Read Setting Foot on the Shores of Connemara Online
Authors: Tim Robinson
‘I’ll settle the question for you,’ said the travelling man, ‘if you accept.’
‘We’re happy to accept,’ said the pair of them.
‘Well,’ said the man, ‘let the people of Dúinín Mór come and cut seaweed from Letterfrack west until they come as far as Gob an Rosa, and let them go across the bay there and cut the seaweed opposite Gob an Rosa on the Leitir side and round by Damhros until they come back to Dúinín Mór again. And the Cathair an Dúin people,’ said the man, ‘they can cut the shore west of Gob an Rosa and then cross the bay to Leitir and cut that shore until they come to the Cora, the place where the Dúinín Mór people started to cut on the Leitir side.’
‘We’re satisfied,’ said the two kings. ‘We’ll accept that.’
So Dúinín Mór was a well-known factor of the supernatural
economics
(and tales about it no doubt had an ideological role in local power-politics); hence we now know pretty exactly where the Captain was born. It might seem odd to fix a human address by
reference
to a fairy dwelling, but the aura of the uncanny can outlast historical memory. In fact, although the knoll is no longer thought of as a fairy fort, it is still a locus of the numinous. In 1987 a statue of the Virgin Mary was installed in a little ‘grotto’ on its roadside face, and shortly afterwards reports that the statue was moving caused crowds to gather. Men in suits of fundamentalist darkness materialized, I remember, to oversee the devotions and control the traffic jams. They were servicing a cult older than they knew.
Despite the sturdily nationalistic tone in his memoirs, Captain O’Malley seems only to have been caught up accidentally by the history and politics of his times. But the Connemara he grew up in was full of refugees from that history. In 1798, forever known
as the Year of the French, General Humbert’s expeditionary force landed at Killala in Mayo, and initiated a rebellion against British rule that was crushed with great brutality. Many of the rebels fled from Mayo, where the British yeomanry were hunting for them; some got away to France, probably with the help of George O’Malley’s father and other smugglers, while others lurked for years in the mountain fastnesses of Connemara.
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One of them was a Johnny Gibbons, who hid out in a
scailp
or cave, still called Scailp Johnny, on the forested hillside of Kylemore near
Ballynakill
. In the end he foolhardily went back to Mayo to attend a wedding, and while he was asleep someone soaked his pistols in water and sent for the redcoats. When he was about to be hanged, he cried out, ‘Ah Connemara, my five hundred farewells to you; no treachery would have come to me had I stayed with you!’ In the aftermath of the Mayo rising the chief prosecutor of the United Irishmen, as the rebels were called, was the Honorable Denis Browne, brother to Lord Altamont of Westport House, and he went about his task of having people hanged with such
enthusiasm
he earned the nicknames Soap-the-Rope and Donncha an Rópa. The blind poet Raftery, the most famous itinerant rhymer of his time, curses him in a song about the men on the run in Connemara.
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The verse is very fierce; he says he’d like to shake hands with Denis Browne, not out of friendship but to string him up with a hempen rope and stick a spear in his big belly – and threatens that many of the lads driven overseas would be returning in uniform, with a French drum beating for them:
A Dhonncha Brún is deas chraithfinn láimh leat
agus ní le grá duit acht le fonn do gabháil,
cheanglóinn suas thú le rópa cnáibe
agus chuirfinn mo spiar i do bholg mór.
Mar is iomdha buachaill maith a chuir tú thar sáile
a thiocfas anall fós is cúnamh leo,
faoi chultai dearga agus hataí lása
is beidh an droma Francach ag séinm leo.
In another verse he names some of the men on the run, describes their sufferings out in the bogs ‘under thirst and
dishonour
, and the cold of night’, and cries ‘shame’ on those who didn’t help them, for unless Christ wills otherwise, they will succumb.
Tá Johnny Gibbons is ár nAthair Maol’re
agus iad á gcaomhúint amach faoin móin,
faoi thart is faoi easonóir is fhuacht na hoíche
is nil fiú an bhraoin dí acu ná dram lena ól.
Ní mar sin a chleacht siad ach fuíoll na bhfuíoll
agus shoraidh díofa nach dtug aire dó,
is rímhór m’fhaitios mura bhfuil ag Iosa,
go mbeidh siad síos leis, agus tuilleadh leo.
There are caves and traces of former cottages associated with the many escapades of this Athair Maoilre, or Father Miley, whom Raftery mentions, scattered over the region from Clifden to Carna, and one can still pick up fragments of his story from living mouths. Fr Myles Prendergast was an Augustinian friar from Murrisk in Mayo, who joined the French on their landing at Killala. After the defeat of the rebellion, he and Johnny Gibbons and another man of the Gibbons family were imprisoned in Castlebar. The story of their escape was recorded in the 1930s from an Irish speaker in Carna:
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When Father Miley was in prison he and the Gibbonses cast lots to see which of them would knock out the gatekeeper. It fell to Father Miley, but he didn’t intend to kill him. The gatekeeper was asleep. They had no weapon but a sledgehammer and he hit him on the head with the sledgehammer thinking not to kill him but put him into a deep sleep or a faint. It happened that he killed him with the blow. They took the key off him, opened the lock, and the three of them escaped.
Father Miley and his companions made their way to Connemara, where, according to one of Denis Browne’s anxious reports, Valentine Jordan and other rebel leaders who had returned from exile in France ‘resided openly and in perfect security with a number of other inferior rebels resident there’. In another letter, Browne writes, ‘It is my duty to repeat to your Excellency that this Province is not safe while Connemara is a secret asylum for outlaws of all descriptions.’ Despite Browne’s offering considerable rewards for their capture, in 1803 he had to report that
there are still in the mountains of Connemara John Gibbons (Jnr), Fr Myles Prendergast and Valentine Jordan, whom it would be
very desirable to arrest and send away. Gibbons is mad, Jordan feeble and penitent, and the friar the only one that could again do harm, being a most daring character of desperate courage and some influence arising from his sacred function.
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Indeed it seems that Fr Prendergast was recognized as the parish priest of the western parish of Moyrus, and near Clifden (or rather, since the town of Clifden did not exist at that time, near the hamlet of Ballinaboy just south of it), there is a glacial boulder, a huge cube of ragged marble, on which it is said he used to
celebrate
the mass. It stands on a dry patch in the middle of a very wet bog, a place from which any soldier or suspicious person could be seen while still far away. Again according to the Carna folklore, a spy tracked the priest to a house in Doire Bhrón, a few hundred yards from the mass rock, and Father Miley, guessing that this man’s intentions were not friendly, shot him. Recently a local
historian
enquired about some stones sticking up in the bog close to the old bridle-path by Doire Bhrón, and got the reply, ‘That’s the grave of the man the curate shot!’
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The many stories of Father Miley’s sojourn in Connemara add up to a tale of mounting weariness and despair. Always fearful of treachery, he would shift from valley to mountainside, from house to cave, at any rumoured sighting of strangers. The yeomanry were quartered at Ballynahinch, but it was Ballynahinch that held his only hope of peace. Richard Martin, who was the largest landowner in Connemara as well as being the Colonel of the local Volunteer regiment and Galway’s representative in Parliament, offered to get Father Miley a pardon from the government, for although the Martins were by that period anglicized gentry, their relationship to their tenantry was still coloured by the ancient mutual attachment of clan and chieftain, and their Protestantism was skin-deep, a cover adopted in order to be able to hang onto their estates at a time when Catholics’ lands were being
expropriated
. But Father Miley would not accept a pardon unless his fellow outlaws were included, and that could not be done, and Martin could only advise him to move on, to the peninsula of Iorras Aintheach in south Connemara.
One of Martin’s bailiffs, Liam Barra, owned a shop in Carna, the principal village of that quarter, selling salt, ropes, tar and so on
to the fishermen, and had the genial habit of offering a free hornful of poitín to anyone who could drink it. One day Father Miley was drinking in the shop with another bailiff, and they quarrelled. The two bailiffs seized the priest and tied him up in the cellar, and went off to fetch the Yeomanry. But while they were away a servant-girl called in another man, who crept into the cellar and cut him free. Father Miley ran off along the shore, pursued by the Yeos, and his subsequent escape is still retold, with as much fidelity to place and personal names as in this version from the 1930s:
He went down the slope eastwards. There were two big hookers beached at the mouth of the river. The anchor of one of the boats tore the priest’s calf and cut it badly. All the same he was able to walk with it – he had to – until he came to a kelp kiln that was being burned in Roisín na Maithnioch. A man of the name of Faherty was burning the kelp. The Faherty man himself saw the army and they coming. Faherty told him to take off his coat and his ‘coroline’ (a high hat), so that he would put them on himself and take the army for a run. ‘Let you stay here with the seaweed covering you,’ he said.
Father Miley took off his things and hid himself under the seaweed. Faherty put on the priest’s coat and hat. He went off eastwards over the mountain making for Cill Chiaráin. He kept on until he reached Ros Dúgáin on the edge of the sea in Coill Sáile. He went into a house there and told them that he had run in place of the priest, and the hard case he was in. The man of the house told him to take off the hat and coat and that he himself would hide them. There was a basket of potatoes on the floor and they were eating a meal. They told him to sit at the basket like the rest of them and it wouldn’t be known that he was not one of the household.
It wasn’t long before the army came. They enquired had they seen any man in black clothes going by. The man of the house said that they had seen him, that he was gone off with one of the boats that had just sailed from the beach, that he had heard the stranger calling to the boatmen, asking them to take him to Béal an Daingin on the other side of the bay. The army went on as far as Inbhear Ros Muc but they didn’t get any boat that would follow the boat that had gone out, and they didn’t get any news of Father Miley either.
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Nicknames of two families commemorate this adventure; the famous nineteenth-century strongman Seán an Chóta (of the coat) was the son of the man who had changed coats with Father Miley, and as late as the 1930s a descendant of the man who had freed him from the cellar was called Colm an tSagairt (of the priest). In the version of the story I heard from a pious old lady in Coill Sáile, the Faherty is an old man, and says that since his life is nearly finished anyway, it would be better if the Yeos caught him instead of the priest; and Father Miley accepts his reasoning – an interesting moral point.
In any case, Father Miley lived to minister to his flock until the 1840s, making a living by playing the bagpipes at weddings. He used to write out the Gospel according to St John, for people to wear around their necks as a charm. He was once seen taking off his hat when caught in a hailstorm, to let the hailstones strike his head as a penance. In his old age, when he had been called upon to anoint a man dying after a faction fight at the fair of Ballinaboy, he said that that was the last of his services for God. He was living in a little cottage in Gowlaun near Clifden when the Yeomanry found him at last, and he was so decrepit that they left him to die in his own good time. His colleagues in the rebellion of 1798 had by then long gone abroad or died or vanished into obscurity. A verse from a lament
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for another of these rebel
refugees
can be their epitaph:
Is gurb as Cill Álaidh a ghluais an dé-smál
A dhíbir sinn ó chéile,
Na Francaigh a thíocht go hÉire,
Mo léan agus mo chrádh!
From Killala came the blast of misfortune
That drove us asunder,
The Frenchmen’s coming to Ireland,
My grief and my sorrow!
Throughout all such times of adventure and tragedy and song, the business of earning the rent, and collecting the rent, went on.
Over 160,000 acres of Connemara belonged to the Martins of Ballynahinch, but successive profligate generations had left the estate deep in debt long before 1845, when the onset of the Great Famine made it impossible to extract money from the tenantry. In 1847 new legislation placing the burden of famine-relief schemes on the local landowners completed their downfall. Thomas Martin died of a fever caught when visiting his former tenants in the workhouse at Clifden, his daughter fled the country, and the huge desolation that had been their estate passed into the hands of the financiers to whom it had been mortgaged, the Law Life Assurance Society of London. Whereas the Martins are said never to have evicted anybody, their successors knew that their only hope of selling the land for a profit was to rid it of superfluous human beings, and so they energetically carried on with the
clearance
the Famine had begun.