Patrick "Staker" Wallace (1733 - 1798) was an Irish farmer who was possibly born at Teermore, in Bulgaden-Ballinvana parish of County Limerick, Ireland, near the town of Kilfinane.
During the Irish Rebellion of 1798, Wallace was arrested in late March 1798 and charged with being a member of the Society of United Irishmen and plotting the assassination of Captain Charles Silver Oliver, before being executed.
A document on the United Irishmen in Limerick found in the 1940s in the Irish State Paper Office listed prisoners in the new gaol (jail) in 1798.
[3] Patrick Wallace's extended family had lived in the southeast parishes of County Limerick for generations.
Wallace was involved in the disturbances leading up to the 1798 rebellion in Ireland, and was hung as a local captain of the United Irishmen.
One account makes it sound as though he was hanged, drawn and quartered, and finally beheaded immediately afterwards, when the torture failed to yield the desired results.
[citation needed] Wallace may also have been a local leader of a secret Irish agrarian organisation, established in 18th-century Ireland to defend tenant-farmer rights, known as the "Whiteboys".
[citation needed] In the 1850s, many of Staker's grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and collateral relatives emigrated to Kane County, Illinois, USA, a rural area west of Chicago.
A version of the air, played by fiddler Eileen Ivers, appears in the soundtrack of the Martin Scorsese film Gangs of New York (2002).