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‘Irish drought’ might appear to be an oxymoron. However, the island of Ireland has been surprisingly drought prone over the last couple of centuries, but perhaps less so in living memory. We recently established a 160-year drought catalogue for the island covering the period 1850–2015 (Noone et al., 2015; Wilby et al., 2015). This was subsequently extended by Noone et al. (2017) to create a 250-year drought catalogue for Ireland (1765–2015) based on the Standardised Precipitation Index (SPI). In constructing this extended drought catalogue we used documentary sources from newspaper archives spanning the last 250 years. Together with other historical sources, these add confidence to the quantitative detection of drought episodes from rainfall records and provide glimpses into the socioeconomic impacts of historic droughts.