Rich legacy of a musical revolutionary

After the 1916 Rising in Galway was quashed, its leader Liam Mellows and two companions found refuge in a remote hilly area south of Gort. Mellows had his treasured fiddle with him and during five months hiding in Knockjames, he played and taught the instrument. For more than 100 years, it’s been in the care of New York’s Carmelite Order but it recently rang out again in the hills that gave him safety. JUDY MURPHY learned of its journey home.

The role played by Liam Mellows in the 1916 Rising in Galway has been well-documented. Likewise, his involvement in Ireland’s subsequent War of Independence and the Civil War, when he was one of four anti-Treaty soldiers executed by the new Irish government in retaliation for the murder of pro-Treaty TD, Seán Hales.

But a less well-known aspect of the revolutionary leader – his love of music and talent on the fiddle – was the focus of a recent ceremony at a tiny church in the mountains between Galway and Clare.

Mellows’ grá for music was something he shared with people in the hills around Knockjames in the months immediately following Easter 1916.

It was in this remote area between Gort and Tulla that Mellows and his fellow revolutionaries, Alfie Monaghan and Frank Hynes, found refuge when they went into hiding after the British authorities quashed the Easter Rising. Many of those involved in the insurrection in Dublin were executed, while others, who had been involved either in Dublin or in uprisings elsewhere in the country, were deported to prison camps in England and Wales.

Mellows had led the rising in Galway and was a wanted man when he fled over the Sliabh Aughty Mountains in late April 1916, with his two companions – and his fiddle.

“Had he been caught, he would almost certainly have been executed,” says Seán Halpin, the man responsible for returning Liam Mellows fiddle to Ireland. It’s on loan from New York’s Carmelite Priory, where it has been housed safely for more than a century.

Seán, who works as a quantity surveyor in New York, was studying for a Master’s in History at New York University’s Glucksman Center for Irish and Irish-American Studies, when he learned about the fiddle, which Mellows had left in the Carmelite Priory in Manhattan in 1920. Having fled to New York for safety in Autumn 1916, Mellows returned to Ireland four years later to take part in the War of Independence.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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