In the Plantation of Ulster, an English Knight Sir Thomas Coach was granted 1,500 acres on the south side of the River Swilly called ‘Lismongan’. While we might associate that solely with the small area of Lismonaghan today, the land in fact stretched out much further than that to take in the areas of Rockhill
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The dispossession of lands from Roman Catholics in Ireland that began with the Ulster Plantation had continued unabated throughout the seventeenth century. Allied with this transfer of land ownership in Ireland, there arose a ruling class of aristocrats, landlords and prosperous lawyers, commonly referred to as ‘The Protestant Ascendancy’...
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Rev. John Kinnear, the popular Letterkenny Presbyterian minister, was elected as a Liberal MP for Donegal in 1880 in a bid to improve the rights of tenants in Donegal and indeed throughout the whole country. However, he was soon to discover the fickle nature of politics. Nine months following his election, on January 19th 1881,
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The mass eviction of 244 people from Derryveagh in 1861 was an example of the lack of rights that tenants had on their lands in Ireland at the time and highlighted the ease with which they could be evicted. Since 1850, the leading Tenant Right campaigners of the Letterkenny area were Edward Gallagher, Ned McFadden,
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