George Driver's Grave

I went looking for the Catholic church in Tinahely (south Wicklow) in the hope it would tell me something about the village’s past. However I was told the nearest church is at Kilaveny two kilometres outside the town and built only in 1843. There had been an earlier church in the area, in nearby Kilcommon, but the building on the site was COI. There had to be a story behind that.

Modern Wicklow began in 1606 when it was the last Irish county to be shired (made a county by royal decree). Previously it was part[Ma1]  of Dublin and Carlow and home of the O’Tooles and O’Byrnes who used its mountains and woods (the finest oak forests in Ireland) to keep outsiders at bay and harass neighbours.

By 1638 English power was spreading out of Dublin and over 90,000 acres in the south of Wicklow were bought by Thomas Wentworth, Lord Deputy of Ireland.  His family were to live there in Coolattin House up to 1948 (it has 117 room on four floors!). They exported the oak from its forests to the Royal navy and its hardy granite for buildings in Trinity College Dublin and Westminster in London.  

The family became the largest landlords in Wicklow with 20,000 tenants in 1836. These great estates in Wicklow encouraged artisans and farmers to come from England for work. By 1790 Wicklow had a higher percentage of Protestants than any other county in Ireland, excluding Ulster.

Tinahely was one of the ‘Planter Villages’, with village greens in angular or diamond shape as in Ulster. But no Catholic church.

The ancient monastic settlement at nearby Kilcommon that had served the community for centuries was taken over by the COI. The local Catholics gathered in an illegal ‘Penal Church’ in nearby Whitefield (more on that another time) and finally a parish church was built at Kilaveny in 1843 to replace the earlier churches.

William Wentworth-Fitzwiliam, of the local Family, was briefly Lord Lieutenant of Ireland in 1794 but recalled to London because he seemed too open to the possibility of Catholic Emancipation. The disappointment this caused among Catholics is said to have led to the 1798 Rebellion which brought havoc to Wicklow and Wexford.

Between August 1798 and October 1800, fifteen Catholic chapels were burned in Wicklow (including Whitefield). In retaliation there were widespread attacks on Protestants and their property, including the massacre of Protestant prisoners in Wexford town. Tinahely was burnt to the ground as it was considered a centre of anti-rebel Yeomen.

In Kilcommon graveyard there is a memorial for George Driver ‘murdered by the Rebels in the late Rebellion, July 2nd 1798’.  

Yet, a small but significant number of the rebellion’s leaders and followers were Protestant: small farmers, miners, textile workers and army deserters. The landlord Fizwilliam family would later sponsor the rebuilding of the Catholic chapel outside the town.

As I passed through Tinahely on my way to Kilcommon, Whitefield and Kilaveny I began to understand the complexity of the trauma the area had experienced.  Stones would be my silent guides.

Photo: George Driver's grave.

 [Ma1]