A daring attempt – Kinvara – 1876

Freeman’s Journal 21st October 1876 p 17

A daring robbery was attempted on the 10th of August, at Kinvara, near Ennistymon (sic.). The administrator of the parish, Father Molony, was attending a diocesan retreat of the clergy, and in his absence a burglar entered the oratory and abstracted a beautiful gold cross and silver pedestal, the latter containing a gold box set with precious stones enclosing a piece of the true cross. It was a treasured relic in the parish, being the gift of a French Catholic nobleman, Baron de Bastrot, whose ancestry, in the stormy days of the French Revolution, had acquired property in the locality. It is pleasant to say that the burglar was detected in his midnight depredations by some of the female inmates, who raised shrieks sufficient to awake the dead and appal the living. So terrible was their effect on the burglar that in his hurried exit through the window he dropped the booty in the dark, and did not consider it prudent, with Pandemonium at his heels, to stay and pick it up.