Fenian Graves
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Last Updated 10/07/2024
HMS Argenta
During the 1920s, the vessel was used by the British government as a military base and prison ship for holding Irish Republicans as part of Britain’s internment strategy following the events of “Bloody Sunday” in 1920.
By February 1923, under the 1922 Special Powers Act the British were detaining 263 men on the Argenta, which was moored in Belfast Lough. This was supplemented with internment at other land based sites, such as Larne workhouse, Belfast Prison and Derry Gaol. Together, both the ship and the workhouse alone held 542 men without trial at the highest internment population level during June 1923.
Conditions on the prison ship Argenta were “unbelievable” according to Denise Kleinrichert who wrote the hidden history of the 1920s’ “floating gulag” in Republican Internment and the Prison Ship Argenta, 1922.
Ballymullen Barracks , Tralee, Co. Kerry
Ballymullen Barracks were built between 1810 and 1815 for local militia units. In 1881 the barracks were occupied by the Royal Munster Fusiliers.
After the signing of the British-drafted Anglo-Irish Treaty in December of 1921 the barracks were occupied by the Irish Republican Army. In August of 1922, during the Treaty War, British-backed Free State forces captured the barracks.
In the ensuing months the barracks were used to house anti-Treaty Republican prisoners including Tadhg Brosnan.
For the duration of the war behind the barrack walls torture, summary executions, sanctioned by leaders of the Free State including Cosgrave, Mulcahy and Higgins and carried out by their henchmen, was the order of the day.
At midnight on March 6th 1923, it was from these barracks that nine prisoners were brought to Ballyseedy Wood near Ballyseedy cross by soldiers of the Free State army. They were Pat Buckley, John Daly, Pat Hartnett, Michael O'Connell, John O'Connor, George O'Shea, Tim Tuomey, James Walsh and Steven Fuller. When they got there, they were tied around a log and a land mine was detonated. Most of them survived the initial blast, however, the soldiers used machine guns and grenades to finish them off. All of them died except Steven Fuller who was blown away by the force of the blast. He landed in the nearby river Lee from where he crawled for about 500 yards to Currans House. They took him in and hid him in a dugout at the back of their farm for some weeks. He was the only one who survived the massacre.
The historic University College Cork campus includes a mass grave of 13 Irish Republican Army (IRA) members executed by the British government in 1921.
They were shot by British Army firing squads at the Cork Detention Barracks inside Victoria Barracks (now Collins Barracks) at different dates in 1921, and buried on the grounds of Cork Men’s Gaol, which was later taken over by UCC.
Following an escalation of the War of Independence, the British government introduced martial law to the rebellious province of Munster in December 1920 (it was subsequently extended to counties Kilkenny and Wexford). Among its many provisions was the death penalty for any civilian caught in possession of arms, ammunition, or explosives. The 13 IRA Volunteers buried at UCC were all sentenced to death for this infraction.
Mass IRA grave a compelling element of UCC’s architectural heritage (irishexaminer.com)
Abbeystrowry Cemetery, Skibereen Co. Cork
Site of Burial Pits and mass graves of the Great Hunger 1845 - 1850
The burial pits is where approximately 9,000 men, women and children were buried, coffin-less, oftentimes in the dead of night during the the Great Hunger years of 1845-1852. The graveyard is adjacent to what was once the Skibereen Workhouse where many of those buried in the pits came from. The workhouse was the last resort for the victims of indifference and disease who sought shelter and food. What they found was inhumanity, disease and death.
The workhouse which opened in March of 1842 was designed to house eight hundred people considered to be the dregs of society by the elites. By the height of the Great Hunger in December 1848, 4,230 poor souls are recorded as residing there.
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Kindred Spirit Monument
Midleton’s Bailick Park, Midleton, Co. Cork
The year 1847 was the worst year of the Great Hunger in Ireland, when close to one million people starved to death. Humanitarian aid came from around the world. One of the sources of such aid were the Choctaw Native Americans who raised $170 equivalent to $5,000 today to purchase food for the starving Irish. What was remarkable about that humanitarian act was that sixteen earlier, the Choctaw people were forced to leave their ancestral lands by then U.S. President Andrew Jackson and trudge five hundred miles on the “Trail of Tears", in terrible winter conditions to Oklahoma.
The Irish people still remember what the oppressed Choctaw indigenous people did for their ancestors in their time of great need. The above monument stands in tribute to their empathy and generosity. Named “Kindred Spirits,” the magnificent memorial features nine giant stainless-steel feathers, shaped into an empty bowl.
The Trail of Tears refers to the US government enforced relocation of the Cherokee Native Americans from their native lands in Georgia to Tahlequah, Oklahoma. This march was a devastating and deadly one for the Cherokee Nation — over 4,000 deaths occurred during the march and afterwards in Oklahoma. Roughly 20% of the Cherokee Nation died, either during the march or shortly afterwards, due to diseases like dysentery.
To the Cherokee Nation, this event is called the Nunna daul Isunyi, or the Trail Where We Cried. The journey was exceptionally difficult, spanning over 1,000 miles (about 1,600 km). At least 2,000 people died during the march, so cause for weeping is not hard to understand.
Memorial to the Soloheadbeg Ambush
Soloheadbeg, Co. Tipperary
The Soloheadbeg ambush on January 21, 1919, is tagged as the start of the Irish War of Independence On that day eight Irish Volunteers Seán Treacy, Dan Breen, Seán Hogan, Séamus Robinson, Tadhg Crowe, Mick McCormack, Paddy O’Dwyer, Michael Ryan and Seán O’Meara lay in wait near Soloheadbeg quarry for a cart driven by two council workers who were bringing a consignment of 160lbs of gelignite and 30 electric detonators to the quarry. On their arrival at the quarry entrance, shots were fired and the two constables Patrick McDonnell and James O’Connell were killed. The workmen were unharmed. South Tipperary was proclaimed a special military area the following day. The gelignite was buried at Goldengarden and used to attack a number of RIC barracks including the Cappawhite RIC barracks on June 4, 1920
Ballyseedy Mouument, Ballyseedy, Co. Kerry, Ireland
At midnight on March 6th 1923, nine prisoners were brought to Ballyseedy Wood near Ballyseedy cross by soldiers of the Free State army. They were Pat Buckley, John Daly, Pat Hartnett, Michael O'Connell, John O'Connor, George O'Shea, Tim Tuomey, James Walsh and Steven Fuller. When they got there, they were tied around a log and a land mine was detonated. Most of them survived the initial blast however, the soldiers used machine guns and grenades to finish them off. All of them died except Steven Fuller who was blown away by the force of the blast. He landed in the nearby river Lee from where he crawled for about 500 yards to Currans House. They took him in and hid him in a dugout at the back of their farm for some weeks. He was the only one who survived the massacre.
Irish Famine Memorial Hyde Park Barracks, Sydney, Australia
The Orphan Emigration Scheme commenced in October 1848 and when it was wound up due to opposition from the Australian colonists in August 1850, 4,175 young girls had been sent from Irish workhouses to Australia. Many of the Irish workhouses participated in the scheme.
A large number of those workhouse inmates were children. Many were orphans, or alternatively had been abandoned by fathers and mothers no longer able to feed them. While they remained in the local workhouse they were a charge on the landowners of the area where they previously resided. No wonder then that Earl Grey, the British Secretary of State for the Colonies received much support from Irish landlords for his Orphan Emigration Scheme under which young girls from the Irish workhouses were to be sent to Australia. The scheme was designed to fulfill the two-fold purpose of helping to resolve Australia’s chronic shortage of female labour, while at the same time reducing the serious overcrowding in Irish workhouses. Not only that but the Irish landlords who financed the workhouse system also hoped to reduce their own financial burden by transferring as many orphan girls as possible out of the workhouse system.
Earl Grey Irish Female Orphans in Australia (geni.com)
Portland Prison, Dorset England
Portland's prison opened in 1848 for the holding of adult convicts. The purpose of a prison at Portland was largely to make use of convict labor in the construction of the breakwaters of Portland Harbor and its various defenses. The Admiralty Quarries were developed for convicts to work in and once established, convict labor was providing 10,000 tons of stone per week for use on the breakwaters. The conditions within both the prison and its quarries throughout the 19th-century would later help calls for penal reform in the UK, as many prisoners died while quarrying stone.
Fenian, Thomas J. Clarke described his treatment there as follows: we treason felony prisoners were known as… the ‘special men,’… kept, not in ordinary prison halls but in penal cells- kept there so that we could be more conveniently persecuted, for the authorities aimed at making life unbearable for us. The ordinary rules regulating the treatment of prisoners, which, to some extent, shield them form foul play and the caprice of petty officers, these rules as far as they did that, were in our case set aside… This was a scientific system of perpetual and persistent harassing… harassing morning, noon and night, and on through the night, harassing always and at all times, harassing with bread and water punishments, and other punishments with ‘no sleep’ torture and other tortures. This system was applied to the Irish prisoners and, to them only, and was specially designed to destroy us mentally or physically – to kill or drive insane.
Other Fenians imprisoned there included, Jerimiah O'Donovan Rossa, John Daly, Michael Davitt and John Devoy. Many other Fenian prisoners spent time there as they were rotated to others prisons on a regular basis.
Croppies Acre, Dublin
D. F. Moore, ‘Croppies Acre’, in The Irish Times ([June] 1967):
The Rising of 1798 was marked by the severest repression and the greatest barbarity that the Irish nation had ever experienced. In the vicinity of Dublin, yeomen and military hunted mercilessly for participants, and in their lust for blood, cared little for their victims’ guilt or and less for justice. Information on the. atrocities committed is not confined to prejudiced or traditional accounts, for Lord Cornwallis, in his correspondence, bluntly stated that any man in a brown coat found within several miles of the field of action was butchere without discrimination. The mutilated remains, piled high in carts, were paraded through the city streets and laid out in the yard of Dublin Castle, while prisoners were executed without trail, frequently being hung from lamp posts in the public thoroughfare. A piece of waste ground close to the river was utilised the speedy disposal of their bodies, and into hurriedly dug trenches in this slobland were tossed the pathetic remains of the victims of the terror. Among those consigned to this rude plot, known to sueceding generations as the Croppies Acre, were the brother of Sir Thomas Esmonde, Dr. Esmonde, who was hanged on Carlisle Bridge; Bartholomew Teeling, who sailed with Humbert’s expedition from France and was executed at Arbour Hill; Ledwich, brother of the Parish Prieset of Rathfarnham, who was hanged on Queen Street Bridge; Wade, Fox, Raymond, Bacon, Kelly, Byrne, Adam and Carroll all of whom were publicly hanged in different parts of the city. Croppies’ Acre lies on the side of the river in front of Collins Barracks. It extends from a point midway between the between the barracks boundary wall, and Wolfe Tone Quay, eastwards and down to the water, for in 1798 the Liffey had yet to be embanked and the waste plot bordered the river. “The day will come”, wrote Dr. Madden the historian of the United Irishmen, over one hundred years ago, “when that desecrated spot will be hallowed ground … decorated by funeral trophies in honour of the dead whose bones lie there in graves that are now neglected and unhonoured.” The day has indeed been long in coming.
Grosse Ile
Grosse Ile, isolated in mid-river but still close to Quebec City, opened as a quarantine station in 1832, in response to Canadian fears of the cholera epidemic in Europe. The failures of the quarantine station are measured in the burial sites of thousands of Irish immigrants, on the island and down the length of the St. Lawrence as far west as Hamilton.
They died of cholera in 1832—and of typhus, ship fever and starvation while fleeing from the Great Hunger in the 1840s. At the western end of the island, between Cholera Bay and the Celtic cross on Telegraph Hill, is a long meadow, corrugated by a regular series of ridges, which inevitably remind the visitor of lazy beds, ridge-and-trench potato fields. On Grosse Ile, too, the ridges are man-made, for they mark the mass graves where the Irish famine victims of 1847 were buried, ‘stacked like cordwood’. -- Click here for more details.
SS Georgette
1876, the American whaling ship Catalpa rescued a group of Fenian political prisoners from Fremantle. Catalpa had dropped anchor in international waters, and dispatched a whaleboat to shore to collect the escapees. The escape was detected while the escapees were still rowing back to Catalpa, and Georgette was sent with a water police cutter to intercept them. However, the prisoners successfully reached Catalpa, and having no official orders to board Catalpa, Georgette and the police cutter withdrew. The following morning, Georgette returned and demanded the return of the prisoners. Catalpa's captain, George Anthony, denied that he had the prisoners on board, and pointed out that he was in international waters. Georgette then fired a warning shot with its 12 pounder (5 kg) cannon, but Anthony pointed at his ship's US flag and sailed away. Georgette pursued until it was low on fuel, then returned to Fremantle.
1916 Easter Rising Monument
The monument is located on the grounds of the Gaelic-American Club in Fairfield CT to commemorate the 100th year of the Easter Rising and the ultimate sacrifice made by seven brave heroes and their comrades in arms who gave their lives so Ireland could gain its independence from England.
The Rising was an armed insurrection in Ireland during Easter Week 1916. It was mounted by Irish Republicans Volunteers to end British rule in Ireland and establish an independent Irish Republic.
It was the most significant uprising in Ireland since the rebellion of 1798.
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HMY Helga
Helga is best known for its role in the shelling of Dublin during the 1916 Easter Rising.The 323 ton, 155 foot long ship, originally named the Helga II, was built in the Liffey Dockyard in Dublin in 1908 as a fishery patrols and marine research vessel. She was taken over by the British Admiralty in 1915, renamed the HMY Helga, and put into service as an anti-submarine patrol vessel and an armed escort.During the 1916 rising, she was used to shell various Irish Volunteers positions throughout Dublin from her position in the River Liffey. The first target fired on with her 12 pound artillery guns was Liberty Hall, the headquarters of the Citizen Army. Her aim was less than accurate resulting in the destruction of many of the surrounding buildings. She also targeted the General Post Office and Boland's Mills. The vessel was given to the Irish Free State in August 1923 and renamed Muirchú
Pikeman Statue, Wexford
The bronze pikemen monument is located on the N25 Wexford to New Ross road. It memorializes the Battle of Three Rocks fought there during the 1798 Rising.
On May 30th, 1798, United Irish Insurgent forces intercepted the reinforcements for the Wexford garrison at this place. The overwhelming of the troops resulted in the evacuation of Wexford by Crown forces. In this engagement Colonel Thomas Cloney, of the Bantry Battalion of the United Irishmen commanded the Insurgent forces.
In the nearby Church Meadow lie some 80 men of the Royal Artillery and Meath Militia who were killed in the battle.
"There is nothing surer than that Irishmen of every denomination must stand or fall together." William Orr
Kelpie
On the 3rd of July 1914, the Asgard, captained by Erskine Childers, and the Kelpie, captained by Conor O’Brien, both travelled to the North sea to meet the German tugboat Gladiator. The cargo of rifles and bullets were split between the two boats with 600 mauser rifles and 20,000 rounds going on to the Kelpie and the rest on the Asgard.
On the 26th of July 1914 the Asgard landed in Howth and were met by a jubilant crowd of 800 members of the Irish Volunteers.
The Kilcoole gun landing operation, however, was kept quiet. After the Kelpie split ways with the Asgard it was met by the Chotah, a yacht owned by Sir Thomas Myles, the president of the Royal College of Surgeons, off the Llyn Peninsula in Wales and offloaded her armament. The Chotah held on to the cargo while the Kelpie sailed across the Irish Sea acting as a decoy for the Asgard.
The Chotah continued the journey and a week later under the cover of darkness the guns were offloaded to the beach where they were met by a small number of volunteers and their supporters who hurried away with the guns in the night to be stashed and stored away.
Source: http://coastmonkey.ie/kilcoole-gun-running/
Arbour Hill Cemetery --- Burial place of the leaders of the 1916 Rising
The military cemetery at Arbour Hill is the last resting place of 14 of the executed leaders of the 1916 Easter Rising. The burial plot includes the remains of Thomas J. Clarke, James Connolly, Patrick Pearse, Thomas MacDonagh, Sean MacDiarmada, Eamonn Ceannt, Joseph M. Plunkett, Edward Daly, Con Colbert, Michael O'Hanrahan, Sean Heuston, John MacBride, William Pearse and Michael Mallin. The leaders were executed in Kilmainham and then their bodies were buried in Arbour Hill.The other two leaders executed are:
Thomas Kent who was executed in Cork Army Barracks and buried next to his execution spot. His remains were removed in 2015 and re-interned in the family burial plot in Castlelyons Cemetery near Fermoy in Co. Cork.
Roger Casement was hanged in Pentonville prison in London on the 3rd. of August, 1916.
His body was disposed of, coffinless, in a quicklime pit. The quicklime, they said, would consume the flesh and leave the white bones—the skeleton—intact, which could then be moved easily. -- Oscar Wilde,
His remains were returned to Ireland in 1965 and now rest in Glasnevin Cemetery, Dublin.
SS Lady Wicklow
SS Lady Wicklow was a steamship built in 1890 in Belfast, Ireland for the City of Dublin Steam Packet Company. This ship was 262 feet long and had a beam of 34 feet.
She was used as a troopship for the Irish Free State to transport 450 officers and men to Fenit, the port of Tralee, during Irish Free State offensive of the Anglo-Irish Treaty War.
In anticipation of such a landing, the opposing Republican forces had rigged the pier with explosives to blow it up. However, the set charges were rendered inoperable by unknown Free State collaborators, thus allowing the landing to proceed unimpeded.
During the landing, that took place on August 2, 1922, the Lady Wicklow was shadowed by a British Warship prepared to lend support if the landing went awry for the Free State forces that consisted mostly of unemployed ex-British soldiers discharged after the WWI.
The armored vehicles, munitions etc., used by the Free State during the landing was part and parcel of the weaponry handed over to them by the departing British army.
As the nascent Free State had no money in its coffers, its army's paymaster was the British exchequer.
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email: tcoisdealba@hotmail.com