As part of Ancestry’s Free-to-Access collections, the Irish Intelligence Profiles 1914- 1922 have been added this week. The original files are held in the National Archives in Kew, London. Again they are not the easiest to search. You really need to know the name of the person that you are searching for and just put the location Kerry into the box also. But once you get into an individual file, they can be very informative. It is amazing the ‘intelligence’ that the British were filing away during this period.
For instance I inserted the name ‘Thomas Ashe’ but what I got was an interesting story. Following the death of Thomas Ashe in the Mater Hospital in 1917, a fund was set up in Kerry to erect a building to be called Thomas Ashe Memorial Hall. Leaflets were printed appealing for funds in Irish and English and distributed widely, including to the United States. This came to the attention of Dublin Castle and we can now read th correspondence and investigations that ensued.
Having ‘investigated’ this undesirable carry-on, the Under Secretary decided that no action should be taken to suppress the ‘leaflets in question’.
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