The guest list for the unveiling of the memorial to Fermoy's Forgotten on October 8th is still being compiled, but the Taoiseach has already accepted the invitation to perform the ceremony. It is an event which should bring together representatives of different countries as well as members of many different families.
Fermoy's Forgotten are the men of the town and the surrounding townlands who were killed in the first World War or who died from their injuries. The memorial, designed by sculptor Ken Thompson, is a screen of Wicklow granite tablets set into a wall at the edge of the town park close to the incline of Barrack Hill, once the focus of Fermoy's prosperity as a garrison town.
The slabs, now being prepared by Michael Sheedy of Midleton, will be inscribed with 131 names under a carved Celtic cross. The wording has been drafted as a simple commemorative sentence: "In memory of those from the Fermoy area who fell in the Great War 1914-1918". These men's remains now lie buried in military cemeteries throughout Europe and beyond, or lie nowhere known at all, or, in just two cases, are buried here at home - one in Kilworth, one in Rathcormac.
The list is a catalogue of foreign fields: Mesopotamia, Gallipoli, the Somme, the Dardanelles, Madras, Gibraltar, Turkey, Greece, Belgium, Britain, Israel, Germany and all over France. Three brothers from the Pigott family, three of the Morrissey boys, three sons of the Rector of Kilworth who served with the Canadian, Australian and UK forces.
This gesture of recognition was initiated by military historian Paudie McGrath. Born and reared in Fermoy, where he can trace his family's ancestry back to 1620, as an ex-army man he never intended any glorification of war. His purpose, supported by the local urban district council and especially by deputy mayor Cllr William Hughes, is only that of acknowledgment. "This is a part of our history which was totally blotted out, and all this information, all these mementoes were consigned to shoe-boxes and attics. The families would have known of course, but mostly they kept quiet about it. But I think this year's commemoration of the Somme has helped a lot of them speak up about that history - indeed some have always been proud of their involvement. So now the time seems to be right, and I've found people have been very receptive to this idea."
In fact McGrath has been working on this plan since 2003, when he saw the USS Sullivan at anchor near Castletownbere. The ship was bringing American top brass to Adrigole in West Cork to pay tribute to the five Sullivan brothers killed while serving with the US navy during the second World War. Theirs was the story on which the Steven Spielberg film Saving Private Ryan was based. The sight of the ship prompted him to wonder just how many families from his own town had had something of the same experience. He decided to investigate links with the first World War, given that so much of Fermoy grew up around its barracks.
Initial, tentative research led to references and connections as his net stretched to take in the villages of Kilworth, Castlelyons, Glanworth, Ballyhooley and Rathcormac. Gradually the search grew into something positive, detailed and finally determined, and now he can unroll a long chart in which is listed every name, place of birth, regiment, serial number, place of death, year of death, burial place (where known) and next of kin.
Inevitably a committee had to be formed and this now includes Ciaran Moran and trustee Sandy Blackly. Equally inevitably the question of money arose, but here Blackwater Resources CEO Valerie Murphy guaranteed 50 per cent of the estimated €16,000 costs up to a ceiling of €10,000. Only a single event had to be held as a sponsored 24-mile cycle race was so enthusiastically supported that the shortfall was quickly covered. "There's massive interest in this now," says MacGrath, who, with Hughes, is anxious to thank all those who filled out the sponsorship cards as well as all those cyclists.
But the support should be no surprise, really. Even as McGrath, Moran and Hughes speak of what has become a community event, Hughes explains that his own grandfather had served with the Connaught Rangers in India, where
he was court-martialled for his part in the mutiny at Solon. His death sentence was commuted and he returned to Ireland to join the new Irish army. His son joined the British forces during the second World War and was imprisoned after the fall of Singapore; his three years as a prisoner-of-war included labour on the Burma railroad and on the bridge over the River Kwai.
The Solon mutiny arose from the Rangers' response to news of the Black and Tan atrocities back home in Ireland - not least in Fermoy, where the Tans took a Capt Prendergast from his post as teacher at St Colman's College and threw him to his death over the bridge into the Blackwater. The college stands on the hill immediately south of the town centre. Another teacher there was Thomas MacDonagh, poet and soldier, while yet another was Dr Croke, of GAA fame. It was during Croke's time that a new student arrived in the person of John Stanislaus Joyce, grandfather of the writer.
Another notable pupil was Patrick Sheehan of Mallow, later known as the novelist Canon Sheehan, who witnessed from a college window the funeral cortege of the Fenian Peter O'Neill-Crowley - a sight which was to influence his last novel, The Graves of Kilmorna. Sheehan saw the procession crossing the bridge where now we talk of the New Zealand Rifles, the Irish Guards, the Engineers, Ordinance, Cavalry and Machine-Gun corps, the Dublin Fusiliers, the Sherwood Foresters, the King's Own Scottish Borderers. All these regiments included sons of Fermoy who are numbered among the 49,000 Irish dead in the first World War. Now they are named close to the stone which commemorates the Kent brothers of 1916, all gathered now into the town's impartial history.