Residents of Holyhead fondly remember Pollecoff’s department and drapery store for its ‘elegance and quality’. Its owner, Solomon Polliakoff, was born in Russia in 1867. He emigrated to the United Kingdom to escape persecution and to better himself…

When exploring the shared cultural history of Irish Sea Port towns, it is expected that there will be movement of people in both directions. However less expected is emigrants leaving from both Ireland and Wales, to head to the same Liverpool port…

In April 1844, John James Murphy, emigrated from the townland of Haysland in Kilrane Parish with the rest of the Kilrane Boys to Argentina. The Rosslare harbour was not yet built and it would have been known as Ballygeary at that time. Ireland would…

An Excerpt from the Song The Kilrane Boys by William McCormack It being on the twelfth of April, in eighteen forty four,In the blooming spring, when birds did sing, all round sweet Erin’s shore.The feathered train in concert, their tuneful notes…

Agnes Ferguson sat down with Ports, Past and Present and shared her memories of her family, growing up in Rosslare and the special scent of the wild lupines by the beach.

Oh Dublin, oh Dublin, what have you done, with your posh Georgian houses, now tenement slums! And the cats and rats and kids in bare feet, and their poor mother and fathers with little to eat, but cold porridge from penny-dinners that you call a…

Gary Brown's poem is an elegy for all the people who took the boat out of Dublin and crossed the Irish Sea for various reasons. Some of them left their homes, never to return; others did, but in altered circumstances. This poem speaks of hope and…

Dublin port during the early twentieth century was a place of great business trade and work. Having been refurbished in the 1800s to give way for more shipping of trades and goods, the port had become a huge employment area for most of Dublin.…