Little Irish language in 19th century Kilcullen

Images: VRTI and Chris Bellew/Fennell Photography.

Just three people were recorded as being able to speak both Irish and English in Kilcullen in 1871, and there was nobody who spoke Irish only, writes Brian Byrne. Two of the three were males. That's just one local nugget in a newly released trove of recovered documents which have been digitised and made public in the Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland. 

The documents cover some seven centuries of Irish life from the Anglo-Norman conquest up through the 1798 Rebellion and 19th-century censuses. They were recovered from copies of material destroyed in the burning of the Irish Public Records Office at the Four Courts in 1922 during the civil war. In all, there are 797 references to Kilcullen.

The VRTI project was initiated in 2022 on the centenary of the burning, led by Trinity College Dublin and involved a global collaboration of academics, historians, computer scientists and other specialists to digitally recreate parts of the lost archive. The work included searching for duplicates and transcripts of the destroyed documents, in libraries and archives in Ireland, the UK, and other parts of the world.

The results are three dedicated portals — The Age of Conquest, The Age of Revolution, and Population — along with 16 'Gold Seams' of documents including a 1766 Religious Census, and 16 curated collections.

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