Katmandu is not where you think it is. This one is in Poulacapple between Mullinahone and Callan. Katmandu was a hideout, a secret room built into a cowshed. The building which housed the room was thirty feet long and ten feet wide, while the room measured ten feet wide by five feet deep. There was no external access to the room and the room could only be entered from within the main building, this insured there were no visible tracks led to the room. It was built by local battalion engineer Jim O’Brien and was on the farm of Michael and John Phelan. Amazingly this little room could sleep up to fourteen people arranged in a two-tier system.
The room was christened Katmandu by a local wag and the name stuck. Interestingly at around this time a common party piece was the recitation of the dramatic monologue “The Green Eye of the Yellow God”, by J. Milton Hayes. The opening line were:-
There’s a one-eyed yellow idol to the north of Khatmandu,
There’s a little marble cross below the town;
There’s a broken-hearted woman tends the grave of Mad Carew,
And the Yellow God forever gazes down.
This monologue may have been the inspiration for the hide-outs name rather than the city in Nepal.
On the 4th of April 1923 LiamLynch, Frank Aiken and Sean Hyde left Katmandu and started their journey to get to Araglin by April 10th. Katmandu would be the meeting place for the Executive meeting of 20th April when Frank Aiken was elected chief of staff and it was agreed to make attempts to start negotiations with the Free State Government. Katmandu was demolished in the 1940s for its materials.
