Independent Archive: Ned Kelly's father Red was a mean fellow

The Independent Archive

25 August 1988

Australians on walkabout in a tiny Irish village have been hearing the truth about its most famous son, reports Stan Gebler Davies

AT FETHARD, in County Tipperary, members of the Historical Society have just revealed the true past of the most notorious felon ever to visit the place. It was not Oliver Cromwell, who behaved quite well when he passed through in 1650. The news is likely to upset some Australians in this, their bicentennial year, for it is now proved conclusively that John Kelly, father of Ned, their national hero, and a native of Fethard, was a mean fellow and a police informer to boot.

John "Red" Kelly was a big man. He was born up the road at Clonbrogan in February 1820 and transported to Van Diemen's Land in August 1841. Seven years after he was released from imprisonment there he fathered Ned, the notorious bushranger, on Ellen Quinn, an emigrant from Ballymena.

Australian patriots of the Republican stripe have always maintained that he was framed. He never stole the pigs for which he was sentenced, or, if he did, he stole them from a wealthy Protestant or an Englishman, which is no crime at all. Undoubtedly he told his famous son that he had been the victim of British imperialists, for Ned, before he was hanged (for shooting three Irish Catholic policemen, incidentally), was eloquent on that subject.

Alas, the true tale is not so heroic. The pigs belonged to James Cooney of Ballysheehan, a close neighbour of the Kellys, who had three-eighths of an acre and a log cabin of their own, measuring approximately 27 feet by 15. The wretched Cooney, by contrast, was a landless labourer who kept the pigs to pay the rent. Kelly had picked on someone even more miserable than himself. The details are to be found in the police report filed at Dublin Castle under the title, "Report of Outrage No 36.081, dated 9 December 1840".

The day before his own trial he appeared as crown witness in the trial of one Reagan (no relation) who was sent down for 10 years for stealing seven fat cows. They were transported on the same vessel.

This new and precise intelligence is the consequence of the formation of the Fethard Historical Society in March of this year. There are many such societies springing up in Ireland now, most likely the consequence of an Irish desire to know what actually did happen in the past, now that history is happening to Ireland again, and mythology is plainly one of the contributing causes.

The members are amateurs but highly enthusiastic and thorough. The Ned Kelly sub-committee, consisting of Terry Cunningham, Mary Hanrahan and Maria Crean, had gone to the trouble of organising a walkabout this week to take in the church where John Kelly had been baptised (it is to be pulled down next month), the Cooney cabin whence the pigs were snatched, and the Kelly homestead itself, which is now the muddy section of a field inhabited only by curious heifers.

A high-powered delegation came down from Dublin to hear this new history, led by Mr Con Howard, co-ordinator in this island of the Australia-Ireland Conference. He is employed by the Department of Foreign Affairs to oversee cultural relations with the rest of the world.

The walkabout proceeded in three buses. There was a light drizzle coming out of the sky; it was a happy occasion. Standing on the mud which once constituted the Kelly cabin, a piper played the lament called "Slievenamon", after the mountain which looms up above Fethard. In Ballyporeen, at the other end of Tipperary, the locals packaged dried mud and sold it as part of the Reagan presidential homestead but do not think the sensible people of Fethard will follow their example.

Sir Sidney Nolan, the Australian artist who has painted many scenes depicting the career of Ned Kelly, sent his greetings. He has bought himself a property in Co Clare. He is returning to his roots. He met in 1945 Ned Kelly's brother, which seems astonishing, and his own great-grandfather was one of the policemen who was sent to track the outlaw down. It is all history now.

From `The Independent', Thursday 25 August 1988