It was a conversation, some years ago, with the late Bryan MacMahon and the poet Gabriel FitzMaurice - appropriately in Irish Distillers' Whiskey Corner - that started my search for the identity of "the Captain's daughter" and the "brave United Irishman" of the ballad The Boys of Wexford.
Robert Dwyer Joyce's song, a favourite with John F. Kennedy, is currently enjoying renewed popularity at commemorations of the bicentenary of the 1798 rebellion. The question has been asked many times recently at such events: who was the Captain's daughter and who was the United Irishman with whom she eloped? They are no figments of the ballad-writer's imagination, but actual people whose descendants live today in Ireland, the United States of America and Australia.
Joyce (1830-1883), a native of Glenosheen, Co Limerick, has recorded that he heard the song as a child but that only two verses of the original ballad were incorporated in his own song - which two verses are not now known. Bryan MacMahon gives a clue in The Storyman as to how Joyce might have learned the original ballad. He describes how the inns or stopping-places on the "butter roads" to Cork in the old days were clearing-houses for news, lore and ballads.
Carters' inns
There were one or two such inns in the Newmarket area of Co Cork where Kerry and Limerick carters would stay overnight. This, said MacMahon, might explain Robert Joyce's contact with ballads such as The Boys of Wexford, which, according to Joyce himself, was popular all over the south of Ireland in his youth.
In my conversation with Bryan MacMahon all those years ago he mentioned that the Captain's daughter and her United Irishman were buried in the same grave in Kilsynan churchyard, six miles south of Listowel, Co Kerry, and that their descendants were plentiful in the area. With help from some of those descendants, I have since tried to piece together the story of the elusive couple who figure in the ballad.
According to Mrs Sue McKenna, of Parknadoon, Listowel, whose husband Jack is a direct descendant of the "brave United Irishman", the latter was a Thomas McKenna from Monaghan who fought in the 1798 rising in Wicklow and Wexford and fled the area after the defeat on Vinegar Hill. He may have passed through south Tipperary, where a family of Cromwellian origin named Foulkes had been prominent since the 17th century. The daughter of "the captain of the Yeos" is supposed to be Jane, or Jennie, Foulkes.
Patriot priest
In the 18th century there were Foulkeses in Clonmel and in Piltown, Co Kilkenny. Ironically, a Simon Foulkes was one of the jurors at the trial in March 1766 in Clonmel, of the patriot priest, Fr Nicholas Sheehy, who was hanged on perjured evidence for the alleged murder of an informer.
It is not clear how and where McKenna and Jane Foulkes met, but they ended their flight in Listowel, where they raised a family of three sons and a daughter, Thomas, Edmond, James and Mary, before their deaths in 1835 and 1840 respectively. They were buried in the Hegarty plot (belonging to other descendants) in Kilsynan graveyard where a tombstone refers to Thomas as an insurgent in Wexford in 1798. From them have descended the McKennas, Leahys, O'Connors, Bartons, Browns and Danaghers located in Listowel, Athea, Dublin, Lixnaw, Tarbert, Limerick, Piltown, Wagga-Wagga (Australia), London and the United States. One of those descendants is Antoinette Dunphy (nee Leahy) of Piltown, who also happens to be a great grand-daughter of Maurice Davin, one of the founders of the GAA. The Christian name Jane occurs again and again in succeeding generations.
Although some Leahy family historians believe Thomas McKenna came from North Tipperary, others think he may have been a native of Co Monaghan, where the McKenna clan was for a long time located. There is yet another school of thought which holds that many McKennas marched south with O'Neill to the battle of Kinsale in 1601 and that some of them did not return but settled in Munster.
It has also been suggested that Thomas McKenna or Kenna may be the man mentioned in Joseph Holt's memoirs and in Brother Luke Cullen's folk records, fighting as an insurgent in Co Wicklow. Holt and Cullen mention Kenna as receiving a severe wound to the hand at the battle of Ballyellis on June 30th, 1798. Ironically, it was one of the insurgent leaders, Edward Roche of Garrylough, Co Wexford, who accidentally inflicted the injury while making a backhanded sword cut. Luke Cullen records that Kenna, despite the awful wound, swore to follow Roche, so loyal was he to the insurgent leader.
Strange link
Whatever his origins and history, Thomas McKenna, the "brave United Irishman" is forever linked with "the Captain's daughter" in the Joyce ballad. There is another strange link in the The Boys of Wexford with another insurgent who was honoured recently in his native Duncormick in south Wexford. As a schoolboy in that area, I heard an old sailor named Billy Cox claim that it was his grandfather, John Cox, who at the battle of Ross on June 5th 1798, fired the cannon-shot that killed Lord Mountjoy:
A young man from our Irish ranks, a cannon he let go,
He slapt it into Lord Mountjoy, a tyrant he laid low.
This may have been Billy's own way of interpreting his grandfather's role at Ross. for, without doubt, John Cox fought at Ross, and at Horetown, where with his neighbour Nicholas Parle he picked off Crown soldiers with his muzzle-loading pigeon gun. the remnants of that gun, stockless and rusted, are now in the proud possession of the writer.