New Iarmhí journal an ideal gift for history buffs

Review by Paul Hughes

“Local history done well,” Dr Paul Connell, Bishop of Ardagh and Clonmacnoise, remarked at the launch of Westmeath Archaeological and Historical Society journal, Iarmhí, “feeds into the national scene, giving us a greater appreciation of realities on the ground, thus preventing us from drawing the wrong conclusions nationwide.”

For many years, the bishop added, “local history was done poorly”, and as the cleric further added, the discipline is done much service by contemporary journals such as this fourth (2025) edition of Iarmhí.

Edited by former teacher and veteran historian Seamus O’Brien, the 2025 iteration deals with a wide array of topics: archaeology, architecture, the Gaelic revival, cartography, medieval history, art, wicked weather, agrarianism, legal history, the aristocracy, popular politics, the diaspora, Mullingar street and business history, crime, military and social history, and book reviews.

Much effort was expended in ensuring as broad and inclusive a geographic spread as possible in this number.

As well as the principal towns of Mullingar and Athlone, the districts of Tyrrellspass, Drumraney, Killare, Kilbeggan, Delvin, Killucan and Moate are among those dealt with by the 28 contributors to the volume.

Readers in south Westmeath will be happy with the material on offer, as articles from Gearóid O’Brien, Martin Timony, Daniel Patrick Curley and Mary O’Malley address topics as diverse as the bridges of Athlone, the high medieval church at Drumraney, and the Land Commission migration scheme.

Gearóid’s forensic examination of the life of Drummer Thomas Flynn, and the circumstances by which he went from being one of the youngest recipients of the Victoria Cross to dying at a relatively young age in Athlone Workhouse, is a particularly interesting inclusion.

Gaps between the local, national and international are bridged, with Peter Wallace and Catherine Campbell focusing on certain Westmeath links with Argentina and Canada respectively.

Sean Murray, a native of New York and great-great-grandson of a Raharney man, presents a new perspective on the always thorny issue of Éamon de Valera’s ancestry (see pages 16 and 17), while widely published historian Cormac Moore looks at the land border in Ireland since partition.

Further international context is explored in Ian Kenneally’s slightly terrifying article entitled ‘Athlone, Moate and the Apocalypse’, in which the Westmeath County Council historian-in-residence draws on documentary sources and interviews with Defence Forces personnel to investigate mid-20th century proposals to house the government in a nuclear bunker in Athlone, in the event that the Cold War turned hot.

“What would you do in a nuclear war?” is the first line of the piece, a thought on everyone’s minds since the outbreak of the war in Ukraine nearly three years ago.

Speaking of Armageddon, the people of Westmeath must have felt like Judgment Day had come on a January night in 1839 known to posterity as ‘The Night of the Big Wind’. So seminal was the moment that elderly people filling out the 1901 census, if unsure of their age, were asked if they remembered Oíche na Gaoithe Móra, and what age they were.

Manus Lenihan’s interesting piece on that red-letter day focuses on Kilbeggan but goes well beyond the boundaries of the town to investigate the impact of the storm across the whole of County Westmeath.

There is even more in this number for Kilbeggan readers, as Martin Linnane examines Ribbonism and violent agrarian activism in the area during the 19th century, and Caroline Barry links the old world with the new in explaining how Twitter solved the mystery of the advent of Kilbeggan’s Miracle Carving.

Of particular interest to this reader was barrister Mary Shine Thompson’s comprehensive analysis of the litigation that followed Brinsley MacNamara’s publication of his locally notorious 1918 novel, 'The Valley of the Squinting Windows' – still a thorny subject in Delvin, even after a century. Meanwhile, with an eye on nearby Killucan, Rob Delaney deep-dives into the anti-tithe agitations in east Westmeath during the 1820s and 1830s.

The landed gentry in Westmeath is dealt with considerably in this volume, and Dr Eugene Dunne brings his extensive knowledge of the county’s aristocracy to bear on a long-overdue bird’s eye study of the illustrious Greville (or Greville-Nugent) family, while historian and former librarian Gretta Connell goes right back to the 17th century and leads us to the modern era with an authoritative treatment of the Reynell family of Ballynegall.

There is a real multidisciplinary feel to some of the contributions to Iarmhí, including Killucan singer-songwriter’s Róisín Gaffney’s brief explanation of the local historical context behind her two songs ‘The Hungry Cry’ and the ‘The Hill of Knockshebane’. Meanwhile, an extra treat is crime author Patricia Gibney’s explanation of the cryptic geography that provides the backdrop to her Lottie Parker books.

Uisneach, one of the key historic sites in Westmeath, receives ample treatment in this edition, thanks to Paul Gosling contributing the second part of his study on the final battles of the Táin Bó Cuailgne in the shadow of the hill. Angus Mitchell, meanwhile, looks at how Uisneach became the centrepiece for a different kind of battle: the Gaelic League’s efforts to promote the Irish language in the pre-revolutionary period.

Other pieces include Janice Mann’s interesting discovery about the nine Mullingar men who signed the unionist Ulster Covenant in 1912; Tom Hunt’s analysis of Daniel O’Connell’s arrival in Mullingar for a monster meeting demanding repeal of the Union in 1843; a short piece on the illustrious contribution to the business life of Mullingar by the versatile merchants, TF Nooney and Sons; and Mary Timony’s fascinating review on the ornate headstones found in various Westmeath graveyards, which were the work of the 18th-century stonemason, Charles Francis.

For the more technical-minded readers, Michael Stanley provides a detailed account of archaeology works and prehistoric/medieval discoveries at Toar Bog, near Tyrrellspass, while Granard native Sarah Gearty, managing editor of the Irish Historic Towns Atlas, amplifies the Mullingar context of the broader atlas project.

Christmas may be over, but a history buff’s thirst for reading is never satiated, and this bumper edition of Iarmhí would make an ideal gift.