While construction on the MGWR continued westward, Martin looked to the east, and beyond, along northern lines. There was a perception, albeit misplaced, that Belfast — Linenopolis — was in some way exempt from the Great Hunger. The inscriptions in Friar’s Bush tell a different story: the graveyard’s ‘Plaguey Hill’ increased by around eight hundred burials during the period, many of them migrants from Connacht who sought refuge in the town only to succumb to fever or exhaustion. Belfast grew, but it grew by absorbing the displaced; its apparent immunity was an illusion created by industry, not by circumstance. Yet perception mattered. From a distance, the chimneys signalled work, and work meant survival. For Martin and Mary, whose young family had few secure ties, the draw of Linenopolis lay in its promise of continuity.

They left Mullingar in the early light. Eliza was old enough to notice what passed beyond the carriage window, and young enough to believe that every stop might mark their journey’s end. John, the toddler, shifted on Martin’s lap; Thomas lay against Mary’s breast. The train exhaled, impatient, as though urging them to decide whether they were truly leaving or merely lingering. Pulling away with a shudder, the railway found the Royal Canal as it began to leave the town behind. The familiar soon gave way to the rural: fields marked by the recent blight, uneven soil broken in search of whatever remained. Mary bore silent witness, heavy, while Martin rested his hand upon the coarse bundle beside him, loosely fastened with string – the sum of all that could be carried.

The canal kept them company; a turf boat bobbing by a lock-keeper’s cottage, its whitewash flaking to reveal the naked grey beneath. Eliza asked where it was going. Martin told her it was bound for Dublin, like them. The answer was enough for her; the man standing in the doorway, the cold chimney, and the stillness of the place did not seem worthy of question. Soon the train slackened at Killucan: a low platform, a modest station building, and a waiting cart. Eliza rose to peer out and asked whether they were there yet – her first guess at measuring distance. Martin replied with a smirk. “Not quite.” Before she could settle, the carriage jolted, and her view returned to fields and farms. He turned back to the weans. To Eliza, their journey seemed without end. To Martin, they were putting distance between one life and a new beginning. She counted each station with diminishing expectation that it might be their destination, losing interest well before Maynooth. Martin pointed to a grey hulk in the distance and told her, with a modicum of pride, that it was the world’s greatest seminary—a thing he had once been told and saw no reason to question. Eliza stared through the window with disinterest enough not to ask. Pressing eastward, their view began to thicken with roads, houses, and intermittent industry before Dublin engulfed them. Slowing through sidings, warehouses, and close-built streets, the train drew into the Broadstone terminus.

The family gathered, the children clinging to their parents as they stepped awkwardly into the cobbled streets. Martin knew a man who had once told him the way. Through the King’s Inns and onto Henrietta Street, where the ordered façades lent a grandeur, they descended through the throngs of Capel Street: the clatter of carts, the calls of hawkers, the smells of horses and spilt grain contesting with people.

“You’ll see the dome of the Four Courts down by the river, to your right,” the man said. “If you’re on the Quay, you’ve gone too far. You want to be going left before that: Abbey Street, past the Hospital, and towards the next great dome—that’s the Custom House.” Turning towards Amiens Street and their next station, Eliza might reasonably have thought they had arrived. Her curiosity had given way to hunger. Mary hoked for the bread tucked into their bundle as the sights and sounds of the morning platform were replicated, though amplified a hundredfold. They clambered on board once more. Her forever was not so long: Eliza cuddled into Mary and let the rhythm of the tracks nurse her to sleep.

It was close to midday as they alighted at Drogheda, crossing the Boyne on foot to Newfoundwell. Peering out from their next train, Eliza saw much the same as in the morning, yet somehow different. Martin marvelled at the great new infrastructure, taking some pride in his part in its making. At Dundalk Junction, another change: Barrack Street and the start of a new Enniskillen line towards Castleblayney. The novelty wore off as the track ran out, and they continued by road, on foot, towards Armagh. A passing cart took pity as they climbed to Keady and then on to the city. As the light began to fail, Mary determined that they had come far enough for one day. Martin went in search of a bed for the night.

The next morning, they were awakened by a whistle as the first Belfast train left without them, leaving them to explore. Eliza did not see a city like Dublin: Armagh was more like home—like Mullingar—but with a great church Martin told her was called a cathedral, looking down upon her—its stone catching the morning light—and another rising on the hill opposite.

Rested, midmorning, the Ulster Railway carried them on to Portadown. As the train slowed, the next place Eliza noticed was Lisburn. The air changed – sharper, busier, carrying the faint whiff of industry, drawing them ever closer. Mill chimneys and bleach greens, and wagons working the roads. Belfast announced itself before the train had even stopped. Chimneys multiplied; factory whistles carried through the smoke; narrow rows of red-brick houses pressed close to the line; the rails divided and converged amid coal wagons, signal posts, engine sheds and the shouted instructions of railway servants. At Great Victoria Street, the family emerged to be absorbed into the bustling town, the smell of coal smoke hanging in the cold, dank air.

One journey had ended; another, about to begin.

Such recurrences pre-dated the Act of Union and post-dated partition. In 1740–41, mortality levels relative to population were comparable to those of the 1840s. Although the harvest crisis of 1799–1801 brought exceptional dearth – the price of oatmeal and potatoes rising fourfold – widespread mortality was averted. The subsistence crisis of 1816–19 left Martin Sullivan an orphan. This was followed by severe regional distress in the south and west in 1821–22, and again in the early 1830s. When the potato crop failed in 1845, it might reasonably have been understood as another recurrence within an established pattern. No one could have anticipated that the blight would recur the following season, nor in the next, and then again.

There was severe distress in 1879–80 once more due to crop failure, particularly in the west. Railways, charitable subscriptions and a more organised relief effort made assistance more readily available. It also highlighted the continued dependence of subsistence farming communities on their potato harvest, feeding into what became the Land War.

The War of Independence (1919–21), the Civil War (1922–23), and their aftermath severely disrupted supplies, infrastructure, transport, and employment. For rural communities on both sides of the border, poverty persisted throughout the 1920s and 1930s.

Food insecurity within the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland – a state with exceptional industrial, commercial, fiscal, and maritime resources – was paradoxical. How that state understood, restricted, deployed and administered those resources within its own territories during 1845–52 requires closer scrutiny.

In 1845, Phytophthora infestans destroyed the single crop upon which a large proportion of Ireland’s poor had come to depend: the potato. It did not, however, occasion a general failure of food production. James Fintan Lalor (1807–1849) made the distinction in contemporary terms: famine, properly so called, meant a general scarcity of food; Ireland, he maintained, had suffered scarcity only in “one solitary species of vegetable”. The country’s soil continued to produce grain, livestock, vegetables and other provisions, subject to ownership, sale and export.

Despite a markedly different outlook and conclusion, C. E. Trevelyan (1807–1886) materially supports Lalor’s factual premise, albeit inadvertently. As Assistant Secretary to the Treasury and the senior official centrally engaged in administering Treasury policy for Irish relief, he recorded that the wheat harvest of 1845 was “a full average”, oats and barley “abundant”, and turnips, carrots, green crops and hay a more than sufficient supply. The failure lay in the late potato crop—the “people’s crop”—whose decay removed the principal subsistence of the cottier and labouring household.

This was a crisis of access rather than production. A household that lost its sole source of food and could not obtain an alternative faced starvation. Access depended upon cash or credit, land and employment, or relief. Without these, continued production elsewhere in the economy was irrelevant. Production answers whether food existed; access answers whether those in need could obtain it.

By 2024, the definition adopted by the United Nations-endorsed Integrated Food Security Phase Classification placed the emphasis on famine as the most acute category of food insecurity: an extreme deprivation of food marked by starvation, destitution, acute malnutrition, and excess mortality. The classification, at area level, requires evidence that at least 20 per cent of households face an extreme lack of food; that acute malnutrition affects 30 per cent of children aged six to 59 months (or 15 per cent when measured by mid-upper-arm circumference); and that mortality exceeds two deaths per 10,000 people per day, or four per 10,000 children, through starvation or the interaction of malnutrition and disease. Applied retrospectively, these criteria would likely identify parts, if not all, of Ireland as meeting the modern threshold in the mid-nineteenth century. Hunger, malnutrition and excess mortality were all plainly present.

While the causes may still be debated, the effect cannot. The loss of access to subsistence brought hunger, disease, death, eviction and migration to households whose primary food had perished. One million died; two million fled. The population has yet to recover. The Great Hunger is a more neutral descriptor for the effect: the lived experience and the demographic consequence.

In the United States, Phytophthora infestans had already devastated the potato crop in 1843 and 1844. The first contemporary report within the UK came from Ireland, on 6 September 1845. The initial reaction was one of studied caution rather than alarm: the London Gardeners’ Chronicle stopped the presses for the story, while correspondents on the ground in Ireland continued to offer reassurance. The movement of potato prices on the Dublin market through October and much of November 1845 registered scarcely any disturbance.

The Prime Minister, Sir Robert Peel, drawing upon his experience as Chief Secretary for Ireland (1812–18) and Home Secretary during the distress of 1821–22, did not share the market’s confidence. In November 1845, against the advice of the Treasury, he engaged Baring Brothers to purchase some £100,000 worth of maize and meal from the US, which was reckoned sufficient to feed a million people for over a month. This minimal market intervention provided a buffer, and prices stabilised: a “remarkable achievement” which made the crisis appear, for a season, comparable to earlier episodes. Peel’s own experts suggested that less than half that year’s crop had been lost, though the loss fell disproportionately upon the poor, whose potatoes, planted later in the season, proved more vulnerable to the blight. Trevelyan’s post hoc narrative corroborated these findings: the crisis of 1845 was confined to the single crop upon which the rural poor had, over the preceding decades, become disproportionately dependent.

What neither Peel nor Trevelyan had factored in was that the blight, having already recurred in the US across successive seasons, would return to Ireland in 1846 with devastating effect. Despite the previous season, potato acreage stood at an all-time high, and the crop blossomed through early summer “like flower gardens.” By midsummer, however, any hope that the blight of the previous year was an isolated misfortune was extinguished. The tell-tale signs—discoloured leaves, blackened stalks, the unmistakable stench of decay—became visible across the country; average yields per acre fell from a customary six to seven to under half a ton. The price of potatoes rose accordingly. Agricultural wages, rarely exceeding eight pence a day, could not keep pace. For labourers and their dependent families, crisis loomed at a level far beyond that of the previous year.

In London, a change of government compounded matters. Lord John Russell’s Whigs, having been highly critical of Peel’s conservative interventions, adopted a laissez-faire approach of wait-and-see. They waited. They saw mortality rise sharply through the autumn. By the end of the year, public works programmes reintroduced by Peel in March 1846 —and continued, with modification, under Russell’s Labour Rate Act—had already revealed a structural weakness: the cost of relief schemes fell entirely upon local property in the distressed districts as a burden they were least able to bear. By March 1847, approaching three-quarters of a million people were employed on relief works. Wages rarely reached subsistence level. Officials conceded that no level of expenditure could hope to avert the level of mortality being experienced.

In February, emphasis shifted under the Temporary Relief (Ireland) Act 1847. Soup kitchens were introduced as a mechanism for direct feeding. By July, three million people were receiving daily rations, with distribution in some areas apparently exceeding the recorded population. This reduced mortality from outright starvation more effectively than any other single measure. It was, by design, temporary: the Act had been framed from the outset as a stopgap, and the last of the government kitchens closed in September 1847.

The Poor Relief (Ireland) Act 1847 transferred the full and continuing cost of relief onto the Irish Poor Law, funded by the Irish ratepayer. Trevelyan’s “natural and necessary limit upon Treasury obligations” was met by Archbishop MacHale of Tuam predicting that the resulting mortality would leave monuments to the Russell administration “more lasting than the ancient pyramids.” By the close of 1847, a crisis initially confined to a single crop had transmogrified into a sustained collapse of household subsistence, compounded by public policy intended to relieve it. Beyond statutory interventions, churches stepped up. Conditional relief predicated on a renunciation of transubstantiation was limited to the excesses of a handful of “Christian” evangelists on Achill Island and in Dingle. In Swatragh, for example, where Dr Daniel Mooney and his wife Sarah ran a dispensary soup kitchen, aid was distributed on the basis of need alone. The slight outlasted the hunger, regardless.

Into 1848, roughly a quarter of all local Boards of Guardians established under the Irish Poor Law had become insolvent; the Poor Law Commissioners in Dublin, themselves established only the previous summer, responded by dissolving the worst-affected boards and installing centrally appointed vice-guardians in their place. An attempt at cross-subsidisation, transferring the rate burden onto more prosperous unions, met with only minimal success.

Workhouses could not accommodate a level of destitution far beyond their design. By July 1849, they housed 220,000 people, while a further 805,000 received outdoor relief. An amendment introduced to the Poor Relief (Ireland) Bill on 29 March 1847 by William Henry Gregory, an MP for Dublin, barred any tenant holding more than a quarter-acre from qualifying for relief unless that holding was first surrendered. Ostensibly designed to prevent larger farmers from abusing a system intended for the destitute, the practical effect was to compel smallholders to relinquish their land entirely to survive, thereby incentivising evictions that continued unabated and displaced some 200,000 tenant farmers.

The cholera epidemic of 1849 further intensified the crisis in those areas already most severely affected. A population already weakened by malnutrition was less able to withstand infection. A cycle of failure, relief, and failure on repeat.

The record falls silent once more until the baptism of Martin and Mary’s third child, Thomas, in Westmeath, on 22 July 1848. In the grip of food insecurity, and with a young family to provide for, Martin and Mary would have been driven to move in search of survival. His skill set was an inheritance from his father and, as unskilled labour, he followed the work.

That they were in Mullingar was not coincidental. In 1845, the Midland Great Western Railway of Ireland Act facilitated the construction of a line running west from Dublin; further enactments later extended the works to Athlone and Galway. Construction started at the Broadstone terminus in January 1846, and by August of that year crews were already at work near Mullingar, laying foundations alongside the Royal Canal at Saunders Bridge. By early 1848, 1,768 casual and semi-skilled labourers – like Martin – had been drawn into the immediate vicinity of the town. The sheer scale of the undertaking explains his presence. Martin was displaced, without traditional ties to a homeplace, evidently mobile with his young family. The project presented an opportunity for itinerant contractual engagement, through contractors and subcontractors, with navvies paid for the volume of earth moved or the weight of masonry laid rather than by any fixed daily wage; an arrangement that would have promoted mobility rather than security beyond the completion of the given task. The line reached Mullingar in September, with the first train from Dublin Broadstone on Monday 2 October 1848, hailed as “a great project — one calculated to extend civilisation, promote trade and agriculture, and increase the wealth and comfort of the people.” The “commodious but temporary structures” at Mullingar were eventually replaced in 1856 on the completion of architect George Wilkinson’s station. This detail reflects something of what Martin would have noted on his own arrival — a town under construction, with its station, yards, and approach roads yet to emerge from the blueprint. He was likely absorbed into the eventual completion of the embankment, the fitting out of sidings, or the ancillary works associated with the temporary station, placing Martin as another otherwise anonymous navvy within a workforce whose collective effort was judged sufficient to transform the “wealth and comfort” of the country it traversed.

Such a role was not worthy of a name-check on the record. The MGWR did not think to gift future generations with the pleasure that might be derived from muster roll-style detail. Rather, the company’s surviving documents weigh heavily toward the engineering and financial administration rather than the day-to-day mundanity of the individual lives of those navvies who made it happen. The macro-significance of the MGWR went far beyond them, placing Mullingar, and the midlands, at the heart of a system which, within the following decade, would connect to Athlone, Galway, Longford, and Sligo, then Cavan and the Ulster network.

The first is that of Jeremiah Sullivan (1/58th), recorded on the 1st Battalion’s winter pay‑list of 1814–15 as a labourer of St Nicholas, Cork, and reappearing the following winter as a private in Company 8, three months after the 2/58th was disbanded at Hull. His civil parish, his pre-enlistment occupation, and his timings are all consistent with what is known of our Jeremiah. A transfer to the 1/58th is consistent with a soldier “for life” still fit for service. His return path takes him towards Cork, and then, most plausibly, to the garrison town of Fermoy. This Jeremiah sounds like our Jeremiah.

The second is Jeremiah Sullivan (57th), who was discharged from the 2nd Garrison Battalion on 23 October 1816, aged thirty-one. He was described as standing five feet four and three‑quarter inches, with dark brown hair, grey eyes and a dark complexion — a description strikingly similar to that of our Jeremiah from 1805. That said, although his town is noted as Cork, the parish is recorded as St Munchin’s and his county as Limerick. Like the clerical error in Glanmire, placing Cork in Limerick prompts a forensic caution. The accompanying statement of service notes two years and 208 days in the 57th Regiment of Foot, followed by five years and 17 days in the 2nd Garrison Battalion — giving a total service of seven years and 297 days. Although the musters for the 57th and 58th reflect different paths, this Jeremiah does look remarkably like our Jeremiah.

The third is Jeremiah Sullivan (2/58th), a private soldier in Company 8. He spent eighty‑one days in hospital during the quarter to December 1809, immediately after the lacuna. In the following quarter, he was still in hospital until 1 February 1810, when the muster simply notes “Died 1st Feby”. That is all. There is no cross‑reference to a pension certificate and no indication of a cause of death. In the context of a battalion that had recently landed in Lisbon, there was a marked increase in hospital cases across the 2/58th; fever and perhaps dysentery were likely relevant factors.

John Pead, Honorary Historian of the British Cemetery in Lisbon, has confirmed a gap in the cemetery’s burial registers between 1807 and 1811, and found no inscription and no separate army death record for Jeremiah Sullivan, and concludes that, if he lies in that ground, the paper that would tell us where has not survived. This Jeremiah has the shortest path to our Jeremiah.

The winter of 1815–16 was particularly tough. The eruption of Mount Tambora in April 1815 caused severe climate abnormalities throughout the Northern Hemisphere. As a result, 1816 was known as ‘the Year Without a Summer’, with 142 days of rain in Ireland devastating harvests coinciding with the economic depression that followed the Napoleonic Wars. The provisioning trade that had sustained Cork contracted sharply, exposing vulnerable households to economic pressures they could neither predict nor control. Famine was prevalent and, from 1817, accompanied by a typhus epidemic.

In Dublin, admissions to Cork Street Fever Hospital soared, from 2,752 in 1817 to 3,720 in 1818. The hospital physicians estimated that in an eighteen-month period, 1.5 million people had suffered from fever. Over 40,000 deaths occurred in Ireland due to famine and disease in 1816–1817, with potentially more going unrecorded.

1817 did for Johana. Aged thirty‑one, having sought the security of a garrison town, she met instead with famine and fever in Fermoy. Martin survived. An orphan, aged just eight.

Thran is a fabulous Ulster-Scots word that can be taken to mean stubborn. It could also feed into the contemporary notion of resilience.

My ‘Dead Duck Day’

There had been times when he knew, somewhere in him, that he would get used to it, whatever it was because he had learnt that some hard things became softer after a very little while.

Nick Hornby, About a Boy (2000)

On Bloom’s Day in 2011, my life was changed forever. I’m told I suffered a ‘significant permanent brain injury’. I can’t remember. I can remember spending my 35th birthday and then our first wedding anniversary in Belfast’s Royal Victoria Hospital. Since then, I’ve learned to walk, talk and read again.

My short-term memory is gone, though. That part of my brain is dead. Despite this, I’m still fairly sure that someone who asks about ‘…that £20 you owe me?’ is due nothing more than a rebuke.

Sometimes I find I repeat myself. Those around me are too decent to notice. I notice though, and it can be engersome – I’ll leave you to Google that one!

I have real difficulty using the phone. I guess this is down to the non-verbal aspects of communication we may otherwise take for granted. Hyperacusis can be an issue, too. I’m fine with email, though, and, as I discovered through lockdown, Skype and Zoom don’t present me with any more difficulty than they do for anyone else.

Acceptance and recalibration

I tried my best to get back into legal practise, but it just wasn’t for me anymore. I don’t get the same buzz; it is just not there.

Then I got caught up in the Neurology Review a few years back. I now have a greater understanding of what I can, and can’t, do.

The damage to my vocal cords, coupled with the issue of my short-term memory, is such that I now know I’ve made my last speech. To those who know me, this may not be a bad thing!

Acceptance has been the greatest hurdle. It is, however, about simply making the most of the hand you have been dealt. Rather than regret what could have been, focus on what can be and celebrate in achieving it.

I still find reading difficult, but I’m a convert to audiobooks. It is not the same as physically holding a book, that smell of the paper, as you devour its contents, conjuring up the writer’s imagery as they tell their story. But if you focus on what can be, audiobooks are actually quite a good alternative.

I listened to Go Set a Watchman when it was released: an awful book only made engaging by Reese Witherspoon’s southern drawl narration. Indeed, I suspect I would have given up on the hard copy.

What I have done is to revisit and develop my pre-existing interest in how we communicate. I’m still learning; still recalibrating.

Still learning; still recalibrating

For me, MOOCs, or ‘Massive Open Online Courses’, have been a godsend. As I’ve said, reading is still a challenge, but bite-sized learning is something I’ve learned to digest. MOOCs can be accessed by anyone with internet access and a desire to learn.

They allow learners to dip their toes into a subject matter with minimal commitment. MOOCs also tend to be free of charge with some upselling if, for example, you want a certificate to document your learning. Platforms I’ve used include FutureLearn, EdX and the Law Society of Ireland.

During lockdown, I went back to my MOOCs. I’m still learning; still recalibrating. ‘Sometimes I find I repeat myself…’.

Legum Magister

MOOCs were my pathway back to formal learning, and then, a few years ago, I got my LLM (Master of Laws), with commendation, for 25,000 words on ‘Regulating New Media and the Workplace’.

It took me the best part of two years, and it was a real struggle. Reading obscure academic articles, which might once have taken me 30 minutes, took me several hours over a few days. I set myself a goal and committed to achieving it.

Breaking a chapter down into headings, subheadings, and even sub-subheadings made writing a dissertation feel tangible and, ultimately, achievable.

So, what is resilience?

So, what is resilience? I’m still not sure. I suppose it comes from the Latin ‘to bounce back’, but it seems to be one of those buzzwords the meaning of which has become somewhat lost in translation.

I prefaced my LLM dissertation with this quote from To Kill a Mockingbird:

Real courage is… when you know you’re licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what.

Harper Lee (1926-2016)

That is good enough for me, but to my mind, my story is not about ‘resilience’. This is just me being me. I‘ve always pushed myself to be the best that I can be, and that hasn’t changed. It isn’t going to change.

Maybe I’m just thran that way…

Oman and Southey both treat the actions at Orthez, the passage of the Adour and Toulouse as the hard close of Wellington’s continental campaign, after which British units were progressively withdrawn from south‑western France and sent home. Brown’s regimental synopsis shows the 2/58th following that pattern: “June – to England joined rest of battalion at Hastings”, and, for the following year, the terse line “1815 Hastings June – Hull December – disbanded at Hull”. A unit raised as a second, notionally home‑service battalion for an invasion crisis, and then carried into Portugal, Spain and France, no longer had a distinct purpose once the Peninsular army had been withdrawn and the immediacy had passed.

Hastings brought four companies of the 2/58th back and into a south‑coast station within the existing command structure, somewhere that could house an infantry unit which no longer had an operational role but still required orderly administration and accommodation. The other six companies returned from Lisbon in 1813 were already there on that footing. On the muster, the 2/58th reappears as a whole, but now entirely on home ground.

The wind-down continued with a move to Hull in 1815 and the bald notation there of “disbanded”. As a garrison, it offered barracks, docks, and an administrative establishment to complete the task. The musters in the closing quarters see those fit for service transferred to the 1/58th, while those who were not were discharged or pensioned off with notations of age, wounds, or general health.

When Napoleon returned from Elba and the British state remobilised, some battalions that had seemed settled into garrison life at home were dispatched to Belgium. The 2/58th was not one such battalion; its disbandment at Hull belongs firmly to the first peace, not to a second war.

On 21 June 1813, the army of Joseph Bonaparte, Napoleon’s elder brother and, from June 1808, Joseph I, King of Spain and the Indies, stood near Vitoria, in northern Spain on the road between Burgos and the Pyrenees, in anticipation of an Anglo-Portuguese‑Spanish assault from the west. Wellington actually advanced simultaneously in four columns from the north, south and west, with the 2/58th now forming part of the 7th Division under Lieutenant‑General the Earl of Dalhousie in the brigade of Major‑General Barnes. Within that brigade, its four companies served alongside those of the 2/24th, their individual identities preserved only in the muster tables, which record them as fractions of a temporary whole. By early afternoon, the French position was no longer tenable, and the battle ended in their retreat towards Pamplona, leaving behind guns, baggage and much of the plunder accumulated during the occupation of Spain. Joseph’s army is usually reckoned to have lost around 8,000 men, while Wellington’s casualties approached 5,000.

For Southey, this was the decisive end of French control in Spain: the point at which Joseph’s authority on the Peninsula effectively collapsed. Napier is more critical in noting, despite the scale of the defeat, that the pursuit was not pressed with the energy that might have destroyed Joseph’s army outright.

After Vitoria, Napoleon appointed Marshal Jean‑de‑Dieu Soult as his brother’s successor, charged with reorganising and leading the French forces south of the Pyrenees. Soult’s attempt to restore the French position produced a series of hard actions in the mountain passes, which Oman reads as evidence that Wellington’s advance could only be kept in check by a sustained counter‑offensive rather than by any stable defensive line. By the autumn of 1813, San Sebastián had fallen, Pamplona was isolated, and Wellington’s army had crossed the Bidassoa into France, turning what had begun as a campaign to expel a foreign king from Spain into an invasion of metropolitan French territory.

Confrontations in France at the Nivelle, the Nive and Orthez culminated in the battle of Toulouse on 10 April 1814. Oman and Southey both stress that these actions were bitterly contested, with the French defending on their own soil with a resolution that was often absent in the later stages of the Spanish campaign. Napier emphasises the cumulative effect of the weather, ground, sickness, and repeated engagements on battle-fatigued French battalions. Napoleon abdicated two days later.

In the weeks that followed, Wellington moved his army north by way of Valladolid towards Burgos, where the castle, on an isolated hill long noted by Napoleon as a point of command over the approaches between Bayonne and Madrid, had been strengthened into a modernised fortress. Oman is sharply critical of the pursuit of the Armée de Portugal, now under General Bertrand Clausel, after Marmont had been wounded at Salamanca, noting that headquarters advanced by short marches and that the pressure applied to a shaken enemy was never more than cautious. By way of contrast, Napier describes Clausel’s “beautiful movements” in retreat, stressing the skill with which the French general declined action and slipped back whenever the British main body came within reach. Read together, Napier acknowledges French professional competence, while Oman is preoccupied with whether a more vigorous stance post‑Salamanca could have restricted the Armée de Portugal from being an effective force. For the likes of the 2/58th, this looked like a sequence of controlled marches pushing their opponent northwards without any decisive engagement. On paper, Clausel was pushed back beyond Burgos. Operationally, the Armée de Portugal remained a threat.

Meanwhile, Wellington’s judgement in laying siege to the fortified castle at Burgos with limited, and ultimately insufficient, artillery and engineering resources has attracted sustained criticism. The month that followed did little to vindicate that choice. Oman’s narrative is one of repeated assaults, costly attempts to seize the hill and a cycle of mining and bombardment that never quite compensated for the lack of proper equipment. The eventual decision to withdraw is viewed as necessary, with an implicit, belated recognition that the enterprise had failed. Napier is more inclined to attribute the reverse to material deficiency and to the resources of the French garrison, and stops short of presenting Burgos as a clear error of judgement, while Southey stresses the strength of the place and the endurance of the besiegers and records the retreat more in the key of disappointment than of censure. For the 2/58th, Burgos was less an isolated folly than a cumulative stress. Casualties, sickness and fatigue were recorded over successive quarters, set against the apparent decisiveness of Salamanca and the success of the Lines.

Wellington’s strategy rested on three pillars: Beresford’s reconstituted Portuguese army, a scheme of devastation, and the Lines of Torres Vedras. His second instrument – devastation – was designed and disseminated in anticipation of a French advance towards Lisbon and required the rural population to withdraw with their movable property and to destroy anything left behind, including supplies, mills and food to forage. Third was a continuous network of fortifications and fieldworks constructed across the peninsula to the north of Lisbon. Thousands of Portuguese labourers were tasked by British engineers with their construction, cutting into the hillsides and filling the ramparts and ditches, the soil excavated, broken and sieved before being tamped back into parapets dense enough to absorb and blunt cannon‑shot.

The Lines would eventually comprise three successive chains of fortification, spanning 50–60 miles across the peninsula between the Tagus and the Atlantic, with 152 distinct forts mounting around 600 guns. By October 1810, over 120 of these were already manned and defensible, each designed for 200–300 men and up to six guns, and connected by roads cut into the earth to enable rapid lateral movement. The project came in at under £200,000, an outlay equivalent to a year’s pay for a single division.

The third French invasion arrived in front of the Lines in October 1810. Under Marshal André Masséna, commanding Napoleon’s Army of Portugal, up to 60,000 troops, already weakened by the battle of Bussaco, marched through the barren countryside of devastation: Wellington’s strategy in practice. Beresford’s army gave depth in numbers and allowed the Anglo‑Portuguese line to be held without thinning the garrisons behind it. Devastation to the north of Lisbon left Masséna with only limited scope to forage and without any secure supply of his own, his columns pushed ever farther afield for food and forage while the Anglo‑Portuguese army drew steadily upon the protected magazines of the capital. The Lines themselves, well‑resourced from the maritime city behind, presented an entrenched position which he ultimately judged too strong to be directly assailable.

Masséna, committed to a position he could neither hold nor provision, saw his army erode from hunger, disease, and the winter of 1810–11. In March 1811, he withdrew into Spain. The three instruments — devastation, national mobilisation and the great defensive lines — had worked together as intended, each incomplete without the other two. Masséna’s losses to this strategy exceeded those he suffered in any pitched battle in Portugal.

Their confidence for what lay ahead would not have been boosted as they passed sea fortifications being dismantled. As early as March 1809, General Sir John Francis Cradock, the British commander in Portugal, had around 10,000 men under command, a figure that soon exceeded 16,000. Despite this, he had maintained a defensive position and even begun pulling battalions back from exposed positions to the north and east, concentrating them in and around Lisbon. This was in contemplation of a possible evacuation, with heavy cannon being shipped out to weaken any future seaward defence should the forts fall back into French hands. Although they held the capital, of greater significance was whether the country was to be treated as a temporary peripheral station or as the base of a sustained continental campaign.

The arrival of Sir Arthur Wellesley brought that question to a point. He regarded Portugal, from the outset, as defensible by a combined British and Portuguese force of 20,000–30,000 against any French army short of 100,000, provided Lisbon and the line of the Tagus could be held, and upon that judgement the war in the Peninsula would proceed.

As the 2/58th disembarked on the north bank, they would have taken in a city climbing steeply from the quays, layering warehouses, churches and tiled houses that, in the preceding months, had witnessed the repeated embarkation and re‑embarkation of British cavalry, movements that had bred anger as much as fear in the inhabitants of Lisbon. The quarterly returns suggest that the 2/58th may have been spread across several ships, rather than any real loss in number en route. Gaps in the record are particularly apparent after the banal continuity of the Jersey years, making it difficult to track any individual soldier with absolute confidence. By September-December 1809, the 2/58th are recorded as being part of the Lisbon garrison with a marked increase in “Hospital” and “Absent sick”. For newly arrived battalions, the city was not merely a point of disembarkation but an immediate trial of climate, crowding and disease, with effective strength beginning to erode before any great action had yet been fought. Otherwise, garrison life followed the routine of parade grounds, guard mounting and sentry duty, but now against the language, law and civic order of a foreign capital.

Their son, Martin, was baptised in St Michael’s Catholic church, Glanmire, on 18 November 1808, with Timothy Donohue and Juliana Scully as sponsors. On the public register, the priest first wrote Juliana’s surname as Sullivan before correcting it to Scully—a clerical error to show even contemporaneous records should be read with forensic caution.

Glanmire, on the Glashaboy River a few miles north‑east of Cork city, was by the early nineteenth century a small industrial settlement of mills and workers’ houses — a middle ground between town and country, close enough to the docks, yards and quays for a labouring household to live within the economic pull of the city, yet still rooted within a parish landscape exposed to the fluctuations in grain and shipping prices that left wages unpredictable and subsistence precarious.

On Johana’s side, a working hypothesis connects her to Clashykinleen West, a townland in the civil parish of Kilmeen in the north‑west of the county. At the turn of the nineteenth century, land in rural Cork was divided, rents were rising, and the balance of the county’s economy was already tilting toward the port city, whose growth rested on export trade, provisioning and the associated demand for transport, milling and casual labour. For smallholders and labourers on marginal ground, there was limited scope to absorb demographic pressure without either subdivision or outward movement; one recognised response, well before the later nineteenth‑century crisis, was to seek wage work in or near Cork, while leaving kin ties and residual claims in the countryside intact. A movement of that nature would fit the wider pattern described for Cork’s working population, in which families from the rural interior gravitated toward urban and quasi‑urban settlements proximate to the city and to a sense of security in subsistence, whilst retaining the solidarities of a recognisable parish community.

The muster rolls neither confirm nor exclude the possibility that Jeremiah was physically present at the font on that November day; what they do show is that, while a child of his name and blood was being entered in the Glanmire register, he remained on the strength of the 2/58th. Martin’s baptism and his parents’ marriage sit at the point where those trajectories intersect, with the fields of Clashykinleen West meeting the streets of the South Parish. For the War Office, Jeremiah in these years remained a number in the 2/58th; for the parishes, he is recorded as both a husband and a father, briefly moving from the abstraction of a private soldier into the more durable record of kinship and faith.

For Jeremiah, they show no transfer to another regiment, no notation of desertion, court‑martial or discharge, and no extended period of hospitalisation during his Jersey years; what they present, rather, is the unremarkable continuity of a private soldier whose service, in administrative terms, raised nothing of note beyond his inclusion in the battalion’s effective strength. In the same sequence, other men are annotated as “Unfit for Service” or detached on recruiting duty in England and Ireland, but Jeremiah’s own entry is consistently “present” at St Helier, without such qualification. By 1808, the musters have him expressly allocated to company 8, with two quarters also noting he was “On Duty”, indicating, at least at those muster points, he was neither in hospital nor elsewhere.

Jeremiah’s years in St Helier were defined by a mundanity that belied the island’s living history of military incursions. A French force had landed and briefly occupied St Helier in January 1781, and the lesson that the island’s proximity to the Normandy coast rendered it acutely vulnerable to assault had been institutionally absorbed without being entirely resolved. With the resumption of hostilities in 1803, and the concentration of French forces along the facing coast, Jersey was again judged to be exposed: close enough to France to be raided, of sufficient commercial importance to defend. Placing the 2/58th on Jersey was part of a wider policy of home‑defence designed as a deterrent for cross‑Channel assault through a combination of coastal fortification and the visible, recorded presence of line infantry on the island.

For a private soldier in the 2/58th, the daily rate of pay was notionally one shilling. Stoppages for clothing, rations and other necessaries could reduce this sum to just a few pence, not dissimilar to what might have been earned in casual labour on the quays of Cork. Garrison life meant shared accommodation, regulated movement and the constant supervision of officers whose authority over a soldier’s time and body was backed by a disciplinary code that permitted sanctions up to and including corporal punishment. Enlisting “for life” was more than a simple undertaking to serve for an indefinite period: it took an otherwise ordinary civilian subject and recast them as just another number embedded within a distinct military jurisdiction, documented in the continuous lines of the muster tables that record unbroken compliance.

By Q2 1809, the War Office returns still carry Jeremiah in the ranks of the 2/58th. His battalion had, however, by then moved beyond its Channel Islands garrison role: the same muster sequence that documents his unbroken service on Jersey also marks the point at which the regiment left the island and was redeployed to an entirely different theatre.

The 2nd Battalion was formed at Kinsale, County Cork, on 28 August 1803 from the Irish Army of Reserve, just as the fear of a Napoleonic invasion was at its height. Their numbers were later supplemented by drafts raised under the Additional Forces Act 1803 from Cork and Kerry. Further intakes in 1806 extended recruitment beyond Munster and across the island. By the time the 2/58th reached Jersey, and Jeremiah Sullivan appeared on the muster roll at St Helier, their composition, if not their cuffs, was more of a really dark green.

On the face of the statutes, the premise was strictly limited: the legislation was framed as an emergency provision ‘for the more effectual Defence and Security of the United Kingdom’. The Government repeatedly insisted that the Army of Reserve and the Additional Forces were to be engaged for home service only. The Army of Reserve was to be raised by county ballot, with a quota for each county in Great Britain and Ireland; the Additional Forces Acts allowed for voluntary enlistment on a similar basis, with bounties offered to assuage resentment of the ballot and to render the taking of the King’s shilling that bit more palatable.

The Militia (Ireland) Acts already required parishes to either furnish the required numbers or raise money by local levy, with county quotas enforced by parish ballot. In practice, that burden was passed down to otherwise unskilled labour, whereas those of means could pay the commutation rates. Against that background, the Reserve and Additional Forces legislation was presented as a straightforward bargain: a bounty and an obligation to serve within the United Kingdom under a threat of invasion, rather than an open‑ended pledge for service overseas.

In practise, its operation was less straightforward. The legislation expressly provided for additional bounties to be paid to men who volunteered from the Reserve and associated forces into the regular army. The administrative mechanisms of the War Office rendered such transfers the expectation, rather than an exception. Fortescue’s characterisation of the Army of Reserve as a ‘net to catch men who could then be transferred to the line’ reads as more than retrospective rhetoric: it reflects the logic of the legislative draftsman, and with it a broad interpretation of the home service covenant.

What can be said is that, in 1726, an area abutting the south channel of the River Lee is recorded on John Carty’s survey of the city as “Boch’s Key”. By 1750, Charles Smith’s plan of Cork has the same frontage as Sullavans Key, with John Rocque’s 1759 survey confirming the designation of Sullivan’s Quay, a frontage of merchant warehouses, docks and provisioning yards. The rationale for the change is not documented. It seems likely that the designation was for a family line embedded in the commercial life of the South Channel over the intervening generation rather than any particular personality.

The self-styled head of the O’Sullivan Mór sept, Benjamin Sullivan (1720–1767), attorney‑at‑law, was appointed clerk of the crown for the counties of Cork and Waterford in 1753. He was a son of Philip O’Sullivan (1682–1737), a Catholic by birth, and Elizabeth Erwin, a Presbyterian from Co. Roscommon. Philip had settled in Cork city in the early eighteenth century, with lineage associated with Dunkerron Castle on Kenmare Bay rather than Dunboy on the Beara peninsula, the principal seat of the O’Sullivan Beare.

By Philip’s time, the title had long been severed from the territory, leaving a lineage without estate. When he was buried from St Mary’s, Shandon, it was operating as a Church of Ireland parish church in a city governed by the Penal Laws. Philip’s trajectory was not inconsistent with legislative restrictions on Catholic access to property, inheritance and the courts, which encouraged tactical alignment with the established church. Benjamin managed, rather than resolved, this tension through outward conformity. Abbreviating the family name and taking public office consolidated his inheritance from Philip into professional standing. By Jeremiah’s time, Benjamin’s sons had extended that reach far beyond Cork: one on the bench in Madras, another as an under-secretary for War and Colonies, a third raised to a baronetcy.

Surveying Cork in 1790, French consul Charles Étienne Coquebert de Montbret encountered near the Parade an O’Sullivan keeping a beer‑house and displaying the family arms in his porter‑room; he further speculated, not entirely in earnest, that the establishment was “perhaps …a house of ill-fame”. Another Jeremiah Sullivan was a printer, bookseller, stationer, subscription agent, paper merchant and lottery‑office keeper at 53 Castle Street, opposite the Exchange and under Leary’s Coffee House.

David Dickson’s account of Cork and South Munster in these years depicts a mercantile city with prosperity reliant on imperial provisioning and Atlantic trade, an environment in which a family with ambition could reposition itself beyond confessional and socioeconomic boundaries. The lawyer, the publican and the bookseller: three branches of one Brehon fine together in the same city, each taking his own line.

Whichever the line, it was unlikely to have been written for our Jeremiah. As a nineteen-year-old labourer standing five feet four and a half, of dark complexion, with grey eyes and dark hair, he stepped out of the crowd at Gosport on 4 April 1805 to take the King’s shilling and attest for life into the 2nd Battalion of the 58th (Rutlandshire) Regiment of Foot.

Joe McKelvey was born in Stewartstown, Co. Tyrone, in 1898, the only child of Patrick, an RIC constable, and his wife Rose. With the outbreak of the Great War, Patrick signed up for home service, and the family moved to Belfast. Isabella's eldest son, John, and Joe were founding members of O’Donovan Rossa GAC in 1916, with her brother-in-law (also John) as chairman. Serjeant McKelvey died in 1919 and is buried in a Commonwealth war grave in Milltown Cemetery.

In July 1921, General Eoin O’Duffy was appointed Truce Liaison Officer in Belfast, based in St Mary’s Hall and lodging with the Sullivans at Walmer. The Truce partially legitimised republican activity in the city, and the hall became its administrative centre.

The Treaty

The fourth Home Rule Bill became the Government of Ireland Act 1920, which created Northern Ireland on 3 May 1921. Mirrored provisions for Southern Ireland were rejected. Negotiations then led to dominion status under the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 6 December 1921. The six Ulster counties that formed Northern Ireland were, however, effectively off the table before negotiations began.

On 26 December 1921, Joe McKelvey and Denis McCullough met Michael Collins at the Gresham Hotel, outlining their reservations and seeking assurances on the position of northern nationalists. This sufficed to secure the Third Northern Division’s conditional acceptance of the Treaty, but McKelvey’s misgivings about the settlement and its implications for Belfast never disappeared.

St Mary’s Hall

O’Duffy’s later military limitations were offset by considerable administrative acumen. This became all too clear on 18 March 1922 when, at 9.45 pm, a whist drive was in full swing, and St Mary’s Hall was raided by the RIC and commandeered by Specials. A significant amount of documentation was seized. Collins described the raid as a clear breach of the Truce, which was already of limited effect in Belfast, where inter-communal violence persisted throughout.

McKelvey had become increasingly disillusioned and, having succeeded O’Duffy as Truce Liaison Officer, bore the brunt for the loss of St Mary’s Hall. Rather than face the fallout and likely arrest in Belfast, he fled to Dublin.

Four Courts

McKelvey was appointed to the (anti-Treaty) Army Council as deputy chief of staff to Liam Lynch and, on 14 April 1922, occupied the Four Courts. With a further split between militant and more cautious factions, McKelvey briefly became the “militant” chief of staff on 18 June.

The Provisional Government initially tried to ignore the occupation. The assassination in London of Irish-born unionist Sir Henry Wilson by English-born republicans on 22 June, however, prompted Winston Churchill to increase the pressure on it to act – or he would. The Battle of the Four Courts lasted for three days before the anti-Treaty garrison surrendered on 30 June.

A Free State

Lynch, now the “moderate” chief of staff, wrote to the Speaker of the Provisional Parliament, or Constituent Assembly, on 28 November 1922, warning of “very drastic measures” against those who had voted for what he called the “Murder Bill”. The assembly lacked full legislative competence in the absence of a governor-general; Tim Healy, Kevin O’Higgins’s uncle, would not be appointed until 6 December 1922. Nevertheless, it had passed an Army Resolution on 27 September 1922 – often inaccurately described as a public safety bill or act – to provide political cover for constitutionally dubious measures.

Day One. By the time the Free State formally came into being on 6 December 1922, Arthur Griffith and Michael Collins were already dead, and Erskine Childers had been executed by the Provisional Government for possessing a small pistol gifted by Collins.

Day Two, 2.43 pm. Pro-Treaty TDs Seán Hales and Deputy Speaker Pádraig O’Máille left the Ormond Hotel and hailed an open-topped horse-drawn taxi for Leinster House. Perhaps following a tip-off from hotel staff, a car pulled alongside and its occupants opened fire with six or seven revolver shots at close range. The jarvey drove instinctively towards O’Connell Bridge, only realising his passengers were hit when he saw blood on the cushions, and then diverted to Jervis Street Hospital.

O’Máille was shot twice, including in his spine, but survived to become a Fianna Fáil senator in later life. Hales was hit at least four times and was dead on arrival. He had not voted on the Army Resolution and was not even in the Dáil on 27 September, nor was his name on Lynch’s list of “Murder Members”; O’Máille had, and contemporary republican accounts suggest he was the intended target.

Day Two, 7 pm. The minister for local government, Ernest Blythe, later recalled that he was running late for the Executive Council meeting that evening. As he took his seat, he heard a list of names being read out and “gathered that the proposal was that they should be executed in the morning without any form of trial”. After a brief discussion, President W.T. Cosgrave called for a vote around the table. Kevin O’Higgins was hesitant before agreeing: “Take them out and shoot them.” The decision was unanimous.

There was, of course, no discussion of names by the Cabinet. The names presumably were selected by Army officers as those of men whose execution would be most calculated to have the maximum warning effect on members of the Irregular forces in all parts of the country. Personal feelings did not come into it at all.

This may have inspired the post hoc hypothesis that the four were selected as one from each province. As a party to the decision, even Blythe did not know. The selection of McKelvey, Mellows and O’Connor related more to their seniority and, for Barrett, notoriety, than to geography; all were IRB men who knew too much.

Day Three, 3 am. The erstwhile go-lucky four were awakened in their cells and told that they were to be executed as a reprisal for the assassination of Seán Hales. Joe wrote his goodbyes to Rose; his later letter to Mrs Sullivan was a thinly veiled farewell to his remaining friends in Belfast.

Day Three, 9.20 am. A prison chaplain, Fr John Pigott, later recalled how the sign was given, the volley rang out, and the men fell. There were two officers on hand “to put out of pain anyone not already dead”. “McKelvey, who was conscious, needed attention and I heard him call out ‘give me another’, ‘and another’, and then there was a silence – a great silence.”

Day Three, 4.30 pm. The inquest jury found that Hales had died from a bullet wound through the heart inflicted by “persons unknown” and declared those responsible guilty of wilful murder.

Day Three, 6 pm. The executions were debated in a deeply polarised Dáil, with the fledgling government defending its actions as a necessary reprisal to protect the State, and its opponents condemning murder without trial and betrayal. O’Higgins exclaimed: “Personal spite, great heavens! Vindictiveness! One of these men was a friend of mine.” Rory O’Connor had been his best man in October 1921.

There was little pretence of legality. The executions, one of the first significant acts of the Irish Free State, were explicitly carried out as a reprisal. Both sides claimed the other to be worse than the British had ever been. Leader of the Opposition, Thomas Johnson TD, described both Hales’s assassination and the State’s reprisals as murder. The Hales family, divided by the Treaty, were united in grief in expressing their horror and disgust at the reprisal executions, which, they feared, would only deepen bitterness and delay reconciliation.

Murder by any definition

General Richard Mulcahy’s son, Risteárd, later noted that his father never expressed regret about the executions. Joe McKelvey’s remains were not released to Rose until October 1924 and were then reinterred in the Harbinson plot in Milltown Cemetery, 100 yards from his father.

In 2011, Leo Varadkar TD said of the Mountjoy reprisals: “It was an atrocity and those people killed without a trial by the first Government were murdered.” In 2022, Micheál Martin TD similarly described the executions as “murder by any definition”.

Legacy

The Military Service Pensions Collection records Dick Barrett as having been executed in Mountjoy “after sentence of death by a Military Court” while on military service. His mother applied under the Army Pensions Act 1932; his service and death in service were certified, and the Board recommended the maximum dependants’ gratuity of £112 10s, while a parallel claim by his sister Mary O’Neill was rejected.

Liam Mellows’s mother, Sarah, missed the original deadline for claims and instead waged a long letter-writing campaign with government departments, De Valera and successive ministers, until the legislation was amended. In 1941, she was deemed partially dependent, receiving the gratuity and later a modest annual allowance until her death in 1952.

Rory O’Connor’s mother, Julia, and his sister, Helen, also applied, including representations on Helen’s behalf from Liam Cosgrave TD. Julia was found to be partially dependent and received the gratuity, but Helen was not initially considered a dependant. Reapplying in 1969 as “an unmarried woman in her nineties with very limited means”, she was finally recognised as a dependant, with an allowance of £246 per annum until her death less than two years later.

There was no application from the family of Lieutenant-General McKelvey. Rose died alone in 1927. She is buried 50 yards from her husband and 150 yards from her son. To paraphrase Martin Niemöller, there was by then no one left.

This article is forthcoming in History Ireland.

Further reading

• Eamon Phoenix, Northern Nationalists (1994) (Belfast: Ulster Historical Foundation)

• John Dorney, The Civil War in Dublin (2017) (Dublin: Merrion)

• Seán Enright, The Irish Civil War (2019) (Dublin: Merrion)

• Alan F. Parkinson, A Difficult Birth: The Early Years of Northern Ireland 1920–25 (2020) (Dublin: Eastwood)