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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

    The golden era of housing in Tullamore from the 1930s to the 1950s: Clontarf Road, Pearse Park and Marian Place, but Dr Moran, P.P. has reservations. By Fergal MacCabe

    An Architect Revealed

    On Monday 16 February 1953, a Banquet was held in Hayes Hotel Tullamore to celebrate two very significant achievements; the completion of the 74-house Pearse Park and the cutting of the sod for a further 106 houses later to be named Marian Place. These two estates, whose very names evoke the atmosphere of the period, would be joined in 1965 by Kearney Park dedicated to the well-known local politician Joe Kearney.The three schemes together represent a high point in local authority housing not just in Offaly, but in Ireland.

    The large attendance that day included the Minister for Local Government Paddy Smith, the cream of Tullamore society; the clergy, politicians, administrators, police and solicitors, as well as those involved in the delivery of the estates. Buried at the bottom of the extensive list which appears in an entertaining frontpage account of the event in the Offaly Independent of the following Monday, but unidentified as such, was the designer of the schemes, the architect Donald Arthur ‘Bob’ Tyndall M.R.I.A.I. (d.1975). Tyndall who had spent his early career in Shanghai was also engaged to deliver the Tullamore County Clinic and is credited with several housing schemes in the Offaly area. In 1971 his practice became Tyndall Hogan Hurley and went on to become one of the most successful in Dublin, specialising in office and residential developments.

    Tyndall was the latest in the line of designers used by Tullamore Urban District Council to implement an admirable housing programme over the previous fifty years.

    Davitt St of 1906 and 1907. It was the second scheme of the urban council

    An Energetic Council

    The growth of Tullamore in the early days of the nineteenth century encouraged an influx of unskilled and consequently poor workers. To accommodate them, ‘cabin suburbs’ grew up on the approach roads of the town and tenements in its back streets; though none of course on its affluent southern side. As the provision of housing for the labouring classes would not deliver commercially viable rents, there was no incentive for developers and so very little building took place in the second half of the century with consequent overcrowding and public health problems.

    The Local Government (Ireland) Act of 1898 broke the logjam and by 1903 a newly established and energetic Tullamore Urban District Council had taken its first steps to alleviate the problem. In doing so, the town began its expansion into the surrounding countryside which continues to the present day. Tullamore was to differ from many Irish local authorities in using architects to design some of their schemes; most being happy with the skills of engineers. The architectural and civic design qualities of public housing in Tullamore deserve appreciation for this reason.

     Bye Law Housing 1903-1940

    The Council delivered its first scheme of 12 single-storey semi-detached cottages in 1903 at Emmet Terrace designed by the eminent architect Frederick Hicks (1870-1965), whose other work in Tullamore includes zz ‘The Bungalow’ built in 1915 in the grounds of Dew Park, the Williams family estate on the Charleville Road, and most probably, the delightful 1907 terrace of seven houses on Convent View also.

    The F. Hicks designed terrace at Convent View, Tullamore, 1903-7, a private development of the Egan family.

    From 1907 to 1912 the engineer and Town Surveyor  Albert Victor Ashe (1873-) designed  Council schemes, providing 46 houses in Davitt Street and Tyrrells Road at an average cost of £127 per unit. The Co. Down born Ashe lived in the Round House on High Street until he left to join the Royal Corps of Engineers in 1917, handing over his post as Town Surveyor to the civil engineer William Holohan (1894-1956) who occupied it until the late 1930s.

    During Holohan’s tenure, the Council built almost 300 houses. Some may have been designed by Holohan personally or by the County Engineer, Thomas Stanislaus Duggan (1892-1961) as both had modest design skills. However, the Kilbride Street, Healy Street and Dillon Street houses were designed by T.F. McNamara (1867-1947) the architect of Scally’s and the Bridge House.

    Callary Street, mid-1930s

    All of these schemes reflect Public Health Bye Laws and follow the same pattern of straight roads and regular building lines which  simplify services.The carriageways are wide enough for two vehicles to pass and with footpaths on either side. No grass verges, street planting, parks or play areas are provided but at the time of building, the sites were then in open countryside.

    My personal favourites are Park Avenue and Callary Street built in the late 1930s. With gardens front and back, these single-storey, plastered semi-detached cottages with their tiled roofs are charming. Each block features a central advanced gable with a pierced roundel harking back to the Eucharistic Congress of 1932.

    The second council scheme in Tullamore was at Davitt Street, 1906-7. This wonderful picture of the Kearney family ‘deliveroo’ of the 1960s with fresh milk for so many houses and smiles from the girls.

    A Golden Age 1940-1965

    In 1948 the geographer T.W. Freeman observed:

    ‘ The industrial and commercial prosperity of Tullamore has brought in its train severe housing problems, which can only be solved by new building on a considerable scale….some of the back streets of Tullamore still have housing conditions that shock any visitors, and the only consolation is that many poor cottages occupied even thirty years ago are already crumbling into dust’.

    The Public Housing Programme  pursued by the Fianna Fail Government in the twenty years after its coming to power in 1933 has been described by one economist as ‘The Golden Age of Irish Social Housing’. In this period, an extraordinary 55% of all new houses were built by the State or by Local Authorities and at one point 18.6% of the population lived in publicly owned accommodation.

    Embarking on an ambitious house building programme in response to the problems described by Freeman and with encouragement from central government, Tullamore UDC engaged the leading architect and town planner, Frank Gibney to draw up its first comprehensive Town Plan and to use it to identify sites for ‘Working Class Housing’-which is ironic considering the high standard ultimately achieved.

    Three of these schemes were delivered by Tyndall and one by Gibney himself. They would provide fine houses with generous public and private space and of a refined architectural and civic design quality. Arguably, the density was too low and a waste of serviced land. Within a few years it came to be realised that the money invested might have been better spent on projects which would give a more productive economic return and a new approach to the provision of social housing emerged.

    The Clontarf Road scheme officially opened in 1950. It had been under consideration since 1938 but progress was delayed by the war.

    Clontarf Road

    Designed by Gibney, the 82 houses in the Arts and Crafts style fronting onto the Grand Canal at Clontarf Road replaced the picturesque but antiquated thatched cottages of Tinkers Row which were at least a hundred years old.

    Broken into terraces of 8 houses each, the new blocks create a rhythmic effect which, reflected in the waters of the Grand Canal, have become an  iconic image of Tullamore. Each terrace is dominated by an advanced gable extending above the roof line and continuing to the level of the ground floor windows-a typical feature of Gibney’s schemes, utilised for feature buildings in his well known Bord na Mona schemes also. The gable encompasses the entrances to two dwellings.

    The flanking blocks culminate in thrust out gables also but contained within the ridge line. Between both gables are a further two entrances, combined under a semi circular arch. The remaining two entrances are to the side, flanked by battered buttresses, which anchor the overall composition. Roughcast plaster finish and red concrete tiles mix well to give an overall attractive visual composition.

    Pearse Park. Marian Place and Kearney Park

    Designed by Tyndall, Pearse Park (74 houses) and Marian Place (106 houses), share the same format of terraced housing served by rear lanes and enclose a central landscaped park in the case of the latter and a triangular area in the former. Adherence to regular building lines on irregular sites resulted in rear gardens of varying depth-some as much as 30 m. long. No on site parking is provided.

    The two storey terraces display a pleasing proportion of solid and void relationship. A particular feature is the continuous concrete canopy, linking the two front doors, with an intervening, vertically lined nap plaster band.

    On a site identified by Gibney, but not constructed until 1965, Kearney Park (60 houses) is in the same architectural style as Pearse Park and Marian Place and consists of two storey terraced houses of which 20 are provided in two terraces fronting onto Puttaghan Road. A central access road leads to two small and attractive parks enclosed by 40 houses in six terraces.This modest scheme is especially notable for its human scale and intimate sense of place and enclosure.

    Pearse Park completed in 1952 and with its wonderful expanse

    Back to the Banquet

    The Banqueters offered toasts to ‘Ireland’,’The Minister’, ‘The Contractor’. The Chairman of Offaly County Council, Mr. O’Connor exuberantly toasted Joe Kearney, the Chairman of the Urban District Council ,saying that ‘though they were on opposing political platforms, he was the best Chairman in Ireland’. Praise was heaped on the County Manager, the County Engineer, the Town Clerk, the building workers, but no one saw fit to laud or even recognise the designer amongst them who had created the excellent schemes of which they were now so proud.

    Parish priest of Tullamore, 1949-65

    Dr Moran’s Bombshell

    Asked to add a few final words, the Parish Priest and noted historian of Tullamore, the Very Rev. Dr. William Moran said that he hadn’t expected to be called on and was at a loss of what to say. He then proceeded to comprehensively dump on the entire project, presumably to the shock and embarrassment of his audience who had attended his blessing of it some hours earlier.

    It might be the right thing, he said, but it was in entirely the wrong place. It would contribute to further rural depopulation and the decline of smaller communities, which he felt had gone too far. He was personally aware of overcrowding and poor housing conditions in parts of Tullamore, but schemes like these, particularly in the town centre, were not the answer. He opposed new urban schemes and believed that only rural housing should be built because:

    ‘A man came into the town and he stayed in the town and eventually got a house. That man is divorced forever from the land’.

    If they must build these schemes, he said, they should be at least a mile out the Clara or Kilbeggan Roads-though presumably not on the Charleville Road.

    Dr Moran was expressing a sentiment which will still be recognized today- a cri de coeur for the dying vision of de Valera of small self-reliant communities focussed on the land and the parish. It also reflected a suspicion of urban living, prevalent in some Catholic thinking of the time.

    Dr Moran was however, confusing cause and effect. The parishes weren’t declining because Tullamore was expanding. In the 1950s, half a million Irish people, mainly from rural areas, saw no hope or future in their lives and if Offaly people couldn’t find a job in Tullamore or Birr, they would find one in Toxteth or Baltimore. It didn’t matter whether the new houses were in the centre of the town or a mile out the road, they were leaving anyway. Those who stuck it out and stayed would have those fine houses which are as impressive today as they were at their launch in 1953, but at what cost?

    Recently reading that frontpage of that issue of the Offaly Independent for the first time , I was startled to see several mentions of my late brother, the wing-three quarter Tom ‘Speedy’ McCabe, in the Tullamore Rugby notes. With the closure of the Distillery two years later, he too joined the exodus.

    To get out of this ruinous downward economic spiral, the way forward would require not just the rejection of Dev and Dr Moran’s rural vision, but also the reassessment of an expensive housing programme which was draining scarce resources.

    February 1953 marked the completion of 74 houses at Pearse Park and the commencement of 106 at Marian Place, Tullamore

    Fergal MacCabe is an architect and town planner and author of the Residential Density Guidelines. He designed Whitehall and Hophill estates in Tullamore for James Spollen and ‘Glenfircal’ for John  Flanagan as well as many housing schemes in the Dublin area. 

    I love lamp

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