By Bernadette Gallagher
‘The death has occurred of
Henry Conyngham, The 8th Marquess Conyngham
(Lord Henry Mount Charles)
At Slane Castle, Slane, Meath‘
Confused about his Irishness, with one foot
in both lands, the Irish Sea flows between.
One land offering up titles, the other,
offering up its land by fate and twist of hand.
He went all the way to Boston to study who
we are and what was done;
returning
(unlike the Irish that he and his ‘peers’ threw off
their land)
a ‘real’ republican.
Still holding on to free and easy-got land,
descending down the line to no 9, with
‘courtesy’ titles.
‘Custodians’, you say, of the taken land, of a
people who never needed nor wanted to be
in your custody.
The ‘undertakers’ of displacement and hunger;
his-tory rewritten to make palatable at his table.
Rewriting placenames and townlands from
Irish to English; our language forbidden,
‘Tamhnach an tSalain‘,
renamed in your likeness to that of ‘Mount
Charles’, sits uneasy on the land, to Lord over us.
No sons of Donegal.
The true sons of Ulster, Earls O’Neill and
O’Donnell, who took flight[i], rather than your rule,
laid to unrest in Spain.
Their ghosts and memory, haunting your legacies,
buried deep within castle walls. Your
monuments to occupation.
Our Irishness lies deep in our DNA, imprinted,
unconfused, always knowing who we are/were:
the Real Republicans.
[i] The Flight of the Earls, 1607
