Book review: Short life of Mary mattered

All trace of 14-year-old Mary Doherty faded from view days after her brutal murder in 1844 yet her presence is evident on every single page of this moving book

Historian Angela Byrne set herself the almost impossible task of ‘Finding Mary’, to quote the title of her book.

• Finding Mary: the untold story of an Inishowen murder, 1844 
• Angela Byrne 
• Four Courts Press, €11.65

On a Sunday morning in March 1844, Mary Doherty, a 14-year-old servant, was murdered during a robbery at a farmhouse near Culdaff in Co Donegal while the family was out at Mass.

The details of her murder were reported nationally and internationally, in lurid detail. 

The “consternation and disgust” were felt all the more acutely because such an “atrocious and cold-blooded” murder was so rare in rural Donegal, the British weekly paper The Era reported.

After a few days, though, the story faded from view and with it all trace of Mary Doherty. 

All that remained were the whispers echoing in folk memory about the blood stains that would never wash away from the walls, and the sound of fiddle-playing that could be heard at night if you walked by the site of her murder.

The story of her short life was told, if at all, through the lens of the man who was widely believed to have murdered her, Daniel McKeeny. 

While he was never charged with her murder, he was transported for 15 years to Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) for sheep stealing.

The local landlord George Young did, however, remark that he deserved to be hanged much more than the man who was given a death sentence on the same day he was in court on March 15, 1845.

McKeeny’s after-life in the penal colony is recorded in astonishing detail, right down to accounts of his disobedience of orders, neglect of duty, and repeated attempts to abscond.

In stark contrast, Mary vanishes. There are just four references to her in the historical record. 

It is not known where she was born or where she is buried yet historian Angela Byrne set herself the almost impossible task of ‘Finding Mary’, to quote the title of her book on the untold story an Inishowen murder.

At one point the historian, who has proven so adept at retrieving women’s stories from history, felt that she was grasping at air when she attempted to reach across time to trace the scant outline of a woman whose only footprint is the brutal fate she met in death. 

Her throat was cut, her skull fractured, and her killer tried to burn her remains.

In the absence of evidence, Byrne mines a wide range of sources to situate Mary in the pre-Famine rural setting where she spent her few short years on earth. 

The author’s rigorous research creates points on a broad canvas on which the terrible action plays out.

She leads the reader expertly through her own discovery of Mary’s murder, outlined rather poetically in the preface, and then she shifts tone to don her historian hat to bring the Donegal of 1844 into sharp focus.

The impatient reader in me wanted to get straight to the action, but chapter one immerses you in a time when most people scrambled through life against a backdrop of unrest and low-level criminality.

Widespread hardship was “alleviated only by the ingenuity, effort and hard work of all members of a labouring household, down to the youngest child”, Byrne writes.

It is easier, then, to understand why a nephew would turn on his own uncle and attempt to steal 50 shillings from a chest, although the brutality of his crime is beyond comprehension.

But Finding Mary is not really a book about finding all of the answers. It is more a study in how to retrieve a forgotten woman from the cracks of history. 

While we might not learn much about Mary Doherty, her presence is evident on every single page of this moving book.

She was little valued in her short life and less in death, but here at last is a book that shows her short life mattered.