6th century, burned by the Danes in 949
St Scíre's monastery
St Scíre - locally remembered on 28 September, though the old martyrologies fix her feast at 24 March - founded a monastery here in the sixth century. It became large and prosperous, a centre of learning in the way the early Irish foundations were. The Annals record it plundered and burned by the Danes in 949, and it was raided again in the centuries that followed. Geophysical survey has since traced the buried ring of the monastic enclosure in the fields around the modern graveyard. The site sits within a landscape thick with the same period - the passage cairns of Loughcrew on the skyline, and two more early Christian sites at Clonabraney and Diamor close by.
A stump, and a castle named in the Down Survey
The round tower and Faire Castle
In the old cemetery opposite the church stand the surviving remains of the round tower and a scatter of ancient tombs. The Down Survey of the 1650s names an 'old Faire Castle' on the same ground - a later medieval structure raised on the monastic site, long gone now. It is the usual Irish layering: a saint, then a Norman or Gaelic strongpoint, then a graveyard, then the present parish church, all on one small piece of consecrated earth.
1847-1854, the Irish Pugin
McCarthy's church
The present Church of St Alphonsus was built between 1847 and 1854 through the efforts of Fr Kelly, and designed by James Joseph McCarthy - the architect contemporaries called the Irish Pugin for how thoroughly he carried Augustus Pugin's Gothic Revival principles into Irish parish building. That a country parish this small was raising a McCarthy church in the years straddling the Famine tells you something about both the man and the priest. The building was given a major restoration in 1999 and 2000.
Born Rathniska 1852, anthem written 1889
Jim Connell and The Red Flag
Jim Connell, eldest of thirteen children of a tenant-farming family, was born in 1852 in Rathniska in this parish. As a young man he joined the land agitation and the Fenians, was blacklisted as a docker in Dublin for trying to unionise the men, and moved to London. In December 1889, on a train home from a Social Democratic Federation meeting during the great London dock strike, he watched a stationmaster raise and lower a red flag - and wrote The Red Flag, the song the labour movement has sung for over a century. His last public appearance was at Crossakiel in 1921; a monument by Michael Keane was unveiled near his birthplace in 1998, and the Red Flag Festival still gathers in his name at Crossakiel and Navan over the late-May weekend.