James Joyce's Ulysses includes a beautifully expressed thought about memory and time: "Every life is many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love, but always meeting ourselves."
It’s a reflection that has been with me a lot in recent days and weeks as I’ve thought about the archive of the O’Connor and O’Neill families, assembled by my father, Seán, with painstaking and patient work, and now presented to the city of which those families were proud citizens.
The archive covers more than 250 years and many dozens of people. It’s a remarkable fact to reflect upon, that I am related to all of them, as are my children and my future grandchildren.
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There are stories of happy times in Dublin’s Liberties and of sadder and more challenging experiences. There are instances of great courage and humour and wit, and there are examples of what I would call the Liberties spirit: a sense of independent- mindedness and a quiet resolve not always to do what you’re told.
And there are very many moments, as you look through the archive of the O’Connor and O’Neill families, when the personal stories of trying to get along and live a life in a place you love get mixed with the larger picture.
Included, for example, is the little framed document which reads: “Government of the Irish Republic. Five per cent registered bond certificates (1919), received from William O’Connor of 142 Francis Street, the sum of ten shillings, signed: Michael Collins, Minister of Finance.”
There is the baptism certificate of Patrick O’Connor, from 1771, who like so many of his family was baptised at St Nicholas of Myra Church, Francis Street.
As the archive reveals, his story is fascinating. A Protestant couple, William and Hanna Cole, had come to live in the Liberties from the parish of Kilcormick in Co Wexford – a town made famous in the ballad Boolavogue – just before their daughter, Dorothy, was born.
As a young woman, Dorothy met Patrick, and Cupid struck. Patrick was Catholic, Dorothy was Church of Ireland, and both of their families were opposed to a marriage. Unbothered by convention, this Liberties Romeo and Juliet simply moved in together, not a thing you often saw in the early 1800s.
Two children arrived and I’d imagine there was a bit of talk.
On April 5th, 1805, Dorothy did two things that the archive records. She became a Catholic, being baptised in St Catherine’s Church on Meath Street, and she got married on the same day and in the same church.
A month later, her third child, a boy, was born. He was named James after his grandfather, a fact I am fond of, since my own first son is James O’Connor.
On the O’Neill side, too, the stories abound. Of the many strong and remarkable women the archive records, one emerges as particularly memorable. Catherine Deveraux was my great-grandfather’s mother.
She raised six children, four of her own and two stepchildren, a fact that on the face of it is impressive enough, but when you look in detail at the archive, the human background emerges.
William O’Neill married Bridget Kelly in the Liberties in 1863 and had two children with her before her premature death. He married Catherine in 1875 but passed away himself a few years later, leaving her with three children of her own and two stepchildren to care for.
In 1881, she married Christopher Downes and they had a child of their own. Imagine the strength of heart of such a woman as Catherine Deveraux, who kept that family together.
All of life is there in the O’Connor-O’Neill archive, from the funny to the serious, from the poignant to the poetic, with all sorts of surprising and revealing detail.
One highlight among the documents is a diary from the 1870s and early 1880s, written by my great-grandmother’s sister, a record of neighbourhood events and everyday happenings in the tenement home where they lived over a shop in 52 James’s Street.
January 1879 Tommy Gavin took the pledge and refused a pint of porter.
February 1879 Maggie Cahill's husband went either to Leeds or Australia.
March 1879 Tommy Gavin enlisted in the 8th Regiment and was sent abroad with the British Army. I wrote to him today in Koorum valley in Afghanistan.
April 1879 I lent Lord Byron's Works today to Mr O'Shaugnessy and asked him to return the book when he has read it. Mr Tutty called to see us.
May 1879 Today I had the chimney swept and my top coat dyed. I had to pull the tail feathers out of my sick canary. Miss King left 52 James's Street for America. She sails from Londonderry in the ship Devonia in a few days.
June 1879 Bridget Ward threw herself into the canal. She was then sent to the Asylum, and when released a few months later was taken prisoner. When she came out of prison she gave up her room and went away on the same day. A few weeks later she was taken prisoner again, although she was to marry Mr Allen on the following day. She was released and a month later was fined 5 shillings or 3 days' imprisonment for being drunk near James's Street. She paid the fine but was found on the same night insensible in Dawson Street, from where she was taken to Mercers Hospital. A bottle with laudanum was found in her pocket. September 1879 Kate went to see Mrs Ward in Mercers Hospital and saw a medical student sitting in a nurse's lap. Very improper.
October 1879 Some person unknown left a foundling baby in the open hallway of 52 James's Street and went away.
And as you wander through this account of everyday dramas, suddenly the struggles of an entire nation loom into view:
8 January 1880 My granny died yesterday. Her death notice was in this morning's Freemans Journal: HOLOHAN – at 52 James's Street, Mrs Margaret Holohan, aged 90 years. She was the daughter of Mr John Tutty of Kilpipe, County Wicklow, who was one of the 25 United Irishmen shot at Carnew on the 25th May 1798 and buried in Kilcashel graveyard at Wingfield, Co Wicklow.
Startling, the shortness of the chain of connections. John Tutty, who was executed, then his daughter Margaret Holohan, and on to her granddaughter Mary O’Connor, who was my great grandfather’s mother, and on, by turn, to me and to my own children.
My late Uncle Billy lived almost 60 years of his life in Australia with his beloved wife, Alice, but his obituary notice in the Sydney Morning Herald began: "O'Connor, William (Billy), Born 15 Francis Street, Dublin."
Of all the hundreds of stories the collection gives witness to, the most dramatic began to unfold on a March morning in 1922, on the street outside the Mansion House, the very building where the Lord Mayor is officially receiving the O’Connor -O’Neill archive on behalf of the city.
It had come to the notice of the IRA that two men from the ministry of labour’s finance branch called into the Provincial Bank at the same time every Friday morning to collect cash, travelling the few hundred yards back to their office by taxi.
Three members of the IRA active service unit, Laurence Dowling, Augustine Troy and my great-uncle, Jim O’Neill, left Francis Street with orders to rob the clerks. Troy was lookout. The hold-up was to be done by the other two.
Max Green was chairman of the Irish Prisons Board at the time. Although a Catholic, he had enjoyed a brilliant career under British administration.
Before his chairmanship, he had been private secretary to the lord lieutenant, the Marquess of Aberdeen, the British monarch’s personal representative in Ireland.
Green’s wife, Joanna, was the daughter of Home Rule parliamentarian John Redmond.
Green’s wife was unwell on the fateful morning. He said goodbye to her at their home on Appian Way and walked their twin boys to school, before setting out to cross St Stephen’s Green for his work.
At the same time, on Molesworth Street, Jim O’Neill and Dowling were holding up the men from the ministry of labour, robbing them of an attache case before making off.
The two IRA men ran towards the Shelbourne Hotel, pursued by onlookers. Dowling threw the case away. At the Dawson Street corner, they went their separate ways.
O’Neill headed back down Dawson Street, gun in hand, but was overpowered outside the Mansion House. As he was led away, shots were heard from Stephen’s Green. Max Green, about to leave the park, had confronted Dowling and had been shot dead either by Dowling himself or one of the armed pursuers.
Dowling was tried four times on charges of murder but the jury did not convict him. Ultimately he received 10 years’ imprisonment for armed robbery.
As for Jim O’Neill, my great-uncle, he appeared four times on the robbery charge but was not convicted because the detective who disarmed him failed to attend the court, perhaps because of intimidation, perhaps because of one-time sympathy.
Such a strange and highly armed place was Dublin at the time that the detective himself, Gerald Grace, was a member of the police force set up by pro-Treaty group within the IRA.
Jim O’Neill had been in prison for two years and was warned to leave the country on his release in April 1924, which he did. The family shop in Francis Street was strafed with bullets. Once again, the lives of the O’Neills and O’Connors intertwined with the larger dramas of a painfully emerging nation.
All families, at once, are both extraordinary and ordinary. There is much in the O’Connor-O’Neill archive that is concerned with the everyday, and it builds into a composite mosaic of a life that no longer exists in the Liberties or anywhere else.
But if we want to know where we came from or how we got here or who we once were and how we became what we are now, the story is now there to be experienced again.
As James Joyce wrote: “We walk through ourselves.” Every day. Every life.
Joseph O’Connor is a novelist, playwright and McCourt Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Limerick
The O’Connor-O’Neill Family Papers 1750-2013 are at Dublin City Library & Archive’s Reading Room, Pearse Street, Dublin 2, and are open to all readers holding a current research card. See also dublincityarchives.ie
