This work was originally published by Maynooth University in Ireland in
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Patrick Carey (1853-1934) was the Union Clerk for the Killarney Poor Law Board of Guardians. Poor law unions and their workhouses were established by the Poor Law (Ireland) Act, 1838, as a response to widespread poverty, and were each governed by a Board of Guardians. This letter comes from the Killarney Poor Law Board of Guardians Minute Book. Messrs Helys was a printworks operating from Dame Lane from 1897 up to the 1960s. Under the control of Charles Wisdom Hely (1856-1929) Hely's printworks were imortalised in James Joyce's Ulysses. In 1916 Helys was performing a balancing act between entertaining Irish nationalists and the British military authorities. After printing several recruitment posters for the British the company were warned to cease printing "British propaganda". Shortly after the printers would produce a commemorative booklet “The ‘Sinn Fein’ Revolt, Illustrated” (1916) along with a series of postcards documenting the destruction of the GPO during Easter Week.
The data in these XML files was generated based on a data dump from the Magellan database (https://github.com/Maynooth-Center-for-Digital-Humanities/Magellan). Each database record has been converted to a JSON file (https://github.com/letters1916static/letters-data/tree/main/json). The element section of the JSON file contains the TEI-encoded contents of the letters. The TEI XML has been cleaned and made well-formed using a Python script (https://github.com/letters1916static/letters-data/tree/main/src).