500 years of history in Ireland
Meelick Church
Situated on a quiet secluded height on the banks of the River Shannon, five miles from Brackloon castle, St. Francis’ Church at Meelick is one of the oldest still in use in Ireland for Catholic services.
Meelick began life in 1414 as a small Franciscan friary, founded on land given by the O Maddens within sight of the former Anglo-Norman castle of the same name. The friary and castle were the focus of considerable turmoil over the centuries, having been built at one of the most strategic river crossings over the River Shannon. When the Anglo-Norman de Burgh family ruled over Connacht and Ulster in the early 1300s a small rural borough or township was established here but didn’t survive the death of the last de Burgh earl of Ulster in 1333, at which stage the O Maddens regained control of the area again.
The English regained a degree of nominal control over Meelick for a time in 1557 when the Lord Deputy brought troops from Dublin and cannon downriver to attack the Maddens who were sheltering Irish rebels. The Irish records tell us that the Lord Deputy attacked Brackloon and Meelick and killed the occupants. As the English records tell us the Irish escaped from Meelick castle, after cannon was placed in the friary grounds and fired, those killed appear to have been here at Brackloon.
The friary buildings at Meelick underwent various periods of decline and re-building and appear to have been in ruin for considerable periods. The site underwent a brief period of reconstruction in the 1670s and 1680s but work appears to have stalled around the time the Catholic King James II was deposed and war broke out in Ireland between the Jacobites, supporters of James II and the Williamites, supporters of his Protestant rival William and his wife Mary.
The church served as the ancestral burial place for many of the most prominent local landholding families and the stone memorials lining the church interior today date for the most part from this building period. Many of those were active patrons of the friars and foremost among them were the Maddens, Burkes, Moores, Horans, Larkins, Cuolohans and Hamiltons.
In July of 1691 the Jacobite Captain John Stevens and his regiment camped at Meelick for more than a week, describing the place as home to only a few friars and remarkable only for the poverty of its house and chapel ‘which are nothing but long thatched cabins.’ The church we see today was only in the process of being rebuilt over the previous decades and was at that time awaiting a roof.
The church was still in ruin and roofless in the early 1830s, with grass and undergrowth growing among the headstones in its aisle and side chapels. The few friars were living still in a small cabin alongside the church ruins and an adjacent cabin served as their chapel.
The friars survived the religious persecutions of the late 1500s and early 1600s, the Cromwellian regime and the repressive Penal Laws of the early 1700s, on occasion having to conceal their identity and on at least one occasion hiding in a local wood. The site was raided by agents of the Protestant Sheriff of Galway in the early 1700s and their letters and correspondence confiscated. Ironically, it is thanks to that raid that transcripts of those letters survive today, revealing the friar’s network of friends and colleagues from this region living in exile across the Continent of Europe.
Eventually it was no longer viable to continue and the last remaining Franciscan left in the early 1850s. Not long after the site became diocesan property and the church was restored to what we see today and Mass celebrated there again in the last years of the 1890s.
Today, the old castle at Meelick and the island fort that succeeded it are gone, no trace remains of the medieval borough and only Meelick church and the ruins of the old friary buildings remain.