Hannans’ Parish: Places of Worship/Burial

Almost all the Hannan family birth and marriage certificates I have seen list the relevant parish as being Ballingarry. One exception is the Fitzgibbon-Hannan marriage which lists Castletown, to the south of Ballingarry, though the marriage certificate itself somewhat confusingly notes the service did take place in Ballingarry RC Church. Castletown would have been the relevant civil parish (as opposed to Catholic parish, whose boundaries unhelpfully were and are different). Another is the marriage of Annie Hannan to Jeremiah Savage in Limerick Cathedral. St Joseph’s church in Granagh, a mile or so southeast of Ballygrennan was also located in Castletown civil parish. It dates from 1831, and some of the services may have taken place there.

In Ballingarry town, the current Catholic church of Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception wasn’t opened till 1879, but an RC chapel existed on the same site at some point before that. The Ordnance Survey Map from the 1899 shows it having the name St Mary’s, so the name must have been changed at some point after the Church was opened.

An earlier survey done in 1841 shows an RC Chapel on the site of said church, so it seems likely that it was demolished to make way for its successor in the 1870s. During the interlude, Catholics may have re-occupied an even older church in the centre of town or attended services in Granagh or Rathkeale, or may have reverted to holding services in a school or a hall as was the practice before churches were built in the aftermath of Catholic Emancipation.

Until 1810 approximately, the RC church had been in the centre of Ballingarry, adjacent to the Protestant church. The ruins are still visible today. The RC chapel just outside the town on the 1841ordnance survey map must have been built after that. We know from John O’Donovan’s recordings of details of rural churches and castles in 1840 that the graveyard in the town was still in use at that point, and there was none adjacent to the RC chapel outside the town. The Limerick Diocese Heritage Project (LDHP) reports that the parish priest who preceded Archdeacon Fitzgerald and who officiated at the marriage of the Hannan parents, Charles McCarthy, was buried there in 1838.

Unless a theory that there is a Hannan plot in Kilfinny is proven, Edward’s grandmother is probably buried in the Ballingarry graveyard in the town centre, but as mentioned elsewhere, the engravings on most of the gravestones have become illegible. However, there is a headstone erected by a John Sheehy in memory of his father who died in 1848, and his mother who died in 1875. Whether they were related to Johanna is not known, but clearly the graveyard was still in use up until 1875. Edward’s parents may also be buried there if the graveyard continued in use till the new church opened four years later. His mother died in 1871, and his father seems to have died sometime in the early 1880s, and you would expect that they would be buried together.

There is no record we have come across which indicates that this is the graveyard where the coffin-less bodies from Knockfierna were buried during the Famine, but several articles in Appendix 1 report that they were taken to Ballingarry, and I have not found an alternative location.

We have been unable to find evidence of John Hannan’s death. As mentioned in the book, he was alive in 1881 for his daughter’s wedding. Records for the Petty Sessions for Ballingarry in the late 1870s show John Hannan as the licensee of a pub in Ballingarry, in a building rented from Pat Noonan of Ballyelan. By 1881, the licensee is Thomas Burke, his son-in-law. The pub is the one that stayed in the Burke family for over a century. Clearly John Hannan did not share his son Edward’s inclination to temperance, and it is possible that there was a falling out which might explain why Edward rarely if ever went home. That is pure speculation however.

Landlord/Tenant Relations

The town of Ballingarry lies to the southwest of Limerick city and was and is still linked by road to several other small towns which feature in this narrative: Rathkeale to the north; Newcastle to the west; Croom and Kilmallock to the east; and Castletown to the south.

We know from research by Desmond Norton [The Limerick Estate of Sergeant Warren during The Great Famine, UCD, April 2002] that the Warren Estates in Ballyruane and Kilmihil, not far from Ballygrennan, experienced a significant concentration in the number of tenants following evictions and assisted passages to the USA in particular, paid for by the estate managers. Good tenants who farmed well and paid their rents on time and in full were prized by estate managers. John Hannan would appear to have been one such tenant.

Norton published a paper based on original correspondence of the biggest land agency in Ireland in the 1840s, Stewart and Kinnaird, who acted on behalf of the absentee landlord Sergeant Warren, resident in Dublin. It is likely that the issues they faced and the remedies employed were similar to those of the other townlands and estates in the vicinity of Ballingarry. The conclusion he reached was that the treatment of the tenants by their landlords was ‘generally humane’. Prior to the Famine, Warren was one landlord who helped his tenants improve the quality of the land, supplying free lime and paying his tenants to improve drainage of the land, some of which was described as a swamp (in contrast to Lewis’s earlier opinion noted in EFH Chapter 1). As the extent of the disease of the potato crop became apparent late in 1845, Warren was sympathetic to his tenants’ plight and allowed nonpayment of at least one quarter’s rent, and deferment of debt repayments. His agents employed over a hundred labourers in the straightening of the river Ballyruane, paying cash for their efforts. However, those in abject poverty were never going to be able to pay off the debts, and many died, and others abandoned the land. Others had their land repossessed. The land agency letters give the names of some fifty tenants in Ballyruane in 1845-46; in the Griffiths Valuation of 1852, there are only nine. Re-allocation of land towards the better off tenants was part of the fallout of the Famine, though there is some evidence of the consolidation having commenced prior to it.

The Hannans’ landlord, John Pigott, like Sergeant Warren, certainly falls into the benevolent category of landlord. Some twenty years after the worst of The Famine, the agent he used to manage his properties, a Robert Reeves, was the guest at a banquet in Pigott’s honour in Rathkeale, attended by the great and the good of the locality. Apologies included those from Lord Dunraven and Dr O’Brien (presumed to be Richard Baptist O’Brien – see EFH Chapter 4). Reeves was a landlord but was also managing agent for Pigott. The speeches extolled the virtues of both himself and the Pigott family, who was said to have worked on the basis that the interests of the landlord and tenant were the same in improving the value of the land, and that the benefits should be shared fairly. On the Pigott estates the rents were said to be well paid and the tenants happy and grateful (bearing in mind that those post Famine years had been prosperous ones for the farming community). Moreover, Reeves quotes Pigott as wishing ‘to render the people of Ireland independent’.

The Pigott in question however is almost certainly not the Hannan’s long-term landlord John Pigott since he died in Dublin in 1867, aged around eighty-five. His three children pre-deceased him, and his wife lasted only nine months after him, so the estate was inherited by his nephew, Henry Armand Robert Pigott, a resident of Berne, Switzerland at the time[http://pigott-gorrie.blogspot.com/2016/09/the-pigott-family-of-capard-in-queens.html]. He did sound as if he might have been a relative newcomer, with Reeves saying ‘when he came amongst you, he saw what you wanted and asked me to fulfil it’. Reeves also mentions Pigott as having been referred to as an absentee landlord but rejected the label in saying that Pigott intended to visit ‘very soon’ and to stay for three months. And to stay even longer the next year. The following year, 1869, a column in a local paper reported that the fund for the new Rathkeale church had received a donation of £100 from ‘the late John Pigott Esq, of Cappard’, courtesy of his agent Robert Reeves [Limerick Reporter and Tipperary Vindicator, 27-07-1869]. Cappard is in County Laois (formerly Queen’s County), long time seat of another branch of the Pigott family. Why he should be described as living in Cappard when the Pigotts held the Kilfinny lands also for a couple of centuries is a mystery. Certainly, when the survey of landlords was done for Limerick County in 1876, H.A. Robert Pigott of Capard (sic), Rosenallis, Queen’s County owned some 3477 acres, and a Mrs John Pigott, of Dromagh, Kanturk (County Cork) owned 393 acres. The relationship, if any, between the two is also unknown [Return of Owners of Land of One Acre and Upwards, 1876, printed by Alexander Thom, Abbey Street, Dublin].

To put it in context, at this time the notorious William Cox of Ballynoe had only 843 acres, whilst Robert Cox in neighbouring Ballyneale had 408 acres. The Pigotts were therefore serious players.

Tracing the Hannan Birthplace

It has long been believed, and the last surviving members of the Hannan family living locally still maintain, that Edward Joseph was born on a farm named The Glen. Descendent Peter Hannan is in possession of an old family letter which states that a grandson of George and Mary Anne Fitzgibbon was still living on the old Hannan farm at The Glen in 1968. Moreover, the gravestone of George Fitzgibbon who died in 1901, clearly states that he was from The Glen, as does the gravestone of Edmund Fitzgibbon who died in 1950. However, neither of the two properties recognised today as The Glen by An Post (the Irish Post Office) has ever been owned or tenanted by the Hannan/Fitzgibbon family.

By way of background, much of the information I have relied on comes from the Griffiths Valuation, an exercise which listed the owners and tenants of all property in Ireland and was published around 1852 when Edward would have been sixteen. Prior to that, there is the less detailed Tithe Applotments survey from around 1830, and later, the censuses of 1901 and 1911.

**Tithe Applotment Data for Ballygrinnan( SIC )**

Land was surveyed by ‘townland’, a defined and specifically named area with plots of land, houses, offices, gardens all listed. The relevant townlands for the Hannans were Ballygrennan and Common. Heading south-east out of Ballingarry today, on the A518, there are two roads to the left; sharp left is a road that takes you to the Knockfierna Famine memorial; half left is the road towards Granagh which passes through Knockfeerina village [Note the different spelling today between the memorial and the village]. Approaching the village, the land to the left (north) of the road is Common townland; the land to the right (south) is initially Ballyelan, followed by Ballygrennan.

In 1852, Ballygrennan townland was divided into twenty plots, all of them owned by landlord John Pigott, who farmed one himself and rented out the remainder.

009 MAP OF BALLYGRENNAN TOWNLAND AND PART OF COMMON SHOWING PLOT NUMBERS and 10 OS MAP OF BALLYGRENNAN 1841

Pigott was a parishioner of Kilfinny RC Church, and was a substantial landowner in several townlands, including the neighbouring Ballyelan, which he rented out in its entirety to a James Grady who in turn had several sub-tenants, several of whom were Noonans. In Ballygrennan, plots 1 and 2, adjacent to the road and at the western end of the townland, were farmed by John Hannan, Edward’s father. Adjacent and to the east, plot 3 was tenanted by Mary Carmody, and further east, plot 4 – and several more besides – by John Hederman. Plot 4 (together with the adjoining plot 9) is the one where the group of buildings recognised today by the Irish Post Office as The Glen is situated. The Tithe Applotments survey of 1830 unfortunately numbered the plots differently from the later Griffiths Valuation but it does show a widow Hannon (sic) in Ballygrennan on plot 609, with neighbours Hederman (608) and Carmody (606), so we can be pretty sure this was John Hannan’s mother, i.e. Edward’s grandmother. She farmed a substantial forty acres at the time. Another Hannon (sic), Michael, curiously had a farm of exactly the same size at plot 617, which was probably at the southern edge of the townland; whether this Hannon is related to the widow is not known. It is worth noting that the sizes of the holdings are overstated by modern standards, since the unit of measurement used in the Tithe Applotment Books was the Irish or plantation acre, which was 1.62 times the standard measure used later in the Griffiths Valuation. So the forty acres mentioned above would be roughly twenty-five acres in Griffiths Valuation terms, still fairly substantial. By 1852 John Hannan had ninety-two standard acres, a sign of the concentration of tenants and farms which occurred during and after the Famine.

In Common townland, to the north of Ballygrennan, where the land was free for anyone to settle and cultivate, i.e. there was no landlord, we find a John Hannan with three small plots (nos 27 – shared with a John Hederman – 28, and 29), one of them (28) adjacent to the road and opposite John Hannan’s plot 1 in Ballygrennan.

It is likely that the bigger Ballygrennan plots were focused on cattle rearing and dairy farming and that the much smaller plots in Common, at least on the lower more fertile slopes of Knockfierna, were used to grow crops for family day to day consumption. And it wasn’t only the tenants from nearby who held the rights to these plots. At least two were held by the Ballingarry Protestant minister, the Rev Gubbins, some of whose cattle – presumably not grazing in Common - had been stolen in the incident described in EFH Chapter 1.

The existence of these plots makes sense because when the Fitzgibbon farm was acquired in 1995 by the Harrington family, two plots in the Common townland were part of the purchase. However, in the 1876 Landlords survey (see below), whereas the Hedermans, Carmodys and Costelloes and others listed in 1852 are mentioned as owning small plots in Common, there is no mention of the Fitzgibbons. There is however, a Patrick Hannon (sic) with slightly over an acre.

There were three other Hannans recorded as living in Common in 1852. James Hannan lived at plot 47, and Michael Hannan lived at 46. Both were adjacent to John Hannan at 28; and Michael Hannan was renting to a John Fitzgibbon. A third Hannan, Mary lived on plot 75, which is a good distance away from the others. James and Michael Hannan were probably John Hannan’s brothers, or in the case of Michael, an older relative who was the tenant holding twenty-five acres back in 1830. John Fitzgibbon was likely the father of John Hannan’s future son-in-law (whose name was also John). It paints a picture of a close-knit self-sufficient extended family or community of tenant farmers and labourers living in accommodation adjacent to one another and working John Hannan’s large farm.

In the immediate surroundings we find another Michael Hannan in Ballynashig townland, renting a substantial forty acres from John Pigott, and a John Hannan renting a house from a Jeremiah Quin on land belonging to John Pigott. At the time of the Tithe Applotments, both a William and John Hannan are renting forty-three (old) acres. The relationship of these people to Edward’s family is unknown. Equally, there are many mentions of Hannans in Kilfinny, home to John Pigott, who owned lands there also, and one wonders if there was some long-term informal relationship between the Pigotts and the extended Hannan family.

Sometime before 1870, possibly when Edward’s elder brother John emigrated to Australia around 1865, or maybe upon the death of John Pigott, George Fitzgibbon took over the Hannan tenancy in Ballygrennan prior to marrying John Hannan’s daughter and Edward’s sister Mary Anne later that year. He was the logical choice since of the other Hannan brothers, Edward was already in Scotland, and Joseph and John were too young, being in their early teens. The Hannan parents moved at that point into accommodation at Knockfeerina village [Fitzgibbon marriage certificate]. The land tenanted by John Hannan and subsequently George Fitzgibbon must have been purchased by the Fitzgibbons from the Pigotts following the various land purchase acts of parliament in the late 19th and early 20th century, and it stayed in the family until it was sold to the Harringtons in 1995.

Today the farm still comprises the land and group of buildings that the Fitzgibbons owned. The last of the Fitzgibbon line alive today, Eamon, maintains that the larger house was rebuilt around 1900, and old maps show there was a property there in the mid-1800s.

PHOTOS OF THE FARM BUILDINGS TODAY and CLOSE UP MAP FROM OS 1899

ADD 011A 011B birthplaces

At right angles to it is a smaller house which at the time I visited in 2021, had been partially gutted in readiness for refurbishment. There were then no internal walls, but the shell could have housed the typical rural farmhouse with a bedroom either end and a living room/kitchen and entrance in the middle. Parts of the external walls seem very old and show signs of having been whitewashed at some point. Equally on the north facing wall there is a blocked up low door which could well date from the 1830s or earlier. On the other hand, the raw data from the Griffiths Valuation list a house, a cowshed and piggery and a barn and stable as being on plot 1, and the smaller house could have been one of the latter.

The Irish Land Registry lists the address as Ballygrennan, Ballingarry, Co Limerick V94 W6AX. Several other properties/plots in the area are listed as having the same address but with different postcodes. Only three properties in the townland do not bear the postal name Ballygrennan. Of these, two adjacent properties share the name The Glen, Ballingarry, Co Limerick, on the former plots 4 and 9, tenanted by and subsequently owned by the Hedermans and the Powers respectively. The Powers are still in residence at the former plot 9 today.

Recent owners of both the former Fitzgibbon and Hederman properties, the Harringtons, confirm that the Fitzgibbons were the owners of plots 1 and 2 when they bought them in 1995. The Hedermans were the long-term owners of the plot 4 farm using the name The Glen, subsequent to which there were at least two other owners prior to the Harringtons buying it in 1990. In late 2021, the occupant of The Glen, Lady Silla Harrington sold the Fitzgibbon property to another local family, the Aherns. At the time of writing, the larger of the two buildings on the farm, and the more likely to have been the Hannan siblings’ birthplace, is being run as an Airbnb.

The only feasible explanation I can come up with as to how Edward Hannan could have been born in The Glen and that the Fitzgibbons lived there is that the term applied historically not only to the Hederman and Power farms as today, but to the whole northern part of the Ballygrennan townland comprising the Hannan/Fitzgibbon, Carmody, Hederman and Power properties. In fact, whereas it is referred to locally and by the Land Registry as The Glen, the old Hederman house (plot 4) was historically called Glen House, and sits on the side of a hill. The 1899 Ordinance Survey map shows it as having that name whereas at the time of the Griffiths Valuation in 1852 it had no given name. It is possible that the Hedermans and Powers registered their farms as The Glen when they bought the freeholds. In contrast, the former Fitzgibbon property sits to the southwest of those properties and is not on the hillside but in a dip between two hills, sometimes referred to as a glen! So it is more than reasonable to conclude that all the Hannan siblings were born in the larger house on plot 1 which today is one of the several carrying the Ballygrennan postal name and which is now owned by the Ahern family.

Edward Hannan’s Schooling: additional information

Hannan’s education in Co Limerick is dealt with in Chapter 4 of Edinburgh’s First Hibernian and conclusions about the schools he attended are drawn based on the best available evidence. What follows is more detailed information on the local educational opportunities available to the Hannan family at that time.

Kevin Condon’s authoritative history of All Hallows, mentions a student, John Naughton, born in Limerick a year before Hannan, who attended a Fr Fitzgerald’s school in Limerick. Naughton did not arrive at All Hallows until 1860, prior to which he had spent 8 years at St Vincent’s, Castleknock, and Maynooth Seminary [Kevin Condon, The Missionary College of All Hallows, 1842-91] . So this Fr Fitzgerald’s school must have been open before 1852. Moreover, All Hallows’ roster of students in 1855 mentions two other budding priests, a P. Danaher, probably of Croom (two other Danahers who graduated in 1845 and 1850 were recorded as being from there}, and a P. Butler, parish unknown, as also having attended the Rev Mr Fitzgerald’s ‘seminary’ in Limerick. Initially it appeared that Edward might have attended the school run by his parish priest prior to going to St Munchins, but it seems that this Rev Mr Fitzgerald was a namesake of the Archdeacon and not the Archdeacon himself.

As we have seen, the Ballygrennan farm by this time was large, and even though only tenants, the Hannans would have been relatively well off, enough to pay for education for all of their children, and to pay their subsequent passages to Australia and Scotland. Even if they hadn’t been, grants and scholarships would have been available to enable Edward to graduate from the local school(s) to St Munchins in his teens. We know for example that his ‘uncle’, Richard Baptist O’Brien ( see Edinburgh’s First Hibernian, Chapter 4), had his studies for the priesthood paid for by the parish priest of St Mary’s parish in Limerick during the 1830s [M J Egan, The Life of Dean O’Brien (1949), p43 ], so there was some precedent for the Catholic Church paying where necessary for the education of its likely future priests.

More schooling options are provided by the entry about Ballingarry written by Samuel Lewis in 1837 and in an academic paper written by Michael Spillane of the University College, Cork in 1973. Lewis notes that there were three Roman Catholic churches in the parish, one of them near Knockfierna. Moreover, he notes that there was a ‘parochial’ school, presumably in Ballingarry town, as well as eight pay (or hedge) schools educating some 420 children. The ordnance survey map from 1841 shows the national school in the centre of Ballingarry town, together with an RC chapel on the site of the current RC church. In nearby Granagh, it shows an RC chapel and a school, but there is no reference to either a chapel or a school being in Knockfierna which would have been the nearest to the Hannan home. From the numbers of children being educated privately as mentioned above, it would seem that paying at least a modest sum for education could not have been only for the rich.

**OS MAP OF KNOCKFEIRNA AND GRANAGH 1841**

Spillane lists all the educational establishments in county Limerick in 1825 [ Milo Spillane, Two Centuries of Popular Education in Ireland, 1700-1900, University College Cork 1973 ] of which there were ten in Ballingarry. By 1835 it claims there were eight day schools for Ballingarry parish and therefore is consistent with the information from Samuel Lewis two years later.

All Hallows lists alongside their students the school which they attended immediately prior to All Hallows. The Rev Mr Fitzgerald’s seminary is listed for the three students named Danagher and Butler mentioned previously. Hannan and a couple of others (another M Fitzgerald – probably no relation – and an R Gallagher) are reported as having come from St Munchins Seminary, Limerick. There are several pupils listed from Mr Fogarty’s school, Charleville, a few miles southeast of Ballingarry, one of whom is a Michael Hennessy from Ballintubber, the same age as Hannan and who is said by Canning to be buried in the family plot in Ballingarry cemetery. There is another townland named Ballingarry near Galbally, where there is a gravestone of a Rev Michael R Hennessy, who died in 1865, just as Canning says. So this is not the Hannans’ Ballingarry; and Fogarty’s school is therefore too far away to have serviced it.

Furthermore, much of the Catholic hierarchy was known to be highly sceptical about the Catholic population attending the National Schools, despite the fact that the Education Board, upon which Catholics were represented, had to approve the curriculum. But Bishop Ryan of Limerick, Archdeacon Fitzgerald’s superior, was said to be a supporter of the national schools, at least initially, believing the benefits of education to outweigh the risk of dilution of Catholic teaching. However, in other counties there were some big hitters on the opposite side in Bishops McHale, Cantwell and Higgins and only fifteen of the twenty-five Irish bishops declared their open support for the National School System when they met to agree an education strategy in 1839 [Tanner, Ireland’s Holy Wars, p 240]. However, the remarks by the Rev Gubbins in Chapter 4 of Edinburgh’s First Hibernian about proselytising were made twenty years after the launch of the National Schools programme and the context had been changed by the Famine. By then every Catholic Bishop was fearful of the charge of losing parishioners to the Anglican Church, particularly with the future Cardinal Cullen back in Ireland.

St Munchins

The annual reports from All Hallows note the ‘students in the house’ for each year, together with their parish and the school they attended immediately prior to All Hallows. As noted previously, in 1854, there are three students from Fr Fitzgerald’s seminary, Limerick. They remain on the roster for 1855 alongside three students, one of them Hannan, from St Munchin’s Seminary, Limerick. After that, there are no more additions from Fr Fitzgerald’s school. Bishop Ryan of Limerick was instrumental in bringing in the Jesuits to run St Munchin’s in 1859, prior to which Malone and Fitzgerald had presumably staffed it with priests from the Limerick Diocese, and from the religious orders. A plausible explanation of these events is that there was indeed a Fr Fitzgerald’s ‘seminary’ in Limerick before the reopening of St Munchin’s in 1853. Given that it provided no students to All Hallows after 1853, it seems likely that it was absorbed by St Munchin’s, and Fr Fitzgerald given a key role in running it, alongside Fr Malone. In their book St Munchin’s College, Limerick, 1796-1996, John Fleming and Sean O’Grady name Fathers Michael Malone and Thomas [note not Michael] Fitzgerald as the priests who reopened St Munchin’s in October 1853 and ran it for 6 years till Bishop Ryan replaced with them with the Jesuits. They were reported as receiving a presentation from their former pupils in early 1859 after the Jesuits had moved in [Limerick Reporter and Tipperary Vindicator, 01-03-1859]. The authors say that their names only appeared in the public press when the Jesuits took over, though this is not quite true, given the reference above in the Limerick Reporter five years earlier. There would appear to have been two Fathers Malone and Fitzgerald and the careers of all four can be tracked after 1859 in both the Irish Catholic Registers and the LDHP. The Registers also publish data about schools, sometimes in the Parish sections of the Register, sometimes in the Colleges section.

The earliest mention of schools in the diocese is in the 1844 register, referring to four Limerick city schools in Sexton St, Clare St and Thomond gate, catering for some 600 pupils and of which the Director was a Mr JP Walsh. A decade later he is still there with twenty-three brothers educating 2000 pupils. These are most probably primary schools, run by the Christian Brothers. In the 1850 register, there is an entry under ‘Colleges’ of an Academy, 34 Henry St, off the Crescent, ‘patronised by the Right Rev Dr Ryan and the neighbouring Bishops and Clergy’. The Principal is Rev James Fitzgerald, OSF. We are told that schooling cost twenty five guineas/annum for boarders, four guineas/annum for day pupils. Not a trivial sum. The curriculum looked remarkably like that of St Munchin’s when it reopened in October 1853. The Academy appears with broadly the same details every year up until and including 1860 but is gone in 1861 when ‘The College of the Society of Jesus, St Munchins’ appears for the first time, coinciding with the Jesuit takeover in 1859 (1860 register). Unlikely though it may seem, it appears that the Diocese was running the Academy under James Fitzgerald from 1849 – 59 at the same time as St Munchin’s under Thomas Fitzgerald and Michael Malone from 1853-59 and with both boarders and day school pupils and broadly the same curriculum. When Spillane published his doctoral thesis, seemed to reach the same conclusion. It raises the possibility that Hannan attended the Academy for a few years before moving to St Munchin’s in 1853. Though if they offered the same curriculum, he would hardly have bothered to change.

Appendix 4 The Hannan Family: Life in Ballingarry in the mid-19th Century