Tom Kehoe
Author: Seamus Kavanagh
Seamus was born, reared and worked as school teacher and Principal in local schools in East Carlow and West Wicklow.

Tom Kehoe
Author: Seamus Kavanagh
Seamus was born, reared and worked as school teacher and Principal in local schools in East Carlow and West Wicklow.

TOM KEHOE
Born in eighteen ninety nine
In a house in Rathduffmore
In your carefree boyhood years
Did you ever dream what lay in store?
Did you run barefoot through the heather
Stretching out to Knocknaskeagh
Hear the skylark sing and the curlew cry
And watched the hare as it scampered free
Did you sit beside a turf fire,
Perhaps upon your fathers knee,
Where tales were told of men who died
So Ireland might be free?
You may have climbed the apple tree
Picked “frockens” down the lane.
And walked the miles to Rathmeigue School
Through sunshine, snow and rain.
When your school days ended
How strange it must have been,
To make your life in Dublin
A boy of just fourteen
Did Mick mac Donnell tell you tales
Of Michael Collins and his plan,
And did you ever think that someday,
You’d be his right hand man?
In Easter week when the tricolour flew
In the smoke of the city sky,
As bullets flew and good men died,
Were you afraid to die?
In Jacobs in that eventful week
You answered Pearse’s call
Deep in your heart you must have known
The chance of victory was small.
At Carriganphuca near Macroom
Beneath a September sky
Amid a mine’s blast your comrades died
And you got time to say goodbye.
Did your thoughts then stray,
As the good nuns prayed
To family ,friends, and school boys days,
And places where you played?
In a graveyard in Knockananna,
Stands a monument proud and grand,
Of a young man from our parish,
Who gave his life to free our land.
May you have found your freedom,
Your comrades by your side
And though memories fade with passing years,
We remember you with pride.

Tom Kehoe, was born in a house that straddlesd the Carlow-Wicklow border. He became a member of Michael Collins' 'Squad' and was regarded as Collins' right-hand-man. A high-ranking officer of the Free State army, Tom was killed by a booby-trap mine near Macroom, an incident that led to some brutal retaliatory action and more gruesome deaths in 'Cogadh na gCarad', the 'War of the Friends.