The Law versus Practice team has had a busy few months and 2026 looks set to be another productive year for the project.

Law versus Practice is now affiliated with the Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland (VRTI) – a development that reflects the ongoing collaborative relationship between the two projects. LvP has been focusing on (re)structuring new and existing datasets; a process that has resulted in the creation a significant number of ‘person’ records (18,000+). Adhering largely to the VRTI schema, LvP will create UIDs for a significant proportion of these persons, and primarily women. These UIDs can in turn be incorporated into the VRTI Knowledge Graph. Dr Frances Nolan (PI) is currently focused on cleaning extant datasets, in order to extract accurate biographical data and mint UIDs. Importantly, LvP’s work in this area will help to identify and address issues that impede the most complete representation of women’s biographical data within structured databases.

Our PhD student, Eoghan Fitzgerald, was awarded a student bursary by the Irish Legal History Society, which will facilitate archival research in the coming months. Eoghan has been busy looking at the Registry of Deeds and exploring the rising and falling fortunes of different families in eighteenth-century Ireland. Most recently, Eoghan has been working on the Armstrong Papers in the University of Limerick, tracing the reduction of the family estate through mismanagement and exploring the impact of economic decline on inter- and intra-familial relationships. Eoghan is uncovering lots of interesting material, which is helping to shine new light on the ROD memorials; he will be reporting on his work here in the coming months.

In other team news, Dr Frances Nolan’s article ‘Zealous for “the Cause”: Irish women as Jacobite agents, 1689-1724’ was published in Eighteenth-Century Ireland in September 2025. The article can be accessed here (via paywall), and will shortly be available “Green” Open Access, through Research Repository UCD.

Frances has also recently published National Hunt and Point-to-Point Racing in Ireland: A History (Four Courts Press), which she has promoted through appearances on RTÉ’s Today Show, TG4, ARTE (France) and Galway Bay FM. The book also received a very positive review in the Irish Independent and made an appearance in The Irish Times’ list of the top sports’ books of 2025!

In the coming months, Frances will appear on series 3 of BBC Northern Ireland’s Long and the Short of It tv series, speaking about land confiscation in the context of the Ulster Plantation.

Project PI, Dr Frances Nolan, on the RTÉ Today Show, November 2025.