By 1921, the magazine’s influence among progressive thinkers probably surpassed its reported nationwide circulation of about 13,700 copies. But it hardly competed with giants of the day such as Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly, with 498,000 circulation, or McClure’s monthly, with 440,000.[4]N.W. Ayer & Son’s American Newspaper Annual & Directory (Philadelphia, N.W. Ayer & Son’s, 1921). A few mainstream newspapers republished some of Survey Graphic’s guest essays on their opinion pages. One editorial endorsement said the Irish issue was “well worth the perusal of every person interested in the Irish cause.[5]Editorial in The Catholic Bulletin, St. Paul, Minn., Dec. 31, 1921.

In an overly optimistic and ultimately inaccurate editorial, Survey Graphic concluded the answer to the question it posed on the issue’s cover–“What would the Irish do with Ireland?–was that the Irish would give the world a new form of “rural civilization” and fraternity. It continued:

This is one of the most encouraging signs of the times—development of rural communities on a cooperative basis; each community to have so far as possible its own general store for supplies of common need; each community to manufacture what it can do advantageously with a common mill, creamery, bacon factory, electric plant, buying the commodities that can not be supplied at home and selling its products; each community to establish schools, recreation halls and libraries, organize community pageants and games; each community to have its town council where common problems and new plans may be discussed. … The old and the very young nations are struggling in Europe for their rights. England by its bloodless revolution gave to the world a new conception of liberty, France by the great revolution, equality. Ireland has the qualifications to give us something as precious: fraternity.

It did not work work out that way. Political partition and sectarianism were major problems in Ireland for most the twentieth century. Agricultural cooperatives were replaced by corporate agriculture. Ireland retains its beautiful countryside, but most of its people live in urban districts, working in an economy that was unimaginable in 1921.

Advertisement in The New Republic, Dec. 7, 1921.

References

References
↑1 Kenderdine to Walsh, Nov. 15, 1921, in Walsh papers, New York Public Library.
↑2 Walsh to Kenderdine, Nov. 17, 1921, Walsh papers.
↑3 University of Minnesota Archival Collection Guides, Social Welfare History Archives, Survey Associates records, SW0001.
↑4 N.W. Ayer & Son’s American Newspaper Annual & Directory (Philadelphia, N.W. Ayer & Son’s, 1921).
↑5 Editorial in The Catholic Bulletin, St. Paul, Minn., Dec. 31, 1921.

American Irish Historical Society leader on first anniversary

County Kerry native Elizabeth Stack became executive director of the American Irish Historical Society in New York City in February 2024. The previous six years she was executive director of the Irish American Heritage Museum in Albany, N.Y. Before 2018, Stack taught Irish and Irish American History and was an associate director at Fordham University’s Institute of Irish Studies. She completed her PhD at Fordham, a Jesuit research university in the Bronx, N.Y. This Q & A was conducted by email as Stack approached her upcoming first anniversary of leading the 127-year-old organization. MH

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AIHS was closed for several years due to financial and legal problems, in addition to the COVID pandemic. New York Attorney General Letitia James appointed you and others to an interim board to right the foundering organization. Since your appointment as executive director AIHS’s has reopened its Fifth Avenue building and hosted many events. Give us your assessment of your first year. What are your successes? What still needs to be done?

Elizabeth Stack

ES: My first year as executive director has been an exciting and rewarding experience, though not without its challenges! The primary goal has been to re-establish the Society as a vital resource for the New York public, and I am proud to say that we are making significant strides toward that. In our first year, I hosted 63 events, both in-person and virtually, covering a diverse range of topics. These events have not only sparked enriching conversations but have also helped us begin to build a thriving community around the Society.

We had to almost start from scratch – we have a new website and are undergoing a new membership drive. We post daily on social media, and have answered queries from researchers, while also opening the building for tours. It was necessary to hit the ground running, and also try to assess the archives, do necessary maintenance on the building, and get the infrastructure back up. But I felt it was important that the Society was seen to be active again as quickly as we could be.

We are committed to making the AIHS a place where people feel welcome to learn, share, and connect. Our goal is to ensure that our doors are always open, and that the Society serves as a space for both education and community engagement. While we’ve accomplished a great deal in our first year, there’s still work to be done. This year we will continue to expand our programming, strengthen our partnerships, and build on the foundation we laid in 2024.

Some specific plans or scheduled events for 2025?

ES: We are kicking off 2025 with a talk on ‘The Rise and Rule of Eamon De Valera’ with David McCullagh, RTE journalist, on Jan. 14. De Valera’s personal and political connection to New York makes it a fantastic discussion to kick off the new year.

We’re also excited to host a fantastic exhibition from Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum of Fairfield at the Society from January to May. The exhibition showcases a powerful mix of historical and contemporary artworks that dive into the lasting impact of the Irish Famine. It’s a great opportunity for visitors to connect with themes of loss, cultural erosion, and the devastation of that time. Plus, we’ll be holding several talks throughout the five months, exploring both the exhibition and the broader history of the Great Hunger.

We’ve also got some exciting events coming up in collaboration with Irish universities and cultural organizations. These events will help strengthen the academic and historical connections between Ireland and the United States, offering a great opportunity to deepen our shared understanding.

We intend to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the publication of The Great Gatsby in April as well as the 1916 Rising. I am hoping that this year we can utilize more of our own archives when telling these stories, and I plan to host more talks on the history of the Society and its holdings.

Any surprises from your first year at AIHS that you can share with our readers?

ES: The most unexpected challenge I’ve encountered during my first year at AIHS is the complexity of managing such an iconic building. While the grandeur of our mansion on 5th Avenue, right across from the Met, is truly breathtaking, it comes with its fair share of obstacles. The size and age of the building brings significant operational costs, and the maintenance required to preserve its historical integrity is no small task. Our technology is subpar and there are various physical limitations to what we can do here. It’s been a constant balancing act.

The American Irish Historical Society mansion on Fifth Avenue in New York City.

There have been numerous columns written on both sides of the Atlantic about the “end of an era” for traditional U.S.-Irish relations and Irish American identity. These pieces are usually pegged to the end of Joe Biden’s presidency, the secularization and modernization of Ireland, the growing diversity of Ireland and Irish America. As an historian as well as AIHS director, what are your thoughts about the transatlantic relationship (political, social, etc.). How would you describe contemporary Irish America? What is the role for the AIHS in the twenty-first century compared to its founding in the late nineteenth century?

ES: Irish American relations have always evolved, and while it’s true that we’re seeing some shifts today, these changes are part of a long history of adaptation and growth. The AIHS has always played an important role in this dynamic relationship, from being involved with the Irish independence movement in the early 20th century, through to collaborating with Irish and Irish American academics and artists, and we continue to do so today. We have strong ties with key organizations like the Ancient Order of Hibernians, the Emerald Guild, the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick, the Emerald Isle and other immigration centers, and the Irish Repertory Theater, which serve as pillars of the community and help preserve our cultural heritage – and we are supported by the Irish Consulate too.

Despite the decline in emigration, Irish America remains vibrant and influential. Our membership demographic is probably mostly among the older generation, but I do want the Society to also engage with younger Irish Americans and recent immigrants. Many of today’s immigrants are educated and working in business or finance and technology, and they come from a different Ireland, so the old touchstones of the Irish story are maybe not as relevant for them. Ireland has undergone a remarkable transformation, and this shift is undeniably positive, although I think there is sometimes a sense of sorrow among the Irish Americans about how much Ireland has changed in the last twenty years or so.

The image of the poor Irish is firmly in the past. Today, Ireland’s global standing has strengthened, with over 500 Irish companies thriving in the U.S. alone and Ireland ranking as the 9th largest investor in the country. This reflects the nation’s newfound prominence on the international stage, particularly in sectors like business, technology, and culture. And in a post-Brexit world as the entire island of Ireland interacts with Europe and America, we are very proud to partner with Queen’s University and Ulster University on various talks and seminars.

In the arts, we’re seeing exciting developments too. Irish actors, musicians, and artists continue to make waves, and one of the most compelling examples is the success of Irish rap, especially groups like Kneecap. We also celebrate the global reach of Patrick Radden Keefe’s Say Nothing, which was adapted into a TV series. As a historical institution, this is something we are especially proud of, as it brings attention to critical chapters of Irish history and culture. Academics and journalists are tackling complicated subjects like the Magdalene Homes and adoption out of Ireland, and how Ireland is dealing with its own immigration experience, so the conversations we are having are dynamic and inclusive.

All of these developments suggest that the relationship between Ireland and the U.S. is not only changing but thriving, and it’s for the better. As we move forward, the AIHS must adapt and embrace these changes, helping to forge a new identity for Irish America in the 21st century. We’re here to celebrate that evolving relationship, while also carving out our own place in it—preserving the rich history of Irish immigration while embracing the future of Irish American cultural exchange.

Do you have any time for your own research? What topics of Irish or Irish American history most interest you these days?

ES: My primary research interest centers around immigration, particularly Irish emigration patterns. I am deeply interested in exploring how Irish emigrants shaped American society, both during their initial arrival and in the long-term. One of the key aspects I wrote about is the Immigration Act of 1924, which imposed strict quotas based on national origins and had a lasting impact on Irish immigration. The law drastically changed the landscape of U.S. immigration policy and is crucial to understanding the Irish experience in America during the early 20th century.

The Great Hunger is another area I’m still really interested in, especially having read recent works by Cian McMahon, Tyler Anbinder, and Anelise Strout. I’m particularly focused on how the famine and the resulting wave of emigration profoundly impacted the Irish American community. Charity, particularly how it was mobilized by Irish American communities to support both new immigrants and the broader social fabric, is another area of interest. I’m exploring how the Irish American community’s experiences as immigrants led them to advocate for others, and how attitudes toward immigrants in American society have evolved over time. I’m fascinated by the anti-Catholic rhetoric of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, but also, I want to look at Irish American attitudes to other immigrants in more recent years. Lastly, American support for Irish independence is another area I would like to concentrate on, especially given the archives we hold here on De Valera’s visit in 1920 and the Friends of Irish Freedom.

Through my work at the AIHS, I’ve been able to rekindle my passion for these topics, and I look forward to continuing to explore the historical and contemporary impact of Irish immigration on both sides of the Atlantic.

Library inside the AIHS mansion in New York.

Remembering Jimmy Carter’s words on Northern Ireland

Happy New Year. This first post of 2025 was going to focus on how Donald Trump’s return to the White House later this month threatens the Irish economy. The risk comes from whether Trump keeps his promises to cut corporate taxes and impose tariffs, either of which could incentivize US tech and pharmaceutical multinationals in Ireland to return production, jobs, and future investment to America. This could be a big blow to the incoming Irish government, which, like Trump’s administration, is still in formation.

Jimmy Carter discusses his cancer prognosis at the Carter Center, 2015. The Carter Center/M. Schwarz

But the Dec. 29, 2024, death of former US President Jimmy Carter, 100, deserves attention. Carter “had no Irish roots and never visited Ireland before or during his presidency,” Seán Donlon, Irish ambassador to the United States during the Carter and Ronald Reagan administrations, wrote in the Irish Times. “Nevertheless, his intervention in Irish matters in 1977 was hugely significant and opened the door for the constructive involvement of subsequent presidents in working for peace and stability on the island of Ireland.”

Carter broke the mold of US deference to the UK on Northern Ireland as a domestic matter. He incurred opposition not only from London, but also from Foggy Bottom, headquarters of the US State Department. Even John F. Kennedy, famously the first Irish American Catholic president, toed this line, established at the time of partition by David Lloyd George and Woodrow Wilson.

Former Irish diplomat to Washington Ted Smyth told the Times there were two key factors at play in 1977: Carter’s natural inclination to see the North as a human rights issue, and the relationships that SDLP leader John Hume forged with US House Speaker Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill and US Sen. Ted Kennedy, the late president’s brother. These two Irish Americans leveraged their roles in helping Carter achieve his legislative goals in Congress to push him into taking a position on Northern Ireland after nearly a decade of the Troubles.

Carter’s statement emerged on Aug. 30, 1977. In part, it said:

The United States wholeheartedly supports peaceful means for finding a just solution that involves both parts of the community of Northern Ireland and protects human rights and guarantees freedom from discrimination – a solution that the people in Northern Ireland, as well as the governments of Great Britain and Ireland can support. …  In the event of such a settlement, the U.S. Government would be prepared to join with others to see how additional job creating investment could be encouraged, to the benefit of all the people of Northern Ireland. (FULL STATEMENT)

While insisting the US would maintain its policy of “impartiality” on Northern Ireland, the statement opened the door to future involvement by saying the people there “should know that they have our complete support in their quest for a peaceful and just society.” The statement meant the Irish government for the first time was considered an equal partner with the UK. It promised economic aid if there was a solution.

Partial clip of an Associated Press story from page 6 of the Philadelphia Inquirer, Aug. 31, 1977.

It took another 21 years of diplomacy by three more American presidents (Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Bill Clinton) and numerous leaders on both sides of the Irish Sea to reach the Good Friday Agreement. The promised US economic aid “has been, and is being, delivered,” Michael Lillis, a former senior Irish diplomat noted in his Oct. 14, 2024, letter to the Times, shortly after Carter’s 100th birthday.

Carter made a private visit to Ireland in 1995, meeting with Irish President Mary Robinson at Áras an Uachtaráin. He extended his Habitat for Humanity work by building a house in the Dublin suburb of Ballyfermotin. He also found time for some fishing near Kilkenny.

As of publishing this post it is unclear what officials from Ireland, Northern Ireland, and/or the UK will attend Carter’s Jan. 9 state funeral at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. Outgoing President Joe Biden, the nation’s second Irish American Catholic leader, will eulogize Carter, the longtime Sunday school teacher at Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains, Ga.

Trump, meanwhile, has nominated Edward Walsh, president of the Walsh Company in New Jersey, as the next US ambassador to Ireland. One of Walsh’s key qualifications appears to be his membership in the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey. His views on Ireland are unknown. Walsh’s US Senate confirmation is likely to lag others nominated for more critical positions in the administration.

Regardless of what happens with future transatlantic relations, Ireland and Northern Ireland have lost a key American ally of the past in Jimmy Carter.

Best of the blog, 2024

It’s been a good year. My work included two public presentations, publication of my first entry in the Dictionary of Irish Biography, and a trip to Ireland. I reviewed important archival collections at University College Dublin and the New York Public Library. I donated archival material to the University of Galway. The site surpassed its 1,000th post on the way to this 12th annual roundup of the year’s news and content.

In April I presented “The American Press and the Irish Revolution” at the American Irish Historical Society in New York City. The one-hour talk highlighted my ongoing research on this topic. In October I presented my paper, “Ireland’s ‘Bloody Sundays’ and The Pittsburgh Catholic, 1920 & 1972,” at the American Journalism Historians Association’s annual conference in Pittsburgh, my native city. This paper and my other work are found in the American Reporting of Irish Independence section.

The DIB published my entry on Michael Joseph O’Brien. The Irish Catholic (Dublin) published my essay on “The ever-changing American Irish.” I have two longform pieces queued for 2025 publication in scholarly journals. One is a non-Irish subject. Detail once published.

1953 letter & shamrocks.

During my November trip to Ireland I donated some 50 family letters to Imicre, The Kerby A. Miller Collection, Irish Emigrant Letters and Memoirs from North America at the University of Galway. The database of scanned and transcribed letters went online in March 2024.

The letters I donated are primary between a daughter of my Kerry-born maternal grandparents (my aunt) and several cousins in Ireland. They are dated from the 1970s and 1980s. A few older letters between other correspondents are dated from January 1921 through St. Patrick’s Day 1953. I have been told the material will be uploaded to the public database sometime in 2025.

More highlights:

–Most popular post of the year: United Ireland in 2024? Fiction and fact

–Voters in the Republic of Ireland this year decided a constitutional referendum as well as local and European Union elections. The electorate there and in Northern Ireland also decided national elections with historical and contemporary implications. See:

–I toured Flanders fields in Belgium, including the Island of Ireland Peace Park (Photo below), and heard Fergal Keane “On war reporting and trauma, then and now” at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia, Italy.

–I have visited more than two dozen St. Patrick’s churches in four countries. This year I finally walked inside the Basilica of Old St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York. (Photo below)

–Guest posts: Mark Bulik contributed an excerpt from his book, Ambush at Central Park: When the IRA Came to New York; Felix Larkin provided John Bruton (1947-2024), an appreciation.

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My work often requires the assistance of librarians and archivists. Special thanks to the staff at the New York Public Library for their assistance in reviewing the Maloney collection of Irish historical papers and Frank P. Walsh papers; and at UCD with the Eamon de Valera papers and Desmond FitzGerald papers. Here in DC, I am grateful for the personal assistance and access to materials at the Library of Congress, Georgetown University Library, and Catholic University of American Library. This year I also received virtual help from the Kansas City (Mo.) Public Library; Special Collections Research Center at Syracuse (N.Y.) University; the Social Welfare History Archives at the University of Minnesota; and Iona University in New Rochelle, N.Y.

I am grateful to all visitors to this site, especially my email subscribers. Wishing happy holidays to all my readers.

Basilica of Old St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City.

Round tower at Island of Ireland Peace Park in Belgium.

Remembering the Freeman’s Journal & Lartigue monorail

Two Irish business enterprises that ceased operations a century ago remain lively in the nation’s memory. The Listowel and Ballybunion Railway, a unique monorail, made its final journey in October 1924, ending 36 years of passenger and freight service in County Kerry. Two months later, the last issue of the Freeman’s Journal, a 161-year-old national daily, rolled off the presses in Dublin. The events were unconnected, but the railway and the newspaper shared a few touch points.

The well-established Freeman reported the monorail from its Leap Year Day 1888 opening and published the legal notices about the sale of its assets. The single-track train never made much profit, and the new Irish Free State government’s decision to exclude it from the railway nationalization scheme was a fatal blow. Many of the monorail’s passengers–whether locals or visitors–surely carried copies of the Freeman as they wobbled along the 9-mile, elevated rail from the market town to the seaside resort. More significantly, both businesses were attacked by anti-treaty republicans during Ireland’s civil war: the rail line because it was used to transport Free State troops; the newspaper because it editorialized against the “irregulars.”

The Lartigue monorail in Kerry opened on Leap Year Day in 1888. The line closed in 1924.

The Freeman reported that the Dublin judge who allowed the “famous” railway’s receivers to close the line “did so with regret,” as if to imbue the legal formality with a romantic resignation.[1]”Mono Railway To Go”, Freeman’s Journal, Oct. 8, 1924. The paper retold humorous stories of how operators had to balance passengers and livestock on each side of the pannier-style carriages. The monorail, popularly known by the surname of inventor Charles Lartigue, years after was recalled in verse and a few books. In 2003, the Lartigue Monorail museum opened in Listowel, including a replica model operating on a short stretch of track.

The Freeman’s cessation was compelled by “the conditions of the time,” its editors noted. But, they added, there remained “the consolation of good work done, of great aims accomplished, of a a nation freer and happier for the existence of an institution that now passes away and become a part–and an unforgettable part–of a victorious people’s story.”[2]”1763-1924” editorial, Freeman’s Journal, Dec. 19, 1924

The Freeman was certainly the more consequential of the two businesses. Its digitized archive is “said to be the most important newspaper source” for more than a century and a half of Irish political, commercial, and cultural life. Dublin historian Felix Larkin has noted the paper figures prominently in James Joyce’s Ulysses, while the attack on its equipment by anti-treaty republicans reflects today’s threats to the free press in many parts of the world. Larkin encouraged An Post to issue a special stamp commemorating the paper’.

Over the years this site has published several pieces about both enterprises, a few of which are linked below the photo for additional reading. Enjoy.

May 2024 launch of the Freeman’s Journal stamp with, left to right, Aileen Mooney of An Post; Catherine Munro, granddaughter of Martin Fitzgerald, the paper’s last owner; and historian Felix Larkin, chair of the Philatelic Advisory Committee. Photo taken in front of the O’Connell Street, Dublin, statue of Sir John Gray, owner of the Freeman’s Journal from 1841 until his death in 1875.

Freeman’s Journal

Lartigue monorail

References

References
↑1 ”Mono Railway To Go”, Freeman’s Journal, Oct. 8, 1924.
↑2 ”1763-1924” editorial, Freeman’s Journal, Dec. 19, 1924