A martyr of 1681 and a rebel of 1916
Two Plunketts on one crest
When Pomeroy's GAA club was formed in 1916 - the year of the Rising - its founders placed it under the patronage of St. Oliver Plunkett and dedicated it to the memory of Joseph Mary Plunkett. The two men share a surname and a violent death, separated by 235 years. Oliver Plunkett was the Archbishop of Armagh who was arrested in 1678 on a fabricated charge of plotting a French invasion, held in Dublin and then London, and hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn in July 1681. He was the last Catholic martyr executed in England. Pope Paul VI canonised him in 1975; his preserved head is in a gold and glass case at St. Peter's Church in Drogheda, where it draws a steady stream of pilgrims. Joseph Mary Plunkett was born in Dublin in 1887, became a poet and journalist, joined the Irish Volunteers, and signed the Proclamation of the Irish Republic at the GPO in April 1916. He married his fiancée Grace Gifford in Kilmainham Gaol chapel hours before his execution by firing squad on 4 May 1916. His face appears on the club's crest. That a small hilltop village in Tyrone chose both names in the same year is, in its own way, a compressed history of Irish Catholic identity.
Centre of Ulster, top of a drumlin
The hilltop village
Before the Plantation of Ulster there was dense forest here. James I granted eight townlands in the area to Sir William Parsons, Surveyor General of Ireland, at the start of the 17th century. By the 1640s the forest had been stripped. For over a century the land sat largely neglected until the Rev. James Lowry arrived in 1770, replanted around 556 acres, established a weekly market and began the village. The Hiring Fairs - held twice a year in May and November - were the great gathering points for labourers and servants from the surrounding countryside hiring themselves out for the season. The railway reached Pomeroy in 1861 when the Portadown, Dungannon and Omagh Junction Railway opened a station here; it became part of the Great Northern Railway in 1876 and ran until the Ulster Transport Authority closed the line in 1965. The station is gone. The hill and the crossroads remain.
The Troubles in mid-Ulster
The East Tyrone Brigade
The Provisional IRA's East Tyrone Brigade was one of the most heavily armed and active units of the conflict, drawing members from across east Tyrone, north Monaghan and south Derry. By the mid-1980s, with a significant supply of weaponry from Libya, the brigade had adopted a 'no-go zone' strategy - sustained attacks on RUC and British Army installations across the area. Pomeroy was within this operational zone. A British soldier from the Coldstream Guards was seriously wounded when his patrol was fired on in the village in August 1992. An RUC armoured vehicle was hit by a mortar outside the village in February 1997. The brigade suffered 53 members killed during the conflict - the highest death toll of any IRA brigade - many in engagements at Loughgall, East Tyrone ambushes, and other confrontations. The security base in Pomeroy was a physical presence in the village for the duration of the conflict. This is not background colour here. It is within living memory.