Category: Local history & archaeology

Donegal Democrat So there we are in naíonán bheaga, small chubby hands holding pencils that feel unfamiliar, learning to make letters. Along comes the teacher, takes the pencil out of my left hand, places it in my right. I was five, what did I know? I went along with it. I didn’t want to make…

Donegal Democrat Jim came from Donegal. He was born in 1910 & so reached the age of sense just as the Irish Free State began to find its feet. He was the youngest of seven children, his father a local farmer, heading up a reasonably prosperous family from just outside Glenties. Growing up in the…

Donegal Democrat As any schoolchild in Donegal can tell you, Colmcille died on Iona on the ninth of June, 597AD. But Dan McCarthy, a senior lecturer in Trinity College Dublin, says it ain’t necessarily so. Scholars have long regarded the dates in the Irish annals as unreliable, because of errors that crept into the record…