The Missing September
For Ireland, 1752 was not chiefly marked by a battle, a rebellion or a change of monarch. Its most immediate national event was stranger: the official removal of eleven dates from the calendar. Yet the missing days of September belonged to a year in which institutions were also being founded, roads and waterways were being imagined as instruments of improvement, and the contrasts of eighteenth-century Irish society were unusually visible. Dublin remained the seat of a restricted Protestant parliament and of government at Dublin Castle; Belfast was a growing commercial town whose merchants confronted conspicuous poverty; and much of the island was connected by difficult roads, horses, coastal shipping, fairs and local networks rather than by modern transport.