It certainly was not economically advantageous for MacNally to inform. The pension he received from the government was obviously so meagre that it forced his family into penury after he died and led to the eventual disclosure of his role as informer. With the broad legal experience that he had and the two legal textbooks … Read more
MacNally was a barrister, playwright, United Irishman and notorious informer who was born in Dublin in 1752. His father was a grocer and MacNally also briefly worked as a grocer in St Mary’s Lane off Capel Street. In 1774 he went to London and on 8 June he entered the Middle Temple to study law. … Read more
The vast riches of Boyle’s archive are being showcased through the Irish Research Council-funded ‘Digital Boyle’ project (2014) at UCC. This will present images of key documents from the earl’s papers in an interactive display to be exhibited in the coming months at suitable locations. Manuscript images will be placed alongside transcriptions of texts, including … Read more
The Boyle family archive, known as the Lismore Papers, is one of the most important archival collections for the study of seventeenth-century Ireland. It is split into two collections, one of which is located in the National Library of Ireland in Dublin, and the other at Chatsworth House in Derbyshire. The archive comprises thousands of … Read more
In 2012 the Irish Research Council agreed to fund an interdisciplinary project on ‘The Colonial Landscapes of Richard Boyle, First Earl of Cork, c. 1602–1643’, involving a team of historians and archaeologists at University College Cork under the leadership of Dr David Edwards. The project set out to reconstruct Boyle’s vast estate, charting its extent, … Read more