The Mystery of the Cannon Chains: Remembrance in the Irish Countryside

And now, of course, you want to hear something of the stolen chains of the guns and magazine. Well, I'm afraid it's one of the stories that will never be rightly known. There were a lot of rumours going around here after '98 and 'tis hard to know if there were any truth in them.

John Clancy, Faughill, county Leitrim, Ireland¹

On 15 September 1957, supporters of the Sinn Fé in party organized a republican demonstration in the village of Ballinamuck in county Longford, in the north midlands of Ireland. They were protesting the internment of the acting headmaster of the Ballinamuck Technical School, Padraig Kelly,² but, in addition to the immediate political agenda, the event was also tied in with local commemoration of the 1798 Rebellion, which was a topic of particular interest for republican activists interred in the Curragh prison camp at the time.³ The keynote speaker was the newly elected Sinn Fé in TD (member of parliament) for the neighbouring area of Sligo-Leitrim, John Joe McGirl from Ballinamore, county Leitrim. Upon arriving on the scene, the organizers were surprised to discover that political opponents had painted the roads with graffiti that protested: 'Go home to Leitrim McGirl who stole the Chains'.⁴ It would seem that McGirl, an Irish Republican Army (IRA) activist who had recently been imprisoned for his involvement in a paramilitary campaign across the Northern Irish border, was being discredited by implication with some obscure theft of 'chains', and that this had something to do with his coming from Leitrim.

This was not the first time that such an abstruse accusation had been made in the context of local political strife. About thirty-five years earlier, a similar case occurred in nearby county Roscommon during a political campaign associated with Civil War enmities and with land agitation between tenants and farmers. At the time, a republican county councillor and local poet named P. J. Neary of Carew, Elphin, was publicly slandered by an ardent Free State supporter, Tom Egan of Castlerea.⁵ Egan circulated an inflammatory poem, which included the stanza:

And Ballinamuck has memoriesand will while time remainsof Neary, Cursed Nearywho cut the Cannons' Chains.⁶

An allusion was made to an act of sabotage also related to 'chains', which apparently had some unspecified connection to artillery. These accusations have been recalled in oral history and do not appear in official records. These cryptic, yet clearly defamatory, allegations would not have been understood by people from outside the area. However, they evidently had a local popular resonance, which was manipulated for political purposes.

The key to decoding these enigmatic references can be found in local Ninety-Eight folklore. While referring to what is known in historiography as the Great Irish Rebellion of 1798, the term 'Ninety-Eight' signifies an evocative category in Irish national historical consciousness analogous to the connotations of the 'Forty-Five' in Scotland. As Jim Smyth (pace Pierre Nora) put it, ' "1798" provides a classic example of an Irish Lieu de Mémoire – a site of collective memory – transmitted and transmuted through song, story, stone and commemoration'.⁷ Ballinamuck has a distinct place within this mytho-historical context. It was there on 8 September 1798 that General Jean Joseph Amable Humbert, commander of the small French expeditionary force which had landed near the town of Killala in northwest county Mayo three weeks earlier (22 August 1798), surrendered to superior British forces, ultimately forsaking thousands of local Irishmen from the province of Connacht who had rallied to the rebel cause and were consequently massacred. The French invasion of the western province of Connacht is well documented and has been studied in particular by military historians.⁸ It has generally been treated as an addendum to the large-scale failed insurrections in other arenas of the 1798 Rebellion and has been put down as a curious 'footnote' in the history of modern Ireland. None the less, it generated a massive body of folklore through which local communities narrated, interpreted, reconstructed and commemorated what they considered to...