The inhabitants of the parish of Kilfian, between Crossmolina and Ballycastle, in North Mayo, Ireland, have honoured a daughter of the parish, Sarah McElroy (1881-1949) and her Scottish-born husband, Sir Alexander Fleming (1881-1955), by erecting a stone monument and bronze busts of the couple on August 6, 2001, beside Kincon Church. After going to London, she qualified as a nurse. She met Alexander Fleming and they were married on 23 December 1915. Their only child, Robert 1924-2015, became a doctor.

  Alexander Fleming was the physician and microbiologist who discovered penicillin in 1928, for which he shared the Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine in 1945, (with Howard Florey and Ernst Chain, who devised procedures for its large-scale production). His discovery has saved millions of lives around the world. He was knighted for his discovery in 1944. There is a museum in his honour in St Mary’s Hospital, London, where he made his famous discovery. In 1999, Sir Alexander Fleming was named in Time magazine as one of the 100 most important people of the twentieth century. He was also named one the 100 Great Britons in a BBC nationwide vote in 2002.

  Sarah was one of twelve children born on May 28, 1881, to Bernard McElroy, who came to Mayo from County Tyrone, and his wife, Maria, née Flynn, a native of the adjoining parish of Lackan. In London, Sarah ran a nursing home for a number of years, which she sold to help support her husband’s research. After her death on October 28, 1949, she was buried in the crypt of St Paul’s Cathedral in London, and where his cremated remains of Alexander were buried in 1955.

  Michael Davitt, ‘the Father of the Irish Land League’, was born at the height of the Great Irish Famine, on March 25, 1846, in Straide, County Mayo, the son of Martin and Catherine. His father, Martin Davitt, who was born in or around 1814, was a yearly tenant farmer on the estate of John Knox in Straide. Martin, who probably attended a local hedge-school in his youth, was literate, bi-lingual, and a good reader, with a big interest in Irish and American history.  He had a reputation as a good seanchaí, or storyteller, and these stories were to nurture strong patriotic feelings in Michael as well as a big dislike of the landlord system. As a young person, Martin was involved in a local agrarian secret society during the 1830s and, arising from these activities, he went to England for a period before returning home to farm a small holding of land.  Martin married Catherine Kielty from the nearby parish of Turlough in or around 1840. Four children were born to Martin and Catherine Davitt in Straide: Mary (1841), Michael (1846), Anne (1848) and Sabina (1850); a fifth child, a boy named James, was later born in England but he did not survive.

  The late 1840s was a difficult period in which to rear a young family in County Mayo.  With the frugal subsistence of most families deteriorating each year, it was a major struggle to survive.  Despite securing work on a local relief scheme and going to England as a migratory labourer for the summer of 1849, Martin Davitt was unable to pay off the arrears of rent which had accumulated during the Great Famine.  After being served with an ejectment notice in 1849, the Davitt family were evicted as part of the “Great Clearances” at the end of the Great Famine, an unforgettable experience for any family. The Davitt family went to the workhouse in Swinford, Co. Mayo, but when Catherine Davitt was told that male children over three years of age had to be separated from their mothers, she promptly took her family away. Sharing the fate of many thousands of Irish dispossessed by the famine, the Davitt family emigrated to Haslingden, a small textile town in Lancashire, north of Manchester, where Martin undertook a variety of jobs.

  Michael Davitt’s eldest sister, Mary, married a Mayo-man Neil Padden in May 1863 in Haslingden. Shortly afterwards, Neil emigrated to the United States and ended up in Scranton, an industrial town in the north-east of Pennsylvania, where Mary joined him in 1865. Five years later, having regard to his involvement in Fenian activities, Michael persuaded his parents and other sisters, Anne and Sabina, to emigrate to Mary and Neil Padden in the United States.  It was their wish to return to Ireland if they could make a living there, but acceding to Michael’s pressure they decided to emigrate to America.  Preceded by Anne and Sabina, Martin and Catherine Davitt sailed from Liverpool and arrived in New York in April 1870, from where they went to Scranton. They were never to see Ireland or England again, which was the experience of almost all emigrants to America at that time. Michael was arrested and sentenced on to fifteen years’ penal servitude on July 18, 1870, most of which was served in Dartmoor prison in Devon.

  Of all the hardships Michael endured in prison, his most depressing experience was when he learned of his father’s death in December 1871, at the age of about fifty-seven.

Michael had great love and respect for his father and agonised about his role in persuading his parents to emigrate to the USA. Martin was buried in the Padden family plot at number 24, section D1, at the Cathedral Cemetery, Oram Boulevard, Scranton, Pennsylvania. After Martin’s death, Catherine Davitt and two of her daughters, Anne and Sabina, moved to Manayunk, Philadelphia, in search of better employment opportunities. After her death there on July 18, 1880, she was buried in the grounds of the Church of Saint John the Baptist in Manayunk.