The tender and beautiful Irish usage extends the use of the words dearbrathair (brother), and deirbhshiur (sister) to other bonds than those of blood. And many of the gentle and pitying women who ministered to the sufferers of those times are truly deserving of the lovely title. The girls from the hotel in Newry who pressed forward under the very hoofs of the cavalry horses to bring refreshments to the carriages of the prisoners of ’96, Charles Teeling, Russell, Neilson, etc., were surely worthy of it. The women who forced their way into the prisons “with bread, and comfort, and grace” were worthy of it. The women whom Holt so frequently shows us at their works of mercy were worthy of it. On one occasion he came to a farmhouse whose only occupants were an old woman and her pretty daughter. “They brought me hot water to bathe my feet, and clean stockings and linen, and took my own and washed them. They then gave me oatcakes and butter-milk, which after I had eaten, they shewed me a comfortable bed, where I slept for several hours....” Finding that the news of his death had been reported to them, and caused them overwhelming sorrow, he informed them of his identity. Their joy at his safety, and their pride at having him for their guest was beyond all telling. Presently “twenty-four poor unfortunates came into the house, who were all desired to sit down, and oaten cakes were placed before them, and the young woman was busily employed in baking more cakes on the griddle; she afterwards told me they had been so employed for some days past.”
And talking of “Sisters” reminds us of the striking fact that it was in the prisons of the United Irishmen, our Irish Sisters of Charity had, in a certain sense, their origin. In the letters of Mr. Luke Teeling to his wife, we find frequent mention of a Miss Alicia Walsh, who came with her aunt, Ally Lynch, of Drogheda (Mrs. Teeling’s sister) to visit him in his prison at Carrickfergus. “Ally Walsh is an uncommonly fine girl,” he notes of her approvingly. Many a tongue was to echo Mr. Teeling’s praise in the after-days when “Ally Walsh,” the first companion of Mary Aikenhead, had become the celebrated Mother Catherine of the Gardiner Street Convent. To learn more of her I must refer my readers to Mrs. Atkinson’s “Mary Aikenhead.” I shall content myself here with borrowing Mrs. Atkinson’s account of her experiences in ’Ninety-Eight.
“During the rebellion of 1798, she went from prison to prison at much personal risk, to carry messages from friends, or to console the inmates who were the objects of her deepest sympathy. Some of her nearest and dearest relatives[[96]] suffered greatly, not only from the confiscation and unjust oppression, but also from barbarous bodily tortures which at that period were commonly inflicted at the will of a licentious soldiery. One of her friends, a young man of exemplary life, was stripped to the waist, tied to a cart, and dragged through the streets of Drogheda, his inhuman executioners flogging him all the way, until at last he fainted under their hands, and was consigned to a prison cell. The first intimation his mother received of the occurrence that had taken place was a demand for old linen to dress her son’s back which was one hideous wound.
[96]. The Teelings conspicuously. Her own father, Mr. Walsh, of the Naul, though like Mr. Teeling he had taken no part in the Rising, was ruined by the pillaging and burning tactics of the Orangemen and the Yeomanry.
“In the family of a near neighbour at Naul, a circumstance occurred equally characteristic of the time. A young lady was engaged to be married to a gentleman, who having been connected with the insurgents in ’98, was obliged to fly from his home. He took refuge in the house of his intended brother-in-law, who had been forced to join a corps of yeomanry. The fugitive’s track was discovered, the yeomanry were called out, and he, having again taken to flight, was overtaken at a village near Dublin, and hanged from a post in the street by the young man from whose house he had just escaped and who dared not shirk the duty. The poor rebel’s mother never learned the fate that had befallen her son. She was persuaded that he had gone abroad; and up to her death she continued making shirts and knitting stockings, which were sent, as she supposed, in parcels to the refugee in a distant land.”
Mary Aikenhead, herself, was, perhaps, too young—only eleven—to have any very active share in the charities the Cork ladies exercised towards the sufferers of ’98—but her father was an ardent sympathiser with “the Cause,” and Lord Edward Fitzgerald was concealed, on one occasion, at their house. Perhaps it was in memory of this—or perhaps it was because she felt what I have tried to express: that the Sisterhood Mary Aikenhead founded, proceeded so largely from ’Ninety-Eight and all it stood for—that Lady Lucy Fitzgerald (or as she then was, Lady Lucy Foley) left at her death, a generous legacy to the Sisters of Charity. One cannot help thinking that the list of the first companions of Mary Aikenhead must have sounded to Lady Lucy like a roll-call of names made immortal in the ranks of the United Irishmen. There were Teelings, Sweetmans, Clinches, O’Reillys, Bellews, and many others.
Mrs. Coleman (Mother Mary de Chantal) was born amid the troubles that preceded ’98. “Her father, a gentleman farmer in Meath or Louth, ... was suspected of disaffection. On the very night his little daughter was to come into the world, the house was surrounded by a troop of armed men, whose heavy footsteps, presently heard on the stairs, gave the alarm to the inmates, who hurried away ‘the poor mistress’ under cover of the darkness to an uninhabited hut sometimes used by the herd. She gave up all for lost, and resigned herself to die, knowing well that no human assistance awaited her in the hour of her utmost need. Her piety was sincere, her faith was strong, and she had an ardent devotion to the Blessed Virgin. As her husband forced open the door and led her into the dark hut, she heard a voice distinctly say: ‘Do not fear, Mary, I will protect you and your child’; while at the same time a bright light filled the place. Then and there under its influence the child was born.”
So, too, we may say, in the darkness of Ireland’s Agony in ’Ninety-Eight, illumined miraculously by the Faith and Hope and Charity of Ireland’s womanhood, there was born the great Congregation to which that little child was destined to belong.
SARAH CURRAN AND ANNE DEVLIN