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About
Derryveagh Evictions: History, Ireland, Dispossession and Donegal.
Bio
Professional Bio for Robert Spiegelman
Contact
Contacting Derryveagh Evictions Then and Now
Credits
Thanks to everyone who makes this project successful
Introduction to the Derryveagh Evictions and the History of Dispossession in Ireland
Derryveagh Evictions: History, Ireland, Dispossession and Donegal.
Resources and Links
learn more about the Derryveagh Evictions
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Posts
Derryveagh Evictions, full gallery
All Derryveagh images in one gallery
Gilded Age Psyches: An Epic of Victorians Run Wild
A lecture by Robert Spiegelman Drawing on original research, on-site photos and his Internet trilogy, Dr. Robert Spiegelman presents a multimedia tour-de-f...
The Derryveagh Evictions - Coillte remembers
The forest property of Derryveagh lies in an all but deserted and now silent valley on the foothills of the Derryveagh mountains and skirts the western shore...
A Plaque Too Far…
A Plaque Too Far… TO THE SACRED MEMORY OF THE PEOPLE OF THE DERRYVEAGH EVICTION AD 1861 \
Players and Places
WHO’s WHO An evolving Who’s Who and Where and When of the Derryveagh Evictions and its Aftermath (In progress… Add your players!)
The Evicted Families of Derryveagh
The names of people uprooted in April 1861 by order of John George Adair.
The Preservers: Keeping Derryveagh’s Memory Alive…
In the front rank of those who preserve Derryveagh…
Feared more than God Almighty
Jack Adair was one of the most unpopular landlords in this country, and I heard a story of him asking one of his agents one day if he was afraid of him. The ...
A Welcome Down Under: At the Immigration Depot
ARRIVAL OF THE DONEGAL EMIGRANTS – The ship Abysinnia which had been anxiously looked for for some weeks past arrived in Sydney on Thurdsay, having left Ply...
Derryveagh Evictions
Against the silence, every picture tells its tale
The Adairs of Donegal
Dr. Robert Spiegelman “The Adairs of Donegal: Towards a Trans-Atlantic Game Plan” in Donegal Annual: Journal of the County Donegal Historical Society no. 59 ...
Dispossessions
Where and how our fates are linked
The Laois Connection
Where John George Adair comes from.
Ascendancy
Ascendancy The lords and other landowners of Ireland, known, together with their relations as the Ascendancy, long after they had ceased to be in the ascenda...
Poverty in 1841 Ireland
content gallery Poverty in Ireland on the Eve of the Famine, 1841.
Ireland’s 26 counties
content gallery A map of Ireland by County.
The Great Hunger
content gallery Severity of the Famine in Ireland, 1845-49
Donegal
content gallery County Donegal: At a Glance
Derryveagh: The Eviction Zone
content gallery Adair cleansed most Gaels from the region around Loch Gartan (R) to own the private m...
Cromwell’s Impact
content gallery Effect of Cromwell on Land Ownership in Ireland 1641/1703
Adair’s Homeland
content gallery In Queen’s County (Laois), where Adair was born and reared. (See Belle Grove nr. Ball...
Then and Now: Roads to and from Derryveagh
Roads to Derryveagh
A Tale of Two Houses
Links and Views of Bellegrove (Rathdaire) and Glenveagh Castle
Self-Consuming Consumers
By the 1860s, big house life for most landlords had returned to one of splendor and plenty. Most owners spent lavishly on maintaining them as they had done i...
The Saga Begins: A Way to Say Mine
Adair first saw Glenveagh in 1857 wheile on a tour of the area and, in his own words, he was ‘enchanted by the surpassing beauty of the scenery.’ After his v...
First off the Lot…
The family of the Widow Mc Award was the first to face the terror of the Crowbar Brigade. The Sheriff, accompanied by Adair’s new Estate Manager, approached ...
On the First Night, and counting…
At night the scene became fearfully sad. Passing along the base of the mountain the spectator might have observed near to each house its former inmates crouc...
What the Famine Couldn’t Do…
By two, Wednesday afternoon, the terrible work had been accomplished and a deathly silence descended over the whole area. The Derryveagh District had been cl...
Numbers Alone Cannot Express…
The official Derryveagh Eviction Report tells us that there were 46 houses from which 47 families were evicted. 159 children were put out on the road. 28 hom...
Past Events
2007 Events APRIL, NYC: ACIS Conference Dr. Spiegelman presents on the Derryveagh Evictions & America at the 45th Annual Meeting of the American Confer...
The Farewell Speech:…Till a letter comes from you
Friends have reached out their hands to you; these friends await you on the shore of that better land…Before you take your foot off your native land, promise...
News Reaches Parliament: Should Adair Lose his Titles?
Motion made and Question proposed: “That, having regard to the papers which have been laid before this House in relation to the evictions which have recentl...
A Debate & The Vote
The Debate William Scully MP “[Derryveagh is] a case of oppression that could not be paralleled in any part of the world out of Ireland [whose] “scenes were ...
Sent to Another Plane of Being…
…[T]o be transported so far [away], the chance of ever coming back is so minute that it was almost as absolute a fate - Australia - as death is. It’s the sam...
After the Battering Ram: The Voyage Down Under
When news of the Derryveagh evictions reached Sydney, there was great consternation and concern for the victims. Archdeacon McEncroe bean fundraising in Sydn...
Oceans of Consolation
When Irish Australians spoke of ‘home,’ they often called to mind a social environment peopled by relatives or neighbours… The Victorian ideal of home as a f...
Realities of Irish Life: The Ribbon Conspiracy
There are few who have not heard of the Ribbon Soceities of Ireland; those dark and mysterious confederacies which, springing up from tme to time in differen...
Aftermath: A View of Glenveigh Castle…
At last we came in sight of Loughveigh lying cradled among the rocks, and got a glimpse of the white tower of Glenveigh Castle. There is a small skirting of ...
Aftermath: A View of Derryveagh
Since Mr. Adair depopulated Derryveigh, and gave it over to silence, the roads have been neglected, and have become rather difficult for a car. The relief wo...
Leaving Home: On the Road to Exile
On the day they were to set out for Liverpool, a strange scene was witnessed. The cavalcade was accompanied by a concourse of neighbours and sympathisers. Th...
Aftermath: Interview with an Evicted Woman
Aftermath: Interview with an Evicted Woman I was called out of my little den to see a woman, one of the evicted tenants of Mr. Adair. She was on her way to ...
Preface to a Tragedy: Part Three
With the advice of the last stanza, I, for one, fully agree. Let Irishmen beg no act of grace from an alien Senate,- no miserable mouthful of liberty flung a...
Preface to a Tragedy Part Two
The following is the ballad by Thomas Nielson Underwood, Barrister, Strabane, Ireland:
Preface to a Tragedy: Part One
“The following pages are the result of no stretch of imagaination, no creation of fancy. The Glenveigh evictions, by which two hundred and forty human beings...
Bad Reviews: From the Times of London
Bad Reviews: From the Times of London To invoke the aid of the sheriff and the presence of the resident magistrate to turn out some fifty families, numberin...
500,000 Curses: Cruel John Adair
50,000 Curses… Cruel John Adair
500,000 Curses Ballad
Here we took another road to visit Glenveigh and see Adair’s castle. On the way we were informed by a woman, speaking in Irish, that a process-server near Cr...
In place of this fine population is to-day a deer-forest…
(This from Bernard Barret…)
Poetic Justice
To form the street, if one may call it street, Where ducks and pigs in filthy forum meet; A scrambling, careless, falter’d place, no doubt; ...
Assisted Emigration - The Answer to Destitution?
Assisted Emigration - The Answer to Destitution? Instead of devising land reclamation or other projects, WS Trench borrowed an idea for “assisted emigration...
A Suffering Consoled, Explained or Rationalized?
The questions naturally arise, What is man? and, What is life? What can be tghe cause of all tghis? Is it a punishment for our crimes? or those of our forefa...
All creation groans and travails
“All creation groans and travails…” Is the reason Adair first goes to America because Europe, England and Ireland’s Great Cattle Plague was a Threat to his ...
Post-Eviction Ironies: So Stately and Grey
“Where the mountains arise to the oft-changing skies, And the Castle stands stately and grey; Where the calm lake lies still ‘neath that wild ru...
Karma 2: The Fate(s) of Kingsley Porter
KINGLEY PORTER DEATH A ‘MISHAP’ Irish Cornoner Thinks Harvard Professor Fell Off Cliff Into Sea ####Wireless to the New York Times
Karma 1: Cause and Effect?
In 1887, Mrs. Adair raised Rathdaire Church (Church of Ireland) to her husband’s memory. Within a few months time, their grand Rathdaire mansion suddenly bur...
Cornelia’s Credo
Cornelia’s Credo “So every time has its own special joys, and the great thing is to miss as little as possible, and to share as much.”
Adair’s Credo: ‘I will, at all costs, maintain my rights’
Adair’s Credo: “I will, at all costs, maintain my rights” “The tenants are aware that my estates are subject to charges, taxes, rents, annuitiex and incumbr...
Depths I Hardly Knew Existed…
I found it extremely moving as I drove up the road to Churchill from Letterkenny, realising that I was coming up the road my great-grandparents had struggled...
Silent Land: Shattered Hearth
Visiting in 1990, Monsignor Tony Doherty of Sydney Derryveagh’s first returning descendant offered its epitaph: “April was the month of the shattered hearth.”