County Laois
Laois
- IrishLaois
- ProvinceLeinster
- County townPortlaoise
- Local governmentLaois County Council
- Area1,719 km²
- Population91,877 (2022)
- Highest pointArderin, 527 m, shared with Offaly
Queen's County
In 1547 and 1548 English forces built a fort in the territory of the O'Mores and named it Fort Protector, after the Lord Protector of England.
In 1556, under Philip and Mary, the plantation was put into law. Laois became Queen's County and the fort became Maryborough, after the queen. Offaly became King's County.
The campaign against the clans was brutal and officially sanctioned. It was the first major English attempt to extend the kingdom by colonisation.
Maryborough became Portlaoise at the foundation of the Free State.
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Rock of Dunamase
A limestone outcrop with a fort on it since early Christian times. Vikings plundered it in 842.
In 1170 it was part of the dowry when Aoife, daughter of Diarmait Mac Murchada, king of Leinster, married Strongbow. It passed with their daughter Isabel to William Marshal, then to the Mortimers, and to the crown in 1330.
Nobody recorded how it became a ruin. Local tradition blames Cromwell's generals in 1651.
In 1795 Sir John Parnell began to make it a banqueting hall, with windows and doors taken from other ruins. Some of what looks medieval there is his.
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James Fintan Lalor
Born at Tinnakill in Queen's County on the tenth of March 1807, the son of a substantial tenant farmer. A childhood injury left him with a hump and poor health for life.
In 1847, in a private letter, he wrote that the absolute ownership of the lands of Ireland is vested of right in the people of Ireland. In 1848 he wrote for the Irish Felon.
He died in Dublin in December 1849, after a failed rising in Tipperary. Pearse later counted him one of the four evangelists of Irish nationalism, and that is a large part of why he is remembered.
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