Ciaran’s Peculier [sic] Blog

Regular readers of my blog will know how I like to use it to expand upon my “Echoes of the Past” pieces for the Cavan Echo. I truly enjoy writing these, and I hope that people enjoy reading them. The blog provides an opportunity to say a little more. This is especially important given the fact that Northern Sound’s Donagh McKeown seems to have lost my ‘phone number and e-mail address – this is the charitable explanation for why he hasn’t been in touch. I am sympathetic enough to know that he is not the master of his fate and that his employers are a pack of miserable bastards. The fact that I am no longer heard on his radio programme is quite frankly, his loss. I am often forced to realise that the town of
Cavan is quite special. It is not as bad as some people who live in it would like it to become. I suppose this is what lay behind my latest piece on Cavan’s
Champs Elysees aka

Farnham Street does possess some of its former glory, though to be honest it seems tatty today. It is a little like an old and once beautiful princess who in her youth attended the most splendid balls but who was later forced by revolution and despoliation into a life of prostitution. Look very very carefully and you’ll still see some of the trappings of her former splendour which still make it through the coarseness of decades spent on the game. The twentieth and twenty-first centuries have not been kind to

. It was even robbed of its name in favour of Roger Casement. If the British had not hanged Roger Casement I somehow doubt that his humanity would have warranted the naming of a street in his honour. He exposed the wicked and pernicious abuses of that most Catholic of monarchs King Leopold of the Belgian on his hapless Congolese subjects. This alone would make him worthy of honour for me. Attempts to besmirch him, by prying into and publicising his sexuality were also made. It seems ironic that the people of Cavan who for so long berated the Farnhams as cruel landlords have not taken the new name for the street to their hearts in preference to the old.

 The Town Hall suffered neglect for about seven decades. This neglect went under the heading of routine maintenance a la Irlandaise. It received a new lick of paint and some long needed TLC in the 1980s. I have to say that the building is like an oversized cottage – and I use the term not in the “Rent-an-Irish…” sense, but a cottage in the sense of a public convenience used as a site for gay rendezvous. It is an oversized edifice which seems to embody the similarly oversized egos of those who meet and those who occasionally work there. It is like one of those brothels you sometimes meet hidden away n the wooded outskirts of American cities. You expect to see “gentlemen” entering and exiting from the place after making furtive side-ways glances to ensure that no one sees them. And on entering the small little vestibule I invariably feel that I am going to hear a cacophony of flushing toilets and rushing feet, accompanied by screams of “Quick, the fucking cops.” Narrow stairways lead from this entrance hall, perhaps to discrete cubicles and washing facilities. 

Other buildings of “note” along the street are the YMCA or CYMS, also mentioned on my Tourist Tips. No doubt there will be those who expect me to say something nasty about
Jackson’s Show-room. Well, surprise surprise I won’t. It has attracted enough adverse commentary from architectural experts, such as the pompous Patrick Shaffrey. True, it may not win many hearts for its beauty, but it does not block the daylight and overlook the surrounding area. It was built in the late 1970s on what had become an overgrown and derelict site. In that sense it was an improvement on what it superseded.   Yet my anger has to be expressed at the act of vandalism carried out on the Protestant hall in October 1995. This was worthy of the Afghan Taleban. Naturally it occurred on a Saturday, the day when
Ireland’s demolition industry did so much of its work. It is hard for me to write about it, as it summons up so many ghosts which I had hoped to exorcise. I had just moved back down to Cavan from
Dublin, a place which was far from free of the stench of corruption. Yet back home in dear old Cavan I felt I had been kidnapped by country-and-Irish loving aliens and transported to another planet. The Protestant Hall was knocked on the whim of the County Council and its then chief executive, and no one was allowed to protest. Indeed anyone who even alluded to the fact that it had ever stood there ran the risk of being victimised and joining the long list of people whom the then County Manager didn’t like. As the man is now deceased I do not wish to say too much. He cannot defend himself from his grave. Let me say this much. I said what I felt needed saying when he was alive. The coven of his detractors has swelled amazingly since his untimely death. He wasn’t the only one responsible for what happened that October day. (Who’s he gettin’ at? They will ask.) The Protestant Hall was a building I had grown up with. It had served as the venue for the Cavan Arts Exhibition for many years, as well as a venue for concerts. I recall attending one by the Douglas Gunn Ensemble and being surprised by how good the acoustics were. This reminds me of the joke about the world-famous conductor who was once asked to give a concert in a small parish hall in Kerry. “The acoustics in here are terrible” he complained to the caretaker. “Ah sure haven’t I been puttin’ down traps for the hoors for over a year…” answered the caretaker.It was sad to see its site taken over as a stopping-off point for migratory birds in the winter. I recall one dark December day in 1996, following a particularly heavy rain shower, looking at the spot which had once echoed to music but which was now occupied by a small lake, the only sound the incessant thud of cold raindrops. Not even the ducks stayed there for long. Sick Transit Gloria Mundy.  

This follows on from my piece in the Cavan Echo of some weeks ago, called “Pop Goes the Weasel”. This was a discussion of the events leading up to and including the execution of Thomas Dunne and James Murphy for the murder of Charlotte Hinds in May 1856.

Thomas Dunne was charged with conspiracy to the murder, with aiding, abetting and procuring two others, one of whom was James Murphy, to carry out the murder. The prosecution case centered upon the evidence of one Terry Bannon or  Black Tarry, and the identification of Murphy by Miss Hinds’ driver, James McKeon.

Terence Bannon’s evidence was suspect from  the start. He had been arrested on suspicion of involvement in the early stages of the investigation, and had subsequently turned “Queen’s evidence”, implicating Dunne and Murphy. There was a suspicion that he was an approver: someone attracted by the lure of the large reward established for evidence leading to a conviction. At the very least his actions were felt to be those of a man wanting to save his own skin at the expense of others.

The men’s counsel produced witnesses stating that they had been approached by Black Tarry with a view to gaining the reward by making false testimony. He had testified that he had been sent by Dunne to get weapons which were subsequently used in the murder. Yet the people from whom he was supposed to have got the weapons stated that he had never come near them for guns, and even if he had, they would have had none to give him.

As for the identification by McKeon this was was far from convincing either. Although present at the assault on Miss Hinds in Currin lane in Templeport he initially claimed to be unable to recognise any of the assailants. However Miss Hinds, who had not been killed outright, identified one of her assailants as local man Red Pat Bannon before she died. He had not been wearing any disguise. As they were practically neighbours it was felt that if she had identified him surely young Jimmy McKeon would have been able to make a similar identification. McKeon’s role in the affair was ambiguous: when the assailants first appeared he had run off, ostensibly to catch the terrified horse which had been pulling Missd Hinds’ conveyance. He had been arrested and while in prison his memory suddenly returned. He was able to “identify” one of the assailants as James Murphy. This was after Black Tarry’s “testimony” implicating Murphy in the murder.

What was the background to the murder? The Great Famine, it has always been said, had its winners and losers – far too many of the latter. Yet it might be said that anyone who survived the terrible hunger and attendant disease, as well as the trauma of those dreadful years, was a true winner.

None of the landlord class died of starvation or disease, but they had their losers too. Sometimes these were landlords who paid for their humanity during the calamity of the Famine through bankruptcy. One of these was the landlord of Kilnacrott, Pierce Morton. Those who were financially compromised ended up in the Encumbered Estates Court, where their lands were bought by wealthy businessmen, intent on squeezing every last penny of income from their lands, regardless of the pain. Those who could not or would not pay were summarily evicted. Folklore from many parts of Co. Cavan says that there had never been any evictions until after the Famine and the arrival of this new parvenu class of landlord. Yet many of these new landlords were Irish. Many too were Catholics.

The Hinds of Tubberlyan Duffin were small landlords. Richard Hinds had run into financial difficulties, landing in the Encumbered Estates Court where much of his land was purchased by his daughter Charlotte. She was determined to pursue her proprietarial rights to the last penny. This was naturally resisted by a peasantry which wondered why it should pay part of its already small income into the hands of relatively wealthy and insensitive landlords who took no interest in their welfare and who compensated their tenantry for any improvements the latter might make with higher rents. Amongs those of her tenantry whom Charlotte Hinds was attempting to evict for non payment of rent was Thomas Dunne. Yet this was no more than circumstantial evidence against him. He restated when final sentence of death was passed against him that he had never had any hand, act or part in the murder.

Were Dunne and Murphy guilty of the murder? I don’t know. All I can say is that the evidence adduced against them was far from strong. It rested on the testimony of an unreliable witness, as well as on identification which was also open to challenge and occurred some time after the event.

But yet it was all very much like Hamlet without the Prince. The one person who had been positively identified by the dying Miss Hinds as amongst her attackers, Red Pat Bannon, wasn’t in the dock. He had successfully evaded capture. 

Justice in those days was as swift as it was partial. By the anniversary of the death of Miss Hinds the two men accused of her demise were themselves in their graves.

This judicial celerity continued into our own day. I am reminded of the famous case of Derek Bentley, the 19 year old of limited intelligence hanged for the murder of a policeman, even though he had not fired the fateful shot that killed him, and had indeed been under arrest when it was fired. These events took place in the first week of November 1952. Three months later Bentley had been hanged. Fifty years later he received a posthumous pardon from an establishment that realised that his trial was a travesty of justice. What good was the pardon to him then? It was some solace to his family though.

I remember when the Guildford Four were released from prison. A journalist asked Gerry Conlon “What would have happened if they’d haged you?” Gerry responded wryly to this banal question by saying he wondered whether the British government would have employed a medium to try and deliver the news that their convictions had been overturned.

Welcome to my new blog, which aims to continue in the spirit of the old one, which can be accessed by clicking the aforesaid link