Birr - City of Ireland

Birr is a town in the Midlands county of Offaly in Ireland. Once called Parsonstown, after the Parsons family who were local landowners and hereditary Earls of Rosse, Birr is situated at the meeting of the Camcor and Little Brosna rivers. On leaving Birr, the combined Camcor and Little Brosna rivers, now simply the River Brosna, flow into the River Shannon.

Birr is a designated Irish Heritage Town with a carefully preserved Georgian heritage. Birr itself has graceful wide streets and elegant buildings. Many of the houses in John's Place and Oxmantown Mall have exquisite fanlight windows of the Georgian period.

A monastery was founded at Birr by St Brendan of Birr. It produced the Gospels of McRegol, named after the abbot at the turn of the 8th/9th century and now to be seen in the Bodleian Library in Oxford. The Synod of Birr, held in 697, was the occasion on which the Cáin Adomnáin, or law of innocents, was pronounced. The town itself is an old market and former garrison town dating to the 1620s.


Emmet Square in BirrIn Emmet Square stands Dooly's Hotel: one of the oldest coaching inns in Ireland, dating from 1747. The name of Galway Blazers was given to the Galway Hunt after a celebration held in the hotel in 1809 resulted in the premises being set on fire. The column in the centre of the square dates from 1747 and was built to carry the statue of the Duke of Cumberland, known as the Bloody Duke and the victor of the Battle of Culloden. The statue was removed in 1915 as it was in danger of collapse. On the Roscrea road, near the County Arms Hotel is the beautiful gothic-style Catholic church of 1817–25.

The town was also the location of The Crotty Schism, one of the few schisms to affect the Catholic Church in Ireland in the 19th century.