Some from their helmets tore away
The badges of distinction;
Some in the public streets declared
Against the name and Order.
And thus our Orange heroes fared
The day they crossed the border.
I print the “Battle of Ross” not to foster the feuds it represents, but to show the agencies that create them; I print it because the battle occurred in my native town; because my people were in the battle; because it was a fireside story in every house around me when I was a boy, and because my “Recollections” would not be complete without it. I have through life done as much as one Irishman could do to checkmate the common enemy’s work of fostering those feuds; I am growing into the mood of mind of thinking that I have done more than I would care to do again could I live my life over, because the gain of a few Protestants or Orangemen here and there to the side of the cause of their country’s independence, is not worth the time and trouble that it takes to convince them you want that independence for some purpose other than that of killing all the Protestants and all the Orangemen of Ireland.
The poem is published in Dr. Campion’s Life of Michael Dwyer. It is from that book, sold by P. J. Kenedy, of 5 Barclay street, New York, that I copy it now. My childhood story of the battle is, that the men of Ross did not engage in it at all; that martial law was in force at the time; that the parade of the Orangemen was only a provocation to make the Irishmen show themselves and put them in the power of the law, and have them either shot down or put to prison; but, that the women of the town sallied out, and with sticks and stones put the Orangemen to flight. Their leader, Parker Roche, lost an eye from the stroke of a stone hurled at him by “brave Maria,” Mary O’Mahony (Baan), or “Mauria Vhaan,” as the people familiarly called her.
The leaders of those Orangemen were the people who led the North Cork Militia into Wexford in ’98, and sixteen years before that, they were some of the people that were leaders of the volunteers of ’82, about whom I think a little too much has been said in praise and plaumaus. I look at the names and titles of the Cork delegates to the convention of Dungannon in 1782, and I find them much the same as the names and titles of those who commanded the Irish volunteers of Cork, and the North Cork Militia, who were fighting for England in Wexford in ’98. Just look at these names as I take them from the history of the volunteers of 1782; by Thomas McNevin and Thornton MacMahon. “Delegates to the Convention of Dungannon, County of Cork, Right Hon. Lord Kingsborough, Francis Bernard, Esq., Col. Roche, Sir John Conway Colthurst, Major Thomas Fitzgerald.”
Names of the Irish Volunteers, County of Cork—Bandon Independent Company, Col. Francis Bernard.