The indications seem to tell us that persecution of the Catholic Church was not as severe during the Penal Laws period as in other neighboring parishes. Persecutions seemed to be uneven throughout the country in those times. It depended on what the local Landlord was like. If he was an illiterate thug, as many of them were, the persecution was severe. The local Landlords of this area were the Tenisons.
Alfred Lord Tennison the poet belonged to a branch of this family which would indicate that they were not all illiterate thugs and so did not always seriously enforce the penal laws. The MacDermott Roe family from Alderford House in Ballyfarnon were Catholics and there is no strong indication that they were forced to cease being Catholic and were able to hold on to their estate and house.
Nevertheless, we do have a number of Mass Rocks or Altar Stones throughout the parish. These may indicate enforcement of the law.
But as far as can be ascertained stones like St. Lasair's Flagstone, the buried Mass Rock at Tents, the very old Altar in Greaghnaleva and The Druid's Altar on Corrie Mountain belonged originally to
pre - Christian times. Parish Pastors , it seems, were appointed with reasonable regularity during the penal times which may indicate at least a flexible attitude to the law.
This is not to say that Catholics were regarded as equal with members of the Established Church before the law. They certainly were not.
But this may have as much to do with the "Class System" as with religious practice.

In 1845 , the year the Great Irish Famine started, the population of the Keadue and Ballyfarnon sections of the Parish was 7,085 people and it is estimated that there were at that time some 6,000 people in the Arigna area or a total population of more than 12,000.
The population soared much more as the famine gripped the country because people tended to come into the hills from all around. It seems that high in the hills the potato blight did not hit the potato crop because it was above the "briar line" and the briar was the chief home of the blight spore. But the people who went up the mountains died in huge numbers from disease and exposure because they often had to try to live in holes dug in the mountain bogs and the potato crop, even without the blight, was very poor. It was a difficult time for priests and people. The "Famine Graves" of the parish and especially the one in the hills above Ballyfarnon bear witness to the hardships the people had to endure.
We continue to this day to have a special mass and prayers for all who died in those awful years of famine at the "Famine Grave" site on Kilronan Mountain above Ballyfarnon on the last Sunday of September each year.
In spite of the considerable emigration the Catholic population of the parish held up quite well. By 1900 there would have been around 12,500 people in Kilronan Parish. The mines in Arigna helped to keep people at home because there was work to be had with "good" wages when there was practically no employment anywhere else around.
But after 1900 the population started to go down quite sharply. From 1900 to 2000 the population dropped from about 12,500 to under 1,000 and is now down to some 950 people and still falling.
Kilronan Parish traditionally had three priests but with the present numbers it really is only able to support one . But the area is too large and scattered for one man. We were lucky that Fr. Tom Ryan, who had spent over thirty years on the African missions, came home and is available to help the parish priest as C.C of Arigna and enables all three churches in the parish to remain open.

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