Barony of Gaultier Historical Society

🌿 He was born in Dublin in 1854, the son of Sir William Wilde — Ireland's leading eye and ear surgeon — and Jane Elgee, who published nationalist poetry under the name Speranza and who gave her son the gift of a tongue so sharp and so playful and so capable of making the important seem trivial and the trivial seem important that his conversation was considered, by those who experienced it, to be among the finest pleasures available in the English-speaking world. He took that gift to Oxford and then to London and made it the foundation of a career that produced some of the most enduring plays, one of the most perfect novels, and some of the most quoted aphorisms in the English language. And then the world destroyed him for being what he was, which was Irish and brilliant and gay and unwilling to pretend otherwise when pretence was still survivable.

Oscar Wilde's Irishness is more central to his work and his worldview than is usually acknowledged in the English literary tradition that has mostly claimed him. His outsider perspective — the Irishman in London, acutely conscious of the codes and conventions of a society he was simultaneously performing for and parodying — is the structural basis of the comedy in "The Importance of Being Earnest" and "An Ideal Husband." His mother's nationalist background and his father's deep engagement with Irish folklore and antiquity shaped a sensibility that was never fully at ease in English social convention, however brilliantly it appeared to inhabit it.

His trial and conviction for gross indecency in 1895, his two years in Reading Gaol, his exile and death in Paris in 1900 at forty-six — broke a man who had been at the absolute centre of his world. But they did not break the work. "The Importance of Being Earnest" is still being performed. "The Picture of Dorian Gray" is still being read. "De Profundis" — written from prison, addressed to Lord Alfred Douglas — is still one of the most searing accounts of love and betrayal and the cost of living as you are rather than as you are expected to be.

He is buried in Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. His tomb is covered in lipstick kisses. It has always been covered in lipstick kisses.

That seems about right. 🌿

They moved the school outside. 🌿 In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as the Penal Laws made formal Catholic education illegal in Ireland, a quiet and remarkable educational movement took shape across the country. The hedge school, taught in the open air against the shelter of a stone wall or a ditch, sometimes literally under a hedge, became the means by which Irish Catholic children received an education that the law of the land said they could not have.

The hedge schools were taught by itinerant scholars, often men with genuine classical educations who had fallen on hard times, or former seminarians who had not been ordained, or simply local men whose learning was respected in the community. They taught reading, writing, arithmetic, Latin, and Greek. They also, crucially, taught in Irish, preserving the language in a generation when the formal structures that had supported it were being dismantled. The curriculum was improvised and the classroom was the Irish countryside, but the standard of learning in the best hedge schools was genuine. ☘️

The tradition is one of the most extraordinary acts of educational defiance in European history. A population stripped of legal access to schools, churches, and the professions organised itself informally across the fields and laneways of rural Ireland and educated its children anyway. The tenacity it required, from the teachers who risked prosecution and from the families who sent their children to learn in the open air, was of a particular Irish kind: quiet, determined, and not willing to accept that the loss of formal rights meant the loss of what those rights had protected.

The hedge school era ended with Catholic Emancipation in 1829 and the introduction of the National Schools from 1831. The National Schools brought formal education in permanent buildings to the whole population. They also taught almost entirely in English, and the shift in language that followed over the next half century was enormous. The Irish language, sustained partly by the hedge schools, began its long retreat. 📚

What survived of the hedge school tradition was something harder to measure: the Irish habit of placing an extraordinary value on education and on the person who could teach. That value has not diminished.

The school was outside. The learning was not less for it.

🌿 The land question was never simply about land. In Ireland, the question of who owns the soil, who has the right to work it and live from it and be buried in it, was the question that contained all the other questions — about sovereignty, about justice, about the right of a people to exist in their own country on terms of their own choosing. And on a wet April day in County Mayo in 1879, the movement that would finally begin to answer that question gathered on a hillside and decided it had waited long enough.

The Irishtown meeting of April 20th, 1879 is generally considered the opening act of the Irish Land War — the mass agitation movement that, over the following decade, fundamentally transformed the relationship between landlord and tenant in Ireland and eventually transferred ownership of the land from the landlord class to the farming families who worked it. It was not the first such meeting and it was not the largest, but it was the catalyst — the moment when the accumulated fury of a century of rack-renting, eviction, and the memory of Famine mortality found its organised political expression.

Michael Davitt — born in Straide, County Mayo in 1846, his family evicted from their smallholding when he was four years old, emigrated to England, his arm lost in a mill accident at eleven, educated in prison while serving a sentence for Fenian arms trafficking — arrived at Irishtown with a specific, radical vision: the land of Ireland should belong to the people of Ireland, not to a landlord class whose title to it derived from conquest and confiscation. He was one of the few in the Land League leadership who went beyond the demand for fair rents and tenant rights to the demand for peasant proprietorship — the actual transfer of ownership.

Daniel O'Connell had shown that mass organisation could move mountains. Davitt took that lesson and applied it to the land. Charles Stewart Parnell took it to Westminster. Between them, they changed Ireland's landscape — literally — in ways that are still visible in every farmhouse in Connacht standing on land that is now owned by the family that works it.

That meeting on the wet Mayo hillside started it. 🕯️

He was born in Dublin. He died in Dublin. And in between, he used his pen to tear apart every powerful person who dared ignore the suffering of the Irish poor. ☘️

Jonathan Swift is remembered the world over as the author of Gulliver's Travels. But in Ireland, he was something far more dangerous: a satirist with a conscience, a churchman with a fury, and a voice that refused to be silenced.

In 1729, he published A Modest Proposal — a savage, darkly comic essay suggesting that the Irish poor should sell their children as food to the English rich. It was not a recipe. It was a scream. A brilliant, devastating indictment of British indifference to Irish starvation, wrapped in the language of polite economics. The English didn't know whether to be horrified or embarrassed. That was exactly the point.

Swift spent decades as Dean of St. Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin, using his platform to defend the Irish against exploitation, currency manipulation, and colonial neglect. He was one of the first public figures to argue loudly and publicly that Ireland deserved to be treated as a nation, not a resource.

Drop your county below and tell us: did you learn about Swift in school, or did Ireland's greatest satirist somehow get left out of the lesson? ⚔️

He built the Spider Light /Screw Pile in Waterford Harbour at Passage East.

A blind Irishman helped sailors see in the dark.

Alexander Mitchell was born in Dublin in 1780 and lost his sight as a young man. But he went on to invent the screw-pile foundation, a system that allowed lighthouses to be built on mudbanks, shifting sands and soft seabeds.

His invention helped place lights where sailors needed them most, guiding ships safely through dangerous waters around the world.

One of his most famous works, Spit Bank Lighthouse in Cork Harbour, was built on his screw-pile foundations between 1851 and 1853 and is still in use today.

A blind Irish engineer, helping guide ships safely through the dark.

Some stories deserve to be remembered.

📖 Fact Friday

Did you know? The original Michael Davitt family home no longer stands today.

During the years of the Great Famine, it was common for landlords to demolish or burn tenants’ cottages after eviction. This was often done to prevent families from returning to the land and to clear estates.

The Davitt family home was among the many houses lost during this difficult period in Irish history. These events helped shape Michael Davitt’s lifelong commitment to land reform, justice, and the rights of ordinary people.



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