Meathman's Diary: The Hurricane that landed in Athboy

God only knows what the people who lived in Tullaghanogue and surrounding areas 80 years ago thought of it all but it must have caused quite a sensation when a Hawker Hurricane IIB Z5070 RAF plane made an emergency landing in a local field.

The war, of course, was raging in Europe and elsewhere at the time with Hitler making strenuous efforts to rule the world. Ireland was neutral but it didn't escape the fall-out from the great conflagration, how could it?

In August 1941 the Hawker Hurricane, piloted by a member of the Royal Canadian Air Force, a Sgt Tees, took off from Halvington, near Bristol apparently on a flight to Clyde, Scotland. He lost his way. He had taken off with two other Hurricane fighters but got lost after his radio went down.

Running low on fuel Sgt Tees was forced to make an emergency landing in Tullaghanogue, near Athboy. Sgt Tees was interned, at least for a time. The aircraft was, apparently, returned to the RAF in 1943 the same year Sgt Tees was released. It was one episode in a series of air-related events that occurred as the war arrived in this part of the world.

My own mother used to tell me how as a youngster she and her sisters would lie in bed at night while listening to the drone of the Luftwaffe planes overhead as they made their way up to the North apparently to off-load a consignment of bombs on Belfast or Dublin as they mistakenly did once. It was a sound that stayed with her all her life.

Anything was likely to fall from the skies as the war raged. In 1940 there was the strange tale of how an Irish Army's look-out post reported the sighting of an unidentified aircraft sighted flying over Gormanston Camp. Somewhere over Ballivor two parachutes were observed descending from the skies from a German Heinkel.

One of the parachutes carried a radio transmitter the other brought a soldier - Hermann Goertz. He was an intelligence officer with the German military intelligence section, the Abwehr. He was a central figure in a daring and cunning plan that had been put together by the Germans.

It seems Herr Goertz was a hardy, indomitable soldier. He swam across the Boyne and somehow made his way down country to Laragh in Co Wicklow where his aim was to link up with a Nazi sympathiser.

Goertz had with him the very substantial sum of 20,000 US dollars and his mission was to link up with the IRA and talk to them about possible co-ordinated attacks on the British forces based in Northern Ireland. Herr Goertz escaped the Irish authorities for 18 months and it is difficult to conclude that when he landed from the skies near Ballivor he wasn't helped in some way by members of the local population. Conjecture, of course, but where would we be without a bit of speculation.