B. Nic A.: Well, do you remember 1916? Can you remember the happenings here?

J. M.: Oh, do I remember? I was always a demon for taking people’s children for walks.

B. Nic A.: Were you?

J. M.: Especially if they had a pram. And a strange thing, now the same woman […] I was down the church and she put her arms around me and kissed me, Lizzie Murphy, married to Brennan. And she’s gone a cripple from operations, and she was Lizzie Nevin – this woman is dead. She was her baby, and I said, ‘will I take her Mrs. Murphy?’. ‘Oh I’d be glad’, said she, ‘an hour or two, till I get a bit of tidying in.’ That was the Easter Monday morning, and you know the iron bridge up here where Wallace’s, the coal place, used to be?

B. Nic A.: Yeah.

J. M.: We got as far as there, everyone had a perambulator, wasn’t like the prams now, big high go cars, made of wood. And we were all going on and a lot of men come and hunched us back. Says ‘you can’t go to town, there’s a Rebellion’. We were all hunched back, and all the mothers was out looking for us and for their children. I know me mother got me and she shook me out of me clothes. She [said] ‘If I ever get you taking anyone’s child again I’ll take the head off of you!’ And now when I do see her, and she’s a grandmother now that same woman. But I remember that, I remember going in too [to town], when all that died down. I was supposed to go to an aunt of mine, and I went to the gang into the pillar, and we were running in and out the trams, they’d no glass in them, all the trams up be the pillar. And Tyler’s was broke in to, shoes. And we all run over and we got two or three shoes, and the three shoes I got was odd! And me mother put them in on the fire, and the same night that she burned them, there was a chap from Ringsend who had been shot in Boland’s Mill, Whelan, and they were bringing him home on canvas.

B. Nic A.: Yeah sorry, go on.

J. M.: They were bringing him home on canvas to his mother’s home, and… bringing him home in the canvas to Ringsend. Me mother was burning the shoes, and the man run in to her, Mr. Clarke, Lord rest his poor soul. ‘Oh’, [says] he, ‘Tilly’, says he, ‘what are you doing?’, says he. ‘There’s a complete blackout, we’ll be all shot.’ And he run and he got blankets and he put them up to our windows and his own windows. Terrible time that time too!

B. Nic A.: I’ll just finish this tape now.

[End of UFP0028, beginning UFP0029]

[Extract starts at 00:27]

J. M.: But […] what was his... can’t think of his first name. But he was a lovely fella.

B. Nic A.: This was 1916 now?

J. M.: Yeah, he was shot in Boland’s Mill. De Valera was in Boland’s Mill.

B. Nic A.: At the same time?

J. M.: Could be! And there was Thomas Whelan that was hung after, lodged with the [unclear] on Barrow Street. He was a lovely fella. I think he was from some part of Galway or something. There’s a song about him, ‘Your Shawl of Galway Grey’.

B. Nic A.: Oh is that right? Do you know it?

J. M.: I used to know, I forget it now.

B. Nic A.: Do you know any of the words of it.

J. M.: No. His mother was a lovely woman.

B. Nic A.: Yeah. Did you meet her?

J. M.: She came down to me mother when me brother was killed. She happened to be in Dublin, and she’d a big… one of them shawls.

B. Nic A.: What colour was it?

J. M.: A… Paisley colour, it was lovely. Beautiful shawl.

B. Nic A.: Wool was it?

J. M.: Oh, pure wool. And she’d a nice cup of tea and all.

B. Nic A.: Well did she come from Galway because her son was going to be hanged?

J. M.: Yeah, I suppose so. Well I knew the people he lodged with, in Barrow Street. Oh, he was a beautiful fella. Very very dark, very good looking. Yeah, he lodged there.

B. Nic A.: And what did he do? He was caught presumably then.

J. M.: He must’ve been caught too.

B. Nic A.: You don’t know what he was involved in?

J. M.: He was an IRA man.

B. Nic A.: Oh and I know, but you don’t know what he actually was doing at the time?

J. M.: No. See I was young, and, like you took notice of some things and you didn’t take notice of others.

B. Nic A.: Yeah, yeah.