Qualla: Oldcastle, County Meath

Oldcastle, County Meath: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Sarah777 at English Wikipedia, Public domain. On 12 December 1914, a specially commissioned train pulled into the small market town of Oldcastle and unloaded sixty-eight German civilians under armed guard. They were marched through the streets to a disused Victorian workhouse on the southern edge of town. Two days later, twenty-six more arrived. By February the next year, three hundred and four men. By June 1916, five hundred and seventy-nine. Oldcastle, in the quiet northwest corner of County Meath, was about to spend the entire First World War as Ireland's only permanent civilian internment camp — a strange interruption in the life of a town that had until then been better known for being the birthplace of a Catholic saint and the home of furniture-makers.

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Image: Sarah777 at English Wikipedia | Public domain

Oldcastle, County Meath: Saint Oliver's Country

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Eric Jones, CC BY-SA 2.0. Oldcastle is the eighteenth-century creation of the Naper family, who received parts of the older Plunkett estate after the Cromwellian wars. The most famous of those Plunketts was Saint Oliver Plunkett, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Armagh — born in this area in 1625 and hang...

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Image: Eric Jones | CC BY-SA 2.0

Oldcastle, County Meath: The Workhouse Becomes a Camp

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit HENRY CLARK, CC BY-SA 2.0. The Alien Restriction Act of 1914 was passed within twenty-four hours of Britain's declaration of war. It gave the government power to intern Austrian and German men of military age — anyone between seventeen and forty-two — on suspicion that they might return home to fight or st...

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Image: HENRY CLARK | CC BY-SA 2.0

Oldcastle, County Meath: Life Behind the Workhouse Walls

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Trounce, CC BY-SA 2.5. Conditions were not comfortable but they were not the conditions of a military prison camp either. Inmates were allowed to write and send two letters a week of twenty-four lines each. Parcels could be received. Visitors were allowed for fifteen minutes twice a month. The class di...

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Image: Trounce | CC BY-SA 2.5

Oldcastle, County Meath: Ireland Changing Outside

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dave Napier, CC BY-SA 2.0. On 13 April 1918, an anti-conscription rally was held in Oldcastle. The guest speaker was Arthur Griffith of Sinn Féin. Thousands attended, only three hundred metres from the camp. The prisoners climbed onto the roof of the workhouse to watch and listen. By that point the politic...

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Image: Dave Napier | CC BY-SA 2.0

Oldcastle, County Meath: Beds, Tombs, and a New Zealand Rugby Star

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Haydn Hammerton, CC BY-SA 4.0. Today Oldcastle is a market town of around two thousand people, serving the surrounding farming country. Its industries lean towards furniture and bed manufacturing — Briody Bedding and Respa Bedding are major employers — and the Lithuanian community that arrived to work in those...

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Image: Haydn Hammerton | CC BY-SA 4.0