Report Paul Murphy
The difficult life of a Catholic priest in the Ireland of the 1600s was explored at a talk delivered to an attentive audience by Bishop Paul Connell, Bishop of Ardagh and Clonmacnoise as part of Dunsany Heritage Week as Killeen Castle Golf Club in Dunsany last night (Thursday). The title of the lecture was “Archbishop and Martyr – The Life and Death of St Oliver Plunkett” and the lecturer was introduced by John Donohoe.
The life of the martyr, whose relic is venerated at St Peter’s Church in Drogheda, is well known to many audiences but there were some fresh insights into the kind of life he led, his travesty of a trial in London, and the brutal way he met his end at Tyburn. The audience at Killeen included Mary Cosgrave, daughter of the late Liam Cosgrave, former Taoiseach, who spoke about her experiences of accompanying her father at the canonisation of St Oliver in Rome in 1975.
Oliver Plunkett, a native of Oldcastle, was born in 1625, a member of the Plunkett family who lived at Killeen and Dunsany Castles and was tutored at Killeen castle by Fr Patrick Plunkett of the Fingall family. When Oliver was 16 he was smuggled to France and then to Rome where he was ordained. Patrick Plunkett was consecrated Bishop; of Ardagh in the Summer of 1647. This was during a time of religious persecution and he was forced to live on the hills and woods, emerging only at night to administer the sacraments. He later had to go into exile, travelling to Portugal, France and Holland.
Returning after seven years he found himself to be the only bishop in Ireland, ordaining priests and watching over dioceses of which bishops had died or banished from. It was to this Ireland that Oliver returned as primate. During the 1670s he confirmed 10,000 people in the seclusion of woods and mountains and was often on the run during that time.
In 1679 he heard that Bishop Patrick Plunkett was dying and he broke cover to visit him in Dublin but was seized and thrown into a dungeon at Dublin Castle before being put on trial for “refusing to quit the realm”. To the credit of a grand jury in Dundalk, made up mainly of Protestants, refused to find him guilty of high treason. That led to him being transferred to Newgate Gaol in London.
He was condemned to be hung, drawn and quartered at Tyburn on 1 st July 1681. That trial was a travesty. Plunkett had no legal representative and insufficient time was given to allow witnesses on his behalf to travel from Ireland.
His last words were “If I were a man that had not good principles, I might easily have saved my life; but I had rather due ten thousand deaths, then wrongfully take away one”. Pope Benedict XV declared Oliver Plunkett a martyr in 1918 and beatified him in May 1920. He was canonised by Pope John Paul VI in 1975, a ceremony attended by the 12th Earl of Fingall and the countess, and Lord and Lady Dunsany.
