War of Independence witness Kathleen dies in Chicago

One of the last credible witnesses of the War of Independence has died.

Kathleen Clancy, aged 105, was 12 when war broke out in 1919.

In reminiscences to her family, she described her involvement in supporting the IRA in the Westport area during the war.

She told of dodging British army and police patrols to bring provisions to IRA units near her home in Co Mayo.

She described to her children how she was shot at and even threatened once by a group of Black and Tans. “There was one big Black and Tan who knew her and he said ‘Kathleen, you little bitch, we’ll get you yet’,” her son Gerry said as hundreds of Chicago’s Irish community and many others gathered to remember her at the weekend.

“She told us as that as a young girl she would bring them [the IRA units] provisions. They would be sitting around the camp fire and she would hold their rifles until they eat.”

Mrs Clancy, mother of seven, grandmother to 23, and great grandmother to 31, died last week at her home on the northside of the Chicago, where she lived since emigrating to the US in the mid-1950s.

Thousands of people paid their respects at a wake on Friday and funeral on Saturday.

The then Kathleen Kenny was born on the grounds of Westport House, the home seat of the marquess of Sligo, in 1907. In 1935, she married William Clancy, an inspector with Lipton Tea Company. Kathleen was employed by Charles Hughes before starting a family. By the early 1950s, economic hardship led to the couple deciding to emigrate to America, William and the two eldest children left first, in 1952.

Kathleen and the five younger children followed two years later on SS Brittanic.

One of her children, Joe, was killed in 1965 while serving as a US marine in Vietnam; the troop transport plane in which he was travelling crashed.

The rest gathered at the weekend for her funeral.

She did not have a doctor and believed in the power of holy water, hot tea, and soda bread, which she baked until she was 101.

Her death was marked by a full page obituary in the Chicago Sun Times newspaper.