Liverpool to Buenos Aires, 1844
The Kilrane Boys
On 13 April 1844 twelve young men from South Wexford left Wexford Quay for Liverpool, and on 21 April they boarded the William Peile bound for Buenos Aires with 115 Irish emigrants aboard. The ship docked on 25 June. Among them was John James Murphy of Haysland in Kilrane, twenty-two years old, travelling with his cousins John and Lawrence and friends John O'Connor, Nicholas Kavanagh, Thomas Saunders, James Pender and Patrick Howlin. A teacher called Walter McCormack wrote a ballad about them - The Kilrane Boys - that Fr Joseph Ranson collected in 1943. John Murphy did well enough in Santa Fe province that a town there is now called Murphy. The ballad blames British laws for the going; the going was forever.
Two pubs, one line
First and last
Both the Kilrane Inn and Culleton's call themselves the first and last pub in Ireland. The reasoning is the same: the N25 is the road off the ferry and through the village, so by road they are the first pour after the boat lands and the last one before you sail. The Inn has the sign that says it; Culleton's says it on its own pages and to anyone who asks. Strictly geography it is whichever sits a few feet closer to the port. Diplomatically, it is both, and arguing about it in either bar will get you a slagging.
Fourteen houses in 1885
A village made by a road
Bassett's Wexford Guide and Directory in 1885 described Kilrane as fourteen houses, four of them slated and the rest thatched. The village grew when the road grew. The opening of Rosslare Harbour in 1906 brought traffic; the N25 brought more; the Europort and the post-Brexit France routes brought more again. By the 2016 census the village was 647 people, up from 432 in 2006 - a fifty percent rise in a decade, all of it riding on the ferry trade and the road that feeds it.