Murphy · 1798
Father John Murphy at Boolavogue
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.
It is twenty past nine on the evening of Saturday the twenty-sixth of May 1798, on the village green of Boolavogue (Buaile Mhaodhóg) in north County Wexford, about eight miles north-west of the market-town of Gorey, in soft late-spring light through the Boolavogue ash-and-hawthorn hedges. He is forty-five years old. He is the Reverend John Murphy, born at Tincurry near Boolavogue on the twenty-fifth of January 1753, schooled at the Seville Irish-College in Spain 1779–84 (the standard education-route for Catholic Irish priests of the eighteenth century, since the Penal Laws prohibited Catholic seminaries in Ireland), curate of the Boolavogue chapel of ease since 1785.
He has, in the past two hours, been witness to the North Cork Militia's Yeomanry-detachment's burning of the Boolavogue chapel-and-priest-house. The Yeomanry detachment of about twenty men under Lieutenant Bookey of Rockspring (a local Anglo-Irish landlord's son), acting under the county-wide disarmament-order of General Lake of the twenty-second of May, came to the Boolavogue priest-house at six this evening to seize Murphy and search for United Irish arms. They had found no arms in the priest-house; they had burned it nonetheless. Two of Murphy's parishioners had been killed in the burning (an unrecorded Boolavogue cottier and his nineteen-year-old son).
He thinks: I have, for the previous six months, been telling the parish from the pulpit to surrender their pikes to the Yeomanry. The parish surrendered, last month, about seventy-five pikes-and-fowling-pieces to the Yeomanry at the Wexford courthouse, on my personal counsel.
He thinks: the Yeomanry have, this evening, burned the chapel and killed two of the parishioners who had, on my counsel, surrendered their arms. The Yeomanry have, in plain reading, broken the tacit-contract on which the disarmament was conditional.
He thinks: the Wexford United Irish leadership at Oulart and at Camolin has been preparing for the rising for the spring. The rising will, on the Boolavogue burning of this evening, begin in the next twenty-four hours. The parish will, by the morning, be in arms.
He thinks: I am the priest of the parish. The parish will look to the priest for the leadership-question. The priest has, on the evidence of this evening, no Catholic counsel that can ask the parish not to rise.
He thinks: if I lead, the rising has a chance of political-discipline. If I refuse, the rising will be the jacquerie of the pikemen, with the priest-of-the-parish on the Yeomanry side. The jacquerie will be put down by the Crown forces in three weeks. The discipline-rising may produce a political-settlement.
He picks up a Yeomanry-cavalry-pistol that had been dropped on the village-green at the burning. He goes into the public-house at the corner of the green where about thirty of his parishioners are. He says, in Irish: fearaibh, tánaig an lá. Tóg na pící. (Men, the day has come. Take up the pikes.)
The Boolavogue rising of the twenty-sixth of May 1798 spread through the north Wexford and south Wicklow countryside in the next forty-eight hours. The rebels under Murphy and Bagenal Harvey defeated the North Cork Militia at Oulart Hill on the twenty-seventh of May and took the town of Enniscorthy on the twenty-eighth. They took Wexford town on the thirtieth and held the county for the next four weeks. The rising was broken by the British army at Vinegar Hill on the twenty-first of June 1798. About thirty thousand people, mostly Catholic countrymen of County Wexford, were killed in the five weeks of the rising, the worst civilian-loss-of-life in any month of Irish history before the Famine.
Father John Murphy was captured at Tullow in County Carlow on the second of July 1798 (he had been on the run with about forty-five surviving followers through the Wicklow Mountains for the eleven days after Vinegar Hill). He was tried by a military court the same afternoon, sentenced to death, and hanged on the Tullow market-square gallows the same evening. By the British-army anti-rebel-priest practice of the summer of 1798, the body was decapitated and burnt in a tar-barrel; the head was put on a spike on the Tullow courthouse roof, where it remained for the six weeks until the Crown amnesty-of-mid-August 1798. The remains were buried by the Tullow Catholic parishioners in an unmarked plot in the Tullow churchyard.
The P.J. McCall ballad Boolavogue, written in 1898 for the centenary commemoration, became the foundational popular-historical song of the 1798 rising. The Boolavogue chapel was rebuilt on the site in 1856; the Father Murphy memorial cross was put up by the Wexford 1898 Centenary Committee on the village green in June 1898. The Boolavogue village is, since 1998 (the bicentenary), the end-point of the annual Wexford-1798 commemorative march.