May Gould probably stood on the deck that October morning watching Ireland recede. She'd travelled up from Limerick with her five children to catch the ferry to Holyhead: with her were Alice, Essie, Michael, Angela and Olive, aged from one to 20, as the ship eased away from the quayside at 9.45. They were all on their way to join her husband, their father, who had found work in England, writes Kevin Myers.
Within half an hour, all were dead save Essie, the second eldest. What became of her down the years which followed? What became of her father in England, who within a few minutes lost almost his entire family, and whose first name - appropriately enough - we do not even know? And what became of the society which managed to occlude all memory of the event which took these and nearly 500 other lives, just as it occluded almost all memory of the deaths of so many Irish people during this time?
The Goulds went down on the RMS Leinster, torpedoed as it headed out of Dublin Bay in October 1918. It was a civilian ferry, and its sinking was an act of mass murder. But no memorial was raised to the victims by any government (perhaps because it was committed by the "gallant allies" of 1916).
In the early 1990s an anchor from the wreck was finally raised by private effort, and the post office workers union erected a plaque to commemorate the sorters killed by the first torpedo exploding in the sorting room.
The tragic story of the Gould family is told in Patrick J. McNamara's extraordinary book about Limerick's losses in the first World War, The Widow's Penny. Much work has been done in recent times to rectify the shameful and deliberate amnesia that obliterated the truth about Ireland's losses in the Great War, but I know of none that has been assembled with such extraordinary care and moral ardour.
The author sifted through 672,000 records of British soldiers killed in action in the war to find his Limerick victims. He also trawled through the records of the Royal Navy, the Royal Flying Corps, the Merchant Marine, and the armed forces of the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and others. It has been a monumental labour of duty and local pride, outstanding in its moral integrity and its scholarly labour. The result is a work like none other. Not merely does it shed an extraordinary light on Limerick, and what Limerick endured and Limerick lost, but also, by reflection, it illuminates the suffering and the sorrowing of so many communities throughout Ireland.
Days of terrible darkness, without comparison since the Famine, befell Limerick during this time. On May 9th, 1915, 139 men of the Munster Fusiliers were killed in an insane attack at Aubers Ridge in France. Thirty of them were from Limerick. It's impossible to imagine now the shock waves that must have passed through those tiny Limerick tenements as the buff telegrams arrived, bringing such heartbreak and loss.
There were other such days when Limerick losses were in double figures: October 9th, 1914, Festubert; May 1th, 1915, Gallipoli; August 21th, 1915, Gallipoli; November 10th, 1917, Ypres; and so many more - an unfolding tale which must have engulfed the city and small towns of the county in a great sea of grief. In all, over a thousand men, women and children from the county of Limerick were killed in the Great War. The highest proportionate loss was probably from the tiny fishing community of Coonagh, which lost 11 men in the service of the Royal Navy, eight of them in a single day in 1915, when the battleship HMS Goliath was sunk in the Dardanelles.
What did Coonagh do in the coming decades? There were just 18 families in the village. How did they manage to cope with such a loss, with such bereavement and such economic disaster? And how did they mourn their dead? Or did they? Perhaps like so many communities they embarked upon creating a monumental case of amnesia, beneath which they buried the 11 men who were lost to war on the seas: three of them were called Davis, and the last of them, Patrick Davis, was killed the day before the war ended. His brother John had been killed three years before on the Goliath. The telephone directory lists no Davis in Coonagh today.
Every death has its tale, and of those tales we know but fragments: Patrick Shine of the Munsters was a widower when he was killed, leaving five young orphans in Church Street, Newcastle West. What happened to them down the coming years? And did the parents of Private John Saunders, Irish Guards, killed in action at the Canal du Nord in September 1918 ever visit his grave in the aptly named Sanders Keep Cemetery near Calais?
With this singular study, Patrick McNamara has stripped back the topsoil laid down by neglect and the Stalinist falsification of our history, revealing some of the vast and tragic truth beneath.
He is a very brave man indeed: he is a pensioner and has spent seven years researching and writing this book, even re-mortgaging his house to cover the publication costs.
The Widow's Penny is not cheap, but it is a truly extraordinary work. It is available from The Widow's Penny, The Tait Business Centre, Dominic Street, Limerick, phone 061-419477. The gates of mystery have been opened just that bit wider with this work, revealing a forgotten and tragic landscape beyond.