[..] About 1878 David Sheehy (Hanna Sheehy’s father), his wife Bessie (née McCoy), and their eldest child Hanna, came to live; renting the Mill in Loughmore. David was born in County Limerick and attended the Irish College, studying for the priesthood, in Paris with his older brother, Eugene, [n.1] latter known as the ‘Land League Priest‘ and also one of Éamon de Valera’s teachers. However he (David), was sent home from Paris during an outbreak of cholera, there in 1866. On his return home he became implicated in the ill-fated Rising of 1867, after which he fled the country going to sea. After a few years he returned home and ran a mill at Kilmallock and later at Kanturk, before renting the mill at Loughmore around 1878. It was while in Kanturk that he married Bessie McCoy, [n.2] who was from the region of Ballyhahill, in Co. Limerick.

David and Bessie went on to have seven children, six of whom were born in the village of Loughmore, Thurles, Co Tipperary. Before the end of the century the whole family had moved to No 2. Belvedere Place, Dublin. David became Secretary to the Irish Parliamentary Party and an M.P. for Meath and later for South Galway; a post he held until the Sinn Féin landslide of 1913. James Joyce, a student at the nearby Belvedere College was a regular visitor to No 2. Belvedere Place, in 1896-1897 and he nursed a secret love for Hanna’s sister Mary, who was later married to Irish economist, journalist, barrister, writer, poet, soldier and Home Rule politician Tom Michael Kettle. Bessie died in 1917 and David around 1932/33, at the age of 86.

Before moving to Loughmore, his eldest daughter Hanna Sheehy had been born 3 years earlier in Kanturk, North Co. Cork, on the 24th May 1877.

Notes:
1. In 1886 Fr Eugene Sheehy was C.C. of Kilmallock, Co. Limerick and later P.P. of Bruff. He resigned in 1909 because he had gotten into trouble with his bishop, Dr Edward Thomas O’Dwyer. He went to live with the Sheehy’s who were then living in Dublin. He was jailed in Kilmainham with Charles Stewart Parnell. He died in 1917 and is buried in Glasnevin cemetery.
2. Bessie’s sister Kate was Mrs Kate Barry of Barry’s Hotel, Dublin.

It lay nearly half-way between Templemore and Thurles in Co. Tipperary, with the Devil’s Bit for a background. I made its acquaintance at the age of three, and lived there in the old Mill till I was ten. I can wish nothing better for any child than to be born and brought up in the country - you miss a lot your whole life long if you have not had such a start.

The railway line from Kingsbridge to the South lay midway between the Mill and the Village, and right at the top of the latter were clustered church, graveyard and school. One of my earliest recollections is listening to the Rooks, cawing from the high tree tops in the graveyard from the open door of the national school as we conned our “tasks” in the big room, our one schoolroom for the girls and younger boys, with a class at each corner and one often in the middle as well. Outside in that same graveyard stands the monument to the Cormack brothers, wrongfully hanged in penal times, whose name was cleared and bodies buried there later.

The Mill was pure romance - the mill race fed from the Suir, the house and kitchen garden, outhouses and grove at the back being practically on an island. Our outer gate closed at night like a fortress shutting us in. The bakehouse was across the yard - the smell of new-made bread is another childhood memory, and the sight of the huge batches shoved into the gaping oven: if you were good, the baker let you knead some dough for a little loaf of your own. And the sound of the doves cooing around the corn and all the wonders of the loft, the granary, the revolving wheel, the sound of running water - water all around, so that we were sometimes caught by flood and marooned - all these made a wonderful childhood setting, and what playgrounds did they offer! Years later, when I revisited the place, I was amazed to find how everything seemed to have shrunk to much smaller dimensions. To childhood’s eyes distances are vast.

Outside the gate we swung an arch (how laboriously made, how elaborately festooned, ivy and boughs of flowering shrubs, slung on a rope) to welcome Archbishop Croke, come for Visitation, to the parish - the first after his return from Rome with his immortal “Unchanged and unchangeable” [See note]. On one side we painted on canvas the phrase (we did not grasp its full meaning then, we just knew it was “a famous victory”) aided by the mill-boys. On the other side we put the word “Wealcome” - it is to the credit of our elders that they left as it was written, for the whole was a spontaneous offering, spelling and all! and the Archbishop’s keen grey-blue eyes twinkled as he passed and caught sight of it.”

“For we had a highly political atmosphere, a beloved uncle being in jail, first in Naas, then in Kilmainham, during part of that time, one of the “Suspects” - did he not send us sweets from each place? We played at evictions and had to conscript Emergency-men from the boys of the village (naturally everybody wanted to be evicted tenants) while we fortified our holdings in the hen-house and hay barn, yelling Fanny Parnell’s “Hold the Harvest”! We hummed derisively “The Peeler and the Goat” as the sleek sergeant passed the gate in the evening, and when a grabber seized a holding in the parish, we took our part in the boycott with the vim of youth for any fray.

Literary memories of a staider kind were the reading aloud at the family circle of Knocknagow, and the equally thrilling (not so public) perusal of Jane Eyre, high in the branches of a cherry-tree across the stream. Grandmother told us stories of the Famine as bed-time yarns, or of O’Connell, whom she knew in her youth - the grandparents revered him, but we sided with our parents, who, loving the Fenians, had no use for Dan. Purcell’s Castle was hard by, with its ruins of other days and its fearsome dungeons that we loved to explore.

In school I learned “the rudiments of Arithmetic”, the chief towns of Ireland (both have stayed with me) and not much else. Oh, yes, a number of most complicated games that we played in the lunch interval in the school yard - I can now only remember one called “Hell and Heaven” like “Oranges and Lemons.” And, of course, “Tig” and “Rounders”. The rest of our education was outside the school. We knew where the first primrose and violet could be gathered, and where the richer land for cowslip and and mushroom lay; we made balls of the former, and mother made ketchup such as one may never taste now. The early lambs, the speckled trout in the stream, the blackbird’s nest in the wall cranny by the lilac-tree, left undisturbed of course; the larks in the far meadow; the fairies in the fort; the Seanachie at Gleeson’s or Dea’s or Hennessy’s, where the young people gathered with the old, around the big fire and watched the old grandmother spin while the tales were told - of highway men, of men on their keeping, of cruel landlords, and how vengeance surely, slowly tracked them down, of ghosts and headless horsemen, of Banshees ... I hope our folk-lore archives have got some of them.

The mill-wheel turns no more, but the ‘Suir’ flows by majestically as of yore, and the Devil’s Bit looks down benignly on old Loughmore.” [End.]

Note: Archbishop Thomas Croke had been summoned to Rome by Pope Leo XIII and Cardinal Simeoni. He had been recalled to answer questions regarding his continued support of Charles Stewart Parnell. Following his meeting and prior to his return he stayed at the Irish College in Rome and when questioned regarding the outcome of his meeting with both men, Archbishop Croke had stated that he returned to Ireland “Unchanged and unchangeable.”