by Thomas Maier
The Danes became the first of Ireland’s oppressors after the golden age of monks and monasteries, which had kept Western culture alive by producing such manuscripts as The Books of Kells. For two hundred years, the island nation existed under Danish domination until Brian Boru, chieftain of the O’Cinneide clan and the larger Dal gCais Sept, defeated the Norsemen in 1014 at the battle of Clontarf, near Dublin. Brian Boru, the King of Munster, the southernmost province of Ireland, emerged as the first Christian king of all Ireland and earned the title Ard Ri, “High King.” According to these ancient scrolls, Brian Boru became king by picking up the mantle left by his brother, Mahon, who was assassinated by the Danes after a long period of peace. A glorious victory by Brian Boru ended that Irish generation’s burden of being ruled by outsiders who ravaged their villages. In the style of a great chieftain, Brian Boru brought a new era of enlightenment for his people.“He restored and built churches,” one historian said of Brian Boru’s era.“He built and set in order public schools for the teaching of letters and science in general and every territory he took from the Danes by the strength of his arm, he gave it . . . to the tribe to whom it belonged by right.”
When Brian Boru died, his heirs’ dreams for national unity fell apart. Over the next several decades, Ireland was torn by political infighting among the clans, rendering it vulnerable to military and economic control from the country across the sea. In 1169, the Norman barons of England invaded Wexford and soon ruled the countryside, opening the door for what would become centuries of British domination. This particular invasion received the blessing of the Roman Catholic Church and from Pope Hadrian IV, who happened to be an Englishman. Though many loyal Catholics lived in Ireland, Hadrian IV decreed that England’s King Henry II could seize Ireland as his own so long as the church received in return a pension of one penny for every Irish house. Surely, as the Vatican reasoned in this fateful exchange, the Catholic King of England would be preferable to the unruly and somewhat heretical natives of Ireland.“We are well pleased that you should enter that island,” the Pope wrote to the British monarch, instructing that the Irish “should receive you with honor and venerate you as their master.”
Under Norman rule, the Irish lost their own lands, and laws were passed that made them social outcasts. During this time, the family’s Gaelic name was Anglicized to O’Kennedy, the “O” eventually dropped. The Kennedys moved into southeastern Ireland; eventually, they were reduced to serfdom and worked as tenants on farms they would never own.
BY THE LATE SIXTEENTH CENTURY, Ireland was a pawn in a larger religious struggle between the British monarchy and the throne of Saint Peter. When the Pope refused to annul Henry VIII’s first marriage, the king broke away from Rome and formed the Church of England. Henry and his heirs converted Great Britain to Protestantism, setting off decades of strife. The austere Puritans, a group particularly intent on ridding England of its Catholic vestiges, replaced altars and rituals from the Latin Mass with the Book of Common Prayer. When the Irish Catholics attempted rebellion in the early 1640s, the British response was bloody and became even more oppressive.
Oliver Cromwell, a bold and ruthless leader, arrived in Ireland in 1649 to crush the rebels. A fervent Puritan during the Protestant reign of King Charles II, Cromwell believed that God oversaw and justified his every move, even those “regrettable” acts of violence that might become necessary. He possessed a relentlessness in demeanor and appearance. He wanted the British Empire “purified” of Catholicism. As a political leader, he envisioned the isle to the west freed of Rome’s influence and colonized by English Protestants.
Cromwell’s hatred of Catholics became a blood-lust in Ireland. His armies marched north to Drogheda, massacring some three thousand people. At Drogheda, the Irish tales of horror included Jesuit priests pierced with stakes, young virgins decimated and children used as shields as Cromwell’s troops assaulted the church and city. “This is a righteous judgment of God upon these barbarous wretches,” Cromwell wrote back to England after this annihilation.“It will tend to prevent the effusion of blood in the future.”Then Cromwell turned south to Wexford, where he again showed no mercy, killing more than one thousand. When three hundred Catholic women in Wexford took refuge near a cross in a public square, their actions sealed their fates. Instead of invoking Christian sympathy from the soldiers, the women were butchered.
The Irish chose as their military leader Owen Roe O’Neill, an experienced field general whose father had fought for Eire’s liberty. O’Neill won a stunning initial victory at the battle of Benburb, even though British troops outmanned his own. As legend has it, the Irish looked to O’Neill, the gallant, auburn-haired warrior, as their savior after years of violence. But their resistance to Cromwell faded that same year when O’Neill died suddenly (probably of illness, though many believed he was poisoned), leaving them without a leader. In song and poetry,Owen Roe O’Neill would long be remembered by the Kennedys and generations of others for his tragic fate and the unanswered prayer of Irish independence. Nearly two hundred years later, Thomas Davis, a poet and nationalist leader himself, wrote his own lament for what was lost:
We thought you would not die—we were sure you would not go,
And leave us in our utmost need to Cromwell’s cruel blow—
Sheep without a shepherd, when the snow shuts out the sky,
Why did you leave us, Owen? Why, why did you die?
In Wexford, Cromwell marched to New Ross, where the local population surrendered rather than fall victim to the same bloodbath. Though Cromwell spared them from certain death in return for immediate surrender, he prohibited Catholics from all future practice of their religion. “I meddle not with any man’s conscience,” Cromwell insisted. “But if by liberty of conscience you mean a liberty to exercise the Mass, I judge it best to use plain dealing, and to let you know, where the Parliament of England have power, that will not be allowed.” Incensed by the support of Irish priests and clergy for the rebellion, Cromwell denounced the Roman Catholic Church in strong, often violent terms, deriding the priests as “the intruders” in Ireland. “Is God, will God be, with you?” Cromwell asked, as his campaign wiped out all hope of Irish independence.“I am confident He will not.” Cromwell’s name was a curse word in Ireland for generations to come.
RESTRICTIONS ON the Irish became broader and more institutionalized, especially after the Catholic King James II put together an army in Ireland and was defeated by William of Orange and his Protestant forces at the historic 1690 battle of the Boyne. To make sure the Irish remained under its thumb, the British Parliament passed laws that reduced the Irish ownership of farms and granted large tracts of land to those, mainly Protestants, who had been loyal to the Crown. When lands were confiscated from Catholics and given to English squires, the fate of the Kennedys living around New Ross was dictated by these edicts. In 1704, the Irish Parliament, with the Crown’s blessing, passed one of several “penal laws”—this one called “the Act to Prevent the Further Growth of Popery.” It not only made the practice of religion illegal for Catholics but also offered a bounty for turning in priests.
Intended to break the back of rebellion, these penal laws enslaved the spirit of a people. No Catholic could own land, vote or hold public office. Catholics couldn’t work in the civil service, nor could they send their children to school or seek education for themselves. Catholics were banned from the military, weren’t allowed to own horses or other property worth five pounds or more. No Catholic was permitted to carry a sword or own other types of weapons. No Catholic could practice as a lawyer, doctor, trader or any professional. No Catholic could earn more than a third of the value of his crops. And all Catholics were compelled to pay a tithe to the Anglican Protestant Church. Irish Catholics became untouchables in their own land. “Papists” were forbidden to marry Protestants, and Catholic orphans were converted. Trinity College, the finest learning center in Dublin,was reserved for Protestants. For the Irish Catholic people, the infam
ous penal laws became, as Edmund Burke later observed, “a machine of wise and elaborate contrivance and as well fitted for the oppression, impoverishment, and degradation of a people, and the debasement in them of human nature itself, as ever proceeded from the perverted ingenuity of man.”
Despite these shackles, the Irish survived and membership in the Catholic Church actually flourished. Religious persecution turned Irish Catholics into the Vatican’s most devoted followers; they no longer worshipped at poorly attended and loosely organized churches influenced by the pagan rituals of old. During the 1700s, and for much of the next century, Catholics attended church in the outdoors, where large “Mass rocks” served as altars. In Dunganstown, where the Kennedys lived, Catholics built a small thatched building with mud walls in 1743 to serve as a church. It was later burned down. Though some Irish championing independence were Protestants, notably Wolfe Tone and Jonathan Swift, the move to rid Ireland of British control and its oppressive laws became linked with Catholicism. As historian Robert Kee later wrote: “The fact that the Church was able to surmount them strengthened not only the Church itself but also its bond with the vast majority of the population of Ireland who, deprived of all political and many other rights, saw the Church as the one representative organization they had.”
The Irish wish to be rid of English domination, freed of its penal laws and its brutal restraints, could be heard in song, verse and prayer.
Oh, Paddy dear! and did ye hear the news that’s goin’ round?
The shamrock is forbid by law to grow on Irish ground!
No mor St. Patrick’s day we’ll keep; his color can’t be seen,
For there’s a cruel law ag’in the Wearin’ o’ the Green!
For the Kennedys in Dunganstown, and for all the Catholics in Ireland, the English penal laws effectively eliminated their hope of reclaiming the lands they had owned before Cromwell. Much of New Ross and its environs was given away to the Tottenham family, descendants of the Normans who became members of Parliament for decades to come. These British owners didn’t visit their property holdings, nor did they care much about the occupants other than to demand that they pay an extortionate amount of rent. Compared to other absentee landlords, the Tottenhams had the reputation of being benevolent, almost mildly sympathetic to the Irish people, but never enough to enlist in their cause for independence. In County Wexford, the Tottenhams would eventually control as much as twenty thousand acres. They were the beneficiaries of laws in Dunganstown that stripped the Kennedys and many other Catholics of their holdings and kept them as tenant farmers. The Kennedy family lived in a farmhouse built of stone and covered on the inside and out with lime mortar, certainly better accommodations than the shanty cabins housing landless laborers and fishermen. They paid their rents to Colonel Charles George Tottenham, but bitterly despised it. For the Kennedys and their neighbors, the penal laws denied them basic human justice and the most fundamental dignities, even regarding their children’s future. In Dunganstown, for example, a retired sailor named Fitzpatrick, disabled from scurvy contracted while at sea, was seized from the school where he taught local children. He was tortured by the military for violating the penal laws against educating Catholics. It was a lesson meant for all.
This British suppression, often sadistically administered, bred uncontrollable resentment and ultimately more violence. By 1798, the revolutions in America and France had inspired many Irishmen to dream once again of their own independence, to throw off the yoke of English rule. Rebel priests such as Father John Murphy and other men of the cloth—despite the indifference of Rome or the tepid direction of their church superiors— became leaders in this growing movement. Some fought to their deaths to establish an Irish republic. The most violent confrontations occurred in County Wexford and likely included members of Patrick Kennedy’s family. “All of the Kennedys were very republican—the whole family,” explains Thomas Grennan, a cousin who lives in the River Barrow valley and has studied the family’s history extensively. “It was very likely that they were involved in the ’98 uprising.”
They were heady days at first. The United Irishmen, a nationwide band of rebels led by Wolfe Tone, openly resisted the British overlords, who reacted by flogging and torturing the Irish. Contemporary historians— attempting to sift fact from partisan myth—would later underscore that many United Irishmen were Protestants and not just Catholics. In Wexford, young rebels, sometimes called “Croppies” for their closely cut hair, managed to win a victory against the local militia from North Cork, then set another town ablaze before setting up a main camp at Vinegar Hill in Wexford County. The madness inspired by years of suppression erupted in a violent fury. At a farmhouse in a place called Scullabogue, some two hundred mostly Protestant men, women and children were set on fire, shot or piked to death—apparently in retaliation for a bitter loss by the rebels at New Ross.
SEVERAL KENNEDY relatives, friends and neighbors took up arms in the Rising of ’98, historians say; very likely they were part of the “Boys of Wexford”who, as the famous folk song would recall,“fought with heart and hand” to break the British grip over their lands. At the battle of New Ross, two uncles of Patrick Kennedy fought, and one was struck by bullets. The second uncle left the battle scene with his wounded brother and dragged him home to the safety of their family farm in Dunganstown. Other accounts say that one of President Kennedy’s relatives died in the crushing defeat at Vinegar Hill. The rebels’ dead bodies were so mutilated that many were buried in a mass grave. Aware of the strong links between rebellion and religion in Ireland, the English troops burned some thirty-three Catholic chapels, including the small altar in Dunganstown.
Some thirty thousand Irish men and women lost their lives in the ’98 rebellion. The short-lived but bloody conflict caused lasting repercussions. Some Irish decided to emigrate to America, a land where they believed they would be free to practice their religion, only to be met by nativist hostility. In Boston, for example, Congressman Harrison Gray Otis, a Federalist, complained that he did “not wish to invite hoards of wild Irishmen, nor the turbulent and disorderly of all parts of the world, to come here with a view to disturb our tranquility, after having succeeded in the overthrow of their own governments.” The fear of insurgent immigrants arriving on American shores led to the passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, which attempted to restrict naturalization and blunt the political impact of these newcomers. But for the Irish who stayed, the failed rebellion doomed them to several more decades of oppression and control by the British. The Kennedys of Dunganstown had lost nearly everything except, as their famous descendant later noted, their sense of liberty and their religious faith.
Chapter Three
The Starvation
“Let any Englishman put himself in the position of an Irish peasant, and ask himself whether, if the case were his own, the landed property of the country would have any sacredness to his feelings.”
—JOHN STUART MILL
NO RECORDS EXIST of Patrick Kennedy’s birth and baptism in 1823. With the stifling system of penal laws still in effect, priests in Wexford secretly performed sacraments throughout the county. But no official documents could be kept by clergymen without endangering their own lives and their parishioners’ well-being. The arrival of Irish infants such as Patrick Kennedy, the third son of a poor tenant farmer, simply didn’t seem to matter.
Even when the penal laws began to be repealed, starting in 1829 with the Catholic Emancipation, life in Dunganstown for the Kennedys barely improved. Six generations of oppression had taken their toll. Nearly all the farmland in Wexford was owned by non-Irish property holders; the Catholic Church and clergy were still harassed by authorities, and most local residents, including the Kennedys’ neighbors, were illiterate. Not much is known about Patrick Kennedy’s father, James, except that he inherited the right to run the farm from his father, John, and that he married a woman named Maria, who died, according to the headstones in the local Whitechurch gravey
ard, on February 16, 1835—when young Patrick was twelve years old. As Patrick grew older, he likely received a meager education by attending one of the “hedge schools,” usually conducted in a damp ditch beside the roadway.
By the time Patrick reached adulthood, both his parents were apparently dead and the family homestead was controlled by Patrick’s older brother. Local land tax records show the lessee to be John Kennedy, more than a dozen years Patrick’s senior,who was already married and the father of four children. Under these circumstances, the tiny family house in Dunganstown was surely cramped. Relatives say it’s likely that Patrick spent some nights out in the loft of their barn with the horses and pigs.
In mid-nineteenth-century Ireland, families produced an average of six children; some died as infants, others were encouraged to emigrate as they became adults. Commonly, the eldest son inherited whatever claims existed to the family’s farm, and a sufficient dowry was accumulated for one daughter to marry. Because of the life-threatening scarcity of food and resources, the rest of the children, such as third son Patrick Kennedy, usually were expected to leave for the New World. Emigration happened to such an extent that, as historian Ruth-Ann M. Harris later commented, “Children became another of Ireland’s exports.” Not much is known about Patrick’s sister, Mary, except that at a young age she married a man named James Molloy and presented the world with a daughter, Maria, in 1838. Patrick’s other brother, James, remained unmarried until his mid-thirties. He became the tenant of another nearby farm, run cooperatively with the family’s homestead farm. It was leased under the name of Patrick Kennedy for reasons that aren’t clear. Perhaps, as some family relatives speculate, James Kennedy faced some sort of financial difficulty or legal trouble, or perhaps Patrick planned to run the farm on his own someday. But this second farm eventually became the home of James Kennedy, who married and raised his own family. His two oldest daughters later made their way to America, but the rest of his children stayed.