ONE FLU OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST

Former RIC Barracks, Gowran, Co. Kilkenny

I was thinking about my family history recently and wondering if there were any themes running through it that I could work up into a talk.

Needless to say I had, unsurprisingly, quite a lot of deaths, some more interesting than others.

I had three infant deaths, including from infant cholera and teething, the latter descriptor being applied, I gather, in cases where they hadn't a clue about the cause of death.

I had four drownings, in India, Dublin, Ballinasloe and Jutland.

I had four deaths from tuberculosis, all in Dublin.

And so on.

My plan was to tell these people's stories, particularly of their deaths, against a backdrop of the incidence of these causes in the wider society, and then invite people to think about patterns in their own families.

It was only when Ida Milne published her book, Stacking the Coffins, on the 1918 flu epidemic that it occurred to me that I had not come across any flu deaths in the family.

But there had been a reference to flu, which I now realise was to the 1918 epidemic, though death was not involved in this case.

In 1920, Larry Medlar, from Paulstown, Co. Kilkenny, was before a British military court, accused of having taken part in an unsuccessful attack on Gowran RIC barracks. His defence didn't do him any good as he had been caught almost red handed, and he got the death penalty.

His three pronged defence consisted of an alibi, force majeure, and not being the full shilling since having the flu two years earlier.

Even I, at this remove, and knowing what I know, could see the flimsiness of the defence and clearly the court didn't entertain any of it for a minute.

Given that the two non-flu grounds were blatant lies, we have to wonder about the flu.

And that's where the cuckoo's nest comes in.