Welcome to the Irish in Europe Project [IEP], hosted jointly in Maynooth University [MU] Arts and Humanities Institute and History Department. Since its 1997 inception, IEP, co-directed by Professors Mary Ann Lyons and Thomas O’Connor, has worked to foster research into early-modern Irish migration to the Continent. It organised a series of five international conferences, published five volumes of conference proceedings, contributed to the organisation of a major exhibition in the National Library of Ireland and built up a network of researchers and collaborators. IEP has a particular interest in making digital material on the European Irish available to the research community and the general public. Since IEP’s inception, its work has been supported by seed funding from the HEA(under PRTLI cycles I and III), the Ireland Fund de France, the Keough Institute, the Irish Heritage Council, Kildare Education Centre, together with MU’s Deans’ Office and Publications Subcommittee.
In 2007, IEP won a major research award from the Irish Research Council. The award was intended to fund the development of a publicly accessible Virtual Research Environment [VRE] to house four legacy databases containing biographical information on early modern Irish migrants to Europe. The four legacy databases were:
The IRC-funded project was led by Thomas O’Connor (MU History), Mary Ann Lyons (MU History) and John Keating (MU Computer Science). Damien Gallagher was the technician. The IEP team accessed the status of the legacy databases, cleansing and reformating the data prior to ingesting it into an XML database to facilitate basic querying and web hosting. The resulting VRE was launched in 2009, to coincide with a public exhibition on the early modern European Irish, hosted by the National Library of Ireland.
The funding crisis consequent on the economic crash of 2008-14 imposed a moratorium on further developments. Over time, technical issues, exacerbated by funding shortfalls, caused the VRE to deteriorate; in 2015 it went off line. Although the data was secured, it took time to source funding to restore and technically update the VRE. Thanks to a number of MU Summer Programme of Undergraduate Research (SPUR) grants, some preparatory restoration work was done on the data (2017-19) under the supervision of Dr John Keating. In 2021, grants from the MU History Department and the MU Arts and Humanities Institute permitted the reprocessing of the 35,000 + biographical records in the original VRE.During this process, a fifth legacy database had been added. This is a database of Irish students at London’s Inns of Court, compiled by Dr Bríd McGrath.
The project’s new technical infrastructure employs the MERN (Mongodb, Express, React, Node) stack and is divided into two projects: i) a front-end user interface and ii) a web-API. The front-end UI is build with NEXT.js, a React framework for the web. The web-API is build with Node.js, a Javascript runtime. Both projects are written in Typescript.
The deployment of the project employs docker, a container runtime for packaging and deploying the apps as containers.
The technical updating was directed by Stavros Angelis, Senior Technical Officer in the Arts and Humanities Institute, assisted by Meadhbh Healy, a postgraduate student in MU Computer Science. These data are once again on-line and available to researchers and the general public.
