Clare Museum | Músaem an Chláir

The donor, Kevin Rynne, came across this document in the family home following the death of his mother. It had been the property of his father Michael Rynne (1922-1975), and are believed to have been collected by him.

The document reads as follows:

‘The Bishop of Killaloe has sent the following letter to the ‘Freeman’s Journal’

Ashline, Ennis

Dear Sir,

Permit me to thank you in your columns for you worthy protest against what I cannot otherwise designate than the slow murder of poor Thomas Ashe.

It is horrible that the country has to stand quietly by listening to the monas of the decent young Irish boys who are being slowly done to death behind the walls of Mountjoy Prison by brutal tyrants; or to see them in the last gasp, thrown to die like dogs outside the jail door.

They may die, as brave Thomas Ashe has died, but with other results that Dublin Castle dreamed of. Their dead will sanctify them in the memory of Ireland, and surround their heartless torturers with unextinguishable hatred and ignominy.

This is the sort of cruelty we were accustomed to hear of as possible only in the ancient Bastile, or the dungeons of Naples, or the black prisons of Russia, but as altogether [illegible] possible under English Rule. We have no need to wait for the future to inform us. The world sees already in these hideous atrocities what the triumph of ‘English Culture’ means for small Nationalities.

I am, yours sincerely,

x M Fogarty, Bishop of Killaloe, 26th Sept 1917.’

Thomas Patrick Ashe (1885-1917) was an Irish revolutionary and politician from Lispole, County Kerry. He was a member of the Gaelic League, the GAA, the Irish Republican Brotherhood and was a founding member of the Irish Volunteers. He was a senior commander in the 1916 Easter Rising and was interned in Frongoch after its failure. He was released under the general amnesty in June 1917 and came to Clare to campaign for Eamon de Valera in the East Clare by-election. He was re-arrested in September 1917 and died as a result of forced feeding while on hunger strike in prison.

Michael Fogarty (1859-1955) was the Catholic Bishop of Killaloe from 1904 to 1955. He was a fervent supporter of the Irish struggle for Independence and shared a platform with Eamon de Valera during his 1917 East Clare by-election campaign. Auxiliaries of the Royal Irish Constabulary raided is residence in Ennis during in what is considered to have been an assassination attempt in December 1920, but he was not there. He supported the Anglo-Irish Treaty when it was signed in 1921.