FR MYCHAL JUDGE:ONE EVENING shortly before dusk, in February 2000, Fr Mychal Judge arrived in the village of Keshcarrigan, Co Leitrim, hoping to find his father's home place.
The first door he knocked on was the home of farmer John Keaney who owns the former Judge property. Yesterday Keaney told a commemorative ceremony in Keshcarrigan at the close of the inaugural “Fr Mychal Judge weekend” in the village, that he believed the first official victim of the Twin Towers attack would be horrified at the way the Irish banks were treating many Irish who have lost their jobs.
“I often wonder if Fr Mychal was here today what would he think . . . I don’t think he would be very pleased,” said Keaney. “We are in an awful predicament.”
Describing Fr Judge as a man of the people “who helped everyone regardless of religion”, Keaney said he would not have approved of banks “who were bailed out with billions – not millions”, evicting Irish people who had lost their jobs.
Appealing to the Government not to allow this to happen, Keaney said: “If ever we needed Fr Mychal we need him now.” A government who allowed people who had just lost their jobs to also lose their homes “deserves to be stuffed”, he added.
Six years ago, the people of Keshcarrigan opened the Fr Judge memorial and peace garden on the shores of Kesh lake, a stone’s throw from the house where his father Michael had lived until he emigrated in 1926.
Keaney recalled that when he visited in 2000 Fr Judge had taken a stone from the crumbling gable wall, all that remained of what was his father’s home.
About 200 people led by Kilgtubrid Pipe Band and firefighters from north and south of the Border paraded through the village yesterday.
Leitrim’s chief fire officer Vivian Joyce carried the stars and stripes that had draped Fr Judge’s coffin and which was presented to the people of Keshcarrigan by his twin sister Dympna, when she opened the peace garden in 2006.
Joyce told the gathering that no word of his could do justice to Fr Judge, subject of a documentary Saint of 9/11about his work with New York's homeless and Aids sufferers, as well as his role as chaplain to the city's firefighters.
Leitrim councillor Francis Gilmartin asked the crowd to remember the other eight victims of the Twin Towers attack with Leitrim connections.
They included four firefighters: John S Heffernan (37), Michael Lyons, (32), Denis P McHugh (34) and Joseph Sporr (35). Other casualties from Leitrim families included: brothers Farrell P Lynch (38) and Seán P Lynch (36), first cousins of Leitrim Fine Gael councillor Gerry Reynolds, Joanna Cregan (32) and Christopher M Duffy (23).
Joyce quoted Fr Judge’s words to firefighters in New York the day before he died. “You show up, you put one foot in front of the other and you do your job which is a mystery and a surprise. You have no idea, when you get in that rig, what God is calling you to, but He needs you, so keep going.”