Newry Museum building: 1

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Now that renovation of McCann’s Bakery is almost complete we can expect shortly to be again bombarded with ‘evidence’ that Newry’s ‘new’ Museum is in fact the very same building that was entitled ‘The New Castell’ on the earliest known map of ‘The Towne of The Newrye’ – the same building that Canavan, Newry’s definitive historian, referred to as the Abbott’s House.

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Thomas Steers, Canal Engineer

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Any western social and economic history of recent times will focus centrally on the Industrial Revolution (usually dated from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries) – which paved the way for our modern state of development. Industry and production shifted from cottages to factories, from country to cities, and serviced not just the home but many foreign markets as well. 

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18th Century Famine

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Scientists recently identified as the greatest danger to Ireland, Britain and Northern Europe, the possibility of the failure of the massive under-ocean current, the North Atlantic conveyor, which – by diverting the ‘Gulf Stream’ to our direction – gives us a much warmer climate than our latitude would normally merit. Ironically, in this part of the world, the first, most-dramatic and irreversible effect of rampant global warming will be much lower temperatures overall.

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Montgomery & Hamilton

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There had been considerable cross-Channel migration – from Scotland to Ulster – even in Tudor times, but the trickle became a flood in the first decade of the seventeenth century, when the Scottish King James (VI) became King James I of England. Indeed it was the success of two Ayreshire Scots in pioneering an Ulster Settlement in 1606 that inspired King James’ Virginia (Jamestown) settlement in the New World; and the Plantation of Ulster that began just a few short years later.

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O’Neills to Squire Jackson

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At the time of the Ulster Plantation, immediately following the Flight of the Earls, Owen MacHugh O’Neill, son of Hugh M

But it was not to be an easy or long-lasting settlement. The fragile relationship between the conquering English and the ‘co-operating’ leaders of the old Gaelic Order was repeatedly riven over the course of the seventeenth century. Remaining clan leaders, including the O’Neills of Glasdrumman and the descendants of Oghie