GRAMMY, Emmy and Oscar award winning musician Sting was in Co Monaghan last week to visit a deceased, widowed pauper buried in a mass grave.
Sting (whose real name is Gordon Stumner) was born in Wallsend, north-east England, but found out about his Irish family when researchers for American television programme ‘Finding Your Roots’ discovered that the singer’s origins could be partly traced back to Inniskeen in Co.Monaghan.
Furthermore, the programme discovered his great-great-great grandmother Mary Murphy had died in a workhouse aged 68 in 1881. All her children either emigrated or died.
After his Odyssey gig in Belfast with Paul Simon, Sting visited Carrickmacross Workhouse.
Speaking to The Sunday Independent, workhouse co-ordinator Kevin Gartlan said he “showed Sting the actual building where Mary Murphy would have lived and died."
The Workhouse was designed for 500 tenants but by the 1850s had 2,000 people living in it due to intense destitution as a result of the Famine.
Clearly taken back by the rough life of his ancestor, workhouse manager Yvonne Marron described how he was "quite overwhelmed by it all - he stayed here for more than an hour".
Carrickmacross Workhouse itself was reopened in 2004 and now provides numerous vital community services.
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