How an Offaly big adventure has travelled time and space to Ireland 2026

Darach Ó Séaghdha Author and linguist

In Calling 353, a new series for The Journal, bestselling Motherfoclóir author and podcaster Darach Ó Séaghdha casts a linguistic eye on how we talk about what it means to be Irish, the signs we post to each other about Irishness – and what really lies beneath it all. 

JULY HAS ARRIVED and radio stations around the island have wasted no time in playing that perennial summertime hit, July by Mundy. As songs of Irish summertime go, I prefer it to Summer in Dublin by Bagatelle – supposedly a bittersweet love letter to Dublin but one where the narrator leaves Dublin for Dun Laoghaire in the chorus.

Does New York New York have a verse where Sinatra decides to clear off to Newark? Does Waterloo Sunset have a line where Terry and Julie do a legger to Billericay? I assure you that they do not.

Mundy is, of course, from Offaly and July this year will be a special one for The Faithful County. As Ireland’s presidency of the European Union kicks into play, the logo chosen to represent the project is the spiral structure of the nebula, which was first identified in Birr Castle by William Parsons in the 1840s.

At that moment in Irish history, Birr Castle had the largest telescope in the world.

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The significance of the discovery at Birr Castle was in identifying the “whirlpool” shape of faraway galaxies and the logical implications this particular shape presented for our understanding of gravity and masses of gas in space, and how those conclusions would lead to our understanding of the birth, life and death of stars and galaxies.

The drawings by Parsons of his findings are strikingly close to digital images recently captured with 21st century technology.

The Leviathan of Parsonstown, as it was known, was a 12-ton contraption of a telescope with a 72-inch aperture. A visitor, writing for the Manchester Examiner in August 1847, remarked “it was my privilege a few months ago, to meet the Right Honourable William Parsons, Earl of Rosse, and by his direction to look through his great telescope, into the caves of the moon and into the far-off regions of the universe… no man of science has lifted his eyes from the earth and penetrated so far into the heavens as him… with the sublime instrument designed by his own genius.”

The correspondent added that this was the Earl’s pursuit by night, as by day he was devoted to “instructing the humblest cottiers (an old term for peasant farmers) on how to cultivate their little fields, and make them profitable and beautiful”.

The context is obvious: it was the worst year of An Gorta Mór and many readers would have been appalled at the idea of some Earl browsing the baubles of the night sky while thousands died all around him.

It would have been completely understandable if some locals took a guarded and skeptical view of scientific experimentation: nearby Tullamore endured the world’s first aviation disaster just over half a century earlier when a contraption called a Montgolfier (a paper hot air balloon) caused significant damage to the town following a poorly-planned launch.

And there has always been a tension between funding scientific research whose value is not yet known instead of doing something to help suffering that is happening right now.

One of the greatest defences of making space for funding science in a world with so many immediate demands is found in the reply from a scientist to a letter from a nun. In 1970, Sister Mary Jucunda wrote a letter to NASA; she was working with the desperately poor in Zambia and did not understand how so much could be spent by the space agency on its plans to to to Mars.

The response she received by NASA scientist Dr Ernst Stuhlinger has since been immortalised in the brilliant book and blog Letters of Note.

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Among other great examples, Dr Stuhlinger tells the of a count in Germany who, as well as giving alms to the poor, decides to support the experiments of a craftsman grinding glass lenses to better see tiny life forms. By leading to the invention of the microscope, this largesse by the count had a larger impact over time in fighting disease than many of the immediate (and still very important) alleviations he funded in the present.

From Parsonstown to Birr

Whether or not the people of Offaly deemed the work of Earl William Parsons as being of similar value to that German count is not known. What is known is that the name “Parsonstown” was abandoned in favour of Birr before independence. As early as 1846, the Parliamentary Gazetteer remarked on the town having two names, stating “Birr is both the ancient and the popular name of the town; and Parsonstown is its name of etiquette, imposed in honour of its proprietors, the Parsons, Earls of Rosse.”

King’s County would not have its name corrected to Offaly until 1921, by which time the The Leviathan of Parsonstown had lost its title as World’s Largest Optical Telescope to the Hooker Telescope in California.

Ireland may no longer have the world’s largest telescope in the world.

Maybe the Barack Obama Plaza gets more visits these days than the Science Museum at Birr Castle (which does not sell petrol or have a Supermacs).

But instead of wasting time comparing the sizes of each other’s telescopes, we can and should think more about the eye that looks into the lens. The discovery at Birr was the result of curiosity rather than commerce, and it is that curiosity that needs to be fed, celebrated and allowed to try again when things don’t work the first time. Science is fascinating whether it is a profitable career or not.

Darach will be back next Sunday with more thoughts on the words and Irish cultural phenomena that unite us.

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