Historic 400-year-old chalice on display at West Cork gathering

A 400-year-old chalice, one of the only examples of 17th century Irish ecclesiastical silver to survive penal times, was a star attraction at recent gathering of West Cork’s diaspora.

As many as 120 people travelled from as far afield as France, Italy, Canada, the United States, England, New Zealand and Australia to visit the ancestral Dunmanway home their forebarers had left a century or more ago.

On display for the gathering was the Hurley Chalice 1633, on loan from its permanent home in the North Cathedral of St Mary and St Anne in Cork.

The Hurley Chalice is one of the finest surviving examples of 17th-century Irish ecclesiastical silver and is rare because so few Irish Catholic chalices from the early 17th century escaped destruction or confiscation during the upheavals of the penal times.

It is described as having entered divine service in 1633 shortly after the death of Randal Hurley and most likely commissioned by his wife Ellen De Courcey.

The Hurleys were a Gaelic family centred around Ballinacarriga Castle near Dunmanway, and they were connected through marriage to the Anglo-Norman de Courcy family, barons of Kinsale.

The Irish Confederate Wars of 1641–1653 led into the Cromwellian conquests and a time when Catholic worship in Ireland was, in effect, outlawed.

Local historian Michelle McCarthy said that Florida-based Professor David Sheehan has spent decades researching his own Hurley heritage and has established a bloodline link from the Hurleys back through Ellen de Courcy to Charlemagne.

“So anybody who goes from the Randal Óg Hurley and the Ellen de Courcy line, all of their children carry the De Courcy bloodline, which is a direct bloodline to Charlemagne, the Holy Roman Emperor, who took over from the Merovingians, who were tasked with minding the Holy Grail in early Christianity,” she said.