I’m starting my walk around the middle of Abbey Street. There are so many brilliant looking shop fronts in this town, we’ll see quite a few of them on our walk. What I love about this place is its narrow streets, you can tell it’s a very old town.
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We pass an amazing looking bar with period façade. The Dan O’Connell is named after one of the town’s most famous residents, indeed, one of Ireland most famous residents. Daniel O’Connell was a political leader in the first half of the 19th Century. He’s best known for securing Catholic Emancipation in 1829, which essentially was the removal of many of the restrictions on Catholics in Ireland. It was in Ennis where he won his British parliamentary seat on two occasions. Dubbed “the Liberator’ he galvanised the support of Irish Catholics in a non violent political movement.
We visit an interesting sculpture up in O’Connell Square. It’s by the sculptor Fiona O’Dwyer and is called ‘Contentment is wealth’. But it’s a little dwarfed by the O’Connell Monument on the other side of the square. You can see the importance O’Connell has in Irish history by how he’s remembered here in this town. Not to mention the numerous O’Connell streets that are up and down the country. The inscription tells us that: On this spot in 1828 Daniel O’Connell was returned MP. Remember for those viewing from outside Ireland, this is long long before Irish independence, and so we’re talking here about O’Connell being elected to the British parliament, incredible for an Irish Catholic.
Ennis has for a long time been a thriving market and commercial town. This is because its history lies in its monastic origins. So the town never had walls (like Galway for example) as it was a commercial centre and not a defensive location.
Now I wonder if you’re not from Ireland if you’ve heard a County Clare accent before? Have a listen to the builders in the video and see if you can understand what they’re saying. Anyway if you think you understood what they were talking about you can pop it in the comments below.
We arrive at the cathedral of St Peter and St Paul. Mass was first celebrated here in 1842 although the church didn’t get its pro-cathedral status until 1889.
Ennis is the county town and unsurprisingly the largest town in County Clare, in the west of Ireland. It’s therefore the 11th largest urban settlement in Ireland with a population of 30 thousand people. Historically the town principally dealt in textiles and clothing, corn and flour milling as well as the brewing of beer and the distillation of whisky - this is Ireland after all. The river would have been used to transport merchandise.
Another sculpture, this time entitled “Weathered Woman” by artist José Croft.
If you’re watching this video from Phoenix Arizona (I know I have a lot of American viewers), you’re probably already familiar with Ennis as it’s twinned with your town in the states. But as if one twinning was not enough, Ennis is additionally twinned with St Paul de Fenoulillet in the south of France and the towns of Clare in both South Australia and Michigan, again in the US. If you are watching from any of these twinned towns, let us know in the comments if your town is as beautiful as Ennis. I’m guessing it isn’t, but who knows?
We head towards Parnell Street - Charles Stewart Parnell, another Irish Patriot like Daniel O’Connell, and everywhere you look there are lovely shops.
Like Westport, that I visited in another video, Ennis has been named Ireland’s tidiest town on two occasions and has had the accolade of tidiest large urban centre on multiple occasions. And you can see in this video I think why it’s been so successful. By the way, the origin of the towns name of Ennis lies in its Irish equivalent Innis, meaning island. And as the town is sandwiched between two courses of the river Fergus, that’s why it was seen as an island. It isn’t, of course, an island in reality.
Finally we arrive at the Ennis Friary and it’s a pretty important place historically as you can imagine. The O’Brien clan, decendants of Brian Boru, built this. They left Limerick in the 12th Century to settle where Ennis is now, where they built a fort on the banks of the river. Franciscan Monks arrived here in 1240 and this Friary expanded into an important religious centre until its official closure in 1540 as a result of the Reformation and the dissolution of the monasteries. Nevertheless it survived that period and was in fact the last catholic school of theology to survive the Reformation, but alas it didn’t survive the impact of the Williamite conflict and closed completely in 1690. In its hayday in 1374 the Friary had 600 students and 350 Friars living here.