Aisling Bea: My pride – and shame - at my family tree

Comedian's mixed findings on Who Do You Think You Are?

Aisling Bea discovered that her great-grandfather was an active fighter for Irish independence when she took part in her episode of Who Do You Think You Are?, which airs tonight.

But her pride in that relative was tempered by the shame of another who emerged from the famine with a larger farm than she had beforehand.

The comedian grew up in County Kildare in Ireland, with her mum Helen and sister Sinead, after her dad, Brian, died when she was three. Her real surname is O'Sullivan and she adopted Bea as her stage name in tribute to her father’s initial.

Aisling and Dad
Baby Aisling with her dad

Speaking on the BBC One genealogy show, she says she was defined by her female-dominated upbringing, saying: ‘I was brought up pretty much exclusively by women. I went to an all-girls school. There were only female teachers and it was such a shock to turn 18 and go to university and realise that they put loads of men in charge of loads of things and I was like, "who are these guys?"’

She said she went on the programme as 'I really wanted to know where this spirit [of strong women] came from'.

Researching her mother’s side of the family, she leans that in the 19th century her three times great-grandparents, Martha and James, were middle-class farmers with 40 acres in Limerick to their name.

The show’s researchers discover an 1841 police report in which a gang of up to 30 men - believed to be angry about the growing industrialisation of farming – attacked the farm, with James forced to hold them off on his own, killing and injuring several of them.

Eventually the mob vandalised a valuable threshing machine and stole a blunderbuss, a case of pistols and two swords. In the attack, James was ‘cruelly beaten’ and sustained severe cuts, from which died shortly afterwards.

The researchers also found that Martha effectively ‘profited' from the famine, as she emerged from it with a larger holding than before, as smaller farmers had been evicted during the tragedy. ‘She does make me feel a little bit shameful,’ Bea admits.

Dublin Farmers March

Also on her maternal side, her grandmother, Rita Maloney, circled, led The Farmers' March from the South of Ireland to Dublin in 1966 in protest at agricultural policy. Bea’s mum Helen says of her character: ‘She felt that you had to be standing in your own two feet, be financially independent. That's she always drummed into us growing up.’

Investigating her father’s side of the family in Kerry, Bea learns that her great-grandfather Padraig was a member of the rebellious Irish Volunteers, and who filled in the 1911 census in the Irish language, in defiance of the British rulers.

‘It's hard not to be emotional reading this for many reasons,’ the comedian says on air. ’It just shows you how committed, even as a family, they must have been to the ideal of freedom for Ireland.'

Padraig

Padraig, above, was all set to participate in the 1916 Easter Rising as part of an operation to receive arms covertly supplied by the Germans via a boat, called The Aud, sailing under a Norwegian flag.

However the plan to distribute arms to the Limerick and Galway Volunteers failed after The Aud was intercepted by the British Navy, which scuttled the vessel.

Bea says: ‘When I was at school and I used to study the 1916 rising, you think of it as a massive part of our Irish history and that eventually everyone was involved.

‘But really a very small amount of people were involved. Most people weren't revolutionary, most people weren’t about to give up their lives for the cause. But there was also a small amount of people like my great-grandfather who are absolutely willing to take up arms and fight for what they believed in and lose their lives for what they believed in.

‘He was part of the Easter Rising, even if they didn't make it to that Monday [when the armed insurrection began] and it's make me really proud that he was part of that small group of people.’

Heavily pregnant at the time of filming, she reveals she’ll call her daughter Saoirse, the Irish word for freedom.

Ailsing as a babt