John Arnold: 100 years after his death, Cork will remember Sam Maguire |
The town of Dunmanway wasn’t overcrowded on Tuesday, February 8, 1927.
Despite ‘discouragement’ from Church and State, ‘Old’ IRA men - most of them Catholics, friends, and neighbours - turned up for a funeral in the local Protestant Church, St Mary’s.
Two days earlier, Sam Maguire had died in his family home at Maulabracka just outside the town. A month short of his 49th birthday, Sam had suffered with TB for a number of years - his brother William was present when he died.
The funeral service in St Mary’s was followed by burial in the family plot in the cemetery which surrounds the church. A guard of honour was formed by locals who had fought for their country during the Irish War of Independence just a few years earlier.
Sam Maguire was buried with no pomp or ceremony, no graveside oration or other such honours. In one way, it might have been fitting - for he was never one to seek the limelight or court publicity.
It was sad, nevertheless, that a man who played a huge role in the struggle for Irish freedom should die in abject poverty.
Just last week, I stood in silence near the Celtic cross that stands at the head of his grave - the original monument was knocked over in a storm but quickly replaced.
After a prayer for a man I admit I knew precious little about until recently, I travelled with members of the local Doheny’s GAA club and Cian Murphy, GAA Director of Communications, to Maulabracka.
Sometimes translated from Irish as the ‘speckled hillocks’, Maulabracka is a truly wild, hilly and beautiful countryside. The Maguire family once owned over 200 acres here - much of it mountainous scrubland with a little over 80 acres of farmable land.
The Maguires were here since the late 1700s at least. In 1868, John married Jane Kingston in Drimoleague. Sam, born in 1877, was the sixth of the couple’s seven children.
Mary........