When was humphrey osullivan born

It was known as Callainn an Chlampair -Callan of the Ructions. It was noted for its extreme poverty in a country where the great majority of the people lived under wretched conditions. He certainly displays many of their talents in his diary. He says the sticks were brandished like swords. He mentions for the 26 th May the Fair of Ballingarry. Sponsored Search. Is Humphrey your ancestor? Please don't go away!

Login to collaborate or comment , or contact the profile manager, or ask our community of genealogists a question. Sponsored Search by Ancestry. Search Records. Businesses are told to specialise, and finance companies frown on anyone whose business plan is not strait-jacketed to one thing and one thing only. This would not have suited Amhlaoibh at all.

He loved trying new ventures, changing courses at various times in his life. Being an urban entrepreneur suited him, but at the same time he sowed crops and kept pigs.

Yet, he missed teaching. The proof of this is that he re-opened his school in May Soon, he had thirty students, but it was short-lived and he closed the school for the last time in Not only that, he was becoming increasingly aware of his rising position in local society and his conscience was often pricked by the deprivation that surrounded him. English and continental tourists to Ireland often remarked on the extreme poverty that plagued the country. Many of the descriptions are harrowing, and Callan was deemed to be one of the poorest towns anywhere in Ireland.

Amhlaoibh was only too conscious of this desperate situation. He had started keeping a diary in January and references to the horrific living conditions of many of the townspeople crop up time and time again.

He was not content with merely recording their sufferings, he wanted to do something to alleviate them. When the local landlord, Lord Clifden, tried to clear the commonage of hovels in which the poor lived, Amhlaoibh was a member of a group who opposed him. Leasing land in conacre outside the town for the cultivation of potatoes and oats, and trafficking in meal and pigs, he managed to expand the business during the depression of the early s.

He obtained retail merchandise hardware etc. He initiated his diary in January , making the first entry in English. Succeeding entries were in Irish, and the diary included within its horizon notes on social conditions, customs, agriculture, prices, and political events; it is not confessional.

Evidence internal to the diary suggests that its birth may have owed something to the onset of illness in his wife. It was clearly intended for public readership, though never deadened by the usual devices of literary construction.

Influenced seemingly by the letters of Gilbert White of Selborne, such a journal would have been revolutionary in concept in contemporary Irish letters, which at the time were confined largely to poetry and song.