Murphy

On the night of Saturday the twenty-sixth of May 1798, in the village of Boolavogue (Buaile Mhaodhóg in the Irish) in north County Wexford, Father John Murphy, forty-five years old, the curate of the Boolavogue parish (a Catholic parish about eight miles north-west of Gorey), led a group of about a hundred local Catholic-tenant farmers who had refused to surrender their arms under the North Cork Militia's Yeomanry-disarmament-order of the previous fortnight in the rising that became the Wexford Insurrection of the 1798 United Irishmen Rebellion. Murphy had, until the twenty-sixth of May, been a Catholic priest of the conservative tradition who had publicly counselled his parishioners against rising; he had urged them, in the pulpit-sermons of the previous spring, to surrender their pikes-and-fowling-pieces to the Yeomanry. On the twenty-sixth, when the Yeomanry burned the chapel-and-priest-house at Boolavogue in a pre-emptive raid, Murphy reversed his position and led the counter-attack on the Yeomanry detachment at the village. The rising spread through the Wexford and Wicklow countryside in the next forty-eight hours; the Wexford rebels took Wexford town on the thirtieth of May and held the county for about four weeks. The rising was broken by the British government's Crown forces at Vinegar Hill on the twenty-first of June. Murphy was captured at Tullow on the second of July, tried by a military court, hanged the same day on the Tullow market-square gallows, and his body was decapitated and burnt in a tar-barrel. He was forty-five years old. The 1898 P.J. McCall ballad Boolavogue (at Boolavogue, as the sun was setting / o'er the bright May meadows of Shelmalier) became the foundational popular-historical song of the 1798 rebellion and is, by every careful judgment of the Irish popular-historical tradition, the most-sung ballad of the Irish public-political-commemoration calendar.

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