Doomed Inheritance – Mitchelstown’s Lost Heritage 1916-2016. What have we lost and why did we lose it is a question that author and historian Bill Power will pose in a talk he is giving in Kingston College Chapel, Mitchelstown at the annual general meeting of Mitchelstown Heritage Society.
“This is going to be different to anything I’ve done before,” says Bill, who questions what 1916 really meant for our local and national heritage. “We adopted a narrow view of the past which deliberately excluded things that were, in fact, part of our national heritage,” he said. “The recent commemorations paid lip service to the past, but little else. In Mitchelstown, the legacy of 1916 led to the destruction of some of our greatest architectural and cultural treasures. ‘I’m going to raise some uncomfortable questions,” he said.
Bill’s unrivalled knowledge of Mitchelstown has been published in several books, most notably in his chef d’oeuvre, ‘White Knights, Dark Earls, the Rise and Fall of an Anglo-Irish Dynasty’. His Master of Arts Degree dealt with the issues surrounding the looting and burning of Mitchelstown Castle in 1922.
“I have the biggest collection of photographs of Mitchelstown Castle and Mitchelstown Convent in single ownership,” says Bill, who has compiled these into two audio visual documentaries which will be shown for the first time in public at his Kingston College talk. Most of the images he will be using have not previously been seen in public.
Coverage in this week’s Print & Digital Edition
