BLOODY PAST BRIGHT FUTURE

Remembering Croke Park atrocity is not about being bound to bitter history, it’s about community

ON THURSDAY morning at Glasnevin Cemetery, the sense of history hung heavy in the November air. The last three unmarked graves of the 14 people killed on Bloody Sunday in Dublin 99 years earlier were replaced with commemorative headstones, the GAA’s important Graves Project also bringing a sense of closure to one of the darkest days in this country’s history.

That was the day when crown forces reacted to a synchronised IRA attack on British intelligence forces, an attack which resulted in 14 men dead. One which prompted a violent reprisal at Croke Park where the Gaelic football teams of Tipperary and Dublin gathered to play a match.

The indiscriminate shooting spree claimed the lives of another 14 victims, one of them Tipperary cornerback Michael Hogan, who had the Hogan Stand named in his memory.

It was the memory of other, less well-known victims who were honoured on Thursday.

Jerome O’Leary, a 10-year-old schoolboy. Murdered as he watched the early stages of the game on a wall behind the Canal goal. With his family line gone, none of his relatives could be traced for this event.

So the GAA stepped in, president John Horan stressing the importance of honouring the dead. ‘We, as the GAA, always value ourselves as a community based organisation and we feel we are here today as Jerome’s family honouring his memory and unveiling this stone and putting it in the correct order that he is actually remembered.’

Patrick O’Dowd, a 57-year-old spectator who was shot and killed even as he was helping others to safety over the old wall that once stood as a dividing line between what is now the Cusack Stand and the former Belvedere College grounds. A relative, Liam Dineen, spoke on RTÉ news of the value of the ceremony.

‘I’m very grateful on behalf of my family that the GAA has seen fit to do this. It is a mark of respect and a mark of pride that it is being done,’ he said, explaining how his late aunt Mary was Patrick O’Dowd’s only daughter and that she never had closure following his death.

Michael Feery was a 40-year-old labourer who lived on Buckingham Street in the north inner-city. A former British Army member and WWI veteran, he was left in the morgue for five days before someone came to identify him.

‘It means that our family has somewhere to come. It’s probably closure for us. It’s been a long, open story of 99 years. Finally we have somewhere to come,’ said Niall Feery, a relative.

These unveilings complete the list of seven Bloody Sunday victims who until recently had all been buried in unmarked graves at different locations at Glasnevin Cemetery.

Their stories, and the story of that fateful day, is chronicled by author Michael Foley, present on Thursday, and whose book The Bloodied Field paints a portrait of a defining day in Irish history.

‘It’s pretty clear that what Black and Tans, the Auxiliaries and the RIC did on the day was an atrocity,’ he says. ‘Was a massacre. Was unjustified. Was unwarranted. A terrible stain on the British Empire at the time – a terrible, terrible thing that they did.

‘But we are now 99 years away. In all of that anger, the stories of the victims were lost. It’s understandable that we got so wrapped up in the story, that we forgot the characters in the story. If you want to get to the heart of the Bloody Sunday story in Croke Park, you must go back to the victims.

‘We’re talking about three children

– 10, 11 and 14. A woman, a fiancée, killed in the week of her wedding. Barmen, farmers, labourers, fellas from Tipp, Dublin, Wexford, Limerick – these were the people.

‘If you want to go deeper than into the complexity of the thing, Feery was wearing British Army gear. Patrick O’Dowd was trying to save the life of a soldier. Ireland was not black and white. It has never been.

‘We now have the freedom 99 years later to look on these things – it doesn’t mean we don’t all condemn what happened, it was an atrocious thing. But it gives us an opportunity of a bit more understanding of the wider story.

‘If you want to look at the complexity of Bloody Sunday, get beyond the Black and Tans stuff and look at the bigger scheme of things - Michael Feery was wearing his army fatigues when he died. He was a British veteran of World War I.

‘The guy that Patrick O’Dowd helped over the wall was a soldier. Feery served in the Marine Labour Corps during World War I and the Royal Dublin Fusiliers as well, I’m not sure did that mean he saw action, but he was in France. It’s important to get these gravestones up.’

It completes the GAA’s Graves