Paddy Kilmartin’s Mother Mary … Granny Kane

Paddy Kilmartin’s Mother Mary…Granny Kane

Paddy Kilmartin was the second son to Mary Kilmartin nee Kelly and her husband Daniel Kilmartin.

Mary’s husband died a young man in 1897 and she was later to remarry to a Robert Kane.

She was a leading personality and character in Stoneybatter and district, known as Granny Kane to her family, friends, neighbours, customers.

Granny Kane had three children by Daniel, the eldest boy also called Daniel, of whom little is now known as he left for America as a youngster and did not maintain contact with his family in Ireland. It is possible that he joined the Merchant Navy, he was two years old when Paddy K was born, 1895.

The youngest child was a girl called Mary ‘Mamie’ b.1898, Mamie was never to know her father who died before she was born.

Granny Kane raised her children on her own starting as a widow from a position of extreme poverty, due to the tragically wasteful death of her young husband.

Patrick Heuston Stephenson who was the eldest son of Mary ‘Mamie’ Kilmartin and Paddy Joe Stephenson wrote a journal as a young man and he records the details of Daniel’s death;

“ My Maternal Grandfather died as a very young man in tragic circumstances.
He was by way of being an athlete, and used to wrestle in the Phoenix Park for stakes with a group of ‘young bloods’. After one of these contests, flushed with success, he took part in a drinking bout—a contest to see who would consume the most beer .
In a fit of bravado he then undertook to drink one whiskey to his opponent’s port. He won. He was carried home, put to bed and then suffocated in his sleep. He died leaving a penniless and pregnant widow and two very young children”
This widow, my Grandmother, was one of the most remarkable and interesting characters I have ever met. Left a penniless widow with young children to support in the Dublin of the last century was no joke. A kind neighbour offered to take the responsibility of having the children put into schools and the widow into the Union, but this women, who laid out and washed her own dead husband and who attended the inquest in the morgue with her 2 year old baby (Paddy) in her arms, was not the kind to go under even in such difficult circumstances.
Some of the determination and fierce passion with which she had supported the Fenians and Parnell made her open a small business with the £25 which was collected for her by the friends of her dead husband.
She worked like a person possessed from early morning in the shop she had opened, and after closing time which was then very late, she worked into the early hours of the morning - on the neighbours’ washing which she washed and mangled herself for payment.
Her work in the shop was hard labour. It was green grocery, and she was up and in the vegetable markets in the early morning… it was hard, dirty labour, and it went on for years until she had built up a reputation for honesty that was known over the greater part of the city. Latterly the shop was a great success, and she was able to hand on to her son Paddy a thriving business before she died in 1940”