THE O’NEILLS OF KINNARD AND SIR PHELIM O’NEILL- Talk on Tuesday 10th April at 8.00pm in the Old Court House Caledon.

THE O’NEILLS OF KINNARD AND SIR PHELIM O’NEILL, Speaker: Dr David Brown T.C.D.

This talk on Caledon is a synthesis of these two interests and relates how Sir Phelim O’Neill’s estate, forfeited due to his participation in the rebellion of 1641, was the subject of a protracted struggle among merchant elites. In marked contrast to the military conflicts normally described during this period, this was a legal and financial conflict that took place at the highest offices of a succession of regimes and rumbled on for a decade after O’Neill’s death. In many ways it is a very modern story of credit defaults, vulture funds and much of the other paraphernalia of modern banking. The words are different but the principles are the same. Finally, the story of Caledon in the 1640s and 1650s demonstrates that the Irish land settlements were far more complicated than they appear to be on the surface.

David Brown is a post doctoral researcher at Trinity College Dublin