Engravings from the ‘Illustrated London News’ showing the laying of the Atlantic Telegraph Cable at Valentia and the ‘Telegraph Cable Fleet at Berehaven, Bantry Bay, County Cork’. The prints are taken from an edition dated 28 July 1866. The captions for the images read (top) ‘The Atlantic telegraph cable fleet at Berehaven, Bantry Bay’ and (lower) ‘Laying the shore end of the Atlantic telegraph cable at Foilhommerum [Bay], Isle of Valentia’. Located off the Iveragh Peninsula in County Kerry, Valentia Island was the eastern terminus of the first commercially viable transatlantic telegraph cable which came into operation in 1866. The prominent ship in the upper image is the ‘Great Eastern’, by some distance the largest ship ever built at the time of her 1858 launch.
An image of Tomás MacCurtain (seated on the tractor) with a nationalist pipe and drum band at a demonstration of a Fordson tractor (manufactured locally by the American Ford Motor Company) in Cork in 1920. Fr. Dominic O’Connor OFM Cap. is among the crowd at the event.
A photograph of Tomás MacCurtain, Lord Mayor, demonstrating a Fordson tractor (manufactured locally by the American Ford Motor Company) in Cork in 1920.
A flier exhorting parents to abstain from and prevent their children from taking part in the coronation festivities of Edward VII because of the denial of transubstantiation made in his Coronation oath.
An illustration by Seán O’Connor (also known as John ‘Blimey’ O’Connor), a London-born republican prisoner at Tintown No. 3 Camp at the Curragh in County Kildare. The drawing is dated July 1923 and is titled ‘Frongoch’, a reference to the well-known internment camp in North Wales in which O’Connor and nearly two thousand Irish prisoners were detained following the 1916 Rising.
