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Our relatives in County Roscommon, Ireland recently sent us a newspaper article from October of last year about the 100th anniversary of the release of four Ballintubber woman who had been jailed in nearby Castlebar. The picture of the womens' release has been floating around family archives for some time...
Here it is:
The quartet of women in the picture -- Mary Leonard, Mary Kate Cooney, Nora Leech, and Maggie Kelly -- had been imprisoned for a month for intimidating two men in what was called the "Anti-Grazing War" -- they had protested the closing of English-owned grazing land to local farmers, had driven some of the English lords' cattle out onto the roadways in protest, and confronted the constabulary that came out to stop them. The woman third from the left is Margaret (Maggie) Kelly; she has an infant in her arms: her three-month old daughter Catherine, who had been imprisoned with her. Maggie is my great-great-aunt, Catherine my first cousin twice removed.
Maggie is also the great-grandmother or grandmother of many of our living relatives in Ireland; when we were in Ireland in 1999, we visited her youngest son Pakie (Patrick), who at the time was 85 -- he's since passed away. Maggie's mother was Mary Farrell, who had married John Coen. Another of their daughters (and Maggie's older sister) was Mary Ann Coen, my great-grandmother. Catherine, the infant in Maggie's arms, would emigrate to Cincinnati in her 20s -- following several relatives, including Mary Ann Coen -- and marry James McCabe. She died here in 1992 at age 85.
In a bit of serendipity, another relative just the other day sent a copy of an article that appeared in a Cincinnati newspaper in 1981, in which Catherine McCabe talked about the picture and the events behind it. Here's the text of that article (I've added a few links for the curious):
According to our Irish relatives, Maggie's incarceration was by no means the only time someone in our family would get into trouble protesting. John Hester, a cousin in his mid-90s when we visited in '99, regaled us with tales of his own days as a youth in the IRA. I remember Martin Mullin (who is Maggie's grandson) taking us around Ballintubber to show us the ruins of the Farrell and Coen cottages and pointing across the field to a large house, telling us how that had been the manor house of the English landlord, and how one day a few of the landlord's chickens came wandering over onto the little farm the Coens had, and so our relatives decided to keep them. The landlord's people came over demanding to have their chickens back, and not only that, they wanted any eggs the chickens had laid. The Coens gave back the chickens -- and gave them back the eggs also: by throwing them at them.
It's interesting to see how one's own relatives reacted to 'interesting' political times in their lives and the struggles they went through. From an American perspective, our own War for Independence took place centuries and many generations before, but I have relatives in Ireland who were alive the day their country was finally declared free. Makes one's own life seem rather blase in comparison...
Here it is:
The quartet of women in the picture -- Mary Leonard, Mary Kate Cooney, Nora Leech, and Maggie Kelly -- had been imprisoned for a month for intimidating two men in what was called the "Anti-Grazing War" -- they had protested the closing of English-owned grazing land to local farmers, had driven some of the English lords' cattle out onto the roadways in protest, and confronted the constabulary that came out to stop them. The woman third from the left is Margaret (Maggie) Kelly; she has an infant in her arms: her three-month old daughter Catherine, who had been imprisoned with her. Maggie is my great-great-aunt, Catherine my first cousin twice removed.
Maggie is also the great-grandmother or grandmother of many of our living relatives in Ireland; when we were in Ireland in 1999, we visited her youngest son Pakie (Patrick), who at the time was 85 -- he's since passed away. Maggie's mother was Mary Farrell, who had married John Coen. Another of their daughters (and Maggie's older sister) was Mary Ann Coen, my great-grandmother. Catherine, the infant in Maggie's arms, would emigrate to Cincinnati in her 20s -- following several relatives, including Mary Ann Coen -- and marry James McCabe. She died here in 1992 at age 85.
In a bit of serendipity, another relative just the other day sent a copy of an article that appeared in a Cincinnati newspaper in 1981, in which Catherine McCabe talked about the picture and the events behind it. Here's the text of that article (I've added a few links for the curious):
Every 25 years of so, some Galway or Roscommon newspaper prints a 1907 photograph and asks the whereabouts of baby Kelly, “Ireland’s Youngest Patriot.” Catherine Kelly McCabe, during her 56 years in Cincinnati, never quite got around to replying.
At 73, still bright and spunky as any colleen, she has fretted all week long, while over in Belfast’s Maze Prison, Bobby Sands of the outlawed Irish Republican Army conducted his fast to the death.
The Irish have grown used to seeing patriots and partisans in prison. They have been witnessing such events as Sands’ since the reign of Britain’s first Queen Elizabeth. Catherine “Baby Kelly” McCabe knows more than a little about such matters. She was in prison with her mother in Castlebar at the wee age of three months.
“The English landlord controlled thousands of acres back then,” she said, showing me a photo postcard of four women (one with a babe in arms) standing in front of Castlebar Prison Gate. “My mother and three other were put in prison for a month for driving the landlords’ cattle onto the roadways as a protest.
The photo inscription reads 'Ballintubber Political Offenders, Released October 2, 1907, at Castlebar.'
Once freed, they were greeted as heroes with banners, gifts and parades. But heroes still had plenty to fear from the British Black and Tans.
“They were tramps,” McCabe said. “They didn’t think no more of killing a person than killing a fly. During the First World War, the English sent over anybody they could get -- to put down the Easter Rising of 1916.”
Once, when she was 5 and at play with her sister in the fields, some Black and Tans in an armored lorry stopped and shot at them. “They fired on us, two little kids!” she said. “My Dad rushed out and carried us on his back all the way home. I couldn’t hear for a long time after.”
The British troops tried to make a neighbor of the Kellys, a Mrs Cryans, confess where her sons were. “They tied her in a chair and pulled her hair out in handfuls,” McCabe recalled. “Then they burned her house down.”
Ireland’s freedom fighters practiced maneuvers at night. Women served as scouts. In her grandmother’s day, the Irish even studied reading and writing at night since the English wouldn’t permit schools. Despite that risk, her mother, Margaret Kelly, harbored “boys on the run.”
"During the 1916 Rising,” McCabe said, “she hid two nephews on the run from the English, hid them under the bed with the rifles still slung on their backs. We were all kneeling on the floor and saying the Rosary when the English came to search. I remember shaking all over. They probably would have killed all of us for harboring or at least burned the house down. I’ve forgotten the Ballad of Kevin Barry, but he was hanged for harboring.”
Don’t believe media reports that it’s just Catholic vs. Protestant in the North. Today, like 70 years ago, and 70 before that, it is the same tug of war: Irish vs. British.
“Why can’t England give up that poor little corner of Ireland?” McCabe asked. A peace-poor corner, maybe, but not poor in industries dear to the British.
Back on a visit in 1974, McCabe happened to go to confession to a priest from Belfast. “Everything you hear about the jails and how our young boys are treated like dogs,” he told her, “you can believe, because I am chaplain in some of those prisons. It’s hell on Earth.”
“I’m sure IRA violence hurts their cause,” said Catherine McCabe. “Deep in my heart, I know the English government is the only one that can solve it. But I also know there will never be peace till the English government gives it up.”
Surely, the Irish never will.
According to our Irish relatives, Maggie's incarceration was by no means the only time someone in our family would get into trouble protesting. John Hester, a cousin in his mid-90s when we visited in '99, regaled us with tales of his own days as a youth in the IRA. I remember Martin Mullin (who is Maggie's grandson) taking us around Ballintubber to show us the ruins of the Farrell and Coen cottages and pointing across the field to a large house, telling us how that had been the manor house of the English landlord, and how one day a few of the landlord's chickens came wandering over onto the little farm the Coens had, and so our relatives decided to keep them. The landlord's people came over demanding to have their chickens back, and not only that, they wanted any eggs the chickens had laid. The Coens gave back the chickens -- and gave them back the eggs also: by throwing them at them.
It's interesting to see how one's own relatives reacted to 'interesting' political times in their lives and the struggles they went through. From an American perspective, our own War for Independence took place centuries and many generations before, but I have relatives in Ireland who were alive the day their country was finally declared free. Makes one's own life seem rather blase in comparison...