Home & Heartland Stories

For Those Who Come After: Remembering Maurice (1936-2022)

Our father (Maurice Francis Fitzgerald) was a man of few words, but when he spoke—or when he acted—the message was always clear. His life was a steady current beneath our feet, guiding, steadying, and sometimes even carrying us when we didn’t realize it. Though he rarely needed many words, his actions spoke volumes, leaving lasting impressions on each of his four daughters. We remember him not for grand speeches, but for the simple, steady ways he showed us what love, family, strength, and loyalty look like.

He left us in 2022, but a recent Facebook reel triggered us to write down 4 very different, but clearly similar, expressions of his actions.  We have talked about these stories before, but now we want to be sure his descendants know him as WE knew him.

The eldest, Terry, shared: “My dad met me, unplanned, late at the Waterloo station in the mid 1980s when I returned from a long weekend in Paris.  I was more than an adult and able to get a taxi to my uncle’s house. But daddy wanted to be very sure since it was a late arrival.  About 10pm.  I was never more shocked and so grateful. Dad was not an expressive man by any means. He was more actions than words.  That action has stood with me for more than 40 years now.  I can still see my arrival into the station and him standing there to make sure I got home safely.  And how grateful I was for his kindness.  Lawd I miss him!”

Next in line, Geraldine, shared: “Mine was when Mt. St. Helens blew in 1980. I was at work late in the evening at Kmart. I usually took the bus home, but the traffic was horrible. He parked where Sears used to be and walked over to Kmart. He arrived almost an hour before I was to get off work because he didn’t want me to take the bus.”

Daughter number three, Debbie, shared: “Mine was Steven’s birth in 1994. Mom went to Laura for Avery’s birth. I was on bed rest in hospital. Dad was there every morning and stayed All day. and when I said I was craving a Yoo-hoo chocolate milk (wasn’t even sure they made them anymore) dad went to 4 stores to find and bring me the next day. He was the best man of action.”

Daughter number four, Laura, shared: “I was just telling a friend about the time I was in the hospital for four days with pneumonia (late 2000s)… Dad was there every morning when I woke up and was the last person I saw when I went to sleep. And I was a grown woman with a husband and 4 kids…. He was an amazing man!!!”

We share these stories not just to remember, but to pass on what words alone could never fully capture. Our father taught us that love is not always loud—it is steady, faithful, and quietly fierce. For all those who come after us, may you know that you are part of this legacy too: a legacy built by a man who showed his heart best through simple, powerful acts of devotion. May you carry his spirit with you, just as we do.

Mary Catherine Comyns Fennell • 1897–1984 

The local Black and Tans commander, Charlie Maslin, held a revolver. Mary Catherine Comyns sat before him, a young woman in her early twenties, and he spun the chamber—a Russian roulette session designed to break her will and force her to reveal the whereabouts of local IRA officers. She did not flinch, and she did not speak. That moment captures the core of Mary Catherine: courage without fanfare, commitment without bitterness. 

This moment, described decades later in her 1984 obituary, encapsulates the extraordinary courage of a woman whose life spanned nearly nine decades of Irish history. To understand how she came to face Maslin’s gun, we must return to her beginning. 

She was born Mary Catherine Comyns on August 16, 1897, in Tullabrack West, County Clare, into a family that would become, as her obituary noted, "noted for its devotion to things Gaelic." But her early years were marked by tragedy rather than revolution. Her father Patrick, a farmer, had emigrated to Galveston, Texas, hoping to make a better life for his family and send for them later. Instead, he died there between May and August 1897—before Mary was born, before he could bring them over, before his dream could be realized. Mary never knew him. Her mother Catherine Cushen Comyns raised Mary and her brother Michael alone, managing the farm at Tullabrack with the help of servants. The 1901 census shows Catherine as a literate, bilingual widow, keeping the household together. 

In 1906, when Mary was eight, her mother died of tuberculosis. Orphaned, Mary and Michael moved to Ballykett to live with their maternal uncle John Cussen and his sister Mary. The 1911 census records the children as literate, bilingual, and working on the farm. It was a modest but stable upbringing in a community still bearing scars from the Famine and land struggles. 

Then came the revolution. Between 1917 and 1921, during Ireland's War of Independence, Mary joined Cumann na mBan—the women's auxiliary of the Irish Republican Army—at an early age. She served with the Kilrush 2nd Battalion of the West Clare 1st Brigade—the same unit where her brother Michael would become O/C (Officer Commanding) after the Crown Forces murdered McNamara and Shanahan in 1920. 

Mary's role in Cumann na mBan was both dangerous and vital. As her son Jack would later recount, his mother worked in a family bar on Vandeleur Street, where she put her bilingual skills to strategic use. RIC soldiers, not realizing she could speak English, often talked freely among themselves about military movements and plans. She gathered this intelligence and then became a runner, crossing the fields from Kilrush town to relay information to local commanders. During the War of Independence, Cumann na mBan women were "indispensable as couriers," praised for their "courage, their capacity, and above all, their discretion." Women like Mary leveraged their ability to appear unremarkable—young women going about daily business—while carrying dispatches through dangerous conditions. They used their local knowledge of fields and back roads, their fluency in both Irish and English, and the fact that British forces often underestimated or ignored them. It was work that required not just bravery, but also quick thinking and absolute discretion. 

Kilrush became a flashpoint. On April 22, 1921, the West Clare Brigade launched coordinated attacks across the town: the workhouse, the Coast Guard station, the RIC Barracks. About 60 armed men, supported by 200 scouts and carriers, struck simultaneously. RIC Sergeant John McFadden was killed. Crown Forces destroyed homes in retaliation, their fury so intense that a British soldier died from flying debris. 

Mary's role went beyond reconnaissance or message-carrying. Her pension application and obituary describe how she helped nurse wounded Brigade members back to health, including Ignatius (Terence) O'Neill, who recuperated from his wounds at her uncle's house in Ballykett. The house became a safe haven, and Mary became a target. 

It was Charlie Maslin, the Black and Tans supremo in Kilrush, who subjected her to that terrorizing Russian roulette session. The psychological warfare failed. Mary kept her silence, protecting the men she served alongside. She received the Service Medal (1917-1921) in 1950, and in 1958, she was granted a Special Allowance under the Army Pensions Act for ill health related to her service. 

After the War of Independence, Mary built a different kind of life. On June 26, 1928, she married Matthew Timothy Fennell, a merchant from Kilrush. They settled on Henry Street and raised seven surviving children: John Joseph, Michael Anthony, Matthew Francis, Patrick Senan, Mary Catherine, Margaret Theresa, and Ann Philomena. In approximately February 1948, another son died, possibly stillborn. The infant may be buried in the Cussen family plot in the Breaffa Cemetery. 

Mary, known locally as Cissie or Cis, became a shopkeeper alongside her husband. Together they ran the boot shop Matt had established on Henry Street. Over the course of their life together, the boot shop morphed into a grocery store, adapting to the changing needs of the Kilrush community. When her uncle John and aunt Mary Ann died, Mary inherited the farms at Ballykett and Tullabrack, becoming both shopkeeper and farmer. 

A 1954 court case over livestock trespass shows her son Michael managing the Ballykett property, dealing with damaged fences and wandering cattle while Mary, identified as "Mrs. Catherine Fennell, Henry Street," pursued the legal claim for damages. 

Matthew died in August 1960 at age 67, his health having deteriorated in his final years and his heart and lungs failing him. Mary was 62, a widow like her mother before her. By then, all her children were grown. She continued working, managing the shop and oversight of the farm, even as her children had already begun to scatter in the mid-1950s—to England and the United States—following the emigration patterns that had reshaped Ireland for generations. 

Her revolutionary past would follow her family for decades to come. In the mid-1980s, when her daughter-in-law applied for a position as secretary with the FBI in New York, the background investigation reached back across the Atlantic. A staff member from the U.S. Embassy in Dublin traveled to Kilrush and called to Henry Street to interview her, by then in her eighties, about her service with Cumann na mBan—answering questions about events from more than sixty years earlier. It was a reminder that her choices during the War of Independence still mattered to governments even an ocean away, her revolutionary service still considered relevant in assessing potential security risks. 

When she died on June 6, 1984, at age 86, the Kilrush Urban Council adjourned its meeting in her honor. Vice-Chairman William O'Looney called her "a joyful, cheerful and pleasant person" with "a heart of gold." But her obituary emphasized something else: "She remained staunch to the Republican ideal to the end." That young woman who had faced Charlie Maslin’s revolver never wavered in her convictions. 

She was buried at Breaffa Cemetery, her gravestone identifying her as "Mary Catherine (Cissie) nee Comyn." The nickname "Cissie" suggests the warmth her neighbors remembered. But history records something more: a woman who chose courage when it mattered most. 

About the Author

Terry Fitzgerald is a family historian and genealogical researcher with deep roots in Irish and Irish-American history. Raised in the United States on the edge of two worlds — the country she grew up in and the Ireland her family carried with them — she has spent years tracing the lives of the people whose choices and sacrifices made her own possible. Her research spans church records and census entries, DNA matches and ship manifests, but her truest interest has always been the stories that don't fit neatly into any archive: the adventures, the losses, the moments that get passed down at kitchen tables and then, too often, quietly disappear. These chronicles are her attempt to make sure they don't.

Sources 

● Mary Catherine Comyns, Birth Registration, Irish Genealogy birth or baptism records, #162. 

● Irish census records for 1901 and 1911: Ireland Census 1901. Residents of a house 9 in Tullabrack West (Clooncoorha, Clare) and Ireland Census 1911. Residents of a house 1 in Ballykett (Clooncoorha, Clare). 

● Pension application for Mary Comyns Fennell, 1949; privately held by Terry Fitzgerald, personal collection. 

● Catherine Fennell, Clare Champion 1950-current, Saturday, July 24, 1954 - Page 1. 

● Obituary for Catherine Fennell, Clare Champion 1950-current, Friday, June 22, 1984 - Page 15. 

A Story About Two Boys, a Pair of Nuns, and Sixteen Miles of New York City — circa 1948

The school year was nearly over. It was spring 1948, and at St. Thomas Aquinas in the West Farms section of the Bronx, seventh grade was winding down toward graduation. The boys had their assignments, their prayers, their routines — and, apparently, their errands.

A sister — the exact nun lost to memory now, though the authority she carried certainly is not — singled out two boys from the class. They were to go to Brooklyn. To a destination ten blocks south of Prospect Park. Something to do with graduation: picking up gowns, perhaps, or settling a payment for them. The details have blurred across the decades, the way details do when a story is told often enough that it becomes less a report and more a feeling.

The boys went. Of course they went. You did not argue with a nun in 1948.

In 1948, New York City ran on nickels. The subway fare had held steady at five cents since the system opened in 1904 — forty-four years of reliable, democratic transportation. For a nickel you could go anywhere: from Pelham Bay to Coney Island, from the Grand Concourse to the Battery. The city's promise was encoded in that little coin. (That summer, the city would raise the fare to a dime, and something quietly would change. But in the spring of 1948, a nickel still got you through the turnstile.)

The two boys boarded the IRT and headed south, the elevated train rattling and swaying, the Bronx giving way to Manhattan through the scratched car windows. They would have transferred somewhere in the city — downtown, likely — picking up a Brooklyn-bound line to carry them over the bridge and into the borough, all the way down to the neighborhood below Prospect Park, and then walking the last ten blocks to wherever it was they were supposed to go.

What they saw along the way is not recorded. The candy stores and clotheslines strung between fire escapes. The newsstands thick with afternoon papers. Brooklyn's particular light in spring. Two boys from the Bronx, out in the world, with a mission.

Somewhere, the money ran short.

Maybe it was on the way back. Maybe a transfer cost more than they'd accounted for. Maybe one of them had miscounted. Whatever the cause, they found themselves without enough fare for some leg of the journey — and so they walked. At least two miles, through the streets of Brooklyn and whatever lay between.

They made it home. They always make it home in stories like this — or rather, the ones who make it home are the ones whose stories we get to tell. And whatever the errand was, it was presumably completed, because nuns in 1948 expected results.

He tells it with a shrug, this father of mine. A shrug and a small smile — the bemusement of a man remembering a thing that happened to a boy he used to be, in a city that no longer quite exists. It was an adventure. A good one, maybe. A story worth keeping.

It wasn't until I pulled up the map that I understood what a shrug was covering.

From St. Thomas Aquinas on Daly Avenue in the West Farms section of the Bronx to ten blocks south of Prospect Park in Brooklyn: sixteen miles. Across two rivers. Through three boroughs' worth of neighborhoods that neither boy would have known well. On a transit system they apparently did not have quite enough money to complete.

Sixteen miles. Two twelve-year-old boys. No cell phones. No safety net. On the authority of a nun who had other things to attend to.

We could not do this today. Or rather — we would not. The city exists, more or less. The subway still runs. Twelve-year-old boys still exist and are still, occasionally, capable of navigating the world. But we have decided, as a culture, that this particular kind of trust is not ours to extend. We track. We text. We wait at pickup lines. We would not send two children alone across sixteen miles of New York City and expect them home in time for supper.

My father did not find this remarkable. That is perhaps the most remarkable thing about it.

He was a Bronx kid in 1948, twelve years old, a Catholic school boy in the late American moment when children were trusted to be small, competent people who could get somewhere and come back. The city was their neighborhood, in a way we have trouble imagining now. The subway was just how you got places. The nuns dispatched you and you went.

What he remembers, seventy-odd years later, is not hardship. He remembers an adventure. Two boys, a city, a mission, not quite enough money — and home before dark.

About the Author