“There was good times coming” – Ella Clarke
My great-grandfather, Philip Clarke, was born in Duleek, County Meath, on 12 February 1876, the second son of Thomas Clarke and Roseanne Keelan. His parents had married in 1873 and raised a large family, eventually settling at Monknewtown, near Slane. His father was an agricultural labourer and his mother a dressmaker. The family appears to have been steeped in the nationalist and agrarian politics of its time: Roseanne was said to have been a cousin of the Fenian John Boyle O’Reilly, while one of her sons was given the name Michael Davitt Clarke.
Philip eventually moved to Dublin, where he worked first as a carter and later as a van driver for Parkes & Sons in the Coombe. He was involved with the GAA and the Gaelic League and became a member of the Irish Citizen Army. One account dates his joining to early 1914, while others describe him as a founder member of the ICA in 1913.
By 1916, Philip was forty years old, a husband and the father of a large family. He had married Monica Fitzroy in 1897. Monica was already widowed and had two sons, George and Robert, whom Philip took on as his own dependants. Together Philip and Monica had Rosanna, Thomas, James, Philip, Richard, John (Jack), my grandfather, Bridget and Charles; another child died young.
On Easter Monday, 24 April 1916, Philip reported to Liberty Hall. His eldest son, Tom, then fifteen, was there with him. For a long time, Philip’s final words to his family have survived in paraphrased accounts. But six months after the Rising, Monica recorded them herself.
Writing from Cork Street on 20 November 1916, she recalled that Philip had expected to be home again on Tuesday. But he gave Tom another message in case he did not return. He hoped that Tom and his brothers would “follow in their father’s footsteps and strike a blow for their country whenever they got the chance and never to deny their country.” He asked Tom to bid goodbye to his mother and all the children and to tell Monica to “keep up her heart, there was good times coming.”
He did not come home.
On Tuesday, 25 April, Philip was removing chains from the Kildare Street gate of St Stephen’s Green to reinforce the barricades when he was shot by fire from the direction of the Shelbourne Hotel. A comrade pulled him beneath a bush and said the Act of Contrition into his ear. He was subsequently brought to Mercer’s Hospital by Margaret Skinnider, where he died from a gunshot wound to the left side of his chest.
He was forty.
The great public narratives of 1916 tend, understandably, to follow the people who fought and died. But there is another history in what happened next.
Philip left Monica with a large family, the youngest child still an infant. His brother James Clarke and Joe McGrath became involved in supporting them. In 1918 the Irish National Aid and Volunteers’ Dependants’ Fund established a formal trust for Monica and eight of the children. She was subsequently awarded a pension and was described in the records as having lived in very poor circumstances following Philip’s death. She nevertheless raised the family and survived Philip by more than thirty years, dying in 1948.
And so, when I think about Philip, I increasingly think about Monica.
Resilience is perhaps too easily attributed to the person who dies for a cause. There was another kind of resilience required of the woman left behind: to keep a family together, raise children and somehow continue after the events commemorated in history books had ended.
Philip’s sons were educated at Patrick Pearse’s St Enda’s, Scoil Éanna. My grandfather Jack was one of those boys. St Enda’s was not simply a school. Pearse had conceived it as an explicitly Irish educational and cultural project, placing Irish language, history, literature, mythology and physical culture at the heart of education.
Joe McGrath, who had helped look after Philip’s family following his death, later helped secure employment for the boys in the Irish Hospitals’ Sweepstake, where Jack met and married my grand mother, Anna Murphy from Tallow. In small but consequential ways, then, the generation after Philip was given opportunities that his own circumstances had not afforded him.
And perhaps that is why one sentence in Monica’s letter catches me now:
“There was good times coming.”
I come from staunchly working-class roots. I am the first member of my family to attain a PhD — at Trinity College Dublin, no less — and I am acutely aware that I did not arrive there independently of what came before me. The distance between an agricultural labourer’s family in nineteenth-century Meath, a van driver killed in 1916, the widow who raised his many children, the boys educated at St Enda’s, and one of their granddaughters eventually completing a doctorate is not simply a story of individual achievement. It rests upon the sacrifices, ambitions and opportunities accumulated across generations, and upon people who imagined that Ireland and the lives of its people might become something more.
My own route to thinking about inheritance and culture was, curiously, through the body.
I trained in classical ballet graduating from a Russian Ballet School in 1993, spent much of my professional life as a contemporary dancer, and subsequently moved into choreography and increasingly postmodern choreographic practice. Much later, undertaking an MA in Ethnochoreology gave me an entirely different way of understanding culture. Dance became not simply an artistic form, but embodied cultural knowledge: one of the ways communities remember themselves, transmit histories and values, and carry something from one generation into another.
Coming from the trajectory I did, I could never have anticipated finding myself in such close proximity to Irish traditional dance, learning its histories and gradually understanding the extraordinary depth of culture carried within it. There is something unexpectedly meaningful in that. Increasingly, I feel that through studying it, teaching alongside it and contributing to the understanding and preservation of embodied culture, I am participating, however modestly, in a lineage rather than simply observing one.
That feeling has become stronger as I have learned more about my own family.
At Rossin, just outside Monknewtown, a memorial plaque to Philip had stood on the bridge over the Mattock since 1964. In March 2016, a century after his death, the bridge was formally named The Philip Clarke Bridge, following a campaign involving his descendants and the local community. There is something deeply moving to me about his name being returned, a hundred years later, to the landscape from which he came.
When I recently completed my doctoral thesis at Trinity College Dublin, I thanked all my foremothers and forefathers for their resilience and fortitude. I understand those words rather differently now.
They include Philip, certainly. But they also include Monica, and those who raised families, worked, endured, remembered and carried things forward without necessarily entering the historical record.
Perhaps that is what lineage ultimately means to me. Culture survives because people carry it: in language and stories, in political aspirations, in names and memorials, in education and opportunity — and sometimes, quite literally, in bodies.
And perhaps, from where I stand four generations later, Philip’s message to Monica is the most affecting inheritance of all:
“Keep up her heart. There was good times coming.”
From the Claddagh to the Stage of The Ambassador Theatre:
Michaela McBride O’Donoghue Brings Family History to Life
For Galway student Michaela McBride O’Donoghue, taking to the stage in Dublin this October will be much more than another performance. It will be an opportunity to connect with a remarkable family history and bring to life a story that has particular resonance for her.
A fourth-year student at University of Galway, Michaela will appear in Mná na hÉireann, which comes to the Ambassador Theatre in Dublin for three nights in October.
The production tells the stories and celebrates the contribution of Irish women during a pivotal period in the country’s history. For Michaela, the subject has a deeply personal connection.
She grew up hearing stories of her great-grandmother, who was a member of Cumann na mBan in Galway during the War of Independence. At a time when the country was in turmoil, women could sometimes move with less suspicion than men. Michaela’s great-grandmother took advantage of this, she would walk or cycle from Galway to Maree in Oranmore carrying vital supplies and messages.
Those family stories stayed with Michaela and made her particularly drawn to Mná na hÉireann.
“It is very special for me to be involved in a production that reflects the experiences and sacrifices of women like my great-grandmother,” is a sentiment that underpins Michaela’s connection with the show.
Performance is in Michaela’s blood. She is the niece of the late Ray McBride, the much-loved Claddagh man who was renowned worldwide not only as an actor but also as a champion dancer. Ray was a familiar and respected figure in Galway and left a lasting impression through his talent, personality and dedication to performance.
Long before Riverdance and Lord of the Dance brought Irish dance to audiences around the world, Ray was appearing on television programmes including The Late Late Show, performing his own routines. He brought a fresh approach to Irish dancing, fusing traditional Irish dance with other influences and creating a style that was less traditional and more focused on showmanship and performance.
His talent for performance extended beyond dance, with Ray becoming a respected actor and winning multiple Harvey Irish Theatre Awards. His career reflected the same love of performing that Michaela now carries into her own work on stage.
Michaela has very much carved out her own path, however, building an impressive record in competitive dancing in her own right. She has won numerous championships and has multiple world medals, establishing herself as a talented performer and competitor.
Now, her talents are taking her in another direction as she joins the cast of Mná na hÉireann.
For Michaela, the opportunity represents the meeting of several strands of her life — her love of performance, her family’s strong connection with dance and theatre, and the stories of the women who came before her.
The journey from Galway to the Ambassador Theatre reflects a family story that spans generations. More than a century ago, Michaela’s great-grandmother carried messages and supplies as part of the struggle for Irish independence. Today, her great-granddaughter will take to a Dublin stage to help tell the stories of those women. For Michaela, Mná na hÉireann is a chance to honour her great-grandmother, celebrate the legacy of her late uncle Ray, and create a chapter of her own in a family story deeply rooted in Galway.