Hello and welcome to the documentary and one last week we brought you Thomasson tests, the first story in a series of War of independence related docs that we're revisiting as we build towards the release of our new doc on the Bloody Sunday centenary.

And so to the second doc in this War of Independence mini podcast series.

Exactly 100 years ago, on November 1st, 1920, 24 year old Eileen Quinn, pregnant and with three children, was shot dead outside her home in Galway.

In this podcast, Ireland's Grandy's All O'Higgins pieces together the events of that day and explores the impact this catastrophic event had on future generations of their family. This is reprisals, the Eileen Quinn's story. Well, I mean, you married women sit and suckle children now armed men, they murder them and passing by. No law, no parliament, take heed. Then close your ears with dust and lie among the other cheated death in November 1920, Ireland is a dangerous place.

It was the second year of the war of independence and the nation was gripped by terror. And in the rolling countryside of South Galway, the shooting death of a 24 year old woman shook a family and a close knit community to the core. That woman was Eileen Quinn, and she was my great aunt of Trivium, November 6th, 1920. Eileen Quinn, a young married woman, was shot by uniformed men passing in a lorry at her home at Kiltartan Gaut.

Mrs. Quinn was sitting on a wall outside her door, holding her youngest child in her arms when she was shot through the hip. On my desk, I have a framed black and white photograph of Eileen. She looks like Scarlett O'Hara from Gone with the Wind. Hair is tied back in a bow and she's looking up towards the sky. Growing up, I only ever heard snippets of stories about Eileen, but I always wanted to bring her memory to life.

I love Eileen's grandson.

Jared Quinn has been helping me find out more about my great aunt who was killed in mysterious circumstances almost 100 years ago. Yoshio's is like quited, very curly hair. Presumably why it's so tight here, but my first daughter has exact same here. So I thought, you know, I see her in her.

Jarett has spent a number of years researching what exactly happened on that fateful day.

He's also my second cousin, my grandfather, Maleki Quynh married Eileen Gilligan. So Eileen Quinn is my grandmother.

She was born Eileen Gilligan in 1896 in a small town land in South Galway called Raheen. She was the second oldest in a family of 11 and went to the Convent of Mercy School and got unusually enough for the time she stayed at school until she was 16. Eileen was a fan of literature and loved the sonnets of Shakespeare. She also loved music. So it's no surprise that she met her husband, Maleki, at a dance at the crossroads near her home.

Maleki married Eileen.

Yes, very young, I imagine, because she was killed when she was about 24 and she already had three children. Alfred, who is my father, tests and ever so there were the three children and of course there was one on the way as well.

Eileen and Maliki's three children were under the age of four, and in November 1920, she was seven months pregnant. They owned their own farm, about 70 acres, and they had a servant girl to help with the children and the housework. They also rented another 70 acres from Lady Gregory, the local Protestant landlord who lived in CWD Park Estates near their home. Beyond the farming world of South Goldway, political changes were taking place that would end up having a devastating effect on Eilene and her family.

Folarin had been formed the year before in January 1919. The army of the newly declared Irish Republic, the IRA, set about gaining independence from Britain. They began their guerrilla attacks on the Royal Irish Constabulary police force and there were ambushes and killings on both sides. Brendan McGowan from the Galway City Museum.

The oracy were primarily Irish Catholics. A lot of them would have gone into the service, not for any loyalty to the crown, but certainly just as a job and a secure and safe and career path, maybe until.

And the War of Independence did a reasonably good interaction with the local community because of increased threat from nationalists in Ireland, the British government started advertising in Britain for men willing to face a rough and dangerous task to support the Irish Sea. The first option was to bring in the black and tans who are made up of soldiers from the First World War. What they were were the.

I see special reserve force and they didn't have enough or I see uniforms. When they arrived in Ireland, they had a mismatch uniform and there were soon nicknamed the Black and Tans.

These were backed up by the auxiliaries former British army officers who wasted no time in making their presence felt.

I suppose they were battle hardened. They were sent here in their eyes to put down a terrorist organisation. They want, you know, Irishman's or maybe they had less feeling towards the native population. I often wonder if some of them were, you know, suffering from post-traumatic stress after being in the trenches and suffering in the First World War. So they came here. Yes. And they had a reputation for brutality and they certainly carried out. But I suppose they should be forgotten.

It was tit for tat. It was both sides.

And certainly the the IRA and our volunteers carried out attacks that were were, you know, atrocious at the time. And it was a tit for tat.

But certainly when you see some of the key incidents and some of the big incidents that were suddenly out of control, these tit for tat killings became known as reprisals or revenge killings, where both sides responded to attacks with brutal retaliation. The policy of reprisals wasn't officially endorsed, but was tolerated, according to British MP for Oxford Lord Hugh Cecil.

It seems to be agreed that there is no such thing as reprisals, but they are having a good effect.

November 1920 was one of the bloodiest months of the war of independence.

I think you need to go back a few days to really get the context for the killing because on Saturday, before the Monday, Monday was the day of the actual killing. In November the 1st, 1920, there was an Irishman killed close by as part of an IRA ambush. He was Timothy Horan.

He was age 40 with very young family himself. And the practice, if not the policy, but certainly the practice of the auxiliaries, was to conduct unpredictable, unpredicted reprisal raids after the killing of a policeman or a member of the black intelligence or the auxiliaries. So it's speculation. But I think it's fair to speculate that the reprisals that occurred on Monday, the 1st of November, killing my grandmother was a reprisal for the killing of the RISC man two days prior to that, to some extent, life went on as normal cows need to be milked and he in turn needed to be saved in other ways.

The sound of crossly tender's across the countryside would have terrified people and people would risk night raids. People were fearful that if there was an attack on the RISC in their community that there would be retaliation and people were fearful of that.

Curfews were in place, according to a written account by Lady Gregory, Maleki had brought in the harvest dog. The potatoes, trashed the corn and was ready for the winter. That morning, he went to the local fair and Gaute leaving Eileen, the children and the young servant at home. My second cousin, Kathleen Ronan, recalls the story.

It was a market day and got what was called a fairer day. But there was all this going on on a bicycle with the cattle while Maliki was at the fair.

Trucks left Lenno Boy barracks in Galway City for the town of Gaute. They contained members of the notorious D company auxiliaries who were ruthless in the tactics of terror they employed.

He was late and coming home, so she went out to the front gate to see was there any sign of him? Because that usually in those days there were through word of mouth, there were no off the back. Contents arrived into the town. Simply they had and the men had to hide.

One company relieving guards to return to Goldway, they fired off round, first in the square and then on their way out of town, Rena McCallan, curator of the country and Gregory Museum, describes the route they took that day that were on a rampage and highly fueled drink or whatever, because then they passed out wins and they shot at the foul in the next door, which was O'Donoghue Donahoe's further down the road.

They broke windows and Callinan's house. So it was certainly on a rampage that day and certainly she was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Saturday, November the 6th, mother killed is the men heading and then underneath that sequel to Shots from Passing Laury, the most graphic accounts of the day my great aunt died come from the correct Tribune.

Judy Murphy is assistant editor with the paper.

The paper would have been the main source of news, really for local people, and there would have been national news on it as well. Being a journalist would have been very, very difficult because you were literally trying to report on what was happening, but not antagonize either side so much that they stopped your reporting on what was happening. And that was a constant threat.

At around quarter to 3:00 in the afternoon, the trucks could be heard approaching Eileen's house.

They were in Crossly Tender's, which are open air trucks that would comfortably accommodate six people. She was sitting on a style in her front wall adjacent to the main road, and the house was only about 15 feet behind that wall. And she had one of her children on her laps. And one part of the testimony as to the effect that the truck slowed down as they approached the house and shot or shots were fired, a servant girl assisted her to the porch.

She bled profusely, was very weak and suffered great pain. Her condition was serious. The child escaped. A priest and medical aid were quickly summoned from got two miles distant.

One of the main characters to emerge from the stories in the chaotic Tribune was the local parish priest from Gaut, Father John Considine.

At about 3:00 p.m., Malachi Quinn called for me and said he had just heard that his wife had been shot. I procured a motor car and hurried to the scene. At the Gateway, there was a large pool of blood on the roadside about three yards away. There was another pool and the porch leading to the kitchen was actually covered with blood.

The young girl, I think she was only about 18, 17 or 18, was a house servant at the time, gathered up all of the children and brought them upstairs. Eileen was brought into the lower level of the house on shaolong. I think it still exists.

Dr. Sandström got a Dr. Foley from our drain or quickly on the scene. Surgeons man and OMalley from Galway were wired for not so great was the sense of terror that they couldn't get a motor car to take them to the scene.

Island suffering was obvious from Dr. Senthil statement in the chaotic Tribune.

When I reached Mrs. Quinn at about three 30, she had the appearance of having lost a lot of blood. I was in a state of collapse. I found a wound in the left groin caused by the bullet. The hemorrhage was then stopped. She had bled so much she could bleed no more. The wound was about the size of a finger and I saw no exit. The direction of the bodies was from a point in front of the left, hip bone downwards and slightly inwards.

She was kept alive on strychnine and sailin the case was hopeless from the start. That paints a picture, doesn't it?

It's very graphic and even some of the descriptions, and particularly, I suppose for the Konstantine, he certainly is very eloquent and melodramatic, but it's also very poignant in a room with the poor woman lying on her back with the blood oozing out through her clothes or father John, she said, I've been shot.

Shot by whom? I exclaimed. By police, she answered. She added that she saw them and that the shot came from the first Laury.

At this point, she became weaker and I put no further questions to her, I tried to console her as best I could and administered the last sacraments. When I had finished, she whispered to me, Bring me Maleki, bring him to me, I hear him crying. I did so what a scene. Then she became weak, Maliki fainted. It was so absurd that you got a weakness and he was taken out and she looked for him, she knew she was dying.

I mean, just imagine being your mother leaving those small little children.

And in the middle of all this chaos, some of the local women were concerned about Eileen's unborn child and the fact that they did tried to actually remove the unborn baby fetus.

That's right. But there are always women who were called Hendee Women in the assisted childbirth, but they tried to remove the baby and they weren't able to do it. They were unsuccessful. For that matter, of course, are for being altogether bad enough. The wound of bleeding to death, trying to remove the baby must be. So I do think of the pain she went through. Must have been terrible for her, and in the eight hours it took my great Aunt Eileen to die, the cover up had already begun.

She was also attended to by the chief constable of the RISC in court in the Bridewell barracks, who refused to take a statement from her.

The head constable arrived with the force of police and military. All seem shocked at the tragedy. I asked him to go and see the woman.

He wouldn't. He felt the trial would be too much for her. He answered, I cannot.

Father Considine was also quoted in the Tribune as saying that Eileen had information that could have identified her shooter.

She claimed to know the identity of the shooter, which I take to mean that if if there was a line up, she could identify the person who pulled the trigger. But the RISC Chief Constable adamantly refused to take the statement. He did take a statement from the girl who was the house servant in the house at the time, but not directly from Eileen. And she bled to death, but the death was very agonizing. It took six or seven hours at least for it to happen.

At 10, 30, her condition became worse, and we knelt beside her to recite the rosary and prayers with Ryan. She tried to join in, but was too weak. A 10 45, the little children who are playing began to cry, and with them, all those in the house burst into tears. And when I read the last prayer of the ritual, she looked around and then closed her eyes and tight. Eileen was WACHT at home and her funeral was held three days later, Connock Tribune, November 13th, 1920, when the hearse arrived to take the remains to St.

.

Coleman's church court where Requiem Mass was celebrated, the deceased three little children cried loudly and the witnesses of the painful scene were visibly affected.

The remains rested in St. Coleman's church on Thursday night and were removed on Friday after a requiem mass to Kiltartan Cemetery. The funeral was by far the largest ever seen in the district, a profusion of beautiful wreaths surrounding the coffin. From the altar for the confident mentioned that Eileen had written to him the day before her death this morning, I had a note from her asking me to say Mass for her deceased friends.

Little did she dream the prayers for the reports of her son would be asked for today from the altar. Pray the Lord have mercy on her soul and may he give strength to her young husband to bear the awful affliction and may he guide and protect her little children for all time.

Why, after all these years, she's your grandmother, my great aunt. Why do you think we're so fascinated by this story? Because there's never been historical closure, because and it's testament to how these things are intergenerational. They're not just at the point in time when they happen. And look at us here 100 years on, we're talking about us. That means the hurt has been transmitted, maybe diluted over time, but nevertheless still transmitters.

But was anyone ever held responsible for my great aunts death? There was an official scramble to minimize the impact of what happened by authorities. Details of the military tribunal held on the day of Ireland's funeral were reported on extensively in the Tribune. 10 witness statements were made, including Father Considine, Ireland's doctors, the servant girl and a neighbor, as well as police witnesses themselves. The case was very sad and regrettable.

He heard shots fired from the car he was driving.

The local police did not make any serious investigations.

He did not notice. The woman on the wall between guards and our driver and the crown representative objected to Mrs Quinn's dying statement to the press was cautioned not to give the witnesses names. Dublin Castle has issued an official report. And the verdict was delivered. The court, having considered the evidence, is of opinion that Mrs. Eileen Quinn of court in the county of Galway met her death due to shock and hemorrhage by a bullet wound in the groin fired by some occupant of the police car proceeding along the got drawn road on November the 1st, 1920.

They are of the opinion that the shot was one of the shots fired as a precautionary measure and in view of the facts, record a verdict of death by misadventure. Eileen's grandson, Jared Quen, has spent the last few years trying to find out how Eileen was killed, who fired the fatal shots and why on a perfectly straight stretch of road could the passing auxiliaries not clearly see a pregnant woman and her three children by the wall outside her house?

I think I have the essentials of it, but there are lots of mysteries that I'd love to unpack further at the subsequent military court or tribunal. One of the men testified that he was the driver of one of the lorries, that the shot came from his lorry, but he didn't know who shot it. I find that counterintuitive because if a loud bang goes off behind you, your first instinct is to turn around. So I think he was a little bit economical with the truth in that instance.

Also, the military tribunal had the discretion to visit the site and satisfy themselves that, in fact, as per the testimony, it was dangerous and they did not exercise that discretion. The three military officers were drawn from the local area. They would have known that route. They would have traveled to go fairly frequently, I imagine.

This road we're driving on here between a gorgeous and goldway, so it's completely, completely straight, so I'm never quite sure why they wrote about us and said in the newspaper, you know, when they were driving along, they said they always fired warning shots if they're coming to a wooded area or if they're coming to a bend on the road. I mean, there's nothing like that. There's no way you could actually miss anybody not sitting on the road, not sitting on the style, as it was called, how they could have missed it.

And it's just it's unbelievable, really. So kind of, I suppose, begs the question, was it something a little more sinister than death by misadventure as it was reported? Was it just accidental random shots or was it a deliberate reprisal?

Another much more chilling account is that somebody got out of the first truck as it stopped next, took deliberate aim and shot her in the groin. That's murder. There's no doubt about that. If that's true, if that it was premeditated and somebody who's into the military explained to me, that would make sense because the rifles they had at the time were very innocuous. But if you really wanted to make sure that your target would be his, you would steady yourself, kneel down and take the.

There is also a hint in some of the contemporaneous accounts that the presiding officer in the tribunal, one of the military officers, was intimidated by the auxiliaries who apparently were outside the room and marching up and down under this cloud of intimidation.

The witnesses with the crown were never named in the newspapers. Neither was the driver of the truck or its occupants, one of whom had fired the fatal shots that killed Eileen.

It's probably to do with protecting the people involved. Judy Murphy of the Tribune. I mean, it's like in any war situation, the military will protect themselves. And it would have been a very foolish paper and a very foolish editor who would have put his newspaper, his staff in jeopardy by naming them if they had been asked not to name them.

Jurors presumed that the military tribunal report would provide some answers and to search took them to the National Archives in London.

There were 200 episodes of these military courts of inquiry right around the country. And by regulation, these reports have to be made public. We have not been able to find the report of that military court of inquiry. I found references to the case, but not the Illington report. It was to be nice for closure, to be able to find the original. After Eileen's death, her husband, Malachy, now a young widower, was left to cope with his grief, you, Simone, was very distraught all together after the shooting of Kathleen Ronan and Father Constantine came every day to help him to forgive and to bring him through the situation, the process of forgiveness.

Maliki had to work the farm and look after his family. I didn't. Sister Cecilia, who was also called Faith, came to help out, as was the custom of the day.

Cecilia was a secondary school and guard at the time, and she reminded them every day for quite some time. She was very young. She was only about 14 or 15 and the eldest was only four, and which is IVA and activist two and a half. And she was only just a year.

It wasn't just the Quinn family who were devastated as what happened to Eileen. Lady Gregory owned Cool Park a short distance from Eileen's house. She was co-founder of the Abbey Theatre, along with her friend, poet William Butler Yates, who also had a property in the area. She was outraged by what was happening in her neighborhood.

Bailey Gregory was from the ascendancy Protestant landlord class Rena McCallan of the Kiltartan Gregory Museum.

But she was regarded as a nationalist and nationalist sympathies and leanings. She felt very, very sad, you know, for Malachy Quinn.

Lady Gregory wrote a number of anonymous pieces in the London journal The Nation as she felt that British people should be made aware of what was going on in Ireland.

She actually wrote six articles for the nation to let the English know what atrocities were happening in Ireland and what the work was gone out of Black and Tans.

And one of the third publications that she wrote was about the murder of Eileen Quinn.

She was also frustrated with Yates at the time as she felt he was completely disengaged from Irish politics.

She was a bit cross with Yates because she felt Yates had left this area. He left here in the autumn of 1999, and she felt that he wasn't here to witness firsthand this Anglo Irish war and that she was here watching her tenants being shot at.

Her house has been burned.

The shooting dead of my great aunt made national headlines and was the focus of a heated debate in the House of Commons. Yates wrote about Alan's death and two of his poems, Reprisals, where he asked where many married women sit and suckle children now and 1919, Yates wrote a poem called 1919.

It was a political poem, is quite a bishop poem, and it opens with Nowadays Are Dragon written, written.

The Nightmare Rides upon sleep.

A drunken soldiery can leave the mother murdered at her door to crawl in her own blood and go scot free.

Gerard thinks there might be a clue about who shot his grandmother, Eileen Quinn, in one of those lines.

And lawyers. Poetry is a bit elusive to me. I'd prefer bullet points, to be honest.

But inasmuch as Yates is hinting at some things, perhaps he was hinting at the identity of the shooter and suggesting that the shooter had gone scot free and the commander in chief of the company was an infamous Scot. And also he mentioned drunken soldiery. And I think the company was noted for.

Let's say over use of alcohol and indeed the commander in chief is dismissed about a month later for drunkenness on the job, we may never know what he really meant as much as we may never find out the identity of Eileen's shooter. Jared didn't find the military tribunal report, but he did come across an interesting file in the National Archives in London. Soon after, Eileen's death, compensation of 300 pounds was approved by the Treasury Department of the British government.

As regards the individual case of Mrs Quinn, loss of a husband is loss of the family's main support and loss of a wife, although it means loss of a housekeeper and the children's mother is measured in money and appreciably lesser loss.

The file not only contains details of the payment to her husband, Malachi, but it also includes correspondence between the civil servants on how best to deal with the issue.

The circumstances of the death, however, seen from the file to be particularly deplorable and indefensible. And it is on these grounds that I should agree to 300 pounds.

I agree generally. I understand that 300 pounds is the least we can expect to get a full. Presumably, they want to avoid precedent setting further expressive payments, but he did receive that money relatively quickly within a year, I would say 300 pounds, which must have been a considerable amount back in those days.

There was no admission of guilt and the compensation was paid without prejudice. But one interesting feature that comes out from the internal dialogue is that there was a frank acknowledgement of the heinousness of the event.

And while it may not be a public admission of guilt in the absence of the military tribunal report, this indirect admission is the most acknowledgement of a wrong we can hope for. The Irish War of Independence ended with the truce in July 1921, and the Anglo-Irish Treaty was signed five months later. Life still went on for Maliki. He stayed living in the same house and I insistences continued looking after the children.

But the next generation of the family also felt the repercussions of what happened to Eilene.

The eldest child ever went on to join the nuns and train as a teacher either was the one that was most affected because when she was four years of age, her mother was shot and she was the one that found her outside the house.

My second cousin, Catherine Ronan. So she entered a convent and she started her first and she couldn't stop fasting and she became anorexic and the nuns were very good to her. The two top specialists in UK and US both said she would die in her 30s if she didn't recover. And that's exactly what happened. She died and about should be about 35 US was so that affected her all her life.

Eileen and Malachi's youngest daughter at Tessy was an alien's arms when she was shot.

She was only in her 20s. By 25, she died in childbirth and because she retained the after birth. And she had she there her baby was born at home. Now it has been said that. Because she had a problem with retention of fluids or DNA that could have been shrapnel from the gunshot wound to her mother on the hip, that may have she may have absorbed it somewhere or another that affected her body.

Eileen's grandson, Jared, tells us about his father, Alfie, Eilene and Malachi's middle child.

That would have happened when he was about three. He was present, as were the other children. But it's inconceivable that they wouldn't have witnessed something. And he was pretty traumatized by that experience. My father spoke very, very sparingly about it. I guess my mother spoke more about us because she was using it as a way to explain to us as teenagers where my father was coming from. He still had a sense of grievance over the loss, as we would expect, and he was full of contradictions in the sense that he would rail against British imperialism.

But if he met an Englishman, he'd be their best friend, which I think is a good testament to, you know, sound intuition of forgiveness and reaching out all those years later, although the loss was very pronounced in his life. But one of my big regrets is he died when I was about 20, 21, so I never really had the time or the headspace to go into it in any depth with him.

Happier times were in store for Maliki in 1938.

Eighteen years after Eileen's death, he married again, this time to Eilene sister Thith. My cousin Kathleen Ronan is also his daughter from that second marriage.

She was so young and taking care of all those children. She was amazing. She sacrificed her life. Really. Well, it was apparently conventional at the time that your next option would be to marry the sister of the deceased wife. I can't quite relate to that in 2019 terms, but in nineteen twenty, apparently, that was the practice.

They always believed that everybody deserves a second chance and that having children was kept you young. I was very good for you. So I maintained that we kept him young, second family, Maliki, and this went on to have five children.

The eldest is calmer than those my sister and my brother John, who has now died. And I'm number four, Kathleen. And then the youngest is Malachi.

But one of the things that is which is remarkable with the music and dancing into the house, I think it was in order to forget the past and we had to party every Saturday night where we had people locally who were playing music would come and play music, and we would have set dancing. And anybody who could do a step dancing, the step dancing with such a happy home, really, we always done so well cared for.

But at the same time, I always knew my father had gone through a great trauma, and particularly I think it was 1960 when we got our television first and the very popular Western movies were on and they would be on maybe the Sunday evening, about 7:00 p.m. Major.

We haven't heard a single shot out of that. I suppose my kid could have gotten through. That's no concern of ours.

And my mother loved the Western because she loved horses and she loved countryside. He was always a romance in the Western. But my father went dark in his face and he saw the shooting. And if it was even 7:00 p.m. in the evening, he went off off to bed with a long, dark face. So he didn't like anything to do with shooting.

Maliki never forgot his first wife, Eileen, but he still found it difficult to talk about her.

My father thought very highly of her. He often said quietly in the house, the way she did everything was so perfect and that she was a great person. That woman that was here before is what she would say. You would never mention her name. I would the house had changed much now since Maleki in. There's nothing changed. Nothing that's Eileen Quinn as coincidence would have as she has the same name as my great aunt. She married John Quinn Maleki son from his second marriage.

She still lives in the same house where Eileen was killed, just outside, bought a house filled with memories and the shaolong long mentioned earlier by Jared infested the then that Eileen was lying.

I believe so. And I got this. What is a beautiful piece of furniture. Isn't it beautiful? I think she did die there.

Pictures of Eilene and Malachy's wedding day still hang on the wall and the grandfather clock that Maliki used to wind every night continues to take in time.

I guess back in 1972 was just about three years ago. Yeah, very nice man. Very quiet, reserved. And he never talked about what happened, he was never afraid, never, never.

Not a word of what happened to it. They never got over it. So he was, you know.

Stunned here is Eileen's home. Her memory is still being kept alive. A century later, I know to do and I leave it outside for, you know, and I get a message always the first November that happens. I always get a miss. It's the start of the fall. So it is. And before John Quinn died, he had time to complete the one thing he had always wanted to do, erect a plaque to commemorate his father's first wife.

He was talking about it for so long. Does he want to push up in memory of her? He thought she should be remembered for what happened in memory of Eileen Quinn murdered by the black interns the first November 19 Twitter. Well, that could be there forever and they won't come down over there. And Kathleen has one last surprise for me.

This is my mother gave it to me years ago because I was always interested in quotations. And by and I then had to watch what it was called an album in those days. And every single page is full of variety of quotations, and most of them have to do with being remembered in love. When you shed a tear in silence for one you love, so dear, think of him who loves you dearly and would wish that you were here. Now that exactly explains the separation between my and I and my father, Malachi.

Be dusting words, so I have him mother gave it to me. I show the album to Gerard. I've never seen this before. In fact, I've never seen any artifacts from her directly before. So this is really touching, really nice. But it kind of brings home that this was a real person, three dimensional person with their own feelings who never got a chance. The rampant violence left its mark and South Goldway in the winter of 1920.

I mean, that was not an isolated incident, as well as the killing of an Iraqi constable in an IRA ambush just before riding was killed. Brothers Pat and Terry Lingnan were taken from their farm in China by the auxiliaries and their mutilated bodies were found a week later in a muddy pond.

These events are never really in isolation.

Is probably was a reprisal for the killing of Constable Hawera. Two days beforehand, he left a wife and three very young children. And later on, maybe three weeks after the killing of Eilene, the Lochner brothers were tortured and murdered. And I think there's an awful symmetry of suffering between all of these three. Everything in war gets reduced to black and white, and there's blame that's clearly ascribed and attributable to either one side or the other. And I think that one of the aspects of looking at it 100 years later is that although it's very immediate and present.

That gives you perspective, maybe vantage points not to his, you know. Not recrimination. But to reach out and say we forgive. It's hard, but we have to forgive. I'm back at my desk. Eileen is still looking skyward in the photograph, and I'm having a last look through the album. And there's one verse written by a teenage eilene that sums up my journey to find out at least a little bit 100 years later, who my great aunt really was.

When the leaves of this album are yellow with age and the words that I write are dimmed on the page and think of me kindly, I never forget that wherever I am, I think of you.

Yes, I'll see you. Mercury. So, so cute. Stacia. Reprisals, the Eileen Quinn story was first published in August 2013, it was narrated by all Hagans and produced by Aula and Sarah Blake. And next week we return with another war of independence related story as we build towards the release of our new and upcoming documentary on the Bloody Sunday centenary. Thanks for listening.