Dora's Ireland

Dora's Ireland

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Images of Ireland.

Doolough Tragedy Cross in Co.Mayo Ireland. (by Mick Bourke)
The Doolough Tragedy is an event that took place during the Great Irish Famine in south west County Mayo.The story goes that in 1849, at the height of the potato famine in Ireland, six hundred starving people arrived at Delphi Lodge where they pleaded with the Marquis of Sligo to give them some food. He refused and sent them away to their deaths for 3 miles into the Doolough Valley, some 400 men, women and children gave up hope and perished by the roadside. A cross and an annual Famine Walk between Louisburgh and Doolough commemorates this event. The monument in Doolough valley has an inscription from Mahatma Gandhi: How can men feel themselves honoured by the humiliation of their fellow beings?The simple monument at Doolough is a sad but fitting reminder of the horrific sufferings that befell the Irish people during that time

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Travellers’ Decorated Caravan (by National Library of Ireland on The Commons)
Family in their decorated caravan en route to the Cahirmee Horse Fair at Buttevant, Co. Cork.
Date: July 1954
Fantastic old photo. Travellers or Tinkers as they are often called are a Clan of Nomads. They have their own rules and laws. It’s an odd way of life !

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Aughrim, Ballinasloe, Co. Galway (by Robert Riddell)
Site of the Battle of Aughrim, “Ireland’s Gettysburg” which was fought on 12th July 1691, in the closing stages of the Williamite-Jacobite War. This War of the Two Kings was fought between rival monarchs, William of Orange and his deposed Catholic father-in-law, James II. The battle was one of the more bloody recorded fought on Irish soil – over 7,000 people were killed. It meant the effective end of Jacobitism in Ireland, although the city of Limerick held out until the autumn of 1691. The Aughrim battlefield site became the subject of controversy in Ireland over plans to build the new M6 motorway through the former battlefield. Historians, environmentalists and members of the Orange Order objected to the destruction of the 1691 battlefield. The motorway opened in 2009.

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