Of the many great women behind the great men of Easter Week and the War of Independence, we must include Kathleen Daly Clarke. Kathleen was born into a nationalist family in Limerick. The Daly family was very big. Kathleen had eight sisters and a brother, Ned, who was born after his father had died. Edward Daly, Kathleen’s father died in 1890, aged only forty-one. It was always thought his early death was brought about by his activities with the Fenians.
During WW2 by a strange quirk of fate, three Allied aircraft crashed within a few miles of each other on the Cooley Peninsula, County Louth. The first occurred when a Lockheed Hudson crashed on Jenkinstown Mountain in September 1941. The second was a B-24 Liberator which crashed on Slievenaglogh Mountain in March 1942. These two incidents have already been chronicled by this author in the Ireland’s Eye editions of July 2000 and April 2001. The subject of this article is the third incident.
After the Great Famine thousands of Irish people, many from Co.Cork, travelled to Cardiff, then a very busy port. They sailed on the coal boats which were used to bring coal from Wales to Ireland. Hundreds of these poor Irish people settled in an area of Cardiff called Newtown. There they lived in crowded houses with poor sanitation. The locals were very hostile to this influx of poverty-stricken diseased Irish emigrants.
