Ireland’s fifth province, now lost in the mists of history, was of course Meath. But in the early decades of the GAA, there was a short-lived attempt to revive the concept. And central to that plan was Cavan.
Amid resentment arising from the 1915 Ulster Football Final, the result of which Monaghan had tried to overturn on appeal, the Breifne county proposed a breakaway province called Tara, in which it would join four Leinster counties: Longford, Louth, Meath, and Westmeath.
The attempted escape from Ulster was motivated by suspicion of Monaghan’s influence in GAA committee rooms, a realm in which the young Eoin O’Duffy – future leader of the Blueshirts – excelled.
It came to nothing in the end. After a decade-and-a-half in which the O’Duffy-inspired Monaghan vied with them for dominance in Ulster, in and out of committee rooms, Cavan instead went on to make a habit of beating their annoying neighbours on the field: something they did with monotonous regularity for half a century until the late 1980s.
I was reminded of all this by a new book that landed on my desk recently: Out on our Own – A History of the People and Places of Annaly and Breifne.
It’s a 500-page epic about another miniature province, once the domain of a trio of powerful families – the O’Reillys, O’Rourkes, and O’Farrells – but today comprising three modern counties in three different provinces: Cavan, Longford, and (south) Leitrim.
A meticulously detailed labour of love, the book results from nine years of research by Benny Reid, a former teacher and educational administrator, and includes a few revelations - at least to me.
One is that the mass movement of dispossessed Catholics after the Cromwellian wars, although summed up in the phrase “to Hell or to Connacht”, was not always to Connacht. Connacht and Hell were movable feasts, clearly. As established by Reid, they began as far east as his native North Longford.
Local lore had always known this. But the author’s trawl through the 1854 Griffith’s Valuation records for an area of Longford known as Upper Conmaicne – where much of the land was unreclaimed bog and scrub - confirmed a preponderance of O’Reillys, Bradys, Duffys, and other non-natives.
“Together, these descendants of the dispossessed from counties Cavan and Monaghan accounted for just under three hundred households,” Reid writes. In their cases, the ultimatum may have been “to Hell or to Conmaicne.”
The O’Reillys paid a heavier price than most for their involvement in the 1641 rebellion and the wars that followed. Today, their forced migration is still remembered in Longford via a family nickname, “O’Reilly of Acres”: Acres being a townland in Cavan.
Of course, there were and remain plenty of O’Reillys in Cavan. But in Griffith’s Valuation and later censuses, as the author notes, they were generally found in the poorest areas. Along with the Bradys, Galligans, McCabes, and Smith/Magowans, they had also become “tenants on their ancestral lands”.
Another of Reid’s discoveries is what seems to have been a hitherto unrecorded victim of the 1916 Rising. And as bad luck would have it, he turns out to have been an O’Reilly of Acres too.
It was an especially unfortunate twist of fate that brought Father Edward O’Reilly into the line of fire in Dublin that Spring. For until January 1916, he had spent most of his adult life very far away from the scene of the trouble, as a priest in the West Australian outback.
But that had taken a toll on his health. So after celebrating the 25th anniversary of his ordination in 1915, the 50-year-old left Perth for what would be his first and last trip home, armed with a “purse of sovereigns” presented by his grateful parishioners.
In Dublin, he took up residence at the Oblates House in Inchicore. And when he died a few months later, back in Longford, the official cause was given as “heart disease”.
Hence an obituary in an Australian newspaper that, noting he had returned to Ireland in hope its “congenial climate” might restore him, lamented: “Alas! it seemed the old days of his pioneering work had only too surely sought upon his strength and gradually [he] paid the penalty of years of hard missionary effort.”
The death was little reported at home, meanwhile, probably because of martial law. Only in the 1980s did it finally become public that Fr O’Reilly had been hit by a bullet near the South Dublin Union during Easter Week. He was then brought back to be nursed in his native county, where he died on 29th August 1916.
Reports of people with bullet wounds then tended to attract attention from the authorities, still rounding up rebels. This helps explain what seems to have been a cover up. The author concludes: “It appears that Fr O’Reilly’s death from his injuries may have been kept quiet in Longford, to prevent the area being overrun by Crown Forces.”
Out on our Own – A History of the People and Places of Annaly and Breifne is available from buythebook.ie and selected shops at €35.
