The story of Father Larry of Manhattan

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.