Last Thursday, 20 June was the Feast day of the Irish Martyrs and most Irish Catholics will know that Archbishop Oliver Plunkett, a native of Loughcrew, was one of the last martyrs to be executed on the gallows at Tyburn, London on July 1, 1681. However, how many local churchgoers are aware that a notable Mullingar Dominican priest died as a martyr for his faith when he was hung, drawn and quartered at Tyburn nearly half a century earlier?
Neither is it well known that not just one but two Dominican priests gave their lives for their faith in less than a decade, the first at Tyburn in 1633 and the second, who died in 1642. And that a notable number of Mullingar Dominican priests distinguished themselves across Europe in houses of the order and also in Ireland in that difficult era.
