The synopsis of the case given in the foregoing charter is founded on die admirable .reports of The Irish Times, extending over a long series of days, at long intervals of weeks and months, and on personal interviews with parties well acquainted with all the circumstances’. The cases dealt with in this and the succeeding chapters are, so far as the public know, quite exceptional cases in Ireland. But the number of people more or less involved in two of them, and the apparent acquiescence of entire localities in some or all of the proceedings, raise them far above the category of ordinary crimes. These cases were hushed up and cloaked, or only partially reported, by the National press of Ireland; and, furthermore, no public condemnation has issued in reference to them from either the pulpit, the press or the platform – or from the oracle at Maynooth. That is not right. There are thousands of ‘good, moral, industrious’ peasants in country localities in Ireland, who, if they do not firmly believe the superstitions which led to such horrible results in these cases, do certainly border on those beliefs. If these dreadful cases are not indicative of any general condition of intense superstitious depravity in Ireland, but are more or less isolated cases; then our note of condemnation should be all the more distinct and unequivocal. They are cases which occurred during the five years reviewed in this book, and, therefore, come within its purview. Perhaps, I attach more importance to them than they deserve. But, at all events, I have come to the conclusion that they afford food for reflection; and that if they are to be narrated at all, they must be narrated in full. Let the reader skip this and the next chapter, if he or she pleases; they do not affect the tenor of the book. I sincerely pity all the people connected with these tragedies, but I pity still more intensely the many peasants who border upon, if they do not firmly entertain, the beliefs expressed in these two cases. This latter feeling is the gadfly which urges me on, as it urged Socrates of old, to do what little I can to crush out those remnants of savagery which should by this tune be as extinct as the snakes in this so-called ‘Island of Saints’. The earliest knowledge we have of the Ballyvadlea case was what occurred on Wednesday, March 13th, 1895. It was on Thursday, 14th, that the brutal tragedy began, so far as the public will ever know, and it was consummated on the night of Friday, the 15th, and in the small hours of the morning of Saturday, the 16th. Let the reader picture one of those new labourers’ cottages, erected at the expense of the locality, and let by the Guardians at a nominal rent, standing in its half-acre of ground close to the public road in the Townland of Ballyvadlea, in the County of Tipperary. The district is far from the railway, but is well peopled. It is in the Parish of Drangan. and, I believe, in the Cashel arch-diocese, and all the people connected with the tragedy are Catholics. Father Ryan, the Curate, tells us that the Clearys were ‘members of his congregation and under his spiritual charge’, and that he knew them for four years and a half. Michael Cleary, described to me as ‘a clever fellow’, and, by trade, a cooper, and his wife, Bridget, were living in their new labourer’s cottage, then, along with Mrs. Cleary’s father, Patrick Boland. Mrs Cleary, from all the accounts I can gather, was a handsome young woman, 26 years of age, who had been married for some years to Cleary, and had had no children. In the words of Judge O’Brien, she was ‘a young married woman, suspecting no harm, guilty of no offence, virtuous and respectable in all her conduct and all her proceedings’. Another witness says, ‘she was nice in manners and appearance’. Cleary’s own words: ‘She is too fine to be my wife’, point to her physical beauty also. One who had frequently seen her, before this dreadful business, on his way to hunt with the Tipperary hounds, tells me she was distinctly ‘good-looking’. We have it that she wore gold earrings, and it leaks out accidentally that there is a canister, with £20 in it, in the house. On the Wednesday, then, which we shall call the first day, Dr. Crean called to see Mrs. Cleary at her house. He had been summoned on the 11th, and ‘was not able to go till the 13th’. He found her suffering from nervous excitement and a slight bronchitis. She was in bed, but the doctor ‘could see nothing in the case likely to cause death’. Dr. Crean then gave her some medicine. He ‘had no anxiety about the case’, left the house, and never saw her alive again. We, in the light of subsequent events, can well understand her ‘nervous excitement’, although we are given no clue to anything that happened previous to this, the first day. She herself never uttered a word of complaint to doctor, to priest, or to neighbour, or to a living person, about the agonies she was subjected to – tortures that equal some of the heinous doings of the Inquisition. Or, as the Coroner, Mr. J. J. Shee, J.P., to his lasting credit, put it at the inquest: ‘Amongst Hottentots, one would not expect to hear of such an occurrence’. The next actor on the scene is Father Ryan, who visited Mrs. Cleary on the same Wednesday afternoon. She was in bed. He says that ‘she did not converse with him, except as a priest, and her conversation was quite coherent and intelligible’. He, too, left her on that day without receiving any clue whatever to the persecution and hellish misery of which she was the victim. If an unpierceable brass wall stood between this confessor and penitent, the confessor could not have been further away from the truth as to her condition. He, too, then walked out from that house, on that Spring afternoon, as ignorant of and as out of touch with her and those people of whom ‘he had spiritual charge’ as if he were a marionette. That is absolutely all we know about Wednesday, the 13th. The doctor saw her, thought her illness trivial, prescribed, and left, ‘The curate heard her confession, gave her Extreme Unction, and left – out of touch with the poor sufferer, who had no friend on earth to whom she could open her inmost heart, and thereby escape from the hideous doom which awaited her. There was no kindly human being in the locality to smell out this nest of horrors, no sharp, sympathetic eye to pierce beneath the surface and probe out her miseries. We now come to Thursday, the second day,. On the morning of Thursday, 14th, Father Ryan says ‘he was called to see Mrs Cleary, but he told the messenger that having administered the last rites of the Church on the previous day, there was no need to see her again so soon! He did not consider her dangerously ill’. The priest knew nothing at all, I hope and believe, about what was the matter with her. She, poor thing, was yearning for some one to speak to, but could get the words out. No need to see her again so soon! A professional ceremony then, it seems, had exhausted the whole duty of the clergyman; a professional ceremony in which as is proved in this case, nothing vital, nothing essential was revealed. The Rev Father Ryan did not go to see her, then, on the second day. How the forenoon and afternoon of this second day passed will never be known; but it is now our task to narrate the horrors of the evening. ‘It appears almost incredible’, said Judge O’Brien afterwards at the trial, ‘that there could be such a degree of human delusion, that so many persons, young and old, men and women, could be so incapable of pity or sympathy with human suffering’. He added that the crimes of that night ‘had spread a tale of horror and pity throughout the civilised world’. But, if we are ignorant of the day’s events, as we are of the events of the many previous days during which she must have been suffering persecution; our information as to the evening’s and night’s proceedings are explicit enough. William Simpson, a near neighbour of the Gearys, living only 200 yards off, accompanied by his wife, left their own house between 9 and 10 o’clock that evening to visit Mrs Clean, having heard she was ill. When they arrived close to Geary’s house they met Mrs Johanna Burke, accompanied by her little daughter, Katie Burke, and inquired from her how Mrs. Geary was. Mrs. Burke, herself a first cousin of Mrs. Geary’s, said: ‘They are giving her herbs, got from Ganey, over the mountain, and nobody will be let in for some time.’ These four people then remained outside the house for some time, waiting to be let in. Simpson heard cries inside, and a voice shouting, ‘Take it, you b___ , you old faggot, or we will burn you!’ The shutters of the windows were closed and the door locked. After some time the door was opened and shouts were heard from within of ‘Away she go! Away she go!’ As Simpson afterwards learned, the door had been opened to let the fairies leave the house, and the adjuration was addressed to those supernatural beings. In the confusion, Simpson, his wife, Mrs. Burke and her little daughter, all went into the house. From this forward we know some, at any rate, of the doings of the incarnate fiends and cowards assembled within these walls. Simpson saw four men; John Dunne, described as an old man; Patrick Kennedy, James Kennedy and William Kennedy, all young men, ‘big, black-haired Tipperary peasants’, as they were described to me by one who had to do with the case from start to finish, brothers of Mrs. Burke and first cousins of Mrs. Cleary; ‘holding Bridget Cleary down on the bed. She was on her back, and had a night-dress on her. Her husband, Michael Cleary, was standing by the bedside’. Cleary called for a liquid,* and said, ‘Throw it on her’. Mary Kennedy, an old woman, mother of Mrs. Burke, and of all the other Kennedys present, brought the liquid. Michael Kennedy held the saucepan. The liquid was dashed over the poor woman several times. Her father, Patrick Boland, was present. William Ahearne, described as a delicate youth of sixteen, was holding a candle. Bridget Cleary was struggling, vainly, alas, on the bed, crying out ‘Leave me alone’. Simpson then saw her husband give her some liquid with a spoon; she was held down by force by the men for ten minutes afterwards, and one of the men kept his hand on her mouth. The men ‘at each side of the bed kept her body swinging about the whole time, and shouting, Away with you! Come back Bridget Boland, in the name of God!’ She screamed horribly. They cried out: ‘Come home, Bridget Boland’. ‘From all of which Simpson gathered that’ they thought Bridget Cleary was a witch, ‘or had a witch in her, whom they endeavoured to hunt out of the house by torturing her body’. Some time afterwards she was lifted out of the bed by the men, or rather demons, and carried to the kitchen fire by John Dunne, Patrick, William and James Kennedy. Simpson saw red marks on her forehead, and someone present said they had to ‘use the red poker on her to make her take the medicine’. The four men named held poor Bridget Cleary, in her night-dress, over the fire; and Simpson ‘could see her body resting on the bars of the grate where the fire was burning’. While this was being done, we learn that the Rosary was said. Her husband put her some questions at the fire. He said if she did not answer her name three times they would burn her. She, poor thing, repeated her name three times after her father and her husband! ‘Are you Bridget Boland, wife of Michael Cleary, in the name of God?’ ‘I am Bridget Boland, daughter of Patrick Boland, in the name of God’. Simpson said they showed feverish anxiety to get her answers before twelve o’clock. ‘They were all speaking and saying, Do you think it is her that is there? And the Answer would be ‘yes’; and they were all delighted’. After she had answered the questions, they put her back into bed, and ‘the women put a clean chemise on her’, which Johanna Burke ‘aired for her’. She was then asked to identify each person in the room, and did so successfully. The Kennedys left the house at one o’clock ‘to attend the wake of Cleary’s  father, who was lying dead that night at Killenaule! Dunne and Ahearne left at two o’clock. It was six o’clock on the morning of the 15th, ‘about daybreak’, when the Simpsons and Johanna Burke left the house after that hellish night. There had been thirteen people present in Cleary’s house that night, yet no one outside the circle of the perpetrators themselves seems to have known or cared, if they knew, of the devilish goings on in that labourer’s cottage. At one time during that horrible night, the poor victim said : ‘The police are at the window. Let ye mind me now!’ But, alas, there were no police there! We now come to the third day, Friday, 15th of March. Six o’clock on that morning found Michael Cleary, the chief actor, Patrick Boland, and Mary Kennedy in the house with the poor victim, when the two Simpsons and the two Burkes were leaving. Simpson says: ‘Cleary then went for the priest, as he wanted to have Mass said in the house to banish the evil spirits.’ This brings us back again to the Rev. Father Ryan, who says: ‘At seven o’clock on Friday morning I was next summoned. Michael Cleary asked me to come to his house and celebrate Mass, his wife had had a very lad night.’ Father Ryan, apparently as completely estranged from those members of his flock as if oceans rolled between, suspects nothing, sees nothing, knows nothing. Cleary ‘asked him to come to his house and celebrate Mass’, and he at once assents to this proposal. Father Ryan arrived at the cottage at a quarter past eight, and said Mass in that awful front room where poor Bridget Cleary was lying in led. He was the medium through which the miracle of transubstantiation was performed there and then, yet he had no glimmering of the atmosphere of hell in which he stood. ‘She seemed more nervous and excited than on Wednesday,’ he says, and adds, ‘her husband and father were present before Mass began, but I could not say who was there during its celebration’. He had no conversation with Michael Cleary ‘as to any incident which had occurred’, because he suspected nothing. ‘When leaving’, he said, ‘I asked Cleary was he giving his wife the medicine the Doctor ordered. Cleary answered that he had no faith in it. I told him that it should be administered. Cleary replied that people may have some remedy of their own that could do more good than doctor’s medicine!’ Yet, Father Ryan left the house ‘suspecting nothing’.  ‘Had he any suspicion of foul play or witchcraft’, he says, ‘he should have at once absolutely refused to say Mass in the house, and have given information to the police’. We have no personal censure for him. He, too, is a victim the victim and the product of a system as rigid as iron, to discuss which would require a separate book. After Father Ryan had said his Mass and left, she remained in bed. Simpson saw her there at midday and never saw her afterwards. His excuse for his presence and non-interference on Thursday night is that ‘the door was locked, and he could not get out’. We find the names of still more people mentioned as having visited her this day. Thomas Smith, a farmer, of Ballyvadlea, was ploughing in one of his own fields, adjoining Cleary’s house, on this day, and ‘hearing that she was ill, went in to see her’. He only remained ten minutes and went home. Other names are also mentioned as having been in the house that day; Meara, Tobin, Anglin, Leahy; who called to see her also. Yet not to one of them did she utter a complaint, let us hope, about the persecution she was undergoing; nor do they seem to have noticed anything strange in what they must have seen and heard in that house. She seems judging from the number of visitors, to have been extremely popular. Johanna Burke seems to have been in the house the greater part of this day. At one time she tells how Cleary came up to the bedside and handed his wife a canister, and said there was £20 in it. She, poor creature, took it, tied it up, ‘and told her husband to take care of it, that he would not know the difference till he was without it’. She was ‘in her right mind, only frightened at everything’. No wonder. Her brain must have been a particularly good one not to have become unhinged. At length the night fell upon the scene; and, at eight o’clock, Cleary, who seems to have ordered all the other actors about as if they were hypnotised, sent Johanna Burke and her little daughter Katie for ‘Thomas Smith and David Hogan’. Smith says: ‘We all went to Cleary’s, and found Michael Cleary, Mary Kennedy, Johanna Meara, Pat Leahy, and Pat Boland in the bedroom’. The husband had a bottle in his hand, and said to the poor bewildered wife, ‘will you take this now, as Tom Smith and David Hogan are here? In the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost!’ Smith was the man who said ‘he had known her always since she was born’.’ He inquired what was in the bottle, and Cleary told him it was holy water. Poor Bridget Cleary said ‘Yes’, and took it. She had to say, before taking it, ‘In the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost’, which she did. Smith and Hogan then left the bedside and ‘went and sat at the fire’. Cleary told them that his wife, ‘as she had company, was going to get up’. She actually left her bed, put on ‘a frock and shawl’, and came to the kitchen fire. They talk turned upon ‘pishogues’, or witchcraft and charms. Smith remained there till twelve o’clock, and then left the house, leaving Michael Cleary (husband); Patrick Boland (father); Mary Kennedy (aunt); Patrick, James and William Kennedy (cousins), Johanna Burke, and her little daughter Katie (also cousins), behind him in the house. Thomas Smith never saw Bridget Cleary after that. According to Johanna Burke, they continued ‘talking about fairies’, and poor Bridget Cleary, sitting there by the fire in her frock and shawl, wan and terrified, had said to her husband: ‘Your mother used to go with the fairies; that is why you think I am going with them’. ‘Did my mother tell you that?’ exclaimed Cleary. ‘She did. That she gave two nights with them’, replied she. This shows us that Cleary had drunk in superstition with his mother’s milk. Johanna Burke then says that she made tea and ‘offered Bridget Cleary a cup’. But Cleary jumped up, and getting ‘three bits of bread and jam’, said she would ‘have to eat them before she could take a sup’. He asked her as he gave her each bit: ‘Are you Bridget Cleary, wife of Michael Cleary, in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost?’ The poor, desolate young woman answered twice and swallowed two pieces. We all know how difficult it is, when wasted by suffering and excited by fear, to swallow a bit of dry bread without a drop of liquid to soften it. It, in fact, was the task set to those in the olden days who had to undergo the ‘ordeal by bread’. How many of them, we are told, failed to accomplish it! Poor Bridget Cleary failed now at the third bit presented to her by the demon who confronted her. She could not answer the third time. He ‘forced her to eat the third bit’. He threatened her: ‘If you won’t take it, down you go!’ He flung her to the ground, put his knee on her chest, and one hand on her throat, forcing the bit of bread and jam down her throat. ‘Swallow it, swallow it. Is it down? Is it down?’ he cried. The woman, Burke, says she said to him: ‘Mike, let her alone, don’t you see it is Bridget that is in it’, and explains, ‘he suspected it was a fairy and not his wife’. Let Burke now tell how the hellish murder was accomplished: ‘Michael Cleary stripped his wife’s clothes off, except her chemise, and got a lighted stick out of the fire, and held it near her mouth. My mother (Mary Kennedy), brothers (Patrick, James and William Kennedy), and myself wanted to leave, but Cleary said he had the key of the door, and the door would not be opened till he got his wife back’. Wanted to leave! Cowards, dolts! ‘They were crying in the room and wanting to get out’. This crowd in the room crying, while Cleary was killing their first cousin in the kitchen. ‘I saw Cleary throw lamp oil on her. When she was burning, she turned to me (imagine that face of woe) and called out: ‘Oh, Han, Han!’ I endeavoured to get out for the peelers. My brother William went up into the other room and fell in a weakness, and my mother threw Easter water over him. Bridget Cleary was all this time burning on the hearth, and the house was full of smoke and smell. I had to go up to the room, I could not stand it. Cleary then came up into the room where we were and took away a large sack bag. He said: ‘Hold your tongue, Hannah, it is not Bridget I am burning. You will soon see her go up into the chimney’. My brothers, James and William, said: ‘Burn her if you like, but give us the key and let us get out’. While she was burning, Cleary screamed out, ‘She is burned now. God knows I did not mean to do it. When I looked down into the other room again, I saw the remains of Bridget Cleary lying on the floor on a sheet. She was lying on her face and her legs turned upwards, as if they had contracted in burning. She was dead and burned’. Cleary next asked Patrick Kennedy to assist him in burying the body ‘until such time as he could lay her beside her mother’. According to his sister, Mrs. Burke, Patrick Kennedy at first refused. His own account, when charged before the magistrates, was that he went with Cleary to bury her ‘for fear he would be killed’. He had nothing to do, he said, with the actual burning on that night; he ‘heard a roar’ from the room in which he was, that was all; adding, ‘I am cracked after it for to see my first cousin burned’. James Kennedy said, in court, that ‘on the second (Friday) night he asked Cleary for the love of God not to burn his wife’, adding, they had gone three nights to the Fort at Kylenagranagh, but did not see anything. As this is the first mention of the word ‘fort’ let me say at once that it means a ring fence, or double ring fence, of simple earth, thrown up in ancient times by the Danes or other settlers in Ireland after the manner of a Zulu Kraal. The South of Ireland is studded with them; and though they are often most inconveniently situated on tillage land, and though their destruction presents no features of difficulty whatever, beyond merely levelling the fence, they have been preserved; from a superstitious dread of ill-luck to anyone who ventured to destroy them. I am informed that people in Ballyvadlea believe that a person being near this fort at night is liable to be struck with rheumatism, paralysis, and soforth! Those accursed unlovely and useless remains of barbarism should be levelled to the ground by every man who wishes to see Ireland prosper. I myself know a score of farmers who have these forts on their land: all farmers of the best class, comfortable, rational, hospitable, intelligent, keen men of business; yet, not one of them has the courage to remove these nuisances from their holdings, although they continually grumble at the inconvenience they cause. Observe, now, the cool generalship displayed by Cleary. William Kennedy says that ‘when he came out of the room he saw Bridget Cleary blazing; he asked Cleary what he was doing; Cleary said it was nothing to him. He asked to be let out. Cleary wouldn’t let him’. No. But, ‘Cleary himself then went out and locked the door after him’, and left those four male and three female human beings in the house with the burned body. Out into the night with him, searching, no doubt, for a trusty, secret spot in which to put the body. The hiding place he selected was over a mile distant from the cottage! ‘When he came back he got Pat Kennedy to go out with him’, and they buried her! Yes, and so well selected was the spot, that the body was not found for six days afterwards by the police. Now, behold Cleary and Patrick Kennedy returning again to the house, having got rid of their horrible burden, after an absence of two hours. Johanna Burke says ‘My mother, my two brothers, Pat Boland, my daughter and myself were made prisoners till they came back’. Cleary had locked the door on the outside! Cleary then, on his return, confronted Johanna Burke, and she says ‘he told me to say that I went to prepare her a drink, and, when returning, met her at the door, and that she spat at me and went out of the door, and that I could not say where she went to’. This is the story to be concocted to explain her disappearance. Cleary said ‘that he would go down towards Cloneen and pretend he was half mad’. Then he said to Johanna Burke: ‘Hannah, it is hard to depend on you; but if you were to be kept in jail till you rot, don’t tell’. Johanna Burke then says: ‘I went down on my knees and declared before God and man that, until the day I died, I would never tell, even if she was found’. Cleary next faced his father-in-law, and, including Johanna Burke in his glance, said: ‘I dread the two of you’. Old Boland said: ‘Now that my child is burned, there is no use in saying anything about it; but God help me in the latter end of my days’. It was now daylight on Saturday morning, the 16th of March, the fourth day; and Johanna Burke ‘saw Michael Cleary washing the trousers of his light tweed suit that he had on him. There were stains like grease on it, and he exclaimed: ‘Oh, God, Hannah, there is the substance of poor Bridget’s body!’ He also picks up one of his wife’s earrings and destroys it; lest it should be evidence against him. John Dunne, who was not present at all on the Friday night, now re-appears upon the scene. He is the man who is said to have suggested holding her over the fire on the Thursday night; but, in extenuation, he says ‘they did not burn her that night they only held her over the fire!’ On this Saturday morning he came up to Cleary’s house, and ‘found her gone’. Cleary, in explanation of her disappearance, told him the story which he had already concocted for Johanna Burke, adding that ‘he thought she was gone with the fairies’. Dunne offered to search for her, and, Cleary accepting his offer, the two men set off for Kylenagranagh fort, and searched it, and the whole neighbourhood near it. Cleary said: ‘She used to be meeting an egg-man in the lower road about a mile and a half away’. The peasant women, living in the by-roads, used to come out with their eggs, to meet this egg-man on the main road. A proof of Bridget Cleary’s thrift. Cleary now insinuates to Dunne that he thought it possible that she actually had gone to meet the egg-man! Having searched everywhere in vain, Cleary could not keep up the self-restraint any longer, and he burst out: ‘She was burned last night’. Ignorant and deplorable a human being as Dunne may be, there is some spark of energy and manliness in his character, and I believe his story. ‘You vagabond’, said Dunne, ‘why did you do it?’ ‘She was not my wife’, replied Cleary, ‘She was too fine to be my wife. She was two inches taller than my wife’. But Dunne brushed him aside, and said: ‘Go now and give yourself up to the authorities and to the priest. You will have no living on earth.’ Cleary replied: ‘Well, I will if you’ll come along with me.’ Dunne consented, and they went towards Drangan. They met Michael Kennedy on the road, and he went back to Drangan with them. He had not been present at the Friday night’s doings either. There are various versions of how the communication was made to the priests. Father Ryan says ‘he saw Cleary kneeling near the altar, very nervous, and asked him into the vestry’; that Cleary ‘suggested going to confession, but I would not allow him, as I did not think him fit to do so! I coaxed him into the yard. I began to feel afraid of him’. Not fit to do so! Is not repentance the only cure for agony of mind? Michael Kennedy took away Cleary from the precincts of the chapel without confession. John Dunne says he told the Rev. Father Ryan that ‘they had burned her to death last night and buried her; and that he had been asking Cleary all the morning to give her Christian burial’. Christian burial; wait until you hear the sequel of the case! Father Ryan was horror struck, and could not remember what reply he made; his only thought was, how could three or four of them go out of their minds simultaneously. Suffice it to say, the priests only told the police that ‘they suspected there was foul play’, and, with this vague direction, blindfolded Justice was started on the track. John Dunne says he told the Parish Priest, whose name has not been allowed to appear in print in connection with the case, and which I shall not mention either. Dunne says that as they walked home from Drangan they saw a policeman following them. Justice, in the person of Acting-Sergeant Egan, met Cleary later on in the day ‘on the road near Cloneen’, where Cleary said he would go, and pretend to be half mad, you remember. Acting-Sergeant goes to Cleary’s house with him, asking him questions about his wife. Cleary tells him ‘she left home about twelve o’clock last night’, and mentions that ‘Johanna Burke had been at the house last night’, and also that his father-in-law had slept in the next room. The two people whom Cleary had coached, you remember, in the morning. Not much madness here, only the pretence of madness, which he foretold in the morning he would assume. Pat Boland was also there, and in reply to a query, cries and says, ‘My daughter will come back to me’. The restless Acting-Sergeant goes off; but returns at ten o’clock at night, and finds the house deserted and doors locked; like some hellish theatre after the tragedy had been performed! Gets himself in through the window, and finds a burned nightdress. Where Cleary and Boland were we do not know. Simpson does not appear to have seen Cleary at all on this day, Saturday. Johanna Burke is taken in hands by the police, and deposes: ‘I was at the house on the night of the 15th. Bridget Cleary was raving. After some time she got up and dressed, and sat at the fire. She afterwards went to bed. I went out for some sticks. When I returned I met her at the doorway, going out in her night-dress. I endeavoured to hold her and failed. Since that night I have not seen her. Her husband followed her some time and returned. He did not see her. She is missing ever since, and they made search for her’. Simpson also deposes what he knows of Thursday night’s doings, before quoted, and says ‘he heard she was missing since Friday night’. Now, blindfolded Justice, double-bandaged, what are you to do? You can arrest the five Kennedys, mother and sons, and John Dunne and William Ahearne and Cleary and old Boland, or watch them like a cat watching a wicked rat, and keep your Burke and your Simpson, your mainstays, well in hand. All of which things are well done. These rats, then under surveillance of the cats of justice, are allowed to play for a day or two. Sunday, the 17th of March, Patrick’s Day, now dawns. Moore’s words, associated with this national holiday, are inappropriate in Ballyvadlea to-day: Though dark are our sorrows, to-day we’ll forget them, And shine through our tears like a sunbeam in showers. There never were hearts, if our rulers would let them, More formed to be grateful and blest than ours. Our Rulers cannot well be blamed for this sad business in Ballyvadlea, our political rulers! Simpson saw Cleary on this Sunday morning, and Cleary told him that ‘his wife left home at 12 o’clock on Friday night’. Between 7 and 8 that evening, Simpson saw him again, and Cleary asked him for a revolver, saying ‘that these parties who had convinced him about his wife would not go with him to the Fort,’ that execrable fort at Kylenagranagh Hill. ‘It appeared to me’, says Simpson, ‘that they had convinced him that his wife had gone with the fairies. The fort was supposed to be a fairies’ habitation. He said she would be riding on a grey horse. She told him so. And he said they should cut the ropes tying her on the saddle, and that she would then stay with him, if he was able to keep her.’ Simpson refused to give him the revolver. What a pity Simpson had not got his revolver with him on the Thursday night? Simpson afterwards saw Cleary going to the Fort with a big table knife in his hand, to cut the ropes and set her free from the grey horse, presumably! Did he think of suicide, or was he still keeping up the pretence of madness? During the interval that now elapses between the 17th and the 21st of March, the police are busily searching for the body, assisted by Michael Kennedy, who was not in the house on the Friday night. The police, thus set upon a false scent, under that able young man, District Inspector Wansbrough, who certainly deserves to rise high in the Royal Irish Constabulary, proceed to search and scour the entire countryside. Railway stations are watched, farmhouses and outhouses are searched; fields and woods and brakes are tried in all directions; ponds and rivers are dragged! Neither priests nor participators give any assistance to the police. At length, when, after several days, no trace of this woman who had left her house at midnight, arrayed only in her night-dress, is discovered, District-Inspector Wansbrough rightly concludes that she must be dead. If Bridget Cleary’s body was not discovered, no further effective proceedings could be taken. No crime could be laid to the charge of those people whatever. It seemed a hopeless quest that the police now entered upon. Thousands of square miles of country to search for one poor half-burned body lying in a few feet square of earth! No assistance, no clue, though so many people around them knew everything. All the parties – Cleary himself; Boland; Dunne; the five Kennedys, and William Ahearne were arrested. The neighbourhood was astir with the mystery of the missing woman. On the 21st the prisoners are brought before the magistrates, in open court, at Clonmel; Simpson’s depositions and Johanna Burke’s false Cleary-concocted story being the only basis on which the prosecution has to work. Denis Ganey, who is said to have supplied the herbs, is arrested, but afterwards released. There was no case against him whatever. His herbs were, perhaps, as good as much of the stuff called doctor’s medicine. Nothing was elicited to elucidate the mystery. Geary, Pat Boland, Pat Kennedy, and his mother, and two brothers, all kept their secret well. Old Boland goes so far as to say from the dock: ‘I have three more persons that can say she was strong the night she went away; she got up and dressed’. This would go to prove, you see, that what they had done to her on the Thursday night, which was all they were charged with so far, had inflicted no serious injury on her, was, in fact, a fatherly kind of curative treatment! Their ’cuteness is the most astonishing thing about all this gang of people. Their appearance, under arrest, in the streets of Clonmel, was greeted with ‘yells, hisses and groans’; but their demeanour in the dock is described as ‘unconcerned; they chatted and exchanged pinches of snuff with each other’. But, notwithstanding all their cunning, discovery was at hand. After the Court had adjourned, and the prisoners were remanded to jail, District-Inspector Wansbrough directed the police at Cloneen, Drangan and Mullinahone ‘to make a deliberate search’ once again for the body. It was next day, Friday, 22nd March, that Sergeant Rogers, keen on the scent, when crossing some furzy ground, noticed ‘some broken thorn bushes freshly cut from a hedge in an angle of a field. And there, under a shallow covering of clay, only a few inches deep, the body of poor Bridget Cleary was discovered at a spot considerably over a mile from the cottage. It presented a most terrible appearance, back and lower part all burned, but head preserved and ‘features perfect!’ Marvellous preservation. There was no clothing on the body, except the stockings. Her head was enveloped in a sack, and in her left ear was one of her gold earrings. Her limbs were cramped up, and her arms folded across her breast. Constable Somers, who knew her for three years, identified her ‘by her features; they were perfect’. He had last seen her about a month or six weeks before. I shall not give the gruesome description of the doctors who made the post mortem, how the muscles of the spine were burned and the bones exposed, and so forth, and the deadly purple marks of strangulation, with others too horrible to mention. Suffice it to say the burns were ‘the cause of death’, which was all the coroner’s jury wanted to know. The coroner’s jury did not go into the attendant facts, but found that the burns, inflicted by some persons unknown, caused the death of poor, young, beautiful Bridget Cleary. Had not that body been discovered, the world may never have heard of the Ballyvadlea case! The inquest was held in a vacant house near where the body was found. After the conclusion of the proceedings, not a single human being, male or female, clerical or lay, would lend any assistance to give Christian Burial to the body. Horror of horrors! The police had to bury poor Bridget Cleary that night, by the light of a lantern, in Cloneen churchyard. We shall find the Maynooth theologians, in a later chapter, arguing that ‘the existence of motion proves the existence of a necessary being apart from the world’. Fudge! I tell them that they will have to answer for this case and the Lisphelan case, I hope and pray, when they are confronted with that ‘necessary being’. With regard to the police, let me say that it is because of their action in cases like this and the Lisphelan case, now about to be described, that I shall never be found saying a word against the Royal Irish Constabulary, no matter what views I may hold about the expensive character of its establishment. The policemen act like Christians, at any rate; and they stand between us and barbarism in such cases as this. It was now, after the discovery of the body, on the second day of the magisterial investigation, that all the dreadful facts of the Friday night’s doings were divulged by Johanna Burke. The end draws nigh at last. The prisoners were returned for trial to the Clonmel Assizes in July by the presiding magistrates, Colonel Evanson, R.M., and Mr. Grubb. J. P., after a prolonged investigation, during which the ’cuteness and coolness of the accused were manifested more than once. At the July Assizes, Judge O’Brien, himself a Catholic, and not a nominal one either, said: ‘This case demonstrates a degree of darkness in the mind, not of one person, but of several, a moral darkness, even religious darkness, the disclosure of which had come with surprise on many persons’. One would hope so! But the leniency of the sentences also, it may be truly said, came with surprise on many persons. The charge of murder was withdrawn by the Crown Prosecutor! Cleary was, therefore, found guilty, not of murder, but of manslaughter, and was sent to penal servitude for twenty years; Patrick Kennedy, found guilty of wounding, ‘the most guilty of all, except Michael Cleary’, in Judge O’Brien’s opinion, got 5 years’ penal servitude; John Dunne, the least contemptible of them all, got three years’ penal servitude; William and James Kennedy, a year-and-a-half’s imprisonment each; Patrick Boland and Michael Kennedy, six months; and when Mary Kennedy’s turn came, the Judge said, tearfully, ‘I will not pass any sentence on this poor old woman’. Thus ends this tale of ‘moral darkness, even of religious darkness, not of one person, but of several’, the events of which took place, not in Darkest Africa, but in Tipperary; not in the ninth or tenth, but at the close of the nineteenth century; not amongst Atheists, but amongst Catholics, with the Rosary on their lips, and with the priest celebrating Mass in their houses. Ah, my readers, Ireland is not the merry country which people think, which Protestant Irishmen like Lever and Lover, have painted it; or of half-humorous, half-contemptible braggarts, as Thackeray saw it. It is a sad, a gloomy, a depressed, a joyless country for the bulk of its peasantry. Hence it is they leave it. When the heart is sad, and the mind clouded in ignorance, and oppressed by darkest fears and mystery, there can be no humour, no gaiety. There is, I have always believed, more real gaiety of heart in one coster on the Old Kent Road, than in all the Catholic peasants of Munster.  ‘The wind blows East, the wind blows West, And there comes good luck and bad; The thriftiest man is the cheerfulest; ‘Tis a thriftless thing to be sad, sad, ‘Tis a thriftless thing to be sad.’ Carlyle. Bibliography: McCarthy, Michael J.F. Five Years in Ireland: 1895-1900 (Dublin 1901), 141-174

Editor’s Note: A fascinating piece where a common assault seems to have been disguised or claimed for convenience to have been a fairy attack.

McLaughlin was seriously assaulted on 15^th and ‘[t]here was a rumour prevalent through Glentogher that the fairies had something to do with the assault’. Is this perhaps to do with the fact that one of the defendants James Diver’s sister, Ellen Diver ‘stated that on the night when the assault… her brother had not been out of the house from shortly before eight o’clock until he went to bed’. i.e. the fairies were a convenient excuse for attackers. Note the assailants were said to have used ‘sticks and a stone hammer’.  ‘Alleged Serious Assault at Cardonagh’, Belfast News-Letter 28 October 1898 no 25969, p. 7.

Ellen Cushion [spelt also as Cummins] and Anastatia [spelt also as Anna, Anactatix, ] Rourkes were arrested at Clonmel, on Saturday, charged with cruelly ill-treating a child, three years old, named Philip Dillon. The prisoners were taken before the Mayor, when evidence was given showing an extraordinary survival of superstitious belief. It appeared that the neighbours fancied that the child, which had not the use of its limbs, was a changeling left by the fairies in exchange for the original child. While the mother was absent the prisoners entered her house, and placed the child naked on a hot shovel, under the impression that this would break the charm. The poor little thing was severely burnt, and is in a precarious condition. Prisoners, who were hooted by an indignant crowd, were remanded.’ The piece in the Liverpool Echo records that Rourke [sic] was sentenced to only a week as she had already been a month in prison. Anon, ‘Extraordinary Superstition’, Birmingham Daily Post (19 May 1884), 8

To-day a man named Daniel McCormack, aged about forty-five years was lodged in Derry Jail on a charge of murdering his son Patrick at their house at the Commons, near Donegal town yesterday morning, under shocking circumstances. It appears the son had been ailing, being confined to bed, and for some time previous had been unconscious. The family had been sitting with him day and night, and noticed nothing unusual with the father, save that he was in deep distress at the thought that his son might die. On Saturday night the family, consisting of father, mother, two daughters, and two sons, were all in the room where the sick boy was lying, and at about twelve o’clock joined in a rosary. When this had been finished, the father said to the others, ‘You are all tired; get something to eat, and go to bed, and I will sit up myself.’ They accordingly left the room, leaving the father behind. Nothing unusual was heard by them till the father opened the room door and said, ‘I have done for Ironsides now I have killed the devil and the fairies for taking away Patrick.’ He then went to the kitchen fire and began throwing the burning coals about saying ‘I’ll burn the fairies. They have taken Patrick and left a wraith in his place’. He had a pair of iron tongs in his hand when he came from the room. He seized a crook and pair of pothooks, and ran out of the house in the direction of the priest’s which is only a short distance from the place. After he left one of the sons went to the room, where he saw a terrible sight of his sick brother butchered. Soon after the father returned with Rev. Mr Cassidy. He was then in a wild, excited state, saying ‘They have taken away Patrick, but I have done for Ironsides… A pair of tongs found in the possession of the accused, bearing marks of blood and hair, is the supposed instrument with which the deed was done, the tongs being bent.’ Anon, ‘Terrible Tragedy in Donegal’, Belfast News-Letter (27 May 1890),  5.

Daniel D.,, aged 50, father; Margaret D., aged 50, mother; Patrick D.,, aged 21, son; and Kate D., aged 19, daughter. These patients were all admitted into this asylum on March 27, 1890, in a state of acute hysterical mania, the females being much the worst, and quite incoherent. The history obtained was that four days previously Patrick, who was a weak-minded and strumous lad, got a weakness while in Chapel. He was taken home, attended by the clergyman, and has since been ill. Nothing further was known until the constabulary found the, on the 26th, barricaded in their house, and on bursting the door open they were all found fighting so savagely that it took several people to separate them, and the mother had attempted to burn a younger child, believing ‘it was a spirit’. In the district it was believed they had become insane from eating the meat of a sheep that had died of hydrophobia; another account said they had been living on putrid meat. ‘On admission, all were very excited, the women, especially, throwing themselves on the floor and shouting. They could not be got to answer questions, and rambled in an incoherent manner of visions they saw, and asserted that they were all damned.’ March 29th Men much improved; women still excitable, especially the mother. April 5th: Steadily improving, men sent to work on the farm. April 11th. All continued to improve, and were to-day discharged… 825 Most of the patients developed strong religious delusions, believing their illness was a direct ‘visitation of Providence’ for their evil deeds, and, in the case of the D.s, an attempt was made to murder a child, believing it was a fairy. An actual murder was committed in the case reported by me in 1889 [Doyles], under exactly the same impression. During last year a murder [Cunninghams] was committed in another county in Ireland under the same belief, when several members of the same family became insane.

Before Mr Somers Payne, in the chair, Mr J. Cullinane, Dr Bird, and Captain Welch, R.M. Jeremiah Cremeen summoned John Donovan, junr, for loss sustained by plaintiff by reason of a dog of the defendant’s attacking, and injuring a sheep of the plaintiff…. Julia Hurley summoned Julia Sullivan for abusive language. Mr P.T. Carroll appeared for the complainant, and Mr O’Donovan for the defendant. Mr Carroll, for the complainant, said she is a bed-ridden old woman, and is often abused by the defendant, who says the complainant is a fairy (laughter), and all that sort of thing introduced in the Tipperary case. The daughter of the complainant said that her mother has been bed-ridden for a number of years; on the 11^th April witness was going to a well for water, when the defendant ran up and jumped up on a ditch near the well, and began to abuse her; defendant said that witness was bringing disease to the well, and that the disease from which wintness’s mother suffered was well known to the Doctor. Mr Carroll: Have you previous to this heard her make any reference to your mother? Witness: She called her a fairy several times (laughter). Mr Carroll: Did she say anything about your mother being gone, and a fairy being left in her place? Witness: Not to me. To Mr O’Donovan: The well is about 100 yards from the house of my brother. Defendant did not jump upon the fence to collect clothes that were hanging there. Defendant did not say that the well was muddied or dirty. She said I was bringing disease to the well. I did say to her ‘you are better leave me alone or I will tear the borders off of you’ (loud laughter). Mr O’Donovan. And she said something about a Clonmel fairy? (laughter). Witness: Not to me. Mr Donovan: Did she say she would beat your mother, or anything that way? Witness: No. Mr Cullinane: Is the well a public one?’ Witness: Yes. James Hurley, husband of the complainant, said that the defendant had often abused his wife and mentioned her sickness, and fairies and the like. To Mr O’Donovan, witness said he was not sure his wife had heard the names called. Mr O’Donovan said there were no threats used by the defendant. Captain Welch condemned the using of the word ‘fairy’ to the complainant. Mr Carroll said it was a monstrous thing to use such expressions to the complainant. Mrs Margaret Keohane said that she was passing the door of complainant’s house one day, and heard the defendant say ‘you have a fairy horse and a fairy wife’ (laughter). Mr O’Donovan contended there were no expressions used that could make the Bench bind the defendant to the peace. It would be bringing the law into contempt to bind the defendant to the peace, and quoted the act which stated that calling a person ‘a rogue, a liar, a rascal’ etc should not be sufficient to warrant a person being bound to the peace. Capt Welch: It does not say ‘fairy’ (laughter), and I say it is not a proper term to use. Mr Carroll said he asked that the defendant be bound to the peace. It was not right that the remark should be allowed to be made to an old bed-ridden woman, by a virago like the defendant. The daughter of the complainant was re-called and said that on the 11^th inst, when the defendant used the abusive language, her mother could not have heard the words used. The Bench held that in the circumstances they could not bind to the peace. The Chairman, addressing the defendant, said if she came up again she would find herself in the wrong box. Defendant protested her innocence. Mr O’Donovan: You will be made a fairy by being sent to gaol, if you don’t mind yourself (laughter). Anon, ‘Bantry Petty Sessions: The Use of the Word Fairy’,  Southern Star (27 Apr 1895) p. 2

McQuillan was assaulted by one Andrew Murphy. Murphy’s defence Murphy attempted to undermine McQuillan’s credibility with the following questions that seem not to have applied to the night of the assault. ‘Mr Reid asked did the fairies ever beat you? Witness – they did. Mr Reid – Did the fairies ever come and take a loaf our of your hand? Witness – They did one dark night. Mr Reid – Did they take half of the loaf first? Witness – Yes. Mr Reid – And you told them that if they spared your life you would give them the other half? Witness – I did and I gave it to them. Mr Reid – This is a man to bring a charge of assault. Mr Boyle – It was not the fairies that cut his head at any rate.’ Murphy was found guilty. ‘McQuillan and the Fairies’, Freeman’s Journal and Daily Commercial Advertiser (13 Sep 1898), 6.

…March, 1896. In the village of Lisphelan, in the County of Roscommon, and, as I understand, the diocese of Elphin, there then lived one James Cunningham, in ‘a comfortable dwelling-house’, along with his father, three brothers and a sister, all people of mature years. Most of the people in this village are said to be inter-related, and it appears the majority of them are Cunninghams, James Cunningham was the second son, and a shoemaker by trade, ‘the rest of the family working on the land’. The Athlone or Roscommon correspondent of the Freeman’s Journal, at the time of the occurrence now to be related, said that ‘the inhabitants of Lisphelan district were extremely superstitious’, and that ‘on the night of the 6th of March many of them, including James Cunningham, were under the impression that evil spirits were hovering round their dwellings’. Father Gately, the parish priest, who, like Father Ryan in Ballyvadlea, ‘was in spiritual charge’, branded this as a calumny, and accused the correspondent of ‘slandering with charges of belief in witchcraft and fairies, etc., a whole locality who, in their appreciation of the laws of God and of His Church, and in their observance, are probably far in advance of what?’ The Athlone or Roscommon correspondent of the Freeman! He says further, that they are ‘good, honest, moral, respectable peasants’. Father Gately is reported as having said at the trial in July, that, for a few days before Friday, the 6th of March, James Cunningham was ‘religiously insane’; and, in a letter to the Freeman’s Journal, of March 13th, writes: ‘I saw him at home on Thursday, in presence of all the members of his family, in whose hearing he told me that, for twelve days, the Devil (I hope your Athlone correspondent will pardon me for using the word) had been tempting him to do away with himself, but that God gave him grace to resist the temptation’. What, it may be asked, was there ‘religiously insane’ in this? Was not He who founded Christianity ‘led by the Spirit into the desert to be tempted by the Devil? Is not the Devil ‘going about like a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour’? Father Gately also writes that ‘not a word did anyone in the house, including the insane man, say to him about witches or fairies’.” Father Gately is reported as testifying in court that it was more than ordinarily zealous of him to call on James Cunningham, because ‘it was not in his district to attend sick calls’. He called, however, at the request of one of the brothers, and he is reported as telling the court: ‘coming near the house, I asked him was he violent, and was there any danger in seeing him?’ The family  pressed me to accept money to offer up Masses for his recovery, and I did not, and begged to be excused for objecting. But they persisted so much that I accepted the money and the obligation’. High Mass, high money; low Mass, low money; no Mass, no money. He said, on the same occasion, that the family were ‘sober, industrious, good people, and inoffensive to their neighbours’; that they were a ‘religious family’. The curate, Father Mulleady, had also been visiting James Cunningham frequently during the days prior to the 6th of March. We are told by Father Gately that, up to that fatal day, ‘no people could be kinder to James Cunningham than the members of his family’. They actually ‘paid a doctor, contrary to James Cunningham’s wishes, to come and see him’. Paid a, doctor! Marvellous proof of kindness in Father Gately’s opinion! At Lisphelan, as at Ballyvadlea, we find visitors in the house. ‘On the night of the dreadful tragedy’, Father Gately writes, ‘they asked neighbours who were visiting up to ten o’clock, to stay for the night, which they would never have done if they had it in their minds to do away with him, for any reason, superstitious or otherwise’. I do not believe they meant beforehand to kill him; but I do believe that those people’s minds were worm-eaten with superstition about devils, fairies – the Thing especially – and all sorts of other non-existent portents. I believe that their nerves were strung to breaking point after a prolonged fit of superstitious terror, and that, on the night of the 6th March, their hysterical, scared condition, such that they were capable of any crime. Father Gately protests his complete ignorance of their superstitious beliefs. I cannot disbelieve him. I do not even censure him for being so out of touch with those poor, poor people – not poor in worldly goods, for they were very comfortable. It is the system of which he is the product, and to which I referred before in the Ballyvadlea case, that is at fault. We are told, but not by Father Gately, that ‘for a week or so’ previous to the eventful night, now about to be described, ‘James Cunningham was observed to pay frequent visits to a fort, called the Fairies Fort, in the locality’. One of those same ring-fenced forts we met in Ballyvadlea, abominable breeding grounds and preserves of superstition! William Cunningham, a neighbour, residing ‘40 yards away’, said at the trial that ‘he only knew that James Cunningham was suffering weakness of mind four days before the occurrence’. This is all we know of the case, then, prior to the 6th of March. It is uncontested that, on that night, James Cunningham and the rest of the family, believed ‘they heard noises’ in and round their house, and ‘determined to sit up till the cock would crow’. Whether ‘other families in the village’, as the local correspondent asserted, and has never since withdrawn; other ‘good, honest, moral, respectable peasants’, were under the same delusion that night, in Lisphelan, and sat up likewise, I shall not inquire too closely. It is to be hoped that no other family of ‘sober, industrious good people’, in Ireland, will ever do so again. During the evening William Cunningham, next neighbour, James Cunningham and John Gately, also neighbours, had been visiting the Cunninghams, and left the house about nine or ten o’clock. Why did not this William Cunningham go to bed when he got home? ‘He went out about eleven o’clock and found the prisoner’s family saying the litany; then he went into his own house; then he heard a dull thud or sound from the prisoner’s house, and could not make out what it was’. So he says; and adds, ‘I bolted my door and got into bed as quick as I could’! Mark you, the pity of it is that I do verily believe these wretched Cunninghams were ‘sober and industrious’. There is no mention made of alcoholic drink of any description, either in the Ballyvadlea case or in the Lisphelan case; and the worldly comfort both of the Clearys and of the Cunninghams would go to prove that they were industrious. Imagine this family now sitting up at midnight, in this lonely Roscommon village, across the Shannon – the father and his four sons, all great gaunt men ; and the sister, who, in the words of Father Gately, ‘is naturally a mild and even timid girl’. Nobody saw anything wrong apparently in the proceeding. The ‘religious’ queerness of James had been remarked, it is said; but the kindness of the members of his family to him, their perfect amity and unity amongst themselves, their perfect sanity is not questioned by anyone. Let us ask ourselves now whether the frenzy of this coming and several succeeding nights, is the sudden and unconnected birth of this night; or, whether it is not rather the outbreak of superstitious flames that were smothered in their breasts from childhood, and which grew in force with their growth to manhood ? When Father Gately left them on Thursday, he wrote them down as we have seen, and entertained a high respect for them! Let us now proceed with our narrative. Twelve o’clock – that fatal hour – strikes, and the whole family ‘kneel down and say the Rosary’. They believe that ‘the house is filled with thousands of devils; that they are in the loft and outside the door’; and they have been sprinkling quantities of holy water over the place to subdue them. As will be found subsequently, they are under the impression that these fairies or devils lodge ‘in a person’s throat’, and must be pulled therefrom. Suddenly now, we are told, James jumps up from his knees, catches his father by the throat and throws him on the ground. The whole family rush to old Cunningham’s assistance, and a fierce fight, of four against one, ensues. But James is a powerful, ‘a gigantic’ man, and the fight rages from room to room for a long time, until at last James is overpowered and slain in a room off the kitchen, ‘terribly battered, chin cut away, teeth broken, etc’. When the murder is committed, they imagine that a voice cries from the loft ‘Look out for yourselves now’, whereat the entire family rush from the accursed house, leaving the corpse alone therein; and fly to William Cunningham’s, the neighbour living forty yards away. How are they received by that ‘good, moral, respectable peasant’? These ‘sober, industrious, inoffensive, religious’ people, in the words of the Parish Priest, how are they received by their neighbour? He says himself: ‘They asked to be let in for God’s sake. I refused to admit them!’ They do not attempt, like Cleary, to conceal what they have done. They say to him, ‘Keep up good courage, you! We have him killed. There is no fear of you. There is no danger now!’ They then, he says, burst in the window, and let themselves in. William Cunningham says that during the rest of the night, while they stayed at his house, they kept ‘saying the Rosary and making crosses’; and they told him how “their own house was filled with thousands of devils in the loft, outside the door, and soforth; ‘and that ‘but for all the holy water’, these devils ‘would sweep them all in no time’. In the morning, on Saturday, the 7th, we are told by him, they went off ‘to inform the priest’. They also went and informed the police, but not until seven in the evening. Patrick Cunningham, the brother, tells Constable Dalton, and his statement is corroborated by his father, that ‘the deceased had attacked them, and they had to do away with him’. The old man tells the Sergeant how he heard a voice from the loft saying: Look out for yourself now. Pat Cunningham tells the Sergeant that his slain brother ‘went down to the priests a couple of times, but they did him no good’. ‘We gave him £12 to go to America’, he added, ‘but The Thing would not let him go. The Thing should have him! The Thing shouted down from the loft: Mind yourself now?’ The police wisely arrested the whole family, and put them into the little lock-up at Lecarrow Barracks. During the night, they kept roaring out for ‘daylight’, kicking the door, spitting (you remember how Cleary told Johanna Bourke to say that his wife spat at him when going away), and saying that ‘spirits would take them away; but that when the cock would crow they would go away’. Not much sleep for the constables in Lecarrow Barracks that night. The Cunninghams broke out the lock-up door; and a battle ensued in the day-room, the end of which was the ‘handcuffing’ of the Cunninghams, and the tying of ‘their legs with ropes’; the ‘talk about fairies and devils’ being kept up all the time! ‘They were very violent. They could not be worse’, says Sergeant Doyle. On Sunday, the 8th, they are all removed to Athlone Barracks, ‘followed by a jeering crowd through the streets’, like the Ballyvadlea people in Clonmel. Why ‘jeering’? Obviously because it was felt these people had brought disgrace upon the locality. ‘They were handcuffed and tied on brakes, presenting a fearful appearance, faces wounded, clothes bloodstained’, and so on. That night in Athlone barracks incessant prayers were kept up to drive away the fairies’. The daughter, let loose out of pity, ‘attacked her father, and nearly choked him trying to draw fairies from his throat’ and she then had to be bound. On Monday, the 9th, an inquest is held at Lisphelan, and after that, the question of burying the body has to be faced. One would expect that in a locality inhabited by ‘good, moral, respectable’ peasants, obedient to the ‘laws of God and of His Church’,” this simple act of human, we shall not say Christian, respect to the dead would be willingly undertaken by scores of pitying hands. On the contrary, the Freeman, of the 11th of March, reports that though ‘Lisphelan village is almost exclusively inhabited by relatives and namesakes of the deceased, not one of them could be induced to lend assistance in the burial of the body. Father Mulleady personally requested most of the neighbours to assist the police’ but in vain! An instance is quoted of how one man, on being asked, made answer that ‘he was only a first cousin by marriage’. Eventually the police, under the direction of the doctors, ‘had to place the remains in a coffin’, which ‘at the last moment was found to be too small for the body’, and had to be broken! ‘The murdered man was not divested of his clothes; the coffin was placed in a cart and brought to the graveyard by the police. None of the relatives or friends took part’. Why, and a thousand times why, was this so? All this, as we say, appeared in the Freeman of the 11th. It was two days later that Father Gately’s letter, before referred to, appeared in the Freeman of the 13th. It is dated March 12th. He has not one word of denial or condemnation for this brutal conduct of the locality. He does not allude to it even. It is to my mind the feature of this case which is most important; and, but for which, the case would not be worthy of mention; the conduct of ‘those good, moral, respectable peasants’, slandered, forsooth, by being called superstitious and believers in fairies, who, doubtless, all read Father Gately’s flattery with unction in the Freeman, two days after they had so savagely disrespected the remains of a poor dead friend and neighbour! Thus were the remains of James Cunningham, all his life a ‘sober, industrious man’, laid in their last resting-place. In the ordinary way, there would not have been a priest present at James Cunningham’s funeral, unless he had been specially invited and his fee prepaid. There is no sight so sad, I think, as the burial of an Irish Catholic peasant, whose friends cannot afford a pound to pay for the priest’s attendance at the funeral. Many and many a time, in the part of Ireland where I was born, attending one of such funerals, my father’s labourers or their wives, have the tears welled up into my eyes; when, at length, the last shovelful of earth had rattled into the grave, and the last sod had been well and truly banked – and there was no more to do! The look of pained suspense, the dead silence used to be heart-wringing, as these poor men and women, gathered around the grave, gazed foolishly into each other’s eyes, not knowing what to do. No word of consolation, no hopeful mention of the Resurrection and the Life to come – in which they so realistically believe – from lips that would command respect. Oh, Heavens, is it any wonder that at such a moment the welkin should ring with what is called an Irish howl, and that the pent-up feelings, for which no intelligent expression is vouchsafed, should thus find vent? Oh, my much-wronged fellow-countrymen, possessed of qualities which, all who know you, admit should command the highest success, why are you thus made to suffer, as it were, on the rack? Your priests, our priests, if one of their own number dies, will attend his interment in shoals; will celebrate his Month’s Mind as a religious festival, and even his Anniversary, with High Mass and other ceremonials. Why will they not attend your funerals, and show your remains that last tribute of religious respect for which you so yearn? It is because – but not in this already overladen book! The theme is too big. Why pursue the tale of woe? After a magisterial inquiry before Captain Preston, R.M., and Mr. Lyster, J.P., the father and brothers were committed to Tullamore Jail, to await their trial for murder at the July Assizes. The Doctor said they were ‘suffering from acute mania, the symptoms of which were religious illusions’. The girl and one of the brothers were sent to Ballinasloe Lunatic Asylum. When the others arrived at Tullamore, we are told, they ‘presented a frightful appearance’. Crowds gathered to see them. They were escorted from the railway station to the jail ‘by a strong escort of police and the Lancashire Fusiliers’. At midnight in their cells, we are told, they began to roar, crying that their ‘cells were filled with fairies and devils, from whom they prayed to be delivered’; and they ‘roared out for Father Gately, the parish priest of their native parish’. On July 11th, before Judge O’Brien again, the father and two sons were tried for wilful murder at the Roscommon Assizes. The father was acquitted. The sons were ordered to be confined in a criminal lunatic asylum during Her Majesty’s pleasure. The same sentence was passed on the third son in the March following. Michael J.F. McCarthy, Five Years in Ireland: 1895-1900 (Dublin 1901), 175-189

‘A child ‘in the fairies’ if washed with water in which fox-glove is steeped the possession is broken. Such a child in modern times was put out on a shovel on the dunghill. A child I rescued and put in hospital some three years ago, was taken home by her parents it was ‘in the fairies’ and it died. No proceedings could be taken in the case, it was so delicate, and proof of neglect was difficult. But the facts are as I state.’ J. Cooke ‘Irish Folklore from Connaught, Collected Chiefly in North Donegal’, Folklore 7 (1896), 299-301 at 300.

After my friend, the Rev. Father L. Donnellan, C.C., of Dromintee, County Armagh, had introduced me to Alice Cunningham, of his parish, and she had told much about the ‘gentle folk’, she emphatically declared that they do exist – and this in the presence of Father Donnellan – because she has often seen them on Carrickbroad Mountain, near where she lives. And she then reported as follows concerning enchanted Slieve Gullion…. The top of Slieve Gullion is a very gentle place. A fairy has her house there by the lake, but she is invisible. She interferes with nobody. I hear of no gentler places about here than Carrickbroad and Slieve Gullion.’ Evans-Wentz 75-76