Newry News and Irish Fun
The ’tilt, wobble and stretch’ of planet Earth on its celestial path contribute to long-term variation in environmental conditions that determine whether and where on Earth life can thrive or even be sustained.
It was a Yugoslav scientist who first closely studied these variations and proposed a theory based upon them, and named for him, the Milankovitch cycle.
Your editor is a huge fan of our present Bishop of Dromore, Dr John McAreavey – a man with the common touch, but also a leader of great piety, erudition, compassion and zeal. But first we want to write a few notes on a number of his predecessors.
Dr Michael Blake – whose virtues have already been extolled on these pages [use Search Engine above!] – served as Bishop of Dromore for almost twenty eight of the mid-nineteenth century years, from 1833-1860. Amongst his legacies to the people of Newry and District are the Bishop’s House and St Colman’s College but far more important, the arrival in Newry of the Christian Brothers and the Mercy Sisters. All of my people have benefited from their devotion to the education of the poor, and there are few Catholics in the district who would not admit the same.
Michael Blake was born in Dublin in 1775 and entered the novitiate of the Irish College in Rome at the age of seventeen. He was ordained in Dublin in 1799. His years of ministry to God were turbulent years and hungry years – including the Great Hunger – and years of continued struggle for Catholics to freely practice their faith. He was parish priest in Dublin for a few years before returning to Rome where he undertook the restoration of the Irish College there. He became Rector of the Umberian College 1826-1829. In 1831 he was transferred as Parish Priest to Westland Row, Dublin. He became keenly aware of the poverty and squalor all around him. He knew also of the work there of the Sisters of Mercy and of the Christian Brothers. The founders of these two Religious Orders, Catherine McCauley and Edmund Rice were his personal friends.
When Dr James Kelly – who had brought the Poor Clares to Newry in 1830 – died in 1833, Michael Blake was appointed to succeed him. He was the first to be consecrated in the Cathedral of SS Patrick & Colman on St Patrick’s Day 1833. His term of office saw the building, re-building or completion of some 25 churches in the diocese and of 16 parochial residences. He set up a Seminary at Violet Hill, still today the site of an excellent Boys Grammar School and of the Bishop’s House that he had built. A devout man he showed intense personal interest in the growth of sodalities and confraternities in his diocese.
Through his direct offices, on 2 Feb 1851 he brought the first Christian Brothers [Br Peter Scannell and Br Vincent McDonnell] to Chapel Street, Newry. As well as a school of learning the Brothers at first provided breakfast for over 100 poor children of the town.
Still not content, he implored the Mercy Sisters to come to Newry. In 1855 his wish was granted. Among the group of first nuns, under Mother Catherine O’Connor of Kinsale, was one local girl, Elizabeth Russell of Killowen. Soon they opened a refuge for down-and-outs and a public laundry in which poor young girls could be provided with a means of support.
A Co-adjutor, John Leahy, was appointed to assist the ageing bishop in 1854. Through his influence the Dominicans [Order of Preachers] were invited to Newry in 1871. The magnificent St Catherine’s Church was soon after built.
Bishop Blake died 6 March 1860 at the age of 85. He had contributed more to the future welfare of generations of Catholic people here than any man before or, possibly since. He rests in St Mary’s Cemetery.
‘Lives of great men all remind us
We must make our lives sublime
And departing, leave behind us
Footprints in the sands of time.’
Up until a generation ago if one was fortunate enough to find work locally as likely as not one worked in the mill.
Damolly Mill closed down twenty five years ago, in 1979. For almost two and a half centuries it – under different guises – had provided employment and community life for ten generations of local people.
St Patrick was born a Roman-Briton and lived his early life near Bannaven Tabernia – which may have been in what today we call Wales, or Scotland or England. His name was Maewyn Succat but he took Patricius upon becoming a priest – a name signifying leader or elder of Roman society. He was the son of a civil servant and grandson of a Christian priest.
I find it maddening in the extreme – given that all of my forebears suffered untold hardships in this vicinity through the years of the Great Hunger of the mid-nineteenth century in Ireland – to hear a supposed authority like the former head of PRONI [named below] – at a public meeting recently in Newry – claim that our area was little affected.
The Ring of Gullion, an igneous, intrusive, granitic rock, dominates the south-east portion of this map. What is perhaps more remarkable is the Newry Granite [white] that has intruded into the centre of the Ring!
The North of Co Armagh, bordering Lough Neagh, is dominated by estuarine clay [tan]. This owes its origin to successive Ice Ages, but mainly the most recent. The melted glacier that dominated the landscape there left the Lough when it melted and created the overflow drainage channel that now constitutes the route of the Newry Canal.
All other rock types here are sedimentary [the only metamorphic rocks in North Ireland are the schists of the Sperrins and Donegal gneisses] and were created over hundreds of millions of years, when this land was south of the equator and much of it submerged beneath equatorial oceans. The terms Ordovician [green] Tertiary [blue] Silurian [lime] etc. refer to periods of Earth History.
Apologies for the roughness of the drawn map: I only had children’s crayons to work with!!
At all times in our history the English have been quick and extreme in exacting vengeance for any violent, direct action taken against landlords. Occasionally a select Committee of the Commons was set up to enquire into the circumstances. Such a Committee in 1852 took evidence from local big-wigs, clergy and the Attorney General for Ireland in the case of the attack upon Meredith Chambre of Killeavey earlier that same year. Chambre was shot and wounded, but made a full recovery.
The people were suffering extreme distress after the Great Hunger that was just then drawing to a close and harsh landlords were evicting many of the surviving cottiers and peasant farmers to amalgamate their holdings and convert them to pasture. Questions germane to this were posed to witnesses. One must accept that most were conscious that they would be seen as reflecting their community’s [or legal] position. The Attorney General insisted that Chambre had never dispossessed his tenantry and indeed, had expended
The 18th century had its own crop of rapparees or highwaymen.
At the Summer Assizes of 1735 one Macklin, a famous horse-thief ‘went down the nine steps’, as was said in Armagh of those on whom the death penalty was passed. These led to the condemned cells below the Sessions House in Market Street.
Before he was himself raised to the Archbishopric of Armagh, Thomas O’Fiaich wrote about his illustrious predecessor Oliver Plunkett – one of only two Irishmen raised to sainthood by the Vatican [the other being Laurence O’Toole, church reformer of the late twelfth century].