Patrick Comerford
Limerick City and County Council’s Decade of Centenaries programme for 2023 continues with the publication of a new collection of essays edited by Dr Seán William Gannon, of Limerick City and County Library Service, and Dr Brian Hughes, of the Department of History at Mary Immaculate College, Limerick.
It is a privilege to be one of the contributors to Histories of Protestant Limerick, 1912–1923, which has been published in recent weeks. This is a collection of 10 original essays exploring the experience of Limerick’s Protestant communities during the revolutionary period, when they formed less than 5 percent of the population.
The essays in Histories of Protestant Limerick essays draw on a wide range of traditional and largely untapped local archival sources, including the archives of Saint Mary’s Cathedral, the Limerick Young Men’s Protestant Association, and the newly discovered papers of Robert Donough O’Brien, which are held in Mary Immaculate College, Limerick.
These chapters look at aspects of political, religious, economic, and social life in the city and county in 1912-1923, and they chart the courses taken by Limerick’s Protestant communities to meet the challenges that they faced during this time.
In my chapter (Chapter 6: ‘Church-goers in Limerick During War and Revolution’, pp 83-89), I take as my focus Limerick’s ordinary churches and their congregations and their experience of revolution and war.
Dr Ian d’Alton, a Visiting Research Fellow at the Centre for Contemporary Irish History, Trinity College, Dublin examines the unionist/loyalist politics central to Limerick Protestant life.
Dr John O’Callaghan, of the Atlantic Technological University, Sligo, discusses the anti-Protestant sectarianism to which these politics, amongst other factors, could give rise.
The Revd Robin Roddie, the archivist of the Methodist Historical Society of Ireland, documents the revolutionary experience of Limerick’s Methodist and Palatine communities.
Craig Copley Brown, a research student in Modern Irish History at TCD, looks at life in Saint Mary’s Cathedral and the Limerick Young Men’s Protestant Association in 1912–1923.
Dr Hélène Bradley-Davies, a lecturer in historical and cultural geography in Mary Immaculate College, Limerick, and Paul O’Brien use the recently discovered papers of the Alice Craven Trust to shine a spotlight on the Protestant poor, specifically widows.
Professor Terence Dooley, Professor of History at Maynooth University and Director of the Centre for the Study of Historic Irish Houses and Estates, and Dr Conor Morrissey, Senior Lecturer in Irish and British History at King’s College London, chart the decline of Limerick’s Protestant landed gentry in the longer revolutionary period.
Finally, Dr Deirdre Nuttall, an ethnologist, researcher and writer, looks at Limerick Protestants in early independent Ireland.
In their introduction, Seán Gannon and Brian Hughes write:
“The First World War and its memorials are central to Patrick Comerford’s essay, which takes as its focus Limerick’s ordinary churches and their congregations in 1912−23. It is, Comerford argues, impossible to overstate the war’s impact on Protestant Limerick. It ‘blighted the lives of almost every Protestant family in [1914–18] and in the decades that followed’, as the memorials erected still attest. Attacks on Protestant persons and property during the subsequent War of Independence and Civil War, inevitably perceived as sectarian, exacted a further emotional toll. Yet Comerford writes too of communal resilience, outlining how religious life for all Protestant denominations proceeded with a remarkable degree of routine throughout revolution and war. Again, we can see how churches across the city and county remained open for worship, diocesan organisations continued to meet, and social life was largely maintained. This determination to press on culminated in rapid acceptance of the new dispensation, through declarations of loyalty to the Irish Free State.”
The book also includes three of my photographs: the World War I war memorials in Saint Mary’s Cathedral, Limerick, and Holy Trinity Church, Rathkeale, and the memorial to Limerick members of the Howth and Kilcoole gun running team at Mount Trenchard churchyard, Foynes, where Mary Spring Rice and Conor O’Brien are buried.
A limited number of print copies of this new book are available through Limerick City and County Library Service’s Local Studies Department, and an e-book version of this volume may be downloaded from the Limerick Museum HERE.
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