Irish digitized historic photographs online

Having recently got a lead on the possible origins of my mystery great-grandfather, John Marmon, I've been exploring Irish resources. A delightful collection, new to me, is of historic photographs from the National Library of Ireland.

Comprising over 20,000 images digitised from Poole Whole plate, Independent H, Lawrence Royal and part of the Lawrence Cabinet collections, they are online at low resolution with basic information, including title, date and location where available.

I did a search for Kilkeel, County Down, from where my ancestor may have originated, and was surprised to find a large number of hits. County Down is in Northern Ireland, not the Irish Republic, but then many of the images predate the Irish Republic.

As the description of the collection warns I found some of the image descriptions inaccurate, sometimes obviously just displaced by one image, and all of them brief with a rather wide associated date range. There are some good images of a church my ancestor probably would have known, both of the interior and exterior.

Did your mother (or any other ancestor) come from Ireland? If so you'll probably find a photo useful to illustrate your family history in this collection.

Find the collection at http://digital.nli.ie/cdm4/index_glassplates.php?CISOROOT=/glassplates