My story of Chaim Herzog and the Levitas brothers has become a topical tale at this evening’s book launch in Dublin

The plaque unveiled by Chaim Herzog in Herzog Park, Rathgar … his Dublin childhood is recalled in one of my essays in ‘Christmas and the Irish’ edited by Professor Salvador Ryan and launched in the RIA this evening (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Patrick Comerford

I am in Dublin this evening for the launch of Professor Salvador Ryan’s new book, Childhood and the Irish, A Miscellany in the Royal Irish Academy. The book, which is being launched by RTÉ’s Miriam O’Callaghan, is published by Wordwell Books and includes two contributions from me.

One of my essays is topical this evening in a way that I never expected it to be when I was subitting my contributions to this new book. ‘In Four boys growing up in Dublin’s ‘Little Jerusalem’ and a synagogue fire’, I tell the story of how a youthful Chaim Herzog, who lived on Bloomfield Avenue, and three Levitas brothers, Max, Morry and Sol, who lived on Warren Street, all of my father’s generation, almost set fire accidentally to Lennox Street Synagogue late one Saturday 100 years ago, back in 1925.

Chaim Herzog (1918-1997), was born in Belfast but had moved to Dublin in 1919 when his father, Dr Yitzhak Herzog, became the first Chief Rabbi of Ireland. He later went to school in Wesley College, Dublin, and would become the President of Israel (1983-1993). Herzog Park in Dublin was named in his honour during one of his return visits to Dublin. He had fought against the Nazis in World War II, took part in the liberation of several Nazi concentration camps, including Bergen-Belsen, and became involved in left-wing politics as a member of the Labour Party. His son Isaac Herzog is a former leader of the Israeli Labour Party and is the present President of Israel.

The other three boys in the incident, the Levitas brothers, eventually moved to the East End of London, where they became heroes in the Battle of Cable Street in 1936 and the Spanish Civil War.

The councillors who wanted to change the name of Herzog Park at a meeting of Dublin City Council this evening, at the same time as this book is being launched, would do well to remember the true grit of these true Dubs who resisted racism and fascism all this lives. Many of them, however, continue to revere the statue in Fairview Park of the Nazi collaborator Sean Russell.

With Professor Salvador Ryan at a previous book launch in the Royal Irish Academy, Dawson Street, Dublin

The new book being launched this evening includes 80 essays from historians, folklorists, archaeologists, theologians, anthropologists, poets, novelists, artists, literature scholars and educationalists, who cast light on the lived experience of children in Ireland.

The contributions range from the scholarly to the deeply personal, with vignettes from almost every county in Ireland. This anthology offers an invaluable resource for all who are interested in the social, cultural and religious history of childhood in Ireland.

The topics include: childhood in early Irish saints’ lives; childhood in medieval Irish literature; remembering the children who died violently during the upheavals of 17th century Ireland; ‘foundlings’ and parish-based care for children in the 19th century; child prisoners; a New York Irish ‘street boy’ in the American Civil War; children and the belief in ‘changelings’; childhood disability; why Manchester City might be considered ‘Monaghan’s best youth club’; the educational experiences of Jewish children and of the children of RIC officers in early 20th century Ireland; the childhood of James Joyce; seasonal migration and childhood farm labour; the origins of the summer Gaeltacht course; the ‘sweet-shop’ culture of Irish childhood; the banbhs who went to the ball in 1930s Offaly; mid-20th century school strike; a Dublin school tour to Lourdes in 1954; childhood among the Travelling community; the evolution of First Communion rituals; a UK-based scholar’s childhood experience of learning different histories in Belfast and Dublin schools; blended family culture in contemporary Ireland; and many more.

Salvador Ryan is Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Saint Patrick’s Pontifical University, Maynooth, with an interest in religious and cultural history from the Middle Ages to the 20th century. This is the ninth book I have contributed to that he has either edited or co-edited.

Those other books include Christmas and the Irish (2023), Birth and the Irish (2021), Marriage and the Irish (2019), and Death and the Irish (2016), all from Wordwell Books; We Remember Maynooth: a College across Four Centuries (Dublin: Messenger Publications, 2020); The Cultural Reception of the Bible: explorations in theology, literature and the arts (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2018); Treasures of Ireland, Vol III, To the Ends of the Earth (Dublin: Veritas, 2015); and Tresures of Irish Christianity, Volume II, A People of the Word (Dublin: Veritas, 2013).

He is also the editor of The Irish Theological Quarterly, to which I have contributed often, and the editor of Under Crimblin Hill, Journal of the Dunkerrin Parish History Society – I have contributed a paper to the latest volume (2026), which was launched in the Barack Obama Plaza in Moneygall last Friday night.

Among my friends, Facebook friends, and academic and clerical colleagues who are included in this new collection are Ian d’Alton, Anne Marie D’Arcy, Séamus Dooley, Crawford Gribben, Kevin Hargaden, Mark Humphries, Laurence Kirkpatrick, Michelle McGoff-McCann, Patsy McGarry, Ida Milne, Miriam Moffitt, Father Colmán Ó Clabaigh OSB, Thomas O’Loughlin, Pádraig Ó Macháin, Clodagh Tait, Natalie Wynn, and, of course, Salvador Ryan.

In ‘Within the Sound of Church Bells’, my childhood neighbour, the writer, songwriter and broadcaster Max McCoubrey, recalls many details of childhood in Dublin 6 that resonate with me.

My contributions to this book are ‘36. Four Boys Growing up in Dublin’s ‘Little Jerusalem’ (pp 153-156) and a Synagogue Fire’, and ‘39. The Children of the Holocaust who Called Ireland Home’ (pp 166-170).

I have read through some of the other essays and contributions and browsed through others at the proof-reading stages, and I am looking forward to reading many more after this evening's book lauch. But, more about this book and my two essays in the days or weeks to come. The book is out in time to include on your Christmas presents list.

• Childhood and the Irish, A Miscellany (Dublin: Wordwell Books, 2025), ISBN: 9781916742192 (paperback), xviii + 344 pp, €25. See www.wordwellbooks.com

A missed opportunity to visit Barack Obama at the launch of a history journal in Moneygall

A visit to the Barack Obama Plaza near Moneygall and Dunkerrin some years ago

Patrick Comerford

I had an invitation to the Barack Obama last night but couldn’t get there.

No, it was not an invitation to meet Barack Obama. But it was invitation to the launch of the latest issue of Under Crimblin Hill, the Historical Journal of the Dunkerrin Parish History Society, edited by my friend and colleague, Professor Salvador Ryan of Maynooth.

The Barack Obama Plaza is a motorway service area at Junction 23 on the M7 motorway in Co Tipperary, and beside the village of Moneygall, just across the county border in Co Offaly. For the five years I was living in Askeaton, Co Limerick, as priest-in-charge of the Rathkeale Group of Parishes, this had been a regular ‘pit stop’ on the road to and frame Dublin.

The Barack Obama Plaza is named after President Barack Obama, whose great-great-great-grandfather, Falmouth Kearney, lived in Moneygall and emigrated to the US in 1850. The plaza opened in 2014, and includes an Obama museum-visitor centre, a bronze bust of Barack Obama by Mark Rhodes, and life-sized bronze sculptures of Barack and Michelle Obama, also by Mark Rhodes.

When Barack Obama visited Moneygall in 2011, he met distant relatives and drank a pint in Ollie Hayes’s Pub, where Michelle Obama tried her hand at pouring a pint.

The nearby village of Dunkerrin, Co Offaly, is just south of Roscrea and near the Co Tipperary border and junction 23 at Moneygall. Dunkerrin Parish History Society was revived in 2014 after a 25-year lapse, and launched its journal Under Crimblin Hill that year.

So, the Barack Obama Plaza was an appropriate and convenient venue for the launch of the latest edition of Under Crimblin Hill last night, when the guest speaker was local artist Philip Ryan, who launched this latest edition (volume 5, 2026).

Salvador Ryan invited me to contribute to this edition of the journal with a paper on the ‘Comerford Crown’ or ‘Ikerrin Crown’, a long-lost archaeological artefact probably dating from the Bronze Age. It was discovered in the Devil’s Bit, near Ikerrin. Co Tipperary, in 1692 and was taken to France by the Comerford family who owned it for over a century, until the mid-1790s, when it was lost during the ‘Reign of Terror’ in the aftermath of the French Revolution.

Although it has not been seen for almost 2½ centuries – perhaps even 3½ centuries – the ‘Comerford Crown’ or ‘Ikerrin Crown’ remains an object of fascination. Although its function was never ascertained and remains uncertain, it became a symbol of Irish identity in the early 19th century, and is said to informed the design in 1843 of Daniel O’Connell’s green velvet ‘Repeal Cap’.

The crown is sometimes referred to by archaeologists as the ‘Devil’s Bit Mountain gold cap.’ The ‘Milesian Crown’ was a more popular term in the 19th century because of the symbol that was based on this crown or inspired by it. Yet, despite all the speculation about the crown, it remains an enigma.

I was so sorry to miss the launch of the journal last night, but I hope to receive a copy when I meet Salvador at the launch of his latest book, Childhood and the Irish, in Dublin next week.

Meanwhile, more about the journal, the Comerford Crown, and that new book in the days or weeks to come, hopefully.

A mound that stands on the soft border between counties and provinces

The motte or hill between Ikerrin and the Barack Obama Plaza is clearly visible where the M7 weaves in and out between Tipperary and Offaly (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2019)

Patrick Comerford

On the road between Limerick and Dublin, I regularly pass an interesting motte or hill on the M7 near Ikerrin in Co Tipperary and close to the Barack Obama Plaza in Moneygall, Co Offaly.

On this short stretch of the road, the county and provincial boundaries between Tipperary and Offaly, between Munster and Leinster, weave in and out, backwards and forwards, through the motorway – the very model of a ‘soft border’ and how the lines drawn on maps in the past are irrelevant to the needs of today’s commerce and traffic.

This motte or hill looks look an up-turned or inverted pudding bowl, and is, perhaps, a reminder of past divisions and boundaries in this locality. But I still have to explore its true history and significance.

The motte stands on a hill overlooking a small stream in townland of Moatquarter, close to Castletown and with a clear view of the countryside for miles.

It is shaped like an inverted bowl, is about 10 metres high and measures 44 metres across at the base. It is surrounded by a deep fosse and a protective bank about two metres high. The bailey to the north was extensive but the surrounding bank has been levelled.

Local tradition has claimed that this may have been the inauguration mound of the O’Carrolls of Ely O’Carroll country, a powerful local family of Gaelic Irish chieftains. But perhaps that mound was just an Anglo-Norman motte.

The motte is described on the website archaeology.ie as standing near the south end of a roughly north-south ridge, overlooking a valley, in pasture. The land rises steadily east of the site, although the slope is still overlooked by a motte. A church and graveyard, a rectangular enclosure and sunken ways can be seen on the opposing ridge to the south-south-west.

The site consists of a steep-sided, flat-topped mound with a classic pudding-bowl profile. It is enclosed from east to south to north-west by a fosse that has been dug into the ridge. The enclosing bank on the south-east side appears to be the remains of the original ridge and is actually a false bank or counterscarp. There is no visible trace of a bailey. A National Monuments Preservation Order was placed on the site in 2008.

There is also a church and graveyard site nearby at Drumroe with a bullaun stone.

In her book Royal Inauguration in Gaelic Ireland c. 1100-1600: a Cultural Landscape Study, Elizabeth Fitzpatrick says this ‘motte’ at Moatquarter, in the Barony of Ikerrin in north Tipperary, has been described in conflicting terms as both ‘the best known Anglo-Norman earthwork in Ely O'Carroll’ and ‘the old inauguration site of the kings of Éile.’

However, she points out that the traditions that this mound was once the inauguration place of the Ó Cearbhaill in only 90years old and ‘derives solely from a local “tradition” documented in 1929.’

This local tradition can only be traced to A History of the Diocese of Killaloe by the Revd Aubrey Gwynn and Dermot Gleeson, where it is stated: ‘Hereabouts was certainly the centre of the Ua Cerbaill rule, and also of the Norman lordship.’

Fitzpatrick also points to the proximity of the mound to an Anglo-Norman caput at Dunkerrin, less than 3 km miles away, and the fact that Drumroe is on the other side of a river, in a different parish and county. She questions the defensive uses of the mound and she compares it to another inauguration mound at Coggins Hill, Co Sligo.

Derek Ryan points out that the mound is right on the border between two baronies – Clonlisk and Ikerrin – but is actually in Ikerrin. In later times, Ikerrin is referred to as O’Meagher country during the reign of Henry VIII. He asks whether it could also have been an inauguration mound for the O’Meaghers in later times.

There are no precise records of the mediaeval function of this mound in an area of many boundaries and borders, where the control of lands and the claims of clans in control ebbed and flowed over the decades and the centuries. I must get out during the journey some day, and explore the site on foot myself.

Searching for Pugin and finding Obama

Lynn phbotographs Katerina photographing John outside a shopfront in Moneygall with a poster proclaiming President Barack Obama’s ancestral roots in the village (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2011)

Patrick Comerford

There was a full red moon rising above Moneygall as we passed by President Barack Obama’s ancestral village on the motorway last night.

Five of us – two Americans, one Greek and two Irish – spent a sunny day in Killarney and Adare, but on our way to the south-west from Dublin, we had an early morning stop in Moneygall on the borders of Offaly and Tipperary. The village is in Co Offaly, but the local GAA club has its grounds in Co Tipperary, and the whole place is in the North Tipperary constituency. I wonder are they going to ask President Obama which county he supports.

They’re painting the town to get it ready for next month’s visit – they may not be painting it red, but that’s the colour they’ve already painted the entrance to the GAA club, which plays in red and black. As we walked along the main street, men were up ladders and down on their knees, painting and scraping.

Flags fluttering outside Ollie Hayes’s pub in Moneygall (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2011)

This is a place with a population of less than 300. But it has two pubs, five shops, a post office, a school, a church – and its very own exit from the M7, Junction 23.

The waking residents of Moneygall were almost outnumbered by the carload of us who arrived early yesterday. When they’re all awake they are certainly going to be outnumbered by President Obama’s entourage and security detail next month.

Apart from the flags fluttering outside Ollie Hayes’s pub, the friendly faces on the streets and the presidential photographs decorating the shop windows, there was little to keep us in Moneygall – no early morning coffee shop, no rest rooms for the three passengers cramped in the back seat, no souvenir stalls, and no cut-out look-a-likes to be photographed beside.

The next stop was Adare. For the real purpose of this journey was to show the three students the charm of Adare and Killarney while I caught up on some photographs of Pugin work that I had missed at the end of last year.

Adare Manor ... Pugin contributed to this Gothic extravaganza at the invitation of the Earls of Dunraven (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2011)

We stopped at Adare Manor in the warm sunshine, and then drove down to the village for coffee in the Adare Heritage Centre. We strolled through the main street, visiting Holy Trinity Church – probably the most beautiful Roman Catholic parish church in Ireland – and looking at the thatched cottages with their pretty, chocolate-box-style, flower-filled gardens.

Father and son confused in a plaque outside Saint Mary’s Cathedral, Killarney (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2011)

It took over an hour to get from Adare to Killarney. After sandwiches and more coffee and a stroll through the town, the five of us visited Saint Mary’s Cathedral early in the afternoon. It was disappointing to notice that the plaque outside the cathedral declares it is the work of Edward Pugin and not of his father, Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin.

Woodford House ... Pugin added the Gothic details to an earlier house (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2011)

Then the other four headed off to drive around the Lakes of Killarney while I went to photograph Woodford House, which Adrian Hilliard has helped me to identify as one of the few examples of domestic architecture by AWN Pugin in Ireland.

Mary O’Connell was very welcoming as she pointed out how an earlier house, built in the 18th century by the Fitzgerald family, had been extended to the front by Pugin, at the invitation of the Earl of Kenmare. At the time, Pugin was working on Saint Mary’s Cathedral, and his work at Woodford House includes a Gothic-style window inserted above the stairs in the original house, and a Gothic-revival, three-bay facade added to the front of the house.

Back in Killarney, I photographed the inside of the church at the Franciscan Friary, and the Covent of Mercy on the corner of New Road, both Pugin works, and visited the former Presentation Convent beside the cathedral, only to be greeted with the sad news that nothing of the former Pugin chapel has been retained in recent rebuilding and refurbishing.

It was still sunny when I caught a taxi up to Kate Kearney’s Cottage to join the other four for a glass of wine. In the warm, late evening sunshine, I mused: was Kate Kearney related to President Obama’s Kearney ancestors in Moneygall?

On our way back to Dublin, the five of us stopped once again in Adare for dinner at the Blue Door, a restaurant in one of the traditional thatched cottages on the Main Street. It was dusk as we left, and the sun was setting behind Holy Trinity Church.

As we passed Moneygall once again on the M7, it was dark. We were listening to Bruckner’s Mass in E Minor and a red moon was rising over the village. By the time we got back to Dublin, the moon was full and yellow, and Monday had tuned into Tuesday.