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Trains, now on Uber. T's and C's apply. Check the Uber app. Hello and this is this is secret society's

Hello and welcome to the Irish history podcast.

My name is Finn Duwire and this is Secret Societies, Communism and Coal, life in the

Castle Commer collierie Part 3.

The last installment of this series about the fascinating Castle Comer collieries took us through the bleak years of the great famine when the region was decimated. We saw manly starve to death while many more emigrated. This episode takes us through the uncertainty of the

post-famine years, the huge changes that followed and finally brings us to the land war which

triggered the great coal strike of 1881.

This part of the story was very difficult to write as there's very little research

conducted on Castle Comer during these years so I had to spend a long time in newspaper archives and the National

Library piecing this story together.

If you have any questions or information you feel I've not covered in this podcast, please get

in touch at history at Irish

history podcast that's history at Irish history podcast dot i.e.

castlecomer emerged from the famine like much of Ireland, a broken society and for those who had survived. Life was by no means easy.

Death along with emigration had torn the close-knit communities

of the coal field apart. Its people spread across the world. Most would never return

to the town of their birth.

For those who had remained behind the countryside once heaving with people was now full

of painful ghosts, memories of childhood friends, other fellow colliers who they had risked

life and limb with down dark coal mines. In the National Library in Dublin, the Wandaards were the landlords of Castle Comer,

...