Search Results for 'Anti-Catholicism'

Last month Galway Diary explored the sham legend that grew around the so-called ‘Empty frame’ on the wall of the Lynch’s Chapel, or Lady’s chapel, in the historic St Nicholas’ Collegiate church. The late Canon George Quinn pronounced that this was the very frame in which the Bishop of Clonfert, Walter Lynch’s sacred icon of the Madonna and Child once hung, before he was forced to flee just before the arrival of Cromwell’s soldiers in April 1652.

When Charles Dickens first visited the United States in January 1842, the popularity of his books was such that he was mobbed by adoring crowds, feted and dined as the major celebrity that he undoubtedly was, and was guest of honour at a famous Valentine’s Ball in New York attended by 3,000 of the city’s great and good.

The term ‘landed gentry’ conjures up images of The Big House, the Ascendancy, and tally ho-isms, but also absentee landlords, exploitation, rack rents, and the confiscation of land from the native Irish.