A look back at the local man who was immortalised by his brutal execution

SO how did a young Presbyterian farmer from Duneane become the subject of a cherished song, recorded by The Dubliners, The Pogues and many more besides?

Hailed as an Irish martyr for his role in the United Irishmen revolt of 1798, it was ironically his untimely death that ensured his name lived on.

Yet for many outside republican circles the name Roddy McCorley will barely register at all. His story, like the failed rebellion itself, is seldom taught in schools.

Nevertheless, despite attempts to quietly airbrush him from history, it still has the power to resonate today - hailed as a textbook example of how the power of the state can be coldly turned against their own subjects if the whiff of revolution is in the air.

So what do we know about the local man? Well, in truth the details are sketchy - with tales of his heroism told through a romanticised prism of the ‘struggle’ 225-years-ago.

It certainly appears that the McCorley family, like many Presbyterians at the time, had been fired up by the revolutionary spirit of the time galvanised by the treatment meted out by landlords.

Indeed, just a few short years before the uprising Roddy’s beloved father was hanged for stealing sheep - though many believed he was condemned by ‘cursed perjury’, silenced to remove a troublesome agitator at a time of great social unrest.

Following the conviction the family were evicted from their small holding.

So when the call to arms finally came, local lore has it that McCorley happily heeded it.

It is said that he led ‘a band of rebels’ at the Battle of Randalstown. They attacked in numbers forcing the Yeomen to retreat to the Market House, finding refuge in the upper storey.

Indeed, it may have been Roddy who thought of setting the building ablaze forcing the enemy to surrender. They were disarmed and sent to Brogan’s Island - while the jubilant United Irishmen awaited news of a similar breakthrough in Antrim.

But when the county town did not fall, they quickly realised that the gig was up and the insurgents dispersed.

McCorley sought sanctuary with ‘loyal friends in the Presbyterians of Drummaul’. They were people ‘tried and true who would guard him, if need by, with their lives’.

It is said his protectors even organised visits by his sister Mary and his ‘sweetheart’ under the cover of darkness.

But he longed for freedom and eventually heeded the call of the bogs and meadowlands of Ballyscullion. People were poorer there, but their humble homes were always open to the leaders of the uprising.

Around this time it is understood that he joined the Archer Gang, led by Thomas Archer.

Some of their number had been members of the Irish militia who switched sides in the conflict, and as such were guilty of treason and thus exempt from the terms of amnesty offered to the rank and file of the United Irishmen.

This meant outlaws were always on the run but they taunted the crown by mounting sporadic attacks on them, as well as engaging in common crime across the valleys and glens of Antrim.

These exploits only enhanced McCorley’s status as a folk hero - and that, in turn, made him a wanted man.

His luck finally ran out in 1800 when an act of betrayal handed him to the dreaded red coats.

Writing in 1907 Francis Joseph Bigger said the local man was finally found hiding by the shores of Lough Beg by Samuel Finneston. It was said that a Catholic man called Duffin had betrayed him and another by the name of MacErlain had ‘laid the snare’.

Weighed down by heavy chains, McCorley was tried by court-martial in Ballymena on 20 February. There was only one sentence. He would hang at the bridge in Toome before the month was out.

To send a signal to others, ‘justice’ would be swift - and it would be brutal.

There are several written accounts of the fateful day, all written after the fact.

Writing in 1951 Nora Ni Chathain tied her colours firmly to the mast. She was clearly a fan.

From a young age, the name - who had been elevated to a major figure in nationalist-republican martyrology due to Ethna Carbery’s poem ‘Roddy McCorley’, written in the 1890s - summoned images of him marching ‘shining pike in hand’ into the fray in 1798 under the green banner which had been fashioned by his sister Mary.

According to the historian, Mary was there on February 28 as McCorley completed his long march from Ballymena.

She was determined to meet him one final time and get a curl of his ‘shining hair’.

‘Concealed in her hand she had a tiny scissor, and when at length she pressed her way through the crowd to her brother’s side she hurriedly whispered her request and, smilingly, he bent his head so that she might chop off the golden curls she wanted.

‘And then a loving word or two of farewell and he was gone, swept around a bend of the road, a prisoner, from her sight.

‘She would never again see him walking along with that gallant, swinging walk; never behold that bright, flashing smile; nor hear that gay, laughing voice’.

Mary turned away and walked back to her desolate home, clutching her treasured keepsake. She did not want to see what happened next.

‘But Roddy marched on proudly and gladly, exulting in the knowledge that he had been accounted worthy to give his life for Ireland.

‘His blue eyes were undimmed as they looked their last on the scene he loved; on the misty slopes of Slemish, on the calm waters of Bann, on the Church Island spire on the island of Lough Beg...

‘He knew that the music of the waterfalls where the river leaves Lough Neagh for its slow journey to Coleraine would sound in his dying ears.

‘In a moment he would have to bow his head to the rope and then his soul would be speeding into eternity to join the countless hosts of those who had ever died for an ideal’.

Grim horror

Stirring stuff, but that romanticised reading of that day does not record the grim horror of events unfolding in the village.

For that, step forward Francis Joseph Bigger and his unflinching account.

The scaffold, he said, had been ‘rudely constructed’ on the bridge - a large platform at the base of which the masked hangman stood.

Beside the bridge parapet a stout post had been sunk in the ground, and from the top of it was a bar at right angles over which the rope was thrown.

That was unusual. It had been designed to allow the executioner to swing the struggling body over the water after the drop for added ‘insult and indignity’.

A large crowd had gathered, many of them ‘sympathetic friends and neighbours’.

Roddy McCorley spoke briefly, calling for repentance from ‘cruel Sam’, before meeting his fate.

After his body became deathly still it was cut down and carried to the nearby barracks. But the indignity did not end there.

McCorley was then disembowelled ‘with horrid barbarity’ in clear view of the crowd.

And, according to the crown, he deserved no better.

‘As a warning to others, it is proper to observe that the whole of his life was devoted to disorderly proceedings of every kind, for many years past, scarcely a Quarter-sessions occurred but what the name of McCorley appeared in a variety of criminal cases.

‘Thus of late we have got rid of six of those nefarious wretches who have kept this neighbourhood in the greatest misery for some time past, namely, Stewart, Dunn, Ryan, McCorley, Caskey and the notorious Dr. Linn. The noted Archer will soon be in our Guard-room’.

Roddy was buried at the rise of the bridge on the roadway where all the traffic from Antrim and Derry would trundle over it.

The story does not end there, however.

Solemn procession

In 1852 it was decided that the old bridge had to go and plans were drawn up for a replacement.

The foreman was a ‘fine, strong giant of a man’. His name was Hugh McCorley - and he was Roddy’s nephew.

He knew exactly where the body lay and he regulated his work to suit his plans.

On June 29 - the Feast of Saints Peter and Paul - he made his move.

The body was found intact and, reverentially, it was lifted from the clay and placed in a coffin which was carried slowly through Toome - past the gallows corner, across the bog, by the old road to Duneane where he was laid to rest in the family plot.

‘It was a great funeral. Not only did all the workmen attend, but the whole countryside was there to do honour to one who laid down his life for his country’.

His legend, added Bigger, outlived his accusers.

‘The names of landlords, yeomen, clergymen are quite forgotten and can only be culled from musty records, but the name Roddy McCorley is known to all - the proudest name on all the hills and by the lough shore around Toomebridge’.

Over a century on man who now rests in a Church of Ireland graveyard is still remembered - in west Belfast.

The Roddy McCorley Republican Heritage Museum opened this week and showcases, they say, ‘a spectacular collection of artefacts and memorabilia as curated by the Roddy McCorley Society over the past 40 years’.

‘The collection charts the Republican struggle for independence dating back to the 1798 Rebellion, through the revolutionary period before and after 1916, right up to the Peace Process of the 1990s’, adds their website.

A multi-million pound monument for a proud Presbyterian from Duneane.