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Updated: May 7, 2025
I have often been out in a curragh in bad weather, though never in quite such a storm as that; but, once launched, she rode lightly enough, and scarce shipped a spoonful of water." "I should like to have been there," John said; "but I should have been no use. My people have always been against my going down to the sea, deeming it a pure waste of time, except that they let me go down to swim.
What a fool he had been, to be seduced on to the turf by such a man as Blake! And then, he expressed a wish to himself that Blake had been a long way off before he ever saw him. There he was, steward of the Curragh, the owner of the best horse in Ireland, and absolutely without money to enable him to carry on the game till he could properly retreat from it!
Shure, I seen it meself whin I wint to the Curragh races wid Barney Maloney; an' by the same token, 'twas Barney axplained it to me. Didn't the divil take his bite, an' then didn't he dhrop it on the plain out there forninst ye, the big lump they call the rock iv Cashel? Av coorse he did. An' if the divil himself found Ireland too hard a nut to crack, how can the English expect to manage us?
Sir James Duff's wanton cruelty in sabring and shooting down an unarmed multitude on the Curragh, won him the warm approval of the extermination party in the Capital, while Generals Wilford and Dundas narrowly escaped being reprimanded for granting a truce to the insurgents under Aylmer, and accepting of the surrender of that leader and his companions.
The curragh which was promised might be a man, a horse, a cart, or chaise; and no more could be got from the man with the battle-axe but a repetition of 'Aich ay! ta curragh.
May be your honour is not sinsible yet who I am I am Paddy M'Doole, of the Curragh, and I've been a flax-dresser and dealer since I parted your honour's land, and was last night at the fair of Clonaghkilty, where I went just in a quiet way thinking of nothing at all, as any man might, and had my little yarn along with me, my wife's and the girl's year's spinning, and all just hoping to bring them back a few honest shillings as they desarved none better!
They could read, as was sufficiently testified by their intimate knowledge of the information contained in "Nimrod upon Horses," and the Veterinary Magazine; and the Clerk of the Course at the Curragh could prove that they could write, by the many scrawls he had received from them entering horses, and giving their particulars as to age, colour, breeding, qualifications, &c., but beyond this they had no acquirements.
"He spent more money on horse-racing than on housekeeping," said a shrewd old man who was in the house. In fact, Mr. Dunne, I am told, entered a horse for the races at the Curragh after he had undergone what Mr. Gladstone calls "the sentence of death" of an eviction! Some of the doors bore marks of the crowbar but no great mischief had been done to them or to the large fine windows.
It was said, in Kildare Street, that no one at Tattersall's could beat him at a book. He had latterly been trying a wider field than the Curragh supplied him and had, on one or two occasions, run a horse in England with such success, as had placed him, at any rate, quite at the top of the Irish sporting tree.
After returning from the Curragh to Liverpool, I married there and carried on business on my own account for several years as a joiner and builder, before taking service with Father Nugent, first as secretary of his Boy's Refuge, and then as conductor for some three years of his newspaper, the "Northern Press and Catholic Times."
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