The Observatory, on its foundation in 1790 by Primate Robinson, was endowed with land to provide an income for the director. This amounted to 200 pounds per annum and was later supplemented by tithes from an area near Carlingford which would normally have been payable to the Archbishop.
The payment of tithes by land-lords and tenants to the established church was far from popular with protestant farmers and even less so with their catholic counterparts who felt that they were being asked to subsidise a rich and alien church. The series of reforms that took place throughout the nineteenth century from Catholic emancipation in 1820 to the land acts of the 1890s had significant repercussions for the pursuit of science in Ireland. In the case of Armagh Observatory, the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland in 1869 took away ‘the right to tithes’ and consequently dramatically reduced the Observatory’s income. This resulted in the first financial crisis of the Observatory. A second came later in the century when the Observatory’s tenants were enabled to buy their land through a Government purchase scheme.
In spite of many petitions to Government for compensation the requests fell on deaf ears and it was not until the late 1920s that the Government (then the Government of Northern Ireland) recognised the importance of the Observatory’s work with an annual grant of 100 pounds per annum. Currently the Observatory and Planetarium are financially supported by the Northern Ireland Department for Communities.
