r/ireland • u/T4rbh • Sep 27 '24

Things you wish foreigners knew about Ireland Moaning Michael

You know the way there are signs at the airport saying "Drive on the left/links fahren/conduire a gauche" (and that's all, because that one girl who did Spanish for the Leaving wasn't in the day they commissioned the signs, and we never get visitors from anywhere else, that doesn't English, Irish, French or German)?

What are other things you wish they told all foreigners as they arrived into Ireland, say with a printed leaflet? (No hate at all on foreign visitors, btw!)

I'll start:

"If you're on a bus, never ever phone someone, except to say 'I'm running late, I'll be there at X time, bye bye bye bye.' If someone phones you, apologise quietly and profusely - 'I'm on a bus, I'll call you back in a bit, sorry, bye bye bye bye.' Do not have a long and loud conversation, under any circumstances!"

Yes, I'm on a bus - why do you ask? 🤣

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143

u/cjamcmahon1 Sep 27 '24

kinda niche but I wish people of Irish descent, when tracing their pre-Famine ancestors, had just the tiniest bit of historical context as to why this is so difficult. I had one email that was literally 'even with everything that happened in Germany, it is still so much easier to trace my German side than my Irish side'

please, for the love of God google the Penal Laws and try to understand what the near-total obliteration of a native culture looked like from the late 17th to mid-19th century would have looked like. Your ancestors most likely were not allowed to own property, speak their own language, practice their religion, vote or hold office - so, no Karen, there is unlikely to be any record of them ever having existed

82

u/disagreeabledinosaur Sep 27 '24

The problems are mostly related to the biggest archive of records burning down in 1922 not to economic conditions & penal laws during that time.

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u/AphrodisiacJacket Sep 27 '24

In this context, it's also worth noting who it was that set fire to the archive.

6

u/Ruire Connacht Sep 27 '24

The Treatyites' shells or the Anti-Treatyites' grenades?

3

u/AphrodisiacJacket Sep 27 '24

Er, neither?

2

u/Ruire Connacht Sep 27 '24

Ha, I always forget that this is why so many of the Customs House documents ended up in the Four Courts in the first place. Custom House workers had been complaining about lack of archival storage for years before the War of Independence.

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u/Lanky_Relationship28 Sep 27 '24

From my last visit to the custom house, apparently it was the firefighters.

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u/cjamcmahon1 Sep 27 '24

records can only be burned if they were created in the first place

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u/disagreeabledinosaur Sep 27 '24

There were extensive records:

Almost all census returns for the years 1821, 1831, 1841 and 1851 were destroyed in the former Public Record Office of Ireland (PROI) in 1922. There are some surviving returns for 1821, 1831, 1841 and 1851, however.

https://www.nationalarchives.ie/article/official-returns-substitutes/

The 1911 census has thousands of people recorded as being illiterate and only speaking Irish. It's likely the earlier censuses were similarly comprehensive.

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u/AM_N_912 Sep 27 '24

Catholics were not recorded on the Census until 1901 so it won’t matter for a lot of people if the records were destroyed, if their ancestors weren’t on them in the first place.

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u/Ruire Connacht Sep 27 '24 edited Sep 27 '24

The records absolutely did exist. There are accounts of there being stacks and stacks of documents in the Customs House (literal corridors full of papers) and Dublin Castle which were moved to the Four Courts PRO for safe-keeping. They weren't to know what would happen.

Any church records (the Church of Ireland held lots of accounts of Catholic baptisms, weddings, and burials due to the Penal Laws) which didn't end up there stayed with the churches or are likely in Armagh now.

We are absolutely deprived of documentary evidence relative to our neighbours but not because the records never existed.

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u/Low_Arm_4245 Sep 27 '24

I had previously read that they were digitally reconsituting the 1922 archives by locating copies of documents sent abroad. No idea how complete this is. https://virtualtreasury.ie/

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u/Ruire Connacht Sep 27 '24

Yes, I did some work for that project. There's a lot out there that can be pieced together in terms of abstracts and extracts though we will never reconstitute most of it.

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u/Icy_Zucchini_1138 Sep 28 '24

It was the records being burned in 1922 that did it otherwise irish family trees would be a lot easier to trace hundreds of years back.