Hands up if you sometimes skip the preface of a book. Well please don’t do that when you read Finding Mary. The untold story of an Inishowen murder, 1844. The preface to Finding Mary is a fine piece of literary writing that sets the scene for an enigmatic but true event – the bludgeoning to death of 14-year-old servant Mary Doherty on March 10^th, 1844, during a robbery in a house on a narrow country road between Culdaff village and Carthage Mountain in the rural townland of Bunagee on Donegal’s Inishowen Peninsula.

Visiting the remnants of the cottage where the murder took place on the anniversary of that baleful occurrence, Angela Byrne marvellously juxtaposes the modern “Moulded cement pillars and garden ornaments” with the ancient cottage peering “through a bare, wind-whipped wreath of gnarled ash and sycamore”. The honking swans and “bottle-green rushes” Byrne so beautifully captures, sound and look no different to what 14-year-old Mary Doherty would have heard and saw on her last day in 1844, perhaps as she gathered eggs from the poultry or fetched water from the well.

The introduction to Finding Mary makes a compelling case for engaging with local history as well as bringing together the cast of players; Mary Doherty – a servant in James McKeeny’s farmhouse, and the murder victim. Daniel McKeeny – James McKeeny’s nephew, known sheep stealer and the man strongly suspected of her murder. Michael Gallagher – convicted cattle-stealer and fellow prisoner of McKeeny in Lifford gaol who, in his desperation to avoid transportation claims that McKeeny confessed to him that he committed the murder. Mary Gallagher – Michael Gallagher’s wife, who helps him hatch this plan because she is terrified of being left destitute with two children if her husband is transported. And finally, George Young, landlord and Justice of the Peace. Unlike the other characters, life does not change for Young, being one of the privileged and entitled elites, but he is punctilious and takes his responsibilities seriously in a paternalistic Victorian kind of way.

The murder and its fallout, which unravelled in one tiny corner of Donegal, mirrors the lives of people just like Mary Doherty, Michael McKeeny, and Michael and Mary Gallagher across Ireland at that time. Finding Mary successfully and admirably attempts to reconstruct the intertwined sequence of events and the motives of the players – a microhistory that allows us to enter the world of pre-Famine rural Donegal as through a time machine. Recording the ordinary and unremarkable is one of the most valuable services of historians. It is the daily problems endured by the “ordinary people” after all, that eventually push the bigger things to happen. Uncovering the details then, of a long ago, far away murder contributes, says Byrne, “to historical understanding of the ways in which global systems impacted on the lives of individuals who appear far removed from centres of power.” (P.17) Byrne has truly maxed out on the historian’s toolkit in a way that would serve as a masterclass to Leaving Certificate and First Year university history students, especially in this era of fake news, Chat GPT, of opinion trumping facts rather than being supported by them, and perhaps a predilection to reach for the online world rather than the brick and stone library or archive. She has unearthed the midden and heroically pieced together what evidence is available to reconstruct an event which proves at a micro level yet again, the powerlessness of the dispossessed and the uneducated in a colonised country.

Finding Mary contains so many distinct historical treasures, for example, the Sisyphean round of heavy and time-consuming chores for female servants in smallholder households and isn’t it shocking that a fourteen-year-old girl was shackled to this life. Byrne’s depictions of gaol life, the frisson of activity in a rural town on the day of the quarterly assizes, and of life on board a transportation ship, are exemplary historical tapestries. We are also given an insider view of human interactions in small, tightknit rural communities like Culdaff, not so distant from the feudal pyramid, with the somewhat paternalistic but all-powerful landlord who was also often a Justice of the Peace. As Byrne explains, “The role of JP was considered an honour, but it was also a means of keeping abreast of events in the community and applying a level of control over the population.” (P.37) A reminder, perhaps, of Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, the oppressed who need to be educated not as silent recipients of knowledge, but in ways that will equip them to confront their paternalistic oppressors. These oppressed communities still exist in the world today.

Byrne rightly wonders how Mary might have been treated by the McKeeny family, noting that servants and labourers on farms were often treated quite badly, and this was seen in Ireland right up to the 1950s. The fact that Mary did not attend mass with the family on the morning of her murder might be a clue that they may not have treated her kindly, despite her indispensable ‘maid-of-all-work’ role in the household. Byrne wonders if a wake and a funeral were held for Mary, and can only speculate where she was buried, because parish records from the time have not survived, and a headstone with Mary’s name on it cannot be found.

Before the days of fingerprinting, photography and the telegram, eyewitness accounts were crucial. With circumstantial evidence proving insufficient to pin the murder of Mary Doherty on McKeeny, he was not charged with that crime. Neither was he charged or tried for the theft of fifty shillings from the same house at the same time on that day. If he was found guilty of both crimes he would certainly have faced the gallows. Remarkably, Byrne notes that transportation for minor offences was common at that time as a means of removing disruptive recidivists from local communities. For the powers that be, and doubtless, the neighbours, it was fortuitous that McKeeny had been accused of sheep stealing two years earlier, and it was for this crime that he was eventually transported. Al Capone being “done” for the far less serious tax evasion rather than bootlegging and murder due to lack of evidence, springs to mind.

Interestingly, Gallagher, who tried to shaft McKenny would also be sentenced to transportation for cattle-stealing. It was an old trick played by Michael Gallagher, reporting that his cell mate had confessed to the rape and murder of Mary Doherty, as well as the robbery. The postmortem found no evidence of rape, and Gallagher was deemed to have fabricated McKeeny’s confession to avoid transportation.

McKeeny was a disrupter in Van Diemen’s Land. With a record of bad behaviour and failed escape attempts, he most likely succeeded in finally escaping in 1853 when any written records relating to him dry up. Byrne surmises that he might, like Young Irelander, John Mitchell, have made his way to Sydney, possibly crossed the Pacific to San Francisco and reached New York, perhaps being the same Daniel McKeeny who appears in the1880 US census, by now aged 56 and married with six children. “Were his actions those of a hardened recidivist?” Byrne asks, “Or acts of rebellion against an imperial authority that often imposed excessively harsh sentences on the poorest and most desperate?” (P.77) We know for sure that Michael Gallagher, the cellmate who tried to shaft him, was a better-behaved convict who eventually succeeded in getting a free passage to Van Dieman’s Land for his wife Mary and their two children, who incredibly managed to survive the Famine.

I guess it’s true to say that apocryphal stories or “evidence” abound in local history and are passed down through the generations to impressionable children. I remember plenty from my own childhood in the historical Dublin suburb of Rathfarnham. A wonderful historical artifact reproduced in Finding Mary is an account of Mary’s murder written by a local child as part of the nationwide Schools’ Collection project initiated by the Irish Folklore Commission between 1937 and 1939 to collect local lore and traditions. Unsurprisingly, the account sits firmly in the realm of the penny dreadful.

There are no heroic or likeable rogues in Finding Mary. McKeeny and Gallagher’s romps are far from picaresque. There is a child heroine though, fourteen-year-old Mary Doherty, a heroine because she endured the unspeakable hardship and drudgery of being a servant in a rural mid-nineteenth Irish smallholding. As Byrne says, “She was valued little in life by those whose home she worked in, and little in death by those who instrumentalized her murder in desperate attempts to secure their own futures.” (P.77) No contemporary sources refer to fourteen-year-old Mary as a child, possibly, Byrne explains, because she was an employed person. She might have fared better in Van Diemen’s Land. Who knows? I wholeheartedly recommend Finding Mary to all students of history.

Bio Berni Dwan

Poet, playwright and radio producer, Berni has received funding from Coimisiún na Meán for fourteen radio projects for broadcast on Near FM 90.3. Berni holds a BA in English and History from UCD and an MSc from Trinity College. She has taught English Literature, Creative Writing, History and Journalism in Dun Laoghaire Adult Learning Centre and Dun Laoghaire Further Education Institute. She is a Professional Member of the Irish Writers Centre, where she has delivered two poetry courses, and a participant in the Poetry Ireland Writer in Schools programme.

Coimisiún na Meán funded productions on Near FM 90.3:

History series: Hedge Schools Beyond the Shrubbery. Eight episodes on: https://listenagain.org/?cat=23087 Charmers and Chancers: Chaucer’s Cheerleaders. Five episodes: Charmers and Chancers – Near FM – Listen Again Hungry Gap, Fat Friars, Food Poverty: Three episodes on: https://listenagain.org/?cat=22788

Rebel Parish: Rebel Bus: Memoir [Currently in production]

Independent history productions:

The A to Z of Historical Blunders: Mistakes in History that Should Never Have Been Made https://listenagain.org/?cat=10362