29 July 1848
The Battle of Ballingarry
William Smith O'Brien was a Protestant landlord and MP for Limerick who had converted to the cause of Irish independence after watching the Famine hollow out his county. By July 1848 he was leading what remained of the Young Ireland movement through Kilkenny and into Tipperary, gathering supporters - perhaps 600 people at the height of it, though fewer than 50 had weapons. On the 29th they caught up with a unit of 46 Irish Constabulary officers at Farranrory, a townland four kilometres from Ballingarry. Sub-Inspector Trant barricaded his men into Widow McCormack's farmhouse and took her five children as hostages. O'Brien went up to the parlour window and offered the constables their freedom if they surrendered their arms. They opened fire. Two rebels were killed - Thomas Walsh and Patrick McBride. More police arrived. The rebel force scattered. O'Brien hid in a cabbage patch; he was found two days later and arrested. He was tried with Thomas Francis Meagher, Terence Bellew MacManus and Patrick O'Donoghue, sentenced to death - the sentence commuted, under public pressure, to transportation for life - and sent to Van Diemen's Land in 1849.
The building that survived
The Famine Warhouse
Margaret McCormack's house became a National Monument in 1989, was renovated between 2000 and 2001, and was officially renamed the Famine Warhouse 1848 in 2004. The name does double work: it reminds you that the rebellion and the Famine were the same event, that the people in the field that day were not romantic insurgents but a population that had been starving for three years and had nothing left to lose. The McCormack family themselves left for America in 1853, five years after the battle, which tells you something. The OPW manages the site now. It opens in the afternoons, with limited hours in winter - check before making the drive.
The Protestant rebel from Limerick
William Smith O'Brien
O'Brien was an unlikely revolutionary: a landowner, an MP, a man who had opposed Daniel O'Connell's repeal campaign on constitutional grounds as recently as 1843. The Famine changed him. By 1848 he was in Paris watching the revolutions of that year sweep through Europe, and he came home convinced that Ireland needed to do the same. The attempt at Ballingarry lasted an afternoon. O'Brien was transported to Tasmania, where he initially refused the parole offered to the other leaders and was held in harsher conditions at Maria Island and Port Arthur. He was eventually given a conditional pardon in 1854, an unconditional one in 1856, and returned to Ireland to a public welcome that suggested how differently the country remembered Ballingarry from how the authorities intended. He died in 1864. A monument to him stands on O'Connell Street in Dublin, placed there in 1870.
Four hundred years of digging
The Slieveardagh coalfield
Coal was being mined in the Slieveardagh hills when the civil survey of 1654 was carried out - the record notes it as 'suitable for blacksmiths at Coolquill.' Commercial operations continued for the next three and a half centuries. Ballingarry Collieries (Production) Ltd operated from 1957 until 1972 and was the largest employer in the district during the 1960s. Smaller operations continued into the 1980s; the last commercial mines closed in 1989 when pumping costs and poor coal quality made the deep workings uneconomic. The shafts are flooded now. The landscape around the village still carries evidence of it - spoil heaps, old headframes, the layout of a community built around shifts and wages rather than farming.