Great Irish Heroes: Famous Irish Heroes

MERCIER PRESS

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© Sean McMahon, 2008

ISBN: 978 1 85635 611 4

Epub ISBN: 978 1 85635 855 2

Mobi ISBN: 978 1 85635 872 9

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FOREWORD

THE DICTIONARY DEFINES ‘hero’ variously as: a man or woman of distinguished bravery; an illustrious person; a person reverenced or idealised; the principal figure in a work of literary or dramatic art. Both real people, and the mythical ones too, are covered in this generous spectrum of meaning. Here, more than fifty figures dancing in a national frieze, astound us with their variety, their courage, their achievements and their Irishness. This last quality is usually achieved by being born here and having a main sphere of activity here. But some born here achieved heroic greatness, of whatever kind, far from the oul sod and a few, though born elsewhere, made Ireland their local habitation.

The list includes saints and scholars, soldiers and statesmen, pirates and politicians, philanthropists and poets, meteorologists and mathematicians, founders and feminists, martyrs and survivors and bold Fenian men. From the noted feminist Medb of Connacht and the prototypical hero-warrior Cú Chulainn, we stride down the ages and we meet a host of outstanding and sometimes unlikely heroes, like the sea-pirates, Granuaile and Anne Bonny; the philanthropists, Thomas John Barnardo and Kathleen Lynn; the frontline soldiers, Sarsfield, Eoghan Rua Ó Néill and Kit Cavanagh; wandering saints, Colum Cille and Brendan the Navigator, the former imposing on himself the bán-martra (‘white martyrdom’) of exile; statesmen like Grattan, O’Connell, Parnell, de Valera; the revolutionaries who made statesmanship possible, Henry Joy McCracken, Wolfe Tone, O’Donovan Rossa, Patrick Pearse, Terence MacSwiney, Tómas MacCurtáin, Michael Collins and many more; and here and there poets, satirists, singers and actors.

Ireland is full of heroes – this book could be ten times as large. This is just a heroic handful and it is fitting, to remember their glories and rejoice in their heroism.

MARY AIKENHEAD

Founder of the Religious Sisters of Charity

1787–1858

MARY AIKENHEAD WAS born in Daunt’s Square, off the Grand Parade in Cork, on 19 January 1787. She was the eldest daughter of David Aikenhead, a wealthy Protestant doctor of Scottish descent and Mary Stackpoole, a Catholic heiress. Mary was baptised into her father’s Anglican religion at St Anne’s church at Shandon but was fostered, because of ill-health, by a poor Catholic family called Rorke who lived in a small cottage in Eason’s Hill, a poor country area behind Shandon. She stayed six years with weekly visits from the parents and was allowed home to make a brief acquaintance with younger siblings, Anne, Margaret and St John. Her return home at the age of six was made less traumatic by the incorporation into the Aikenhead household of her beloved foster parents, ‘Mammy Rorke’ and ‘Daddy John’. Whatever the motives lay behind the fosterage it had the effect of acquainting Mary with the dire poverty of parts of the area, and the memory of her sojourn there was to prove significant in her later vocation. It also was her introduction to Catholicism, as she went to Mass with the ‘Rourkes’.

Her father knew the poor areas of the city well since he ministered, often unpaid, to the poor of Cork and by the time of his death in 1801, the teenage daughter realised just how necessary and unusual this practical charity was. She was strangely moved when her father converted to Catholicism on his deathbed. She had attended mass regularly, but secretly so as not to offend him. Soon she was taking instruction and was received into the Church on 6 June 1802, when she was in her sixteenth year. Her two sisters and brother followed her into the faith of their mother. When she was twenty-two she went to stay with a married friend Anna Maria O’Brien in Dublin and joining her in charitable work found conditions in the poorer parts of the city indescribable. Still very religious she resisted a strong vocation because all of the existing religious orders were enclosed and, while fully supporting that kind of calling, felt hers was intended to be more practical. While in Dublin she met Daniel Murray, who later became archbishop of Dublin, and he chose her to be the founder member of a congregation called the Sisters of Charity. He also gave his support to Catherine McAuley, who founded another religious order.

She thought it essential to have training in the religious life and so with a companion, Alicia Walsh, she endured a rigorous novitiate at the Convent of the Institute of the Blessed Virgin in York from 6 June 1812 until August 1815. They made their vows of perpetual profession privately to Murray and with assent from Pius VII initiated the Pious Congregation of the Religious Sisters of Charity on 9 December 1816. As well as the usual vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, there was a vow of service to the poor, with a particular emphasis on visiting people in their homes. One of their first foundations was in North William Street, off Summerhill, in north Dublin and a second one in Stanhope Street. The authorities in the grim Kilmainham Jail invited the sisters to visit the convicts. Mary, superior-general of the order, made the women on the death wing her special concern.

Of the members of her immediate family, St John died young, Margaret married a doctor and went to live in Kerry and in 1823 Anne joined the order in Stanhope Street, Dublin.

In 1824 John Murphy, Bishop of Cork, asked Dr Murray to let him have a community of Sisters of Charity in his diocese. Dr Murray referred the matter to Mary Aikenhead, who was delighted at the prospect of having a community in her native city. However, Dr Murphy wanted to have the Sisters under his own jurisdiction, whereas the Congregation had been established as one with central government. Mary Aikenhead, having consulted Dr Murray, Fr Peter Kenney, SJ, and Fr Robert St Leger, SJ, informed Bishop Murphy that she could not accede to his request. Although this did not please him, Bishop Murphy decided that he still wanted the Sisters of Charity in Cork, so in September 1826 the sisters move in to the house provided for them. This proved to be a ramshackle building which the sisters jokingly called Cork Castle. It was to be their home for nineteen years before they finally acquired St Vincent’s Convent on Peacock Lane. The order had by then won much praise for their succouring of the poor, especially during the great cholera outbreak of 1832.

Realising the need for a hospital for the needy in Dublin Mary bought the town house of Lord Meath in St Stephen’s Green for £3,000 (£240,000 today) in 1834 and opened it as St Vincent’s, the first Catholic hospital in Ireland and the first run by nuns. Medical expertise was obtained by sending members of the order to Paris for training. Mary had already begun to show signs of inflammation of the spine, which severely debilitated her but did not stop her work. In 1838, at the request of John Polding, archbishop of Sydney, the Sisters of Charity went to establish a community in his city. Convents were opened in Waterford (1842), Galway (1844) and Clonmel (1845).

Though crippled with spinal troubles, dropsy and eventual paralysis, Mary still worked prodigiously. In 1845 she moved to Our Lady’s Mount in the rustic village of Harold’s Cross, south of Dublin city. It was there that she died on 22 July 1858, having spent many years of her heroic life in a wheelchair. Her coffin was carried to the graveyard of Donnybrook by Dublin working-men.

By the time of her death, her congregation has spread to England and Australia.

She was commemorated on an Irish postage stamp in 1958, the centenary of her death.

THOMAS JOHN BARNARDO

Philanthropist

1845–1905

THOMAS JOHN BARNARDO was born in Dame Street, Dublin on 4 July 1845, the son of John Michaelis Barnardo, a furrier of Spanish descent and his English wife, Abigail. Little is known about his early life; like all heroes, he tended to attract stories that are impossible to verify and even his autobiographical writings are fanciful – one of the tales about him describes how, thought dead because of diphtheria, he was already coffined when the undertaker noticed signs of life.

His mother belonged to a strict religious sect founded in Ireland in 1828, later known as Plymouth Brethren. Thomas attended the St Patrick’s cathedral grammar school, where he had the reputation of having little interest in studies and of being a good debater. He did not advance further and by 1861 was apprenticed to a wine merchant, called Robert Anderson, but soon became convinced in line with his parents’ beliefs that alcohol was a source of evil.

He joined the Brethern in 1862, and there followed a period of teaching and preaching in a Dublin ‘ragged school’, one of the charitable institutions where poor children were educated free. He became a member of the Dublin Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) and was one of the regular speakers. Here he heard J. Hudson Taylor describe his China Inland Mission to spread the message of Jesus Christ and the young Barnardo thought his future lay in this field. Taylor persuaded him that he would be most effective with some medical skill and so with a little financial help from the YMCA and the Brethren, he began his medical studies in 1866 at the Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel. His medical training coincided with an epidemic of cholera in which 5,600 people died in a few weeks and there were even more homeless children on the streets than previously. A child called Jim Jarvis, who attended his classes at the ragged school in Ernest Street, told to him how many (including himself) slept where they could, sometimes on roofs curled round the chimneys for warmth. Not all were orphans; some were simply abandoned by their parents. It convinced Barnardo, that homeless children needed help and this became his crusade.

He announced in the religious magazine Revival that he would hold a tea-meeting service for children in November 1867 and 2,347 children attended. Lord Shaftesbury, who had done much to improve conditions for child workers, and Robert Barclay, the founder of the banking house, assisted him. He opened the first ‘Dr Barnardo Home’ in Stepney Causeway where the London headquarters are still situated and where there is a Barnardo Street, named in his honour. The first schools for his charges were two rented cottages in Hope Street, Stepney, one for boys and a separate one for girls, in the culture of the time. By the standards of today’s society his direct methods may seem intrusive, almost arrogant, but whatever about his methods, his mission was literally life-saving.

The movement grew so that by the time of Barnardo’s death in 1905, there were 112 ‘Homes’ and he had the satisfaction of knowing that he had rescued a quarter of a million homeless children. One night in 1871, a destitute boy named ‘Carrots’ was turned away because there was no room. He was found dead of exposure in a barrel he had climbed into for shelter. Thereafter a sign was posted at the entrance to the home reading: No Destitute Child Ever Refused Admission. Though frequently suspected of proselytising Barnardo was frequently short of cash but determinedly lived up to his mission to help destitute children. Infants and younger children were boarded out to foster parents in rural districts; girls over fourteen were sent to training institutions to prepare them for careers as domestics and clerks; boys of seventeen and over, when trained, were placed in employment, sent to sea or aided in emigrating. Of the many boys and girls who went to Canada only 2% proved failures thus reinforcing Barnardo’s dictum: ‘If the children of the slums can be removed from their surroundings early enough, and can be kept sufficiently long under training, heredity counts for little, environment for almost everything.’

Because of his continuing Brethren work, Barnardo was careful to assign the assorted waifs he took under his wing, to appropriate denominational ministers and teachers. He tried to replicate the training that parents should have been able to provide. For religious education his children were divided into two groups, one Protestant (including all the various sects of a formally religious age) taught by him and his assistants, the other handed over to the Jewish Board of Guardians or Catholic institutions as appropriate. His care and practical help for the destitute had the effect of stirring the consciences of other bodies to a social evil that they should have tackled themselves.

Barnardo married Syrie Louise Elmslie in 1873 and they had seven children, one of whom, also Syrie, was the mistress and later the wife of the writer Somerset Maugham (1874–1965), author of many popular plays, novels and short stories. In 1899 Bernardo’s many homes and schools were incorporated under the umbrella title of ‘The National Association for the Reclamation of Destitute Waif Children’ but they continued to be known as Dr Barnardo’s Homes. There was some irony in the title since he had never quite had time to complete his medical training. He died of angina pectoris on 19 September 1905 and almost immediately, a national memorial fund of £250,000 (€100 m today) helped to put Barnardo’s existing foundations on a sound financial basis. The work of the Dublin almost-doctor and missionary continues and the many Dr Barnardo’s Homes still operating are a fitting memorial.

FRANCIS BEAUFORT

Admiral and Hydrographer

1774–1857

FRANCIS BEAUFORT WAS born of Huguenot descent in Navan, County Meath, on 7 May 1774, the son of Daniel Augustus, a clergyman, amateur mapmaker and member of the Royal Irish Academy. (His father published a new and remarkably detailed map of Ireland in 1792.) Francis had the same interest in topography as his father but had a stronger desire to go to sea and so at the age of fourteen he was sent to Dublin for a crash course in astronomy, an important talent for a sailor of the time. His well connected father was a friend of Dr Henry Ussher the Professor of Astronomy at Trinity College, Dublin and the young Beaufort spent five months studying at the recently opened Dunsink Observatory in north Dublin. In 1787, he sailed as a cabin boy in a vessel of the East India Company and two years later enlisted in the Royal Navy. He served throughout the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars until 1812, and in action off Malaga in 1800, he was wounded nineteen times, one bullet lodging permanently in his chest, causing him intermittent pain for the rest of his long life. During his convalescence (1803–04) he helped his brother-in-law Richard Lovell Edgeworth, the father of the novelist Maria Edgeworth, lay a telegraph system from Dublin to Galway.

Having been shipwrecked when he was fifteen, because of a faulty chart, when he was back in the navy, he continued his practice of logging each day’s astronomical observations to determine latitude and longitude, soundings and bearings, all to make charts more accurate. He was given his first command, HMS Woolwich, in 1805 and assigned the task of conducting a hydrographic survey of the Rio de la Plata estuary, between Uruguay and Argentina. The result was so meticulous that even the blasé admiralty admitted that no one had his professional knowledge and ability, and that ‘in zeal and perseverance he cannot be excelled’.

During these early years of command, he developed the