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    Founded in 1938 and re-established in 1969, Offaly History (Offaly Historical and Archaeological Society) aims to preserve and promote the rich heritage of County Offaly. Since 1993, the Society has occupied premises at Bury Quay, Tullamore offering a Bookshop, library, reading room, and lecture hall for researcher and members of the public.  Offaly History Centre is beside the new Aldi Supermarket and Old Warehouse restaurant), and best approached from Kilbride Street via Patrick Street or Main Street.

    The main objective of the society is the collection and sharing of research and memories. We do this in an organised way; through exhibitions, the publication of local interest books, weekly blog posts, monthly lectures, and more. The bookshop and reading rooms at Bury Quay are open to the public Monday to Friday, 9am-4:30pm. Regular updates can also be found at our website, www.Offalyhistory.com and on our social media channels on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and X.

    To promote Offaly History including community and family history

    What we do:

    • Promote all aspects of history in Co. Offaly.
    • Genealogy service for counties Laois and Offaly.
    • Photographic collections of County Offaly
    • Purchase and sale of Offaly interest books though the Society’s book store and website with over 3000 history books in our shop and up to 1000 online.
    • Publication of books under the Society’s publishing arm Esker Press.
    • The Society subscribes to almost all the premier historical journals in Ireland.
    • The Society manages the collections if Offaly Archives under the care of a professional archivist.

    Our Society covers a diverse range of Offaly Heritage:

    • Architectural heritage, historic monuments such as monastic and castle buildings.
    • Industrial and urban development of towns and villages.
    • Archaeological objects and artefacts.
    • Flora, fauna and bogs, wildlife habitats, geology and Natural History.
    • Landscapes, heritage gardens and parks, farming and inland waterways.
    • Local literary, social, economic, military, political, scientific and sports history.
    Offaly History is a non-profit community group with a growing membership of some 150 individuals. The Society focuses on enhancing educational opportunities, understanding and knowledge of the county heritage while fostering an inclusive approach and civic pride in local identity. We promote these objectives through:
    • The holding of monthly lectures, occasional seminars, exhibitions and social media. Organising tours during the summer months to places of shared historical interest.
    • The publication of an annual journal Offaly Heritage – to date twelve issues.
    • We play a unique role collecting and digitising original primary source materials, especially photographs and oral history recordings
    • Offaly History is the centre for Family History research in Counties Laois and Offaly.
    • The Society is linked to the renowned Irish Family Foundation website and Roots Ireland where some 1,000,000 records of Offaly/Laois interest can be accessed on a pay-per-view basis worldwide. Currently these websites have an estimated 20 million records of all Ireland interest.
    • A burgeoning library of books, CD-ROMs, videos, DVDs, oral and folklore recordings, manuscripts, newspapers and journals, maps, photographs and various artefacts (now over 25,000 items and a catalogue online)
    • OHAS Collections
    • OHAS Centre Facilities
    The financial activities of the Society are operated under the aegis of Offaly Heritage Centre c.l.g, a charitable company whose directors also serve on the Society’s elected committee. None of the Society’s directors receive remuneration or any kind. All the company’s assets are held in trust to promote the voluntary activities of the Society. Our facilities are largely free to the public or run purely on a costs-recovery basis.

    Acting as a policy advisory body –  Offaly History endeavors to ensure all government departments, local authorities, tourism agencies and key opinion formers prioritise heritage matters.

    Meet the current committee: Our Committee represents a broad range of backgrounds and interests. All share a common interest in collecting and promoting the heritage of the county and making it available to the wider community.

    2024 Committee
    • Helen Bracken (President)
    • Shaun Wrafter (Vice President)
    • Michael Byrne (Secretary)
    • Dorothee Bibby (Treasurer)
    • Charlie Finlay (Assistant Treasurer)
    • Niall Sweeney
    • Ciarán McCabe
    • Noel Guerin
    • Angela Kelly
    • Rory Masterson
    • Oliver Dunne
    • Frank Brennan
    • Pat Wynne
    • Laura Price
    Co-opted
    • Reneagh Bennett
    • Michael Scully
    • Jim Keating
    • Eamon Larkin
    If you would like to help with the work of the Society by coming on a sub-committee or in some other way please email us at [email protected] or let an existing member know.  
    +353-5793-21421 [email protected] Open 9am-4.30pm Mon-Fri

    Kathleen Cowan, Birr Suffrage Activist. By Rosemary Raughter

    The name of Kathleen Cowan is virtually synonymous with accounts of the suffrage movement in Co Offaly during its most vital phase. As secretary of the Birr Suffrage Society, she reported on its activities in the local and suffrage press, organized and spoke at meetings in the town and throughout the county, and represented it at suffrage gatherings in Dublin. Beyond the fact of her involvement, however, little is known of her background. I was, therefore, particularly pleased to come on her name in the context of some unrelated research, and to realise that *my* Kathleen Cowan was the person described by historian Margaret Hogan as ‘tireless in the cause of women’s issues’ and one of the moving spirits in the campaign locally.[1] This short account of Cowan’s life is intended to fill in some of the blanks in her story.

    Early life

    Born on 6 November 1885 at Cranbrook Terrace, Belfast, Kathleen was the daughter of Thomas Harrison, a law student, and his wife, Mary.  A second daughter, Florence, was born two years later. Thomas was called to the Bar in 1886, but he also had political ambitions, and in 1891 successfully stood for election to Belfast City Council. In the same year, however, his wife died of TB, leaving him a widower and Kathleen and her sister motherless.

    In 1893 Thomas Harrison remarried. His second wife, Lady Cowan as she continued to be known, was the widow of a leading merchant and former Mayor of Belfast. She was now an extremely wealthy woman in her own right, as well as the mother of eight children by her first marriage. For the next few years the couple, together with the two Harrison girls and Lady Cowan’s younger children, lived at her home, Craigavad House, an early Victorian mansion with views of Belfast Lough, near Holywood in Co Down. Thomas Harrison was re-elected to the Council in 1894 and again in 1897. In 1899, however, he resigned his seat, stating his intention to move to Dublin, and by the end of that year the family was established at number 65 Fitzwilliam Square, in the fashionable heart of the capital.

    Education

    The census of 1901 shows Kathleen, her sister and two of her stepsisters living at Fitzwilliam Square and described as scholars. In fact, all four girls were currently pupils at Bedford High School for Girls, founded in 1882 as one of the relatively few establishments in Britain or Ireland offering a full academic curriculum. Here Kathleen excelled – in 1901 she was reported to have come fifth out of over three thousand candidates in the Oxford Local Examination, and went on to win prizes in German and Constitutional History. She also had talent as an actress, and may have taken drama classes in London after leaving school. However, neither she nor any other of the girls in the family went on to university.  In 1904 she made her formal entrance into Dublin society when she was among the debutantes presented to the Lord Lieutenant at the first Dublin Castle Drawing Room of the season, and for the moment her talents were confined to Dublin drawing rooms, with her ‘delightful ease and aplomb’ in performance thrilling her stepmother’s guests at her musical soirees in Fitzwilliam Square.[2]

    Marriage

    On 26 April 1906 Kathleen was married in St Ann’s Church in Dublin to Francis Cowan, a lieutenant in the Antrim Artillery, and son by her first marriage of her stepmother, Lady Cowan. The bride wore white satin with silver embroidery, a long tulle veil and a coronet of orange blossom, and her three bridesmaids white taffeta and ‘white crinoline Gainsborough hats’. Over two hundred guests attended the reception afterwards at Fitzwilliam Square, among them ‘many of the leading people of Dublin and Belfast’, and the presents were described as ‘numerous and costly’.[3]

    Following a honeymoon in Cork and the West of Ireland, Kathleen and her new husband moved to Birr, where they set up home at 1 Wilmer Terrace. She was soon pregnant, and between 1907 and 1911 gave birth to four daughters, but despite this found time to immerse herself in the life of the town, whether that involved riding to hounds with the King’s County Hunt, supporting worthy causes such as  the Birr Jubilee Nursing Association or the NSPCC, presenting toys and story books to the children at Birr Workhouse on Christmas Eve, taking the part of Portia in a Birr Shakespeare Society reading of ‘The Merchant of Venice’, or starring in a comedy put on at Oxmantown Hall in aid of the ‘Titanic sufferers’, when her performance was declared by one critic to have ‘reached a level of excellence not previously attained in Birr’.[4]

    Home Rule

    The confidence and ‘elocutionary powers’ so much admired by Birr theatregoers were also in evidence at an anti-Home Rule meeting chaired by the Earl of Rosse, and held in Oxmantown Hall in July 1912. Following several speeches, and clearly to the surprise of the rest of the audience, ‘a lady’ – Mrs Cowan – rose to speak, and did so, it was noted, ‘without the least trace of nervousness’.  Avoiding any discussion of the wider issue, she chose instead to focus on the possible impact of Home Rule on the Irish education system, which she described as having been starved and neglected by the current administration. However, she expressed a fear that matters would be ‘infinitely worse’ under an Irish government. Changes must be made, she declared, ‘and … those changes must cost money, which Ireland could not afford. Her only chance was the credit of the British Treasury.’[5]

    Oxmantown Hall (National Inventory of Architectural Heritage)

    Women’s suffrage

    On 6 April 1910 the Irish Women’s Franchise League, the suffrage society founded just over a year before by Hanna Sheehy Skeffington and Margaret Cousins, held two meetings at the Printing House Buildings Lecture Room in Birr. The speakers included Kathleen Cowan, who was clearly already a vocal advocate for the cause locally, and who dealt briskly and humorously with ‘some objections quoted to her personally here in Birr against extending the franchise to women’. ‘We want direct influence’, she concluded, ‘and the sooner … the better it would be for the men and women of the country.’[6] Nearly two years later, on 3 February 1912, she was among the organisers of a meeting at Oxmantown Hall, which saw a ‘fair attendance’ turn out to hear Susanne Day of the Munster Women’s Franchise League put the case for the female parliamentary franchise, and two weeks later, on 19 February, she hosted a meeting at her home in Wilmer Terrace, at which a branch of the Irish Women’s Suffrage Federation was formed. She herself was unanimously elected secretary of the branch, which she declared to be non-political and (unlike the IWFL) strictly constitutional. Over the following months, she would become a familiar figure on suffrage platforms in Birr, described in one account as the ‘leading local lady’ of the cause[7], chairing visiting speakers such as Louie Bennett, Charlotte Despard and Alice Abadam, and organizing and speaking at meetings in Banagher, Roscrea and Limerick, as well as farther afield. In August 1913, for example, she managed to combine two of her enthusiasms by participating in a concert given by Sligo IWSF, her recitation once more proving her ‘an able exponent of the rhetorical art’[8], and in December of that year represented Birr at the Suffrage Week Conference in Dublin, chairing a panel entitled ‘If women had votes’, at the Rotunda Concert Rooms.

    Wilmer Terrace, Birr (National Inventory of Architectural Heritage)

    War

    While the outbreak of war in August 1914 posed a dilemma for some suffragists, for those such as Kathleen who supported the union with Britain it was clear that war relief work must for the present take precedence over the suffrage campaign. Indeed, as she herself admitted at what was probably the last such meeting to be held in Birr for some time, on 3 March 1915, ‘it is almost useless to ask people to listen at this time to purely suffragist matters’, and instead the designated speaker, Susanne Day, focused in her talk on the work currently being done by suffragists for the war effort.

    Now living at Croghan House, and with her husband away at war, Kathleen did at least have the company of her stepsister, Helen, whose husband, Major Henry Walter Weldon of the Leinster Regiment, was also at the Front, and who was currently living with her children at Clonbeale. Together the sisters busied themselves with relief work and fundraising under the auspices of the British Red Cross and other aid organisations. In April 1916, for example, they attended a concert in Oxmantown Hall in aid of British prisoners of war in Germany, and in July 1917 Kathleen supervised arrangements for the French Flag Day, which included a fair, and saw the French tricolour flying from business premises and private houses throughout Birr.

    Cartoon from The Lepracaun, 1913

    Final years

    Although Captain Cowan was wounded in action, he did survive the war, and on 10 January 1919 he and Kathleen, together with her sister, Florence, were among the attendance in Oxmantown Hall for the Birr Victory Ball. Drawing together the gentry and military of the locality, the ball was described as ‘a very brilliant event in the social life of the elite of Birr, and probably has never been equalled, in the hall which has been the scene of so many joyous functions of the same order.’[9]

    If this report has a somewhat elegiac air, it is hardly surprising. The 1918 General Election, held just a few weeks earlier, had seen Irishwomen use their parliamentary franchise for the first time, if not yet on the same terms as men. But Sinn Fein’s overwhelming victory at the polls, coupled with the ongoing War of Independence, gave clear indication of impending revolution, and can only have filled most of the revellers on that January night with foreboding. Whether because of this or for purely personal reasons, the Cowans’ time in Birr was coming to a close. In May 1920 the household furniture and other contents of Croghan House were sold at auction, and the family moved north, settling in Helen’s Bay in Co Down, close to other family members and to their shared childhood home at Craigavad. Widowed in 1961, Kathleen died in Belfast in 1968, nearly half a century after leaving Birr. By then in her eighties and among the last of her generation of activists, she took with her memories of those heady days when Birr buzzed with suffrage activity and she herself was its ‘leading local lady’.

    The Irish Citizen, the journal of the Irish suffrage movement, published 1912-1920. The cartoon shows Irish Parliamentary Party leader John Redmond trampling on Irishwomen’s demands for equality.

    SOURCES

    Rosemary Cullen Owens, Smashing times: a history of the Irish women’s suffrage movement, Dublin 1984.

    Louise Ryan, Winning the vote for women: the Irish Citizen newspaper and the suffrage movement in Ireland, Dublin 2018.

    Margaret Hogan, ‘Women’s right to vote, 1918: the campaign’, Michael Byrne ed, Offaly and the Great War, Tullamore, 2018, pp 77-85, pp 81, 79.

    Newspapers consulted via the British Newspaper Archive https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/

    Censuses of Ireland, 1901 and 1911 http://www.census.nationalarchives.ie/

    Records of births, marriages and deaths https://civilrecords.irishgenealogy.ie/churchrecords/civil-search.jsp

    Northern Ireland will calendars https://www.nidirect.gov.uk/services/search-will-calendars

    British Red Cross volunteers during World War I  https://vad.redcross.org.uk/

    [1] Margaret Hogan, ‘Women’s right to vote, 1918: the campaign’, Michael Byrne ed, Offaly and the Great War, Tullamore, 2018, pp 77-85, pp 81, 79.

    [2] Weekly Irish Times, 17 February 1906.

    [3] Northern Whig, 27 April 1906; Dublin Daily Express, 27 April 1906.

    [4] Midland Tribune, 4 May 1912; Leinster Reporter, 4 May 1912.

    [5] Leinster Reporter, 6 February 1909 and 6 July 1912.

    [6] Leinster Reporter, 16 April 1910.

    [7] Leinster Reporter, 2 November 1912.

    [8] The Irish Citizen, 9 August 1913.

    [9] Leinster Reporter, 18 January 1919.

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