Palmerstown.

V. - Palmerstown.

Lord Palmerston died on the 18th October, 1865. Up to his death he was Prime Minister of England. He was an Irish Peer. He sat for the borough of Tiverton. By the Act of Union Irish Peers could sit in the House of Commons for English, but not for Irish, Constituencies. Lord Palmerston’s father, while driving through Dorset-street, in the City of Dublin, was thrown out of his carriage. In a state of great physical suffering he was carried to the house of Mr. Mee, apothecary. Here he was faithfully nursed by Miss Mee, a daughter of the apothecary. She afterwards became his wife, and the mother of the celebrated Prime Minister of England. It was from Palmerstown, adjoining the district of Lucan, that Lord Palmerston took his title. Palmerstown is another boundary of the Lucan district.

Here are the venerable ruins of a church. Its round-arched windows, its nave and chancel, its graveyard, “the sanctuary of the dead,” stand commandingly over the river.

By the shore a plot of ground

Clips a ruin’d chapel round,

Buttress’d with a grassy mound,

Where day and night and day go by,

And bring no touch of human sound.

Washing of the lonely seas,

Shaking of the guardian trees

Piping of the salted breeze;

Day and night and day go by,

To the ceaseless tune of these.

Or when as wind and waters keep

A hush more dead than any sleep,

Still morns to stiller evenings creep,

And day and night and day go by -

Here the stillness is most deep.

And the ruins, lapsed again

Into nature’s wide domain,

Sow themselves with seed and grain,

As day and night and day go by,

And hoard June’s sun and April’s rain.

Here fresh funeral tears were shed;

And now the graves are also dead,

And suckers from the ash-tree spread

As day and night and day go by,

And stars move calmly over head.

• Allingham.

The nave is 10 yards by five, the chancel four and a-half by three and a-half. Palmerstown House, once the residence of Provost Hutchinson and Lord Donoughmore, is now the Stewart Institution for Imbeciles. It is an imposing building.

In Palmerstown is the country seat* *of Mr. T. M. Healy. MP., “clarum et venerabile nomen. Here he is loved and revered by all. Generous to a degree to every form of charity, he is the model of a devoted husband and father, of a kind and genial friend, of a consistent and edifying Catholic.

There is also a Chapel of Ease, opposite to which is a flourishing National School for boys and girls.

It was with Lord Donoughmore’s steward poor Father MacCarthy spent his last evening on earth. It was here he held his last Station, in which he heard Confessions, administered Holy Communion, and laboured hard in the service of his Master. And wearied and worn out, on his return home to lay him down to sleep, he fell into the arms of the murderer, lying in wait for a victim in the dead hour of night. He died at his post of duty.

Palmerstown used to be called Laurence Town, after St. Laurence O’Toole. Amongst the ancient records there is mention of a house of lepers in this locality dedicated to the saint, and of the Church given by Milo de Brett to the Hospital of St. John without Newgate. The lepers’ house was, in 1427, handed over by King Henry VI.* *to John Waile at the rent of three shillings a year.

The celebrated Thomas Hibernus was a native of Palmerstown. He was living in 1290. He wrote the following works:- “Flores Bibliae,” “Flores Doctorum,” “De Christiana Religione,” ” De Illusionibus Daemonum,” “De Tentationibus Diaboli,” “De Remediis Vitiorum.” In 1615, when Simon Swayne was curate during the royal visitation, the Church was made impropriate.

Lord Edward Fitzgerald, accompanied by Mr. Neilson, was on the point of being arrested in Palmerstown by a military patrol. He was reconnoitering the line of advance on the Kildare side to Dublin. He escaped by declaring he was a doctor, and was hurrying off to a dying patient.

Up to the time of the Union there were in Palmerstown six mills for printing works, 17 wheels for iron works, two oil mills, one dye-stuff mill, one skin and corn mill, and three wash mills. All have vanished! The black progeny of the Union - famine, emigration, oppressive taxation, importation of foreign goods and men, and that hydra-headed demon, landlordism - have left their cloven feet in this once flourishing district.

Weary men what reap ye? Golden corn for the stranger.

What sow ye? Human corses that wait for the avenger.

Fainting forms, hunger stricken, what see ye in the offing?

Stately ships to bear our food *away, *amid the stranger’s scoffing.

There’s a proud array of soldiers - what do they round your door?

They guard our master’s granaries from the thin hands of the poor.

Pale mothers wherefore weeping? Would to God that we were dead -

Our children swoon before us, and we cannot give them bread.

We are wretches, famished, scorned, human tools to build your pride,

But God will yet take vengeance for the souls for which Christ died.

Now in your hour of pleasure - busk ye in the world’s caress,

But our whitening bones against ye will rise as witnesses,

From the cabins and the ditches, in their charred uncoffined masses,

For the Angel of the Trumpet will know them as he passes -

A ghastly spectral army, before the great God we’ll stand

And arraign ye as our murderers, the spoilers of our land.

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