Beyond the walls of Glenstal Abbey, the Saturday Milk Market in Limerick was Fr Brian P Murphy’s second home. Market day was a highlight of his week, where he would buy seedlings from Garden World, chat to local historians, joke with stallholders, and enter the vibrant slipstream of the midwest community. In recent years, he delivered a bouquet of cut flowers to Hartmann Opticians, who cared for his deteriorating eyesight. There was nothing he enjoyed more than spontaneous acts of kindness.
When he died suddenly on May 16th last, Limerick lost a strong and true independent spirit. In the monastic tradition, he had dedicated his life to Christ, but to most people he was joyful, caring, compassionate and always non-judgemental. He took people for who they were.
An aphorism he liked to repeat, dum spiro spero, while I breathe, I hope defined his own optimism about the world he inhabited as a Benedictine monk. Born in England in 1935, John Patrick Murphy was the eldest son of Irish emigrant parents. After entering Douai Abbey, he was professed in 1955, and took the name Brian, in honour of Saint Birinus, a 7th-century Bishop of Dorchester. Ordained in 1963, he remained in Douai for the next decade before temporarily leaving monastic life to become a teacher and headmaster of St Gerard’s School in Bray. He then returned to monastic life at Glenstal community in 1984.
His historical writing was distinguished by rigour and clarity of argument. His first monograph: Patrick Pearse and the Lost Republican Ideal (1991) traced the genealogy of “republican authenticity” from 1916 through to 1938. This was followed by a biography of John Chartres: Mystery Man of the Treaty (1995) that unpacked the complex political and diplomatic compromises framing the birth of the State. Increasingly, his research cut against the grain of the dominant paradigm of prevailing academic orthodoxies.
A lot has changed for US women since 2016. What does that mean for Kamala Harris?
Forty years of the Dart: ‘Dealing with the public is one of the hardest things anyone can do’
Mark Francis: Acoustic Oceans review – A fascinating development in the Irish artist’s decades-spanning career
Fake phone calls, meeting pretend-presidents and being ambushed by your parents on TV: The rituals of All-Ireland week
In the late 1990s as documents relevant to the activities of British intelligence in Ireland became available, Brian analysed Ireland’s history wars and the role of “verisimilitude” as an instrument of imperialism. His doctoral thesis was published as The Catholic Bulletin and Republican Ireland (2005) and was followed by The Origins and Organisation of British Propaganda in Ireland (2006). He liked to remind other historians of Alice Stopford Green’s reflection: “We do not want in Ireland the absence of history, we do want a larger study of its truth.”
As a regular writer of pamphlets and letters to the editor, Brian played the role of public intellectual and catalysed important discussions on many local and national issues. He opposed wasteful development, the squandering of public funds and the confused politics of commemoration. He would often repeat: littera scripta manet, the written word remains.
During recent years, he made valuable interventions on the history of the murdered Limerick mayors and the national importance of the anti-Treaty Sinn Féin politician and academic, Kate O’Callaghan. At the time of his death, he had painstakingly reassembled the history of the polychrome statue of Our Lady of Limerick and her links to the martyrdom of a 17th-century Catholic bishop.
In 2014, we worked together on the publication of Glenstal Abbey Gardens, an illustrated history of the garden at Glenstal where he could be found any afternoon, come rain or shine, weeding the herbaceous borders. Often he was aided in this work by a variety of volunteers including homeless “men of the roads”. When fruits and vegetables were in season, he would deliver bags of rhubarb and cooking apples to his friends. Nothing delighted him more than to charm visitors to his bible garden by reciting specific verses about the plants and trees.
His last study was The Life and Tragic Death of Winnie Barrington (2018) that seamlessly wove the history of the unionist Barrington family, the architects of Glenstal, within a subaltern history about the rise of the Limerick IRA during the War of Independence. An invitation from President Michael D Higgins and Sabina to Áras an Uachtaráin to plant a tree dedicated to Winnie Barrington was discreet acknowledgment of the contribution of his scholarship to ethical remembering.
His funeral was a celestial moment, where his fellow monks sang and celebrated with many friends and family including his two daughters, Frances and Miranda. They, and their children Amelia and Paul, were a source of great solace and joy in his later years.
His memory will live on in the garden he tended so lovingly, and the 16 silver birch trees dedicated to the 1916 leaders, each one underplanted with a different variety of snowdrop (Pluirín sneachta).