Author: John Mulcahy

Blarney has welcomed many visitors over the years. Some have left a record of their visit for posterity, usually in words, but sometimes in visual media; a drawing, a print, watercolour or oil painting.

The War of Independence in County Cork stepped up a gear on January 2nd 1920 with simultaneous attacks on police barracks in Carrigtwohill, Kilmurry and Inchigeela.

By the will of Nicholas Mahony, his nephews Martin and Edmund Roynane, were appointed trustees of a sum of £5000 to be spent in establishing a convent of Sisters of Charity in Blarney.

For almost 100 years the Sodalities founded by the Sisters of Charity played a prominent part in the spiritual life of the community. Here is their story, told in the words of the convent annals.

The Great War cast a long shadow over Blarney and the surrounding districts. Many young (and some not so young) men joined the armed services at the beginning of the war, some from a sense of duty, some from a need for adventure, but many from sheer economic necessity; to support themselves and their families and to escape the grinding poverty of unemployment and unskilled labour.

The original school was founded by the late Mrs. Peg O’Connor in the Emer Hall, Waterloo Road in 1952. Among the teachers in those early days were Mr. Aodán O’Donoghue, later to become Cigire in the Dept. of Education, and the late Ms. Marie Hobbs, later a Vice-Principal in St. Aloysius, Cork.

War at Sea, Food Shortages, Regulation. The battlefields of Belgium and France may have seemed far away but the war was also being fought just off the coast of Ireland.

The Blarney Tapping Station 1920 – 22 The role of I.R.A. intelligence in the war against the British forces between…