FORGOTTEN

The Championships were running well behind schedule as the War of Independence persisted, while the world was still reeling from successive waves of a deadly virus.

The Spanish flu had already acquainted Julia O’dowd and her family with tragedy, from which they were still in a tailspin when her husband Patrick was shot dead at Croke Park 100 years ago today.

Originally from outside Navan, the couple lived in the Buckingham Buildings in inner city Dublin with their three children. Patrick was a builder’s labourer for Clarke’s in Fairview and, once he was old enough, his eldest son, also Patrick, came to work with him.

Tens of thousands of Irish died as a result of the Spanish

FRIENDLY The footballers from Dublin and Tipperary pictured on that fateful day. Around 10,000 came to Croke Park to see the challenge game flu, many of them young adults. his family began to draw conclualong with their six children. funding it. It paved the way for Young Patrick contracted it and sions of the worst kind. The As Willie and Mary never had the GAA’S Bloody Sunday Graves couldn’t shake it off. dead and injured had been children , th eir nieces and Project, which was effectively

Having found it increasingly ferried to various hospitals and nephew close by filled the void completed a year ago today, on difficult to catch his breath, morgues in the city and Julia set to a large degree, floating in and the 99th anniversary, when he was taken to Jervis Street out on foot that evening to try out of the shop on a daily basis. gravestones were unveiled for Hospital but his condition and locate her husband. EvenThe trauma that had been Patrick O’dowd, Jerome O’leary deteriorated further. He died in tually, she was pointed to the visited on her and her family, and Michael Feery.

January 1919, aged just 19. Mater Hospital, where she idenparticularly with her father’s “Two years ago they found

Patrick Senior had a keen tified his body two days later. shooting, was always evident, out where I lived,” Liam Dinneen interest in sport and, given the When the shooting started at however. Mary was troubled by explains. “Michael Foley (author proximity of the family home to Croke Park, Patrick O’dowd the fact that nobody had ever of ‘The Bloodied Field’, below) Croke Park, he often ambled up headed for the wall on the east made contact with them to approached me to say they that far for matches. side of the ground, where the apologise for or to even acwanted to put up a tribute to

That there was a commotion Cusack Stand is now, and knowledge what had happened. the people who were killed by at the ground on that fateful helped people over it and away Contrition was never likely to marking their graves with a Sunday, as the Dublin-tipperary to safety. He was ready to jump be forthcoming from the British, tombstone. football match was halted by himself when he was shot in the but could the GAA have done “I was very happy because of RIC and military storming the head, landing on the off-duty more? For sure. the tribute it would be to my field and opening fire, obviously soldier that he had just assisted. “The grief was always apparaunt, that she would have been wasn’t l ost on those in the At 57, he was the oldest of the ent,” says Liam Dinneen, very proud to know that surrounding areas. 14 victims at Croke Park. her nephew. “Any time her f ather’s life was

With the hours passing and her husband, Uncle Wilbeing recognised.” Patrick still having not lie, and myself, would go He firmly believes that completed the short walk home, down to Croke Park, she Mary, who died 50 years would always be saying, ago next month, rests ‘ D o n’ t d e l ay g e tt i n g easier for it. home’ and I think that “The fact the GAA had was always the fear, that the magnanimity and the father had not came home. the goodness to do the honour

“The regret she would have able thing by searching out the had was, ‘Nobody ever came to families and the relatives of the us to tell us they were sorry, to people who had been killed, tell us he was a good man, that that was a great tribute and it he didn’t have to die like that’..” gave closure to the families.

“It has given great closure for my aunt even though she didn’t see it in her own life. But I know now, wherever she is, that she’s probably saying, ‘Thanks a lot’, because it has worked out and she probably feels that her father’s honour and his memory is appreciated now.”

THOSE LEFT BEHIND

WITH Julia having l ost her eldest son and husband in the space of 22 months, the family was left without its two breadwinners. Mary, still in her teens, found work as a seamstress to try and keep her mother and younger brother, Johnny, afloat.

Johnny was traumatised by the loss of his brother and father and, with limited education, struggled for much of his life.

Mary married Willie Bermingham, who inherited his mother’s grocery shop on St Ignatius Road, within walking distance of Croke Park, which he and Mary ran for years afterwards. Just down the way lived Willie’s sister, Eileen and her husband, Edmond Dinneen,

UNMARKED GRAVES

OF the 14 victims from Croke Park, eight lay in unmarked graves for almost a century.

On the 95th anniversary in 2015, the extended family of Jane Boyle, the only female victim, erected a gravestone in her memory, with the GAA partly