Authors: Tim Robinson
A smith has an affinity for iron; he can sense its presence by smell or magic; Mícheál has told me that he can always find a cast shoe or a link or hook lost off a harness and kicked into the grass of the roadside. Similarly iron tends to find its way to the forge, whose dark shelves and dusty windowsill are littered with odd bolts and nuts that sometimes after long separation achieve a new conjugation in use, twisted hinges that might live to squeak again, rusty cleats, stanchions, toggles and pulleys discharged from the sea but still fit for odd jobs on the water-front. And among all this lumber I have found an accumulation of generations of
anvil-talk
. The son of the smith watches and listens as the raw matter of reality is heated, hammered out, quenched, shaped into useful and durable items, which in his turn he will be called upon to reshape and improve and adapt to other days. Mícheál is generally admitted in Fearann an Choirce to be the best man for
genealogies
, which in this densely interwoven community are much discussed, sometimes with pride or anxiety, but often with a
disinterested
fascination, like a puzzle. If a particular field is mentioned in an anecdote, we have to diverge into the question of its
ownership
before the story can proceed, and thence into genealogies,
which either ramify uncontrollably and have to be summarized with an exclamation of “Oh, there’s a crowd of them in it!” (
e.g.
the Ó Direáin clan, so numerous in this village), or successfully pursued down to a personal acquaintance (“Oh, I knew him as well as an old penny!”). Thus everything is worked over again and again, every place, personality or event is traversed from every angle, everything is shown to be connected with everything else, every story contains all stories. And now by some quirk of elective affinity I have fallen heir to four generations of these anvil-words. Difficult as I find its country elisions and density of local
reference
, after years of repetitious neighbourliness and
companionship
a portion of this matter has lodged itself in my head—only a fraction of the whole, but more than I know what to do with. The fact that I could, for example, recount the course taken by the last hare to be hunted in Aran, or imitate Fr. Farragher’s domineering way of taking the hammer from the hands of Mícheál’s father and forging a horseshoe himself, sometimes feels like a burden, a responsibility it might take more than a lifetime to discharge.
The next buildings down the road from the forge are the
National
School and the Summer School, with the ruins of the
earlier
National School opposite them, and a little further away, the former teacher’s residence. Whatever joyful rumpus or dull
rumour
of rote-learning songs emerges from the living schools, I hear the echo of a thunderous silence from the dead one. The original of this silence lasted for six months, from January to May, in 1911; it is part of the island’s history.
David O’Callaghan, of Broadford in Limerick, came to Inis Meáin as national schoolteacher in 1880, and married the
schoolmistress
. He took over the Oatquarter National School in 1885, and was driven from the island in 1914. A go-ahead cleric dominated most of this period: Fr. Farragher, who was a curate under Fr. O’Donoghue and returned to the island as Parish Priest in 1897, was the driving force behind the buying-out of the Hill Farm and its division between the Cill Éinne tenants, and later in the foundation of the Aran Fisheries Co-operative Society. At
first O’Callaghan was not opposed to the priestly drive to
material
improvements. He became the secretary of a little agricultural bank under the chairmanship of Fr. Farragher, which he ran from the Residence; it was known popularly as Bane na mBanbh, the piglet bank, because it lent money for the buying of piglets,
repayment
being due on sale of the fattened pigs. (Unfortunately some who could have benefited from it did not do so because they tasted the copper spoon of charity in it; Mícheál remembers hearing old men boast that, poor as they were, they “never went to Bane na mBanbh.”) O’Callaghan was also concerned in the
fisheries
; in 1895 he had two currachs let out to islanders and was among the founders of a fishing co-operative. But he soon became deeply interested in the islanders’ culture. He learned Irish and spoke it with his neighbours, as appears from this account of the “evil eye” he gave the ethnographer A.C. Haddon in 1890 or ’91:
Numberless are the tales told of the Evil Eye and of those who have
succumbed
to it, and of those who have been cured. Among the latter is one which was related to me lately as having happened to the narrator
himself
:—
“Well, master,” he says, “and you don’t think there is such a thing as the Evil Eye?” “No, Pat,” said I; “I don’t think there is.” “You don’t think there is? Well! I tell you there is, and I am the man who can tell it to you. You see me now,” he says; “I suppose you don’t think much of me today; yet, thirty or forty years ago, I was one of the best men in Aran. I was one night at a dance, and although you would not believe me now, I was then a fine dancer. I was praised by all in the house while I was dancing, but just in the middle of the dance I fell down dead on the floor.” “Dead, Pat?” “Yes, dead,” said he; “for I had not a kick in me then, nor for two days after. Well, my friends, knowing what was the matter with me, got every person in the house to throw a spit on me, saying at the same time, “God bless you,” but to no purpose. I remained dead, thrown in a bed in the corner near the fire, for two days, when a young woman comes in and spits on me, saying “God bless you, Patrick, you are very ill;” when I went of one jump from the corner to the middle of the floor, and began to dance; and I was well from that
out.” “Of course, Pat,” I said, “You married that girl?” “God bless you,” said Pat, “I thought you had sense till now. I did not, nor would I, if there was not another girl in Aran.” This is as close a translation, as possible, of Pat’s story as told to me in Irish.
O’Callaghan also contributed lists of Aran words to Fr. Dinneen’s famous dictionary, and an Aran folksong to a pioneering collection published in 1892 by Dómhnall O’Fotharta of Callow in the west of Connemara, a fellow schoolmaster and enthusiast for what he called
“an
teanga
bhinn
bhríoghmhar,
teanga
treun
tuilteach,
teanga
uasal
ard
ársa
ár
sinnsear
féin”
(“the sweet lively tongue, the strong overflowing tongue, the noble, high, ancient tongue of our own ancestors”). Such teachers were at that time totally reversing the ethos of the National Schools; whereas it had been the policy to beat the Irish language out of the pupils and to turn them into loyal subjects of Her Majesty, it was now the schoolmasters and mistresses who were insisting on the importance of Irish, even in the face of parental opposition, and who were revealing to native speakers that their language had an existence in books. Liam and Tom O’Flaherty were among those taught to read and write Irish in Oatquarter National School. Returning to Aran from America thirty years later Tom O’Flaherty remembered O’Callaghan with the greatest respect:
Mr. O’Callaghan did great work. He was no cheap Jingo nationalist of the type who froths at the mouth at the mention of an Englishman; but he hated British imperialism with all its works and pomps. He was the first
Sinn
Feiner
in the island, and had no difficulty in making one of me….I wondered where my old schoolmaster was, if he were still alive, and if he recollected the many tricks I played him on him for which he thrashed me with violence and with demoniacal fury. He was a fine man. How many workers like O’Callaghan are forgotten when the ideals for which they struggled are realized in whole or in part, while the blatant politicians and the gentlemen who always managed to pick the winning side are
honoured
?
O’Callaghan was a member of the Gaelic League from soon after its foundation in 1893, and when Patrick Pearse was
thinking
of starting an Aran branch in 1898 it was natural for him to canvas the opinion of “Dáithí Ó Ceallacháin.” At the inaugural meeting of the Aran branch, chaired by Fr. Farragher, O’Callaghan delivered “a scathing indictment of the National School system as worked in the Irish-speaking districts, maintaining that where Irish is the home language of the people it should be taught
simultaneously
with English from the time the child first enters the school.”
Over the next few years relationships between the two rival leaders of the island community deteriorated. In 1905 O’Callaghan resigned from the secretaryship of the bank, and in 1907 Fr.
Farragher
resigned from the position of school manager for a time in an attempt to get rid of the teacher. Then came “the time of the Saucepans,” the bomb-attack on the presbytery arising out of a feud over the distribution of the Hill Farm lands, and the sentence of boycott pronounced from the altar by Fr. Farragher on those responsible and anyone who had dealings with them. O’Callaghan, deeply involved in the web of island relationships, refused to ban certain pupils from his school as directed by the priest. Farragher tried to have him dismissed, but O’Callaghan had the respect and support of the Inspectors of the Board of National Education and was able to hold out against him. Just before the beginning of the January term in 1911 the priest spoke from the altar about O’Callaghan’s school:
[I] would not recommend parents to send their children to that school if they had any other; not telling you not to send them there, but if you take my advice you won’t. As you know I have not visited that school for some time, and when the Priest does not visit the school there is something out of place, and I believe the fault is not mine.
As a result O’Callaghan found the school deserted when he came to open it. He remained facing empty benches to the end of
the school day; he came the next day at the appointed time and did the same, and maintained this dignified and lonely vigil throughout the winter and spring, until the school closed at the end of May. In the following year he took Fr. Farragher to court for the words he had spoken from the altar, but the jury found that the priest had spoken in good faith and without malice, and the slander action failed. Fr. Farragher was awarded costs, and as O’Callaghan refused to pay, eventually had him evicted from the Residence. O’Callaghan wrote a last plaintive letter to a Galway paper before leaving the island, in February 1914:
Dear Mr. Editor,—I was evicted from my residence on yesterday, 16th inst. at the suit of Rev. M. Farragher, P.P., Aran Islands, for the recovery of his legal expenses in the case of Callaghan v. Farragher…. The late Mr. Gladstone styled an eviction “a sentence of death.” These sentences were carried out in the past by a few evicting landlords, but it is rather a novel incident for a priest professing national sentiments to play the role of evictor.
Of course it was not a sentence of death; O’Callaghan went on to teach elsewhere, and even, I am told, revisited the island in about 1931, at which time Liam O’Flaherty was writing up his old schoolmaster as the eponymous hero of
Skerrett.
O’Flaherty, who as pupil to the one and altar-boy to the other had seen them both as towering figures, made of their conflict a titanic struggle for the island’s soul. He ends his version of their story with these words:
Thirty years have passed since Skerrett’s death and already his name has become a glorious legend on that island, where his bones were not allowed bleach and moulder into the substance of the rock, which was so like his spirit. His enemy … has also become a legend, but his legend grows less with the years, while that of the schoolmaster grows greater … He aimed at being a man who owns no master. And such men, though doomed to destruction by the timid herd, grow after death to the full proportion of their greatness.
However O’Callaghan inhabited a more complex and less
teleological
world than does his literary counterpart. A few Dublin Gaeilgeoirí are aware of his role in the preservation of the Irish language in Aran, but on the island itself his spirit is locked up with that of the priest in the puppet-booth of folk memory. The Residence is now Mícheál’s, for the educational authorities eventually sold it off to his father, and together with its other
dilapidated
fixtures and fittings he has inherited something of its history, from which he has acted out a few scenes for me. The first shows me the villagers and the curate assembling in the
Residence
for the annual Stations. It was customary on such an occasion for the householder to send a horse for the parish priest, but the teacher has omitted to do this, and after hearing the
confessions
in the living room the curate has to emerge into the kitchen and tell the people that as the Priest has not arrived they will have to wait until the next Sunday to receive the Sacraments. The next scene takes place on that Sunday: the priest paces up and down outside the chapel wondering if the teacher will apologize, but when he arrives the teacher comes bounding up the steps and pushes past with an off-hand greeting. Sorrowfully the priest speaks from the altar, saying how glad he is that it was no islander who has done this thing. Finally I see the teacher swaggering back to the Residence with his cronies and crying “I wouldn’t send a
cat
for that old devil!”
The Residence stands almost on the brink of the scarp marking an ancient boundary which I will use to fractionate off a
further
essence of Aran, and so it provides a convenient full stop for the eastern portion of this book. It is a neat little house, perfectly symmetrical, of the standard 1880s design of such residences; an architect has described it for me as follows:
This two-storey house has an unusual front elevation. The traditional
straight-ridged
slated roof, with gable-ends, has a feature central gable with a
decorative
scalloped fascia. The two small square windows of the upper storey are gathered together within the gable directly under the fascia. At the
intersection
of the gable with the main roof ridge is a central chimney-stack.
The entrance porch is plain and small, with a lean-to roof having a sprocket-supported fascia; there is a glazed lunette fanlight above the single solid entrance door. On each side of the entrance porch is a rectangular window, which is four-paned, as are the windows at first-floor level.