Last man sentenced to death in Ireland had Mayo connections
Local History by Alan King
In Ireland, the last man to be sentenced to death by the horrific process of being ‘hanged, drawn and quartered’ was married to a Castlebar woman from the Main Street.
Anyone who watched the movie Braveheart, starring Mel Gibson, will have seen his character William Wallace die by this process: slowly hanged until he is unconscious, disembowelled and eventually his body cut into quarters.
The person who received this sentence (which was later commuted) was James Francis Xavier (known as J.F.X.) O’Brien, 1828-1905, an Irish Nationalist Fenian revolutionary in the 1860s.
A native of Dungarvan, Co. Waterford, he qualified as a doctor, joined the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) and took part in the 1867 Fenian Rising.
For his participation in an IRB attack on Ballyknockane police barracks, near Mourneabbey, Co. Cork, in March 1867, he was tried for high treason and received the sentence mentioned above.
He was released two years later as part of an amnesty.
He also held the position of president of the IRB, c1869-c1872, and was later elected to the House of Commons as a Member of Parliament for South Mayo, 1885-1895 (and succeeded by Michael Davitt), and for Cork City, 1895-1905.
In 1870, he married his second wife, Mary Teresa O’Malley, with whom he had three daughters and two sons.
Mary’s parents, Patrick and Mary O’Malley, had a business (grocery shop and pub) in Main/Bridge Street where Vaughan’s Shoes is located today.
In 1879, the O’Malley’s sold their business, and their pub licence was transferred to a Michael McDonagh, a businessman who once owned the building in Linenhall Street known in recent times as Gift’s Supreme.
McDonagh was a relation of the Rogers’ family, Spencer Street, and the Munnelly family, McHale Road.
A daughter of JFX and Mary, Molly O’Brien, spent time in Spain as an honorary agent of the Irish Republican Government and after returning to Dublin in 1922, joined the Publicity Department of the government.
Later she transferred to the Department of Local Government, and she died in 1958.
Another member of the O’Malley family, Rev. John O’Malley (1835-1892), a brother of Mary, is credited for coining the term ‘Boycott’, meaning ‘to join with others in refusing to have any dealings with some other individual or group’.
In 1867, Rev. O’Malley was appointed parish priest of The Neale and was one of the first priests to rally behind the land agitation that began in Mayo at the end of 1879.
The term ‘Boycott’ is derived from an incident that occurred at Lough Mask House near Ballinrobe.
An English landlord, Captain Charles Boycott, was very unpopular and showed no leniency to his tenants when rents were in arrears.
After Boycott obtained eviction notices against 11 tenants, Rev. O’Malley ‘advised’ all of Boycott’s servants and farm workers to peacefully leave his estate and not return.
Boycott, despite getting some Ulster loyalist volunteers from the North to help, could not adequately work the land and bring in the harvest.
Shopkeepers in the nearest town of Ballinrobe refused to deal with him or provide transport to and from the farm.
With financial ruin pending, Boycott eventually decided to move his family back to England.
The word ‘Boycott’ came from a dinner between Rev. O’Malley and a journalist James Redpath of the New York Tribune, when O’Malley suggested the word because he felt ‘ostracism’ was too complex a term for the tenants to understand.
Rev. O’Malley remained a leading agitator in south Mayo throughout the land war and died 30th of May 1892.
In the Neale, Fr. John O ‘Malley Millennium Park or ‘The Fairgreen’ was established to honour Rev. Fr. John O‘Malley who founded both the local church (St. John the Baptist) and the local school in the 1870s.
A figure still remembered.
(Alan King is a member of the staff of Mayo County Library).