County Leitrim
Liatroim
- IrishLiatroim
- ProvinceConnacht
- County townCarrick-on-Shannon
- Local governmentLeitrim County Council
- Area1,588 km²
- Population35,199 (2022)
- Highest pointTruskmore southeast cairn, 631 m
Eighteen in a hundred
Leitrim had 155,297 people in 1841. By 1961 it had 33,470.
It fell at every census. By 1971 it was down to 28,360, about eighteen in every hundred it had held before the Famine, the deepest fall of the eight western counties. It went on falling until 1996.
The land explains part of it. In 1900, 80.7 per cent of holdings in Leitrim were under thirty acres. A younger son in Leitrim walked to the boat.
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Parke's Castle
A restored castle of the early seventeenth century on the north shore of Lough Gill, built for the English planter Robert Parke.
Before it there was a tower house of Sir Brian O'Rourke, lord of West Breifne. An English governor called him the proudest man this day living on the earth. He was handed over to the crown, tried in London and hanged at Tyburn.
In 1677 two of Parke's children drowned in the lake. The castle fell into ruin. It was restored in the late twentieth century in Irish oak.
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Seán Mac Diarmada
Born in January 1883 at Corranmore, near Kiltyclogher, the son of a carpenter.
He was a tram conductor in Belfast until he was sacked for smoking on the platform. He was sworn into the Irish Republican Brotherhood in 1906 and became its relentless organiser.
In 1911 polio left him lame, and he walked with a stick from then on.
He signed the proclamation in 1916. He and Connolly were the last of the leaders shot in Kilmainham, on the twelfth of May.
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Read further
Leitrim fell from 155,297 people in 1841 to 33,470 in 1961, the furthest fall of any county in Ireland, and it went on falling into the 1990s.