Tag Archives: Eric Shaw

A HERITAGE project in Clarecastle and Ballyea has established that more than 100 local men served in the British Army during World War I, while a local historian believes there are at least the same number again of men from the area that they don’t know about yet. The Clarecastle and Ballyea Heritage Group are continuing to collect stories about The Great War and parishioners involved and a number of people have come forward recently with medals, photographs and fascinating stories of their grandfathers’ roles in that war. “We’ve been at it for the last couple of months; we’re trying to build up a database for people from the parish of Clarecastle and Ballyea of people who might have gone off to The Great War. “We know the men who went off and were killed, we’ve plenty of information on them, but there’s a lot, we reckon from the parish, who went away and served, then came back and never …

IN 1860, over 1,200 volunteers from Ireland travelled to Italy to fight for the Papal States in the Papal Wars. An appeal was made throughout the country for funds to support the volunteers. Twenty-three Catholic parishes from Clare published lists of subscribers in newspapers of the day and, now, members of Clare Roots Society have undertaken to transcribe the names of these subscribers, resulting in a database of over 4,000 names. This week, members of Clare Roots Society handed over the Papal Army database to county librarian, Helen Walsh. In recent times, staff at the library’s Local Studies Centre came across extensive lists of subscribers names published in The Clare Journal, the local newspaper of the day. The subscriptions were in response to an appeal for funds to support the Irish volunteers to the Papal Army in the summer of 1860. Peter Beirne, Local Studies Centre librarian, immediately saw the value of these lists to genealogy researchers tracing Clare families. …