Irishtown, Kilkenny

Irishtown (Irish: An Baile Gaelach[1]) is the neighborhood in Kilkenny in Ireland around St Canice's Cathedral.

It was formerly a borough, also called Newcourt or St Canice's, separated by the River Breagagh from the walled town of Kilkenny to the south.

The site of Irishtown was the capital of the Mac Giolla Phádraig dynasty of the medieval Kingdom of Ossory, and a daughter house of Aghaboe Abbey was built there.

It was through Dean's Gate in 1650 that Cromwell's army entered Irishtown and from there captured Kilkenny, capital of Confederate Ireland.

[5] In 1846, the Parliamentary Gazetteer wrote: The city all stands on the right bank of the Nore, and is cut by the Bregah rivulet into the two great sections of Irishtown and Englishtown, or of the more ancient and the less ancient Kilkenny ... Irishtown on the north of the Bregah, and Englishtown on the south, though formerly regarded as distinct towns, and even possessing separate charters and corporations, are now both topographically and politically fused into each other, so as to form in the strictest sense one town; and except that each possesses remains of its originally distinctive character, and boasts as a pre-eminent feature its peculiar metropolitical edifice, the former in St. Canice cathedral on a hill or rising ground in the north, and the latter in Kilkenny-castle on a hill or rising ground in the south-east, they could not possibly be suspected by even a dabbler in Irish antiquities, who should happen to be ignorant of their particular history, to have ever been in any manner mutually distinct.