Stephen Heffernan
In person and online Zoom lecture
(following MHSI AGM at 7.00pm)
For Methodists the name of the Wood family of Lismore, County Waterford is known chiefly because of two daughters, who served with the Methodist Missionary Society. Annie, a teacher, served in China from 1885–1904, and Dr Fanny Wood in India from 1900–20 and from 1928–46.
Their family serves to bring into sharp focus the debate that has been prompted in recent years regarding the decline of the non-Catholic population between 1911 and 1926 in what became the Irish Free State, with David Fitzpatrick’s work on the Methodists having come in for particular attention. This lecture considers the experiences of a family that illustrates the difficulty of taking a strictly denominational look at such matters. The Wood family moved easily between Methodism, Presbyterianism and the Church of Ireland. The lecture will follow the family from their arrival in the Lismore district in the aftermath of a boycotting campaign in Kerry during the Land War up to the sale of the last farm held by the Woods in the area in the 1930s and to place them in the wider context of boycotts, cattle runs and killings of ‘emergency men’ that happened during the revolutionary years.
Stephen Heffernan is a graduate of University College Dublin (B.A. German and History) and the University of Galway (M.G.O.). A native of Newcastle on the Tipperary-Waterford border, he teaches at Coláiste Chilliain in Clondalkin.
