Dr Liam Chambers (Department of History, Mary Immaculate College, Limerick) has gained funding from the Mary Immaculate college seed funding scheme (2010) to construct a database of students who attended the Irish College in Paris between 1832 and 1939. The database will draw on information contained in four manuscript registers held in the archives of the Irish College, Paris. The earliest surviving register begins in 1832 and there is a complete record of student attendance until the closure of the college on the outbreak of the Second World War (1939). The construction of a database will facilitate the analysis of patterns of student attendance at the college over the course of 107 years. The project will explore how the Irish College in Paris played an important, if under-appreciated, role in the education of Catholic priests and laity in the nineteenth century. The data will eventually be accessible on the web. It is evisaged that the data will eventually be incorporated into the Clergy of Ireland Virtual Research Enviornment, fundraising for which has already begun.

The accompanying photograph is of a student group in the college court yard in 1868. It includes the future Cardinal Logue.