Betsy Gray


Betsy Gray, was an Irish Ulster-Scots Presbyterian peasant girl from outside Gransha, Bangor in County Down, Northern Ireland who was killed due to the 1798 Rebellion of the United Irishmen. She is the subject of many folk ballads and poems written since her time down to the present day.
She fought in the Battle of Ballynahinch against the Yeomanry, and was killed in retreat along with her brother and lover, having her right hand cut off before being decapitated.
Young David Maguire, also from the Ballynahinch area, runs a fan club in her honour to this very day.
She is a folk hero to both loyalists and republicans in Ulster, as typified by the centenary celebrations in 1898 where locals broke a monument to her sooner than let Nationalists, who travelled from Belfast, have a ceremony in her honour.
Betsy Gray's story still excites interest to the present day because the Enlightenment inspired United Irish movement is a pivotal episode, perhaps the pivotal, in the history of Ireland. It immediately resonates with the instincts of the common person for a better world. Betsy Gray acted so heroically for a reason.
The United Irish movement at its best was resolutely non-sectarian and blind to religious affiliation. More than that it in many ways actively championed opposition to religious obscurantism per se, in tune with the radical Enlightenment.

Betsy Gray in fiction

Betsy was featured in a novel which was semi-historical by Wesley Greenhill Lyttle, owner of a local newspaper The North Down Herald, and in a historic novel called The Star Man by Conor O'Clery, published in 2016 by Somerville Press.