Ireland is a small country, as we know, but its intimacy never ceases to surprise. Only last month, for example, I covered the funeral in Tipperary of Harry Gleeson, wrongfully executed in 1941, whose remains were being belatedly returned to his home village.
Then, in a pub at the Galway Races this week, I was grimly fascinated to find myself in the company of a woman who had helped discover and excavate Gleeson’s grave.
After his posthumous pardon, her archaeological forensics company secured the sombre but important contract of excavating an area near Mountjoy Prison’s north wall, presumed to be the resting place of him and many other hanged prisoners.
One of the obstacles was patchy record keeping, especially for the years after independence. Under British rule, grave locations were well recorded; in the Free State less so.
By a lonely prison wall – Frank McNally on digging up Mountjoy’s forgotten past
Frank McNally: I was humbled by a Pakistani taxi driver in Galway and how he fell in love with the place
War veteran, doctor and newspaper tycoon – Oliver O’Hanlon on William Lombard Murphy
Bold moves – James Mason and William Pollock, two Irish chess masters
But that staple of Irish history – oral tradition – proved helpful in this case too. My friend told me she benefitted from the advice of a prison staff veteran, whose forebears had also worked there and who was able to give crucial information.
In a literal sense of a phrase now more usually deployed as a mere metaphor, he knew where the bodies were buried.
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The Gleeson funeral was part-celebration, with the dead man reinterred to the sound of his own fiddle, playing traditional tunes including the cheerful hornpipe “Harvest Home”.
But an indirect effect of the work to find his body was the rediscovery of many other remains, more or less forgotten. Most of these will not be welcomed home anywhere. They’re more likely to end up in a communal grave.
It seems unlikely, for instance, that William Mitchell, a member of the Black and Tans hanged in Mountjoy in 1921, will be the subject of a celebratory funeral, assuming anyone still remembers him.
It was news to me that a Black and Tan had been executed during the War of Independence. And The Irish Times archive doesn’t seem to know anything about it.
But in February 1921, he and a fellow constable named Arthur Hardie were accused of the murder during an attempted robbery of a Wicklow magistrate and cattle dealer, Robert Dixon.
Hardie, probably the actual killer, took his own life before the law could deal with him. It was his presumed accomplice who was left to swing, which he did a few months later, despite disputed evidence.
The only member of the crown forces hanged for murder during the Troubles, Mitchell was the subject a book a few years ago, DJ Kelly’s Running with Crows.
But his remains too were among the gloomy harvest gathered in Mountjoy in recent months.
And if they were to be given a homecoming, it turns out, they wouldn’t have to go far.
In common with about 20 per cent of the Black and Tans, Mitchell was Irish. He had been born in the notorious Dublin district of “Monto”, then Europe’s biggest red-light district.
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Mention of Monto reminds me that the US actor Carroll O’Connor (1924-2001), who would have been 100 on Friday, owed his career to the same place, indirectly.
He is now best remembered for the 1970s sitcom role of Archie Bunker, a grumpy middle-aged man much given to complaining about ethnic minorities (including the Irish), feminists, communists, Catholics, and Jews.
But his breakthrough was playing Buck Mulligan in Ulysses in Nighttown, a stage adaptation of Joyce’s novel. Not even having an agent at the time, he contacted director Burgess Meredith in person and demanded an audition, declaring himself perfect for the part.
Meredith agreed eventually and the production was a surprise Broadway hit of 1958, a months-long run ending only when the theatre was demolished.
The play’s title exploited the notoriety of an episode of Ulysses set in Monto, renamed “Nighttown” by Joyce.
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On a day trip to Galway last weekend, a friend and I saw the Druid production of Endgame, Samuel Beckett’s bleak comedy on the human condition.
The staging of which, it is said, was inspired by chess. With his dominance of the other characters but limited powers of movement, the chair-bound Hamm is a king. His long-suffering sidekick, Clov, who moves for him, is a knight.
But that wasn’t the only human chess game we witnessed on Saturday, thanks to the return train journey and the bleak comedy that is being an Iarnród Éireann passenger.
The second drama started with a temporary malfunction of the seat-booking system, corrected as we left but not before many passengers on the overcrowded train were sitting in the wrong place.
There followed a lesson in the human condition as some who had booked seats were too polite to say so and stood stoically, while others insisted on their rights, only to find unlawful occupiers doubling down.
Two seated passengers with Mediterranean accents brazenly claimed there had been an announcement that all seat allocations had been cancelled, until we and others loudly contradicted them.
Those were the opening gambits.
Then came a bewildering flurry of moves: b34 x b39; b39 x b45 (threatening check); b45 x b37 (threatening to call the conductor), etc.
The whole thing was almost as good as a play, although we thought better of giving it a standing ovation.