I am with you

Erwin

Can I explain ... this is not an attempt to claim ownership of anything.
Merely a method of keeping track of posts which have a relevant irish connection.
There is no 'bar' on anyone ..
Des

I'm in... ! Somebody was telling about drinking?
I prefer Kilkenny over Guinnes... 

regards,

The Beer Archives, I mean The Passchendaele Archives

I dont know where else to post this, but I hope Irish types find it interesting.

Private John Condon - the youngest soldier to die in WW1
WWI 1914-1918

The other day, I noticed for the first time the memorial in Carlow to Lieut Kevin Gleeson, killed in action in the Congo over 40 years ago, writes Kevin Myers.

A million violent deaths or more have followed his in that terrible part of the world, and our planet has not grown measurably safer in the decades that have passed. But there is a measurable unity in the chronic disorder which took his life, and which caused me to pass the memorial to this brave young son of Ireland.

I was going to Waterford for the launch of the fund-raising campaign to erect a memorial to another son of Ireland. It would be fatuous to say he was brave, because we know almost nothing whatever of the last hours of 14-year-old John Condon, who was the youngest British soldier killed in the Great War. Yet far from his particular tragedy entering the folklore of the place where he was from, it was entirely forgotten.

His tragedy was unique only in his youth. As early as the spring of 1915, his regiment, the Royal Irish Regiment, which recruited from Tipperary-Waterford areas, had had over 500 officers and men killed in action. Perhaps as fresh draughts of reservists and new recruits were being readied for the front, the youth of the boy-soldier John Condon got overlooked.

Hence he arrived in the front-line trenches near St Julien which had been under repeated gas attacks for a month. At 2 a.m. on May 24th, 1915, the Royal Irish were stood to arms near Mouse Trap Farm. Twenty minutes later, the gas rolled in yet again from the German positions. Some of the Irish soldiers had respirators. Most didn\\'t. In the final action of what we now know as the second battle of Ypres, the second battalion of the Royal Irish regiment was all but wiped out.

Every officer, bar one, was dead or wounded. The survivors were held together by their sergeant major, Freddie Plunkett, who was to finish the war as a brigadier general, twice recommended for the Victoria Cross, with a DSO and two bars, an MC and a DCM.

No such celebrity awaited John Condon. His war was over, and his bones, and a boot, were only found some seven years later. Moreover, down the years that followed, it became increasingly difficult to talk in public about what had befallen the tens of thousands of Irishmen, and not a few women, who like young Condon had died in the Great War. A new state had come into existence, and it was forging a new identity based on a narrative which actively excluded all those who had followed the almost unanimous advice of their political and church leaders and joined the colours. In time, an amnesia of almost Stalinist rigour consumed this country.

This is particularly perplexing for a people with such a powerful and vigorous memory as the Irish. When I first visited Condon\\'s grave in Poelkappelle cemetery near Ypres in 1984, I discovered that he was buried next to 47-year-old Thomas Carthy, who, according to the cemetery register, had been married to Mary Condon of 34 River Street, Clonmel, Co Tipperary. On returning home, I wrote a letter to the occupiers of that house, asking them if they knew what happened to the Carthy family.

The reply came from a lady in Nenagh, whose grandmother had been Thomas Carthy\\'s sister. The Carthys were Church of Ireland small-town poor. He had been the eldest of (I think) 11 children; her maternal grandmother the youngest. The house at 34 River Street had been demolished in the 1930s, and, over time, most of the family had become Catholic.

So. Fifty years after Thomas Carthy\\'s house was demolished, the local postal authorities in Tipperary were able to track down his great-grand-niece, despite a change in town, a change in religion and two marital name-changes.

To have successfully delivered my letter was a heroic piece of communal memory, and a uniquely Irish one. Yet the culture that could connect such genealogical detail over half-a-century was still prepared to consigned to the dustbin of history the enormous machinery which caused the middle-aged Thomas Carthy to lay his bones alongside those of the boy John Condon, for the rest of time.

But now, finally, inspired and led by the splendid city mayor, Tom Cunningham, and organised by the indefatigably efficient city archivist, Donal Moore, the city of Waterford is undoing that great historic wrong by erecting a beautiful memorial to young Condon. The sculpture is designed by Anne Harpur and Patrick Cunningham, and it is clear from the maquette that it will be hauntingly evocative, its very molecules infused with a sense of loss of so much life, so much hope.

Thus Waterford is finally remembering Private John Condon, 14, Royal Irish Regiment: RIP