The Kettle Family come from North County Dublin with origins going back to the 14th Century. They owned lands from Artane St Margaret’s, Swords to Kinsealy where they lived. Andrew Kettle (1833-1916) was a founder member of the Land League and a farming pioneer and one of the best informed and most progressive farmers in Ireland. He was always the first to try out new machinery which he imported from Germany. A tillage farmer he grew barley for brewers and distillers and raised bullocks and did some horse breeding.

In 1880 he helped to found the Land League and was a major supporter of Charles Stewart Parnell. Often referred to as Parnell’s ‘Right Hand Man’ they had a shrewd respect for each other. In a moment of good humour the great leader said, on introducing him to a group of electors, “Here’s a man whose name is a household word.”

Andrew Kettle became something of a patriarch. He was a pillar of cloud by day, his son told a friend and a pillar of fire by night to the farmers of County Dublin. His arrest under the Coercion Act and imprisonment in Naas Jail provoked his supporters and greatly upset his family.

After he retired from public life his health deteriorated and for the last seven years of his life he was disabled by rheumatism.

When the news came through that his favourite son Tom was killed in the battlefield he was devastated. He remarked “Tom is dead, life is over for me.” Four weeks later he was dead.

Tom Kettle was born in 1880 in Artane and attended the O’Connell School, arriving each morning in a pony trap. His abilities were above-average and the Christian Brothers soon saw him as a potential prize winner.

He excelled in every subject and quickly gained the title of scholar. When he left for Clongowes Wood in 1894, the Christian Brothers were lavish with praise. They remarked “he is the most brilliant pupil that ever went through the portals of O’Connell Schools.”

The enigma of Tom Kettle has been well-documented, patriot, essayist, poet, barrister and the first professor of national economics at UCD. He was elected MP for East Tyrone in 1906. As a writer he deserves to be ranked with Oscar Wilde as a witty conversationalist and a master of epigram and with George Bernard Shaw as an expert on the use of paradox.

After the outbreak of the First World War he applied for a commission in the Dublin Fusiliers and took part in the campaign to recruit Irishmen for the British Forces. He asked to be sent to France and was killed in September 1916 when leading his men in an attack on Givenchy. His body was never recovered. Five days before his death Tom Kettle wrote the sonnet by which he is best remembered. His poem was addressed: ‘To my baby Daughter, Betty, The Gift of God’.

To My Baby Daughter Betty, the Gift of God
In wiser days, my darling rosebud, blown
To beauty proud as was your mother’s prime,
In that desired, delayed, incredible time,
You’ll ask why I abandoned you, my own,
And the dear heart that was your baby throne,
To dice with death. And oh! They’ll give you rhyme
And reason: some will call the thing sublime,
And some decry it in a knowing tone.
So here, while the mad guns curse overhead,
And tired men sigh with mud for couch and floor,
Know that we fools, now with the foolish dead,
Died not for flag, nor for king, nor Emperor
But for a dream, born in a herdman’s shed,
And for the secret Scripture of the poor.

The last three lines were inscribed on Kettle’s memorial when it was erected in St Stephen’s Green on 25th March 1928. The bust on the simple memorial was designed by the celebrated Irish Sculptor Albert Power.

From top: The memorial to Tom Kettle, a cameo photo and the memorial to Andrew Kettle.