Abstract
Benedict Kiely’s 1973 story “The Night We Rode With Sarsfield” is set in Dromore, near Omagh, and concerns the friendship between the Catholic narrator’s family and their neighbors Willy and Jinny, a Presbyterian small farming couple. Kiely’s story is replete with layers of historical associations, touching upon events from the seventeenth century to the twentieth: the Cromwellian conquest, the Famine, the practice of migrant “tatie hoking,” and World War II; in Dromore, it seems“the ground is littered with things, cluttered with memories and multiple associations.”1 But the story hinges upon a faux pas that is also derived from Irish history.Willy is an Orangeman, and the narrator recalls being asked to sing a song for him by his sisters. He innocently recites a somewhat nationalistic ditty—“Our bayonets flash like lightning / To the rattle of the Thompson gun”—while Willy’s bowler hat and sash are being aired in preparation for the twelfth of July. ToWilly’s amusement and his sisters’ chagrin, he then proceeds to recite a poem about Patrick Sarsfield’s famous raid at Ballyneety, County Limerick, as recalled from, of all things, the Christian Brothers magazineOur Boys. The poem was, he said,“nothing if not patriotic”:
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