We do a good funeral in Ireland and nowhere better than in Tipperary, as I was reminded on Sunday for the second time in eight months.
Coincidence of county aside, the ceremony that welcomed the remains of Harry Gleeson back to his home village 83 years after he was wrongfully executed in Dublin had something in common with Shane McGowan’s last December: the importance of music.
The production was a lot simpler in Gleeson’s case, but no less moving. Played by one of his in-laws, Anthony Condron, the dead man’s own fiddle provided much of the accompaniment, first in the church via Mozart’s Ave Verum and Danny Boy.
Later, at the cemetery, it played the Tipperary anthem, Slievnamon and – a favourite of Gleeson’s – The Coolin.
Ostentatiously discreet – Frank McNally on the French honours ribbon
The spirit of Dublin – Beatrice M Doran on distiller and lord mayor George Roe
A giant of the stage – Gerard Smyth on Donal McCann
Centre of excellence – Frank McNally on Irish literature’s most famous phrase and the rise of Gallic football
Both sounded suitably mournful.
But as in Nenagh before Christmas, the keynote of this funeral was celebration. Once the remains had been committed to the ground, Condron turned to cheerful dancing tunes of the kind the fiddle’s original owner must have played many times.
The last was an aptly-titled hornpipe, Harvest Home: clapped along to by the crowd at the graveside and then, along with the returned son himself, given a round of applause.
The funeral Mass had been held in the beautiful 12th-century Holycross Abbey. From there, the cortege passed the pleasant village green en route to St Michael and St Mary’s Churchyard – formerly Anglican but also home to many Catholic dead, including the Gleesons – itself picturesque.
And yet, as you couldn’t but be aware, the prettiness of the surrounds and the perfection of the ceremony at this Tipperary funeral were in stark contrast to the story – set mostly in a different part of the county – behind it.
Not even Shane McGowan at his most lyrically brutal, à la Boys from the County Hell, could have done justice to that.
For it was in a rather more bitter harvest that on the third Thursday of November 1940 – Thanksgiving Day in America then – Harry Gleeson found the body of Mary “Moll” McCarthy, hours after one shotgun blast had killed her and a second blew away her face.
McCarthy had been the scandal of New Inn for years. Born dirt-poor in a part of the country – the Golden Vale – where that was an even bigger crime than elsewhere, she had had to make the most of being pretty. Like her mother before her, she turned it into a living of sorts. Providing sex to local men, McCarthy had children by at least six of them. Her kids went to the same school as the respectable families did. When other mothers glared at them, she pointed out that they had “the same fathers as yours”.
Various stratagems were deployed to put her out of business. The parish priest (a former IRA man) “read” her from the altar, to little effect. A judge was asked to find her an unfit mother, but interviewed her children to learn the worst complaint they had was not getting enough “jam”.
When locals burned her thatched roof, she won £25 compensation and got a galvanised one instead. So finally, a group of IRA men – including the father of two of her children – deployed the ultimate sanction. She had made the mistake by then of becoming friendly with a garda, sealing her fate.
A labourer on the neighbouring farm, Gleeson found the body. As McCarthy had been a social outsider, Gleeson was a geographical one – a blow-in. He fitted neatly into the role of fall-guy.
A conspiracy of bad luck and bad faith sent him to the gallows while the silent guilty lived to draw pensions.
McCarthy’s children, meanwhile, were taken into care after all. Not all their fates are known. One of the daughters, also Mary, went to a Magdalene laundry. One of the boys, Michael, emigrated to England and had some success as a building contractor.
In the words of my former colleague Kieran Fagan (whose 2015 book The Framing of Harry Gleeson is currently being reprinted), “he was the one that seemed to have got away”. Alas, he was later killed in a tragic family incident involving alcohol and mental illness.
One of the few heroes of the Moll McCarthy story was Anastasia Cooney, a local landowner for whose family McCarthy’s grandfather had worked.
Cooney drove an ambulance in the first World War and her credentials as a member of respectable society in New Inn were bolstered by a prominent role in the Legion of Mary. At a time when McCarthy was untouchable (except in secret), Cooney made a point of befriending her, sending out a signal for other Christians.
On a similarly uplifting note, among the people I chatted to briefly in Holycross at the weekend was Denis Byrne, now aged 90.
He was only six in 1940 and could have had no idea that he was a half-brother to two of Moll McCarthy’s children (one of whom died in infancy), nor that his father was among the suspects for the killing.
But in recent years, he supported the campaign to have Gleeson’s name cleared. And on Sunday last, bravely and decently, he also attended the funeral.