On the afternoon of Bloody Sunday, James Matthews met a friend near home in the tenements on North Cumberland Street in Dublin’s inner city and went for a walk. He called to his mother to say hello and somewhere along the way, James and his friend decided to drop into Croke Park and watch Dublin play Tipperary.

When the firing started, James made for the wall near the exit at the northeastern corner of the ground. His friend clambered over the wall. James was shot in the leg and slid back down onto the bank. When the shooting stopped, he was dead. That week his wife Kate sat in the Pro-Cathedral for his funeral with their daughters, expecting another baby.

Nancy was born the following spring and lived to see a gravestone erected over her father’s grave in 2016 at Glasnevin cemetery.