Michael Davitt’s Mother

This year (2020) is believed to be the bicentenary of the birth Catherine Kielty, who became the mother of the great Irish patriot and founder of the Land League, Michael Davitt, 1846-1906. While the exact date of her birth has not been established, she is said to have been born in or around 1820 beside the round tower in the parish of Turlough in County Mayo. Around 1840, Catherine married Martin Davitt, a tenant farmer from Straide in County Mayo. Catherine could neither read nor write, which was very common at that time, but she was the dominant partner in the marriage. A fluent Irish speaker, she had a great pride in the language as almost all families in County Mayo were then Irish speaking. Catherine, passionate, proud, and possessed of a great natural intelligence, was a good Christian, with a rich imagination, strong nationalistic views and a good memory, especially of the suffering and poverty she and her family endured. Her stories of these times were very influential on Michael.

Four children were born to Catherine and Martin Davitt in Straide: Mary (1841), Michael (1846), Anne (1848) and Sabina (1850). (A fifth child, a boy, was later born in England but did not survive.) They were christened in the nearby seventeenth-century church in Straide (which was refurbished and opened in 2000 to house the impressive Michael Davitt Museum). The 1840s in Ireland was a difficult period in which to rear a young family. With the frugal subsistence of most families deteriorating each year, it was a major struggle to survive. Despite securing work on a local relief scheme and going to England as a seasonal migratory labourer for the summer of 1849, Martin Davitt was unable to pay off the arrears of rent which had accumulated during the Great Famine, 1845-50. After being served with an ejectment notice in 1849, the Davitt family were evicted, probably in October 1850, as part of the ‘great clearances.’ This involved the landlord’s agents forcing in the door of their home with a battering-ram, putting the family out on the road, and knocking the house, an unforgettable experience for any family. Michael never forgot that scene.

The family went to the local workhouse in Swinford, but when Catherine was told that children over three years of age had to be separated from their mothers, she promptly took her family away after one hour. Sharing the fate of many thousands of Irish dispossessed by the famine, the Davitt family emigrated to Haslingden, a small textile town in Lancashire in England about twenty-seven kilometres north of Manchester. Catherine and Martin reared their family there in difficult circumstances until 1870, when they emigrated with their three daughters to Scranton in Pennsylvania, USA. Life continued to be difficult for them there and after Martin’s death in December 1871 at the age of fifty-seven, Catherine and two of her daughters moved to Manayunk, a suburb of Philadelphia, in search of better opportunities.

Michael Davitt was fortunate to be in the United States, on one of his many visits there, when his mother died at Manayunk on July 18, 1880. Her death caused him great remorse and he reflected on how little he had been able to do for her and all the worry his life had caused her. It was her wish to be buried in Turlough, County Mayo, but Michael and his sisters could not afford the expense involved and, to his grief, she was buried in the grounds of the Church of Saint John the Baptist, 146 Rector Street, Manayunk. A harp and a bunch of shamrock decorate her gravestone to recall her Irish background.

Exploring Mayo by Bernard O’Hara is now available Worldwide as an eBook for the amazon Kindle application.

The print version of Bernard O’Hara’s book Exploring Mayo can be obtained by contacting www.mayobooks.ie.

www.mayobooks.ie also sell the print versions of Killasser - Heritage of a Mayo Parish , Anseo and Davitt.

Bernard O'Hara's book entitled Killasser: Heritage of a Mayo Parish is now on sale in the USA and UK as a paperback book at amazon.com, amazon.co.uk or Barnes and Noble

It is also available as an eBook from the Apple iBookstore (for reading on iPad and iPhone), from Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk (Kindle & Kindle Fire) and from Barnesandnoble.com (Nook tablet and eReader).

An earlier publication, a concise biography of Michael Davitt, entitled Davitt by Bernard O’Hara published in 2006 by Mayo County Council , is now available as Davitt: Irish Patriot and Father of the Land League by Bernard O’Hara, which was published in the USA by Tudor Gate Press (www.tudorgatepress.com) and is available from amazon.com and amazon.co.uk. It can be obtained as an eBook from the Apple iBookstore (for reading on iPad and iPhone), from Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk (Kindle & Kindle Fire) and from Barnesandnoble.com (Nook tablet and eReader).