A story long known in the traditions of Ballingarry is that of its Parish Priest of three centuries ago, Father William Kelly. The documentary sources for the story are few, but the strange story of his life and his death and burial have never been forgotten.

He was, as far as we can tell, the son of William Kelly of Gragaugh and his wife, Ellen Butler, who was the daughter of Colonel Richard Butler who had been an officer in the Confederate Army. She was the granddaughter of Pierce, Lord Ikerrin of Lismolin. There is no record of his date of birth but he was ordained in 1661 at Ferbane, Co. Offaly by a Bishop Geoghegan of Meath. He must have returned to his native place soon afterwards. His mother’s cousin, the second Viscount Ikerrin, had conformed to the Protestant faith, but had fallen on evil times. At any rate the tradition is that the long persecution by Lord Ikerrin or Baron Butler as he was usually called, was due to a desire to get hold of some small estate which should have come to Fr. Kelly. The Penal laws of the time were used by the Baron and his heirs as a convenient excuse.

Fr. Kelly, however, had no home, and no church. He lived with various farmers, mostly in Balloughboy or Gragaugh, and said Mass in these houses, and despite the offer of a substantial reward by the Baron, nobody ever betrayed him.

The death of the 3rd Baron in 1688 must have given him a respite, since the 3rd Baron had married the daughter of Col Redman of Ballylynch – now Mount Juliet, Thomastown, and reverted to the Catholic faith just before his death.
Fr. Kelly was registered as Parish Priest of Ballingarry in 1704, however, this was a time of persecution and it seems that the reward was still offered; or so the people believed.

Fr. Kelly’s death was probably in 1713, according to one account, but we only know that his successor, Fr. Lonergan, was there in 1731. Possibly some other priest or friar was in the area in the period after his death. Fr. Kelly died of natural causes in a house in Balloughboy owned by the Finnane family. His sister had married a man named Croke, said to have come from Co. Limerick and his six Croke nephews carried his coffin at night to Lismolin churchyard for burial. When they come to a ford on the King’s River, where the Metal Bridge is now, they could see the moonlight glinting on the equipment of the soldiers occupying the cemetery. The reward for his body, dead or alive, was still in force. They turned round and went back to Balloughboy and buried the body in the haggard of the house where he had died.

At this point tradition is divided. Some believed that the body remained there. Others, and they are probably correct, say that at some later time they exhumed the body and reburied it in Lismolin. No tombstone or any other memorial remains to show his grave.

Some time in the 1930’s the late Canon William Fitzgerald made exhaustive enquiries and was satisfied that his remains lie in the consecrated soil of Lismolin. I also heard that the grave in Balloughboy had at one time been marked by an iron cross. One man, who knew the traditions well, the late James Lanigan searched for the cross and found its rusty remains thrown in a ditch as if it had been discarded and believed this may have been done after the reburial.

The tradition is that many of the Croke families in the area are descendants of his sister, and the Kelly family of Lower Ballingarry descends form his brother.

— Michael Fitzgerald, Thurles

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