A History of County Clare

Clare is one of the six counties of Munster, although many older maps show it as part of Connacht. In Gaelic times the present county formed part of the kingdom of Thomond which at its peak extended eastwards as far as Birr in County Offaly. From the twelfth century onwards the county was contained between the important Norman cities of Galway and Limerick and remained contested territory for many centuries. Gaelic culture continued to flourish although some of the older families abandoned Catholicism for Protestantism from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries on. In the nineteenth century Clare was the focus of nationalist revival with the famous by-election of 1828 which returned Daniel O'Connell to the House of Commons. Like all Atlantic counties, Clare was decimated by the effects of the Famine and did not recover for generations. However, the twentieth century has seen institutional revival through Shannon Airport and Shannon Newtown; a powerful cultural heritage focused on traditional music; and a vigorous economic life symbolised by Ennis, the county town, becoming Ireland's first 'information age town', through its wholesale embracing of new technology in 1997.