"What Jim Carroll presents above as being widely documented is all hearsay."
I don't want to make an issue of this but it is researched history from documented sources
That 19th century historians should publish details such as this about a British Lord is out of the question, so whoever wishes to examine the subjects is left with contemporary accounts - in this case, clergymen, newspapers, family histories, parish and court records... and in this case, descriptions of the man by his peers
Afer several decades of recording local history from oral sources, I have been left with the impression that is as reliable as the public persona prejected by establishment sources
A friend has been doing similar work of the song, Fanny Blair, with some startling results.
I confess I am at a loss to understand why anybody would wish to defend one of a group of people who helped virtually depopulate a country in order to sieze their land
This was the period of Irish history which led to decades of Land Wars (also fairly reliably recorded in songs and tales)
One of the stunning things I discovered in my researches into songs is that, up to the 150th anniversary of the Irish Famine - the most catastrophic event in this country's history, there was only one bood dedicated to the subject - written by an Englishwoman!
Jim Carroll