In eighty short essays, historians, folklorists, archaeologists, theologians, anthropologists, poets, novelists, artists, literary scholars, and educationalists explore diverse facets of the experience of childhood in Ireland over the past 1,500 years. Ranging from the scholarly to the deeply personal, each contribution illuminates some aspect of the lived experience of children in Ireland, or of children of Irish descent abroad.

Topics include: childhood in early Irish saints’ lives; childhood in medieval Irish literature; remembering the children who died violently during the upheavals of seventeenth-century Ireland; ‘foundlings’ and parish-based care for children in the nineteenth century; child prisoners; a New York Irish ‘street boy’ in the American Civil War; children and the belief in ‘changelings’; childhood disability; why Manchester City might be considered ‘Monaghan’s best youth club’; the educational experiences of Jewish children and of the children of RIC officers in early twentieth-century Ireland; the childhood of James Joyce; seasonal migration and childhood farm labour; the origins of the summer Gaeltacht course; the ‘sweet-shop’ culture of Irish childhood; the banbhs who went to the ball in 1930s Offaly; school strikes in mid-twentieth-century Ireland; a Dublin school tour to Lourdes in 1954; childhood among the Travelling community; the evolution of Irish First Communion rituals; a UK-based scholar’s childhood experience of learning different histories in Belfast and Dublin schools; blended family culture in contemporary Ireland; and many more.

With vignettes from nearly every county in Ireland, this anthology serves as an indispensable resource for anyone interested in the social, cultural, and religious history of childhood in Ireland from the earliest times to the present day.

Salvador Ryan is Professor of Ecclesiastical History, St Patrick’s Pontifical University, Maynooth where he writes on religious and cultural history from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century. Other published titles include Christmas and the Irish, Death and the Irish, Marriage and the Irish, and Birth and the Irish (Wordwell Books, 2016-21); We Remember Maynooth: a College across Four Centuries (Messenger Publications, 2020); Northern European Reformations: Transnational Perspectives (Palgrave, 2020); Material Cultures of Devotion in the Age of Reformations (Peeters, 2022), and Reforming the Church: Global Perspectives (Liturgical Press, 2023).