The History of Witch Hunts in Ireland

Witch trials have haunted the popular imagination for centuries, but Ireland's story is one of the strangest of all. Fewer than ten trials across four whole centuries, cases so rare and so peculiar that they've been largely forgotten, and a supernatural world that looked nothing like the Devil-fearing panic gripping the rest of Europe.

The cases that do survive are extraordinary: wealthy widows accused of sorcery and demon lovers, communities gripped by possession, confessions to impossible crimes. But the real story isn't just about the trials themselves, it's about why there were so few of them. In Ireland, misfortune wasn't blamed on a witch's pact with the Devil. It was blamed on the fairies. The good folk. The cunning folk who knew how to deal with them. This older, stranger supernatural world shaped what people feared, who they accused, and why so little of it ever reached a courtroom. Join us to explore a corner of history that is all the stranger for being so overlooked.

• Discover why Ireland stood apart from the European and American witch-hunting crazes
• Explore the remarkable case of Alice Kyteler - Ireland's most famous accused witch
• Uncover the role of fairy belief in shaping Irish justice, fear, and community life

Doors open at 4pm, talk starts at 4:30pm - come down early to grab a good seat!

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Speaker Bio:

Dr Gillian Kenny is a historian of medieval and early modern Ireland whose work focuses on women, magic, and folklore. She is Adjunct Associate Professor in the UCD School of History and Visiting Research Fellow at Trinity College Dublin. She has taught widely on Irish folklore and the supernatural, including the Banshee, witches and witch-hunting in Ireland, the Irish art of cursing, and the long history of magic and the women who practised it across Irish history. She has appeared on The Rest Is History and You're Dead to Me, along with numerous other podcasts and television programmes discussing Irish history.