Letters That Still Haunt

Cormac MacConnell - The West's Awake

Letters That Still Haunt

October 26, 2007

By Cormac MacConnell

IN the middle of the Halloween season I’m reading a touching article in a Clare journal about the execution by the free state in 1923 of a young Clare so-called irregular called Patrick Hennessy. He and his anti-Treaty comrade Con McMahon were just two of the many casualties in the Civil War which, to this day, is somehow blanked out of the normal verbal agenda.

Poignantly, I’m also reading the piece by Ellen Murphy on the eve of the Clare county hurling final between Crusheen and Tulla. Both parishes are close to the scene of the incident which led to Hennessy, himself a fine hurler, being sentenced to death and executed.

Furthermore, he was at the time the secretary of the Clare GAA County Board. And, as almost always, there is an American link in this small and painful yarn. And a link with Halloween as well.

There is a parlor game which is still being played in many Irish rural homes at Halloween. It is a fortune game. Some of ye who are Irish-born will remember it.

Saucers were placed on the kitchen table. They contained various items such as a gold ring or a coin or water. The player is blindfolded, spun around several times before the table, then stretches out his blind hand to touch one of the saucers.

If it is, for example, the saucer containing water then it means that they will be crossing the water, probably to America. The ring signified love and happiness ahead. The coin signified wealth. The saucer of clay was often omitted because clay is death.

In Halloween of 1922, in that troubled era, Patrick Hennessy and Con McMahon were in the home of Hennessy’s sweetheart Jenny, a safe house. They played the game too.

Two months later both were in an IRA group which raided Ardsolus Railway Station near Quin, on the edge of the parishes contesting this year’s hurling final. The irregulars at that time were attacking the free state’s transport system, disrupting it as much as possible, destroying the lines and the signals.

They were caught as they attacked Ardsolus Station for the second time on January 14, 1923. Hennessy made a run for it but was shot and recaptured.

He and McMahon, summarily court marshaled, were executed in Limerick six days later. It was a minor skirmish on an island in bitter turmoil, brother against brother.

And on the night before his execution Patrick Hennessy wrote three letters which are heartbreaking in content. One was to his former comrades. One was to his sweetheart Jenny and his friends. And one to his younger sister Theresa.

Some of them have now been donated, or are being donated to the Clare Museum by his descendants in America and England. And the brief extracts from them quoted by Ellen Butler in her splendid article serve to strip folklore and myth down to the bare and very mortal bones. They would break the heart.

What had the young man to leave to his comrades?

“I am leaving my cigarettes to be divided among the Clare section. A cigarette will go a long way. It will only be a little token of remembrance of me. Distribute them as far as they will go and say a little prayer for me.”

And how much blood was on the hands of the young hurler as he faced his execution? There was a lot of blood on many hands back then, before and during the Civil War. How much blood?

In his letter to his small sister he wrote, “I have never fired as much as one shot at anybody, and that is a great consolation going before my God. I know it is God’s will and I am reconciled he wants me and Con for Himself in heaven and has called us to Him.”

And to his sweetheart, “Darling, do not shed tears for us, if you do let them be tears of joy for we are going straight to heaven. do not worry, it is home to God we are going.”

Widen the focus a little. The state that Hennessy and McMahon fought and died for so long was unable to support so many of those who survived the ordeal. Those simple last letters, or most of them were carried away from the island as precious mementoes by the tide of emigration.

That’s the American link. Patrick’s young sister Theresa brought his letter to her on the emigrant ship. The family of Patricia Benker in New York State have the only surviving photograph of Hennessy, a strongly built young man with a dark moustache and a chain of hurling medals proudly displayed on his waistcoat.

The letter to his sweetheart Jenny was treasured by the Kilrush family of Ellen Murphy. The IRA retained a copy of the letter to his comrades.

Most of the material, including the photograph, either has been or is about to be donated to the Clare Museum in Ennis for exhibition there. On the back of the photograph a sad aunt wrote, “Poor Patrick. Died January 20, 1923” in the blackest of ink.

And the Halloween link?

In the sweetheart letter to Jenny the young hurler hours away from death recalled the Halloween party games they played in her house. All those saucers on the table and the blessed blindfold.

And he wrote, “Oh Jenny, little did we think that what we did for sport on November night when myself and Con drew the saucer of clay that it would so soon indeed be our fate!”

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