In August this year my wife and I and our
three teenaged children travelled to Ireland to visit her mother, Catherine
Dwyer (aka Kitty), in a rural area near Moate on the border of
counties Offaly and Westmeath. We then travelled north, accompanied by Granny
to a holiday cottage at Moville in Donegal.
As a keen researcher of the family tree, whenever we
visit Ireland I take every opportunity to update information from Kitty about
her family roots in the area. Irish genealogy is well known for being difficult
for a number of reasons, so the oral history approach which involves recording
stories and looking at old photographs and documents such as Mass Cards is
therefore very important.
Where Ireland has gaps when it comes to census records
and the like, the Irish people generally make up for in terms of the rich oral history
tradition. Everyone has a story to tell given some gentle encouragement and an
appreciative audience. I once wrote to a parish priest in County Laois,
researching my mother’s ancestors and asked the slightly unusual question
(based on a family myth I might add), “are there any tales of Ireland’s tallest
woman once living in your parish?” To which he responded in his return letter, “I
haven’t come across that particular one, though most of my parishioners should be
able to tell you a tall story”.
One evening this summer, as Kitty and I sat quite
literally rummaging through her archive of chocolate boxes and biscuit tins containing
old photographs and assorted memorabilia, we came across the Mass Card of a
priest named Lawrence D. Flanagan whom, Kitty recalled, was a cousin of her mother
from Moate. The Mass Card indicated that the Very Reverend Lawrence D Flanagan
was born on 19 June 1882, he professed on 17 October 1901, was ordained on 17 March
1907 and died on 3 April 1966. His order was Carmelite.
Kitty recalled various facts and anecdotes about Lawrence
Flanagan such as that his family owned a saw mill in Moate and that Lawrence
went to New York as a young priest and worked in America for most of his life.
She recalled Father Flanagan once visiting her family on their farm at Lurgan
near Moate, probably in 1939. Kitty was a child and her fleeting memory has
movie-like imagery to it and instantly conjures up a picture of this intriguing
man striding through the Irish countryside towards Lurgan:
“I remember him coming to
visit us one day in about 1939. He was walking along the Balycumber Road from
Moate and then he turned along the Bog Road and through the fields to our house
at Lurgan. I remember that we ran and told our mother that Father Flanagan was
on his way along the lane so she was able to quickly clean around the house and
get out the best china cups. Father Flanagan was a very tall man and I remember
his lace-up boots were extremely well polished. He stayed for tea with my
mother and I remember him blessing us all and blessing our home before he
left”.
The most intriguing piece of
information which Kitty told me was a snippet of a story relating to the Irish
War for Independence. She told me that one night Father Flanagan received a
knock on his priory door in New York to discover it was a fugitive seeking
shelter, none-other than the infamous insurrectionist Eamon De Valera, the
leader at that time of Ireland’s struggle for independence from Britain who had
escaped from Lincoln prison in February 1919 and travelled secretly to the
United States.
Within a few days we drove
up to our holiday cottage at Moville, a long car journey which took us through
Northern Ireland, driving through towns and places which in my mind are sadly associated
with ‘the troubles’, Enniskillen, Omagh, Sion Mills, Strabane and finally through
the city of Derry before driving back into the Republic and out along the coastal
road that runs along Lough Foyle. As a family we had never visited ‘the north’
before and our teenaged Brummie-born children were struck by the oddness of
passing through areas of Ireland where bright and pristine Union Jacks and red
hand of Ulster flags hang from every lamp post. Foreboding rather than
welcoming.
My own mind came back
constantly to the story of De Valera knocking on the door of the Carmelite
priory in Manhattan in 1919, seeking refuge in America at a time when Ireland
was on the verge of its ultimate push for independence. An event in family
history linked in some small way to the greater narrative of Irish history.
It would have been both
amiss and totally out-of-character for me not to have dived straight into some devoted
online research into the background to this event on my return home to
Birmingham. What I discovered was that De Valera’s midnight knock was not a random
act of desperation, on the run in a foreign city, but that his personal link
with Lawrence Flanagan went back to their school days at Blackrock College in
Dublin in the late 1890s. I also discovered much more about the full extent of
the support of the New York Carmelites for Ireland’s struggle for independence
between 1916 and 1922 – a story not widely known on this side of the Atlantic
Ocean.Don’t miss the next instalment of the story of Father Larry and the New York Carmelites in the next edition of The Harp.
