What has happened to Robert Emmet's bed, or rather the remainder of the bed later converted into a table, which figures in Malachy Horan Remembers by Dr George A. Little, former President of The Old Dublin Society? In the book we are told about the Mrs Duffy of Ballinascorney, not far up in the hills from Dublin. Dr Little paints a picture of the cottage she occupied: "Busy hands had brought the light here as surely as evening brought the shade. Everything that could be polished shone; everything that would scrub white gleamed whitely. Primrose-yellow walls gave life to the chinaed dresser. Lord Edward beamed approval from his frame." And Mrs Duffy said: "Robert Emmet, that is a name always loved in this house. My husband's family suffered for him." Her late husband's grandfather was arrested just after Emmet, but they couldn't make him speak. They kept him in jail for a year and a day.
A predecessor of Mrs Duffy was given the four-poster bed in which Robert Emmet slept while hiding in Ballinascorney house. Woodworm had got into it so that nothing but the foot was left and she had a table made out of the uppers of the posts and the panel. She gave it to Dr Little "because of what you are to all of us up here in the mountain". No, she wouldn't sell it. There is a photograph of the table, two obvious bedpost front legs, plainer legs behind, and on it a decanter of Dublin glass and a rushlight candlestick, Dr Little having had it reconstructed by Mr M. Murray, Woodwork Instructor, Bolton Street Technical School, in 1942.
Robert Emmet is still remembered around Rathfarnham, Co Dublin, as if it were not so long ago that he courted Sarah Curran up the road. Thirty or 40 years ago the ruins of that house used to be a place where children clambered perilously, picking blackberries among the stones. Emmet's house in Butterfield Avenue, then Butterfield Lane, still stands, and nearly opposite is a house which, until recently anyway, had a priest's hole, well constructed behind a fireplace. Some think they see Emmet's hand in this. Robert Sherwood was a very well-known American playwright and in the 1950s, a sister called at the latter house, looking for family traces, for her brother was Robert Emmet Sherwood. Y