On Saturday, in the Long Gallery at Kilkenny Castle, the Royal Household clipped a silver star to Aoife Ní Bhraonáin’s left breast and read out a five‑year warrant. The ink was hardly dry on 27 June by the time the court photographers had coaxed her under the tall windows where the afternoon made a lens of the varnish on the bindings. She is the new Historiographer Royal of Ireland and, by the same breath, a Commander of the Order of Aughrim. It is a combination designed to warm the courtier’s heart and raise the hackles of those who read her book last winter and binned their parish brochures.
We spoke in the draught that runs down that room, beneath the Stuart portraits and opposite the narrow table where dignitaries sign the ceremonial register. I told her I was from south Roscommon, which is either a credential or a warning in such conversations. She smiled tightly and set the star’s case on the table between us, lid open as if to keep the thing in parliament.
Review: The news first. What exactly have you accepted? Term, money, leash.
Ní Bhraonáin: Five years, subject to good behaviour as the lawyers still like to say. A stipend of €104,000 paid through the Department of Arts, Heritage and the Crown. An office of four historians and two archivists, with the right to secondees from the National Library and the Army’s Cartographic Corps for specific projects. I answer ceremonially to the Household and practically to the Cabinet via the Department. The leash, if that’s what you mean, is in the budget lines and the calendar.
Review: And the calendar means standing at Kilcommadan before dawn on the twelfth, bowing at the cairn and reading a set piece that calls the victory by its names. You have called those set pieces a fog machine.
Ní Bhraonáin: I have called lazy writing lazy writing. The rite is the state’s. My task is that the words speak to the evidence and that the evidence be opened. If that means retiring a few purple paragraphs introduced in 1981, then good riddance.
Within three months, she promises, the Order’s citations and the audit milestones will be published online; access to the map room makes that possible.
The key she means is literal. The Royal Archives’ Aughrim collection, a body of field maps, correspondence, requisition lists and ceremonial registers, sits partly in the Castle and partly in a climate room built under the south lawn in 1996. Access is supervised. Digitisation has lagged since the crash; the contract renewal issued in 2022 to O’Riada Digital Heritage Ltd of Callan sits under an audit cloud. The draft report that reached the Public Accounts Committee in May flags scope creep, overbilling on scanning hours by an estimated €380,000, and a helpful email from a Household aide promising to “streamline” change requests.
Review: You inherit that. Will you publish the citations for the Order of Aughrim honours and the archive’s vendor contracts?
Ní Bhraonáin: The citations first, yes. The Order has a prose problem; it often reads like a club minute. Names and reasons should be on a single page on the Department’s site within three months. As for contracts, the audit must run its course, and then it will not be optional. The Archives are not a private chapel.
Review: Some would say the chapel just placed a star on you. Your book told parish committees to take down their martyrs and told schoolchildren that Aughrim turned on the men who counted sacks as decisively as on those who charged.
Ní Bhraonáin: It told the truth that is in the papers. The “relief lines” that moved grain along the Galway–Ballinasloe route in the spring and early summer of 1691 are in customs tallies and in payments from the Crown’s emergency granary. The Limerick–Athlone corridor moved cattle, barrels, powder, and smashed apples for cider, of all things. French subsidy accounts delivered specie at Kinsale and Galway; I published the March and May ledgers, €2.1 million in today’s value. If you want to know why Dillon’s horse could still move at five in the evening, answer: horses fed. The ground held. Money bought time.
Review: Did courage do nothing at all?
Ní Bhraonáin: Courage is plentiful in every army that makes it to the field. What decides battles is often who can bring bread and dry powder to the place where courage wants to act. I will never disparage the men on Kilcommadan. I will disparage the habit of turning them into saints because the paperwork is less romantic.
Her office, founded in 1764, keeps the campaign papers and oversees the rite. In Connacht, the story it tends is as thick as moss. In Roscommon and south Galway, parish funds paid for plaques and park benches and an annual tea where an elderly man was made to recite a family letter that gave us St Ruth’s last joke. That letter (the one in the red frame in the side room of the community hall at Ahascragh) has failed new tests at the University of Dublin Materials Lab. Iron gall ink dated to the 1820s, rag content wrong, watermark spurious.
Review: You wrote in Breakers of the Centre that the “St Ruth field letter” was nineteenth‑century piety. The new analysis lands like a hammer. What do you say to a parish committee that raised €18,000 over six years for its display?
Ní Bhraonáin: I will go to the hall and say thank you for caring for the memory and then ask them to help write a better label. The object is still old; it tells us about the 1820s, a time when people hungry for gravitas made things. We can mourn the comfort a forgery brought and still publish the test report in full. The Royal Archives will commission a travelling case so the hall can show both the letter and the science that unmasked it. And I will ask the Department to match the parish’s €18,000 with a maintenance grant this autumn.
The forged ‘field letter’ will not be binned; it will be labelled with a date and a context, and the lab report will sit beside it.
The losers of our ceremonies do not only live in parish halls. In Belfast’s markets, the memory of Aughrim is not the warm bath it is in the schoolbooks. The Autonomy Act of 1921 went some way to addressing power, but honours still tilt. When the new honours list came out at Easter, I called a bookseller who has made a life from the paper trail of families on both sides of 1691. “I can price the past by who feels welcome at Kilkenny,” said Ruth Caldwell, proprietor of Linenhall Rare Books. “Catalogues of ex‑estate libraries from Down and Antrim come across my desk because their descendants never got a look‑in on boards and fellowships. Then I see donors from the same handful of Catholic surnames given green sashes for ‘services to heritage’. Put the citations online. If reasons were named, I’d expect different consignments through my door next season.”
Review: Will you press the Household to spread the Order of Aughrim beyond the usual choir? Or is that above your station?
Ní Bhraonáin: The citations and the data will put pressure where I cannot. If we publish the last ten years of lists, with occupations, counties, and community affiliations, the picture will speak plainly. I can advise. I cannot command. But I can refuse to inflate those who do not deserve it.
Review: You accept a Commander’s star even as you propose to prune the tree it hangs on.
Ní Bhraonáin: Look, there are historians who think any honour is a bribe. I think an honour is a card placed on the table where decisions are made. The question is whether you use the card. If I fail to push for the Archives to open and for the rite to be rewritten, throw the star back at me.
I tell her I do not collect sashes for sport. She tells me to come to the map room at nine on Tuesday and sit in on the first meeting with the digitisation contractor. She says I can bring a tape measure if I like, to count how many boxes can be processed per week at the rate we are paying. We argue about line items for a quarter of an hour. She knows the numbers. The Archives’ operating budget this year is €2.8 million. Of that, €740,000 goes to environmental systems and security, €600,000 to staff, €520,000 to digitisation, €160,000 to outreach and education, €120,000 to the battlefield rite itself, with the balance claimed by storage, transport, and conservators’ invoices. It is a file without fat, she insists, and yet the audit says otherwise about the contract.
Review: The Aughrim Trust will read that €120,000 and tell you to defund the pageant and fund the trenches where the boundary walls are falling in the bog.
Ní Bhraonáin: The rite budget does not pull a penny from enforcement. In March, Galway County Council missed a statutory enforcement deadline on file 24/173 for works near the old wall line; the notice lapsed on 14 April. The Trust sent a polite letter on 20 April and did not seek a Section 160 injunction. That is where walls are lost. I will ask the Attorney General for a standing instruction on emergency heritage injunctions.
On the hill itself, a planning battle grinds. A private scheme proposes twenty‑six houses and a cul‑de‑sac near the line of old boundary stones. The developer has friends on the county committee and a set of glossy drainage plans. The Trust sues. I rang the builder on Monday. He had things to say about historians who wear sashes and stop families getting keys.
“I grew up digging footings with my father outside Ballinasloe. I respect graves and I respect jobs. If they want a setback, give me the exact metres and the survey. But they move the posts every month and they ring the press instead of the engineer. ‘Heritage obstructionism’ is the phrase and I’ll stand over it. People need houses,” said Liam Shaughnessy, managing director of Shaughnessy Homes (Connacht) Ltd.
Review: Does he have a point? Does the Trust need engineers before poets?
Ní Bhraonáin: The Trust needs a list of coordinates and a legal budget—that’s true. It also needs to remember that the field is not a museum; it is land with drains that clog and grass that grows. But Mr Shaughnessy will not run a cul‑de‑sac through an 18th‑century wall because he can pronounce “attenuation basin”. Setbacks will be published to the centimetre. I will bring the Cartographic Corps to mark them in paint and GPS. Then let him build outside the line if he can meet it.
We turn back to the book. The core of her argument—and the cause of half the column inches turned against her—was her chapter on the Crown’s famine belts and the way they intersect with the campaign. In 1847 the same corridors were reopened as relief lines along canal and rail from Galway to Ballinasloe and Limerick to Athlone. Ní Bhraonáin walks the reader from bulletin to invoice to wharf, and some of her colleagues have complained that she writes like a quartermaster. I ask her if the office will cure her of that tone.
Ní Bhraonáin: I will go on sounding like someone who can count. We flatter ourselves by calling gallantry what was done with money and oats and weather. If the Crown wants elevated language in July, I will cite people by name and page. Patrick Ó Duibhir, a commissary clerk, signed the 12 July 1691 inventory that recorded the final powder deliveries to the centre (RAA, Requisition Book C/17, fol. 42). The Galway–Ballinasloe relief ledger for March 1847, folios 9–13, shows the flour barges that kept children alive. Those are the facts I intend to read aloud.
Review: That will go down badly at the oration.
Ní Bhraonáin: Then let it go down. The point of the rite is not to keep the crowd warm; it is to tell the truth of the country we live in. We are sovereign enough to be honest with ourselves.
Honesty has a constituency and an opposition. In the weeks since Breakers of the Centre came out, my inbox has filled with emails that begin “With respect” and end with threats to cancel subscriptions. In Clonfert I met a priest who told me that parish memory has fed children in winter, and that he did not need a lab report to tell him who his martyrs were. Around the same time I heard from a civil servant in the Department who thanked Ní Bhraonáin for putting numbers to things their office had only waved at. The fight is not only over what happened on a hill in 1691; it is over who gets to pronounce what counts as honourable in 2026.
Review: What about the Belfast Assembly? Does any of this reach them? Will you stand in front of a room of Presbyterian schoolchildren and tell them to cheer the victory that pushed their great‑great‑grandparents out of a library?
Ní Bhraonáin: I will stand in front of any room and tell them that the Irish state is theirs and that Aughrim is part of that inheritance whether they like it or not. I will also tell them that our honours system has privileged some stories and that this office will fight, by publishing facts and by changing the rite, to make the state hospitable. If they boo, I will listen.
Review: Last question. Those who admire you for your argument fear you have been co‑opted. You have a sash and a star. You will process at dawn. Who will keep you honest?
Ní Bhraonáin: You will. Caldwell in Belfast will. Shaughnessy, irritatingly, will when he points to a line on a map. The Public Accounts Committee will, I hope, if it sharpens its teeth and stops nodding when the Household says “tradition”. And I will try to keep myself honest by doing the hardest thing a court appointee can do: say no in public.
Review: Say it now, then. What is your first no?
Ní Bhraonáin: No to the 1981 language in the oration, page four, the bit about “sacred glories never touched by coin or carbines”. That line goes in the bin this week.
When we finish, the chamberlain hovers two paces off and the light has shifted down the spines. The star in its case sits open on the table. Ní Bhraonáin closes it with a click, tucks the warrant into a brown envelope, and says she will be at Kilcommadan before first light on Sunday. “With a rangefinder and a thermos,” she says.