Paul MacCotter MAGI has contributed a paper entitled ‘The origins of the parish in Ireland’ to the latest edition of the  Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. It comprises a history of pastoral care and the parish in Ireland from the seventh century until circa 1300 AD, showing how pastoral care evolved into a parish system against a background of reform movements and the Anglo-Norman invasion and should be of interest to all genealogists, since the medieval parish is the ancestor of the later civil parish, an areal unit of fundamental importance for Irish research.