The Harper that Once - Frank McNally on Patrick Byrne, a famous, long-forgotten relative

This Saturday marks the 160th anniversary of a man widely described during his lifetime as “the last of the great Irish harpers”. He was born Pádraig Ó Beirn, probably in 1799, and became Pádraig Dall Ó Beirn after being blinded in childhood by smallpox.

He learned English only as a teenager. But by the time of his death, on April 8th, 1863, he was generally known as Patrick Byrne, and famous under that name throughout Britain and Ireland.

He had been a travelling musician all his adult life, playing the wire-strung harp in the old style, with fingernails, and drawing on a repertoire handed down from musician to musician over centuries.

The tradition might have died after Kinsale, when Queen Elizabeth ordered troops to “Hang the harpers, wherever found, and burn their instruments”. It lingered on, however, and Byrne benefitted from a revival in the 1790s, under the United Irishmen of Belfast.

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His virtuosity took him from a life of poverty to something like wealth. But he had no musical heir. When he died, his harp was hung on a wall in the house of his local landlords, the Shirleys, who had long supported him. An ancient line ended with him.

One of Byrne’s lesser distinctions, today, is that he was also my great-great-granduncle. This fact had escaped me until a few years ago when Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann started an annual féile in his honour in Carrickmacross.

Then one thing led to another, so that when the 2023 Féile began last weekend, I had to give the opening talk. And before doing so, while still wrestling with a central mystery of Byrne’s life, I paid a visit to his grave.

It is the strange case that, despite his fame and many powerful friends – he had even played for Queen Victoria - the great musician now rests in a paupers’ cemetery.

Known, like other such graveyards, as Bully’s Acre (after the original and most famous one, in Kilmainham), this was where the Carrick workhouse dead were once brought, by a circuitous route that avoided the town.

The mystery of the celebrity harper’s presence there is deepened by the grand altar tomb under which he lies, erected by the Shirleys, and proclaiming him to have been harper by royal appointment to Prince Albert.

Byrne had been born in rural Magheracloone, where his father (died 1843) is buried in the Catholic churchyard. The headstone there proudly dates the family’s local history to 200 years before, including an O’Beirn who was a captain in the rebellion of 1641.

The usual explanation for the harper’s exile in Bully’s Acre is that he converted to Anglicanism at some point, and that in his will, he asked to be buried in Carrick’s “new Protestant cemetery”.

But what became the new cemetery, named Moravian style as “God’s Acre”, opened only in the 1890s. And if Bully’s Acre was ever temporarily considered the new one, as some scholars think, Byrne’s headstone is a conspicuously lonely one.

Only two other graves are identifiable. On one, all details have been obliterated by time. The second, from 1947, is for a Catholic member of the Travelling community.

Even Byrne’s supposed conversion is a mystery. The only written evidence is the will and newspaper reports from the 1840s mentioning his membership of two masonic lodges In Scotland.

That was after the Papal interdict of 1826, when even Daniel O’Connell had given up the freemasonry habit. And we know that the landlord Evelyn P Shirley took great trouble to bury Byrne’s remains where they are. It involved exhumation, because the harper had died in Dundalk and was first interred there, hastily.

Shirley’s agent warned that the “papist relatives” might want to take the body. But the remains were successfully moved to Bully’s Acre, and as executor of the will, the landlord deducted exhumation costs from the bequest to the deceased’s sister Alice (his only full sibling, my grandmother’s grandmother).

Since first learning of the connection, I wondered if the scandal of Byrne “taking the soup” had been a factor in the family’s apparent amnesia about him.

But a previous Féile speaker, Rev Robert Kingston, was sceptical about whether Byrne ever actually converted. The masonic thing meant little then, he believed, the Pope having had to reiterate the ban many times afterwards.

The will suggested “the hand of Shirley”, thought Kingston. The tombstone inscription “requiescat in pace”, being a prayer for the dead, was a mainly Catholic thing. And whatever about dying Protestant, Rev Kingston added, Byrne was not buried as one. There is no mention of the event in the Church of Ireland “burial book”.

It is the strange case that, despite his fame and many powerful friends – he had even played for Queen Victoria – the great musician now rests in a paupers’ cemetery. the poor. It may not matter much to him, either way. When I stood at his grave last week, on a hillside awash with sunshine and primroses, it seemed as good a place as any to end up.