Stones of Aran (58 page)

But he has a certain satanic dash even in his drunken follies:

Eventually the pangs of desire give way to the pains of age, and after lying for a while in his house in the wood, a house in which laughter has been rare, he joins his ancestors in the graveyard, and is eaten by the worm that does not distinguish between high and low degree. “May your sleep be tranquil in the tomb tonight,” prays the poet of this memorial.

My translation has of course brought the poem into a more literal relationship with Aran history than Ó Direáin may have intended. Perhaps it is the irritation of a single line in it that makes me do so. While Ó Mórna was giving himself to debauch, his land was administered by four abusive and extortionate
stewards,
says Ó Direáin, and he names them for us:

This is very specific. The first three names are familiar in the
island’s
history; the fourth is not, but it was probably suggested by that of Charde, the Protestant schoolteacher and shopkeeper. Thom(p)son is of course the land-agent whose misdeeds I have
catalogued—but he was agent to the landowners, the Digbys, rather than to O’Flaherty, who was only a middleman, leasing land from the owners and subletting much of it to lesser tenants. Henry Robinson succeeded Thompson in this post in the 1880s; he was agent for a number of estates and in particular for the former Martin estate in Connemara, and he lived in Roundstone, in a house rather grander than O’Flaherty’s. (Since I too live in Roundstone it is sometimes assumed that I descend from him, but it is not so; nevertheless this mention of his name spurs me to redress if not a historical injustice—for Robinson was a great evictor in his day—then a historical over-simplification.) As for Wiggins, the family may or may not have inherited its name and an ever-reducing proportion of its genes from some
seventeenth-century
Anglo-Saxon trooper gone native, but for many generations they had been smallholders in Cill Éinne under the same conditions as other families. However, the reasons for Ó Direáin’s use of their non-Aranite name for one of his gang of petty
villains
, rather than that of his kinsfolk and neighbours, Ó hIarnáin, are quite comprehensible.

The unmasking of these names reveals James O’Flaherty as an actor in the cross-fissured capitalistic society of
nineteenth-century
Aran, rather than as the survivor from some archaic, amoral and almost heroic age Ó Direáin half-admiringly depicts. He was in shifting alliances with the representatives of other
social
powers transcending his own jurisdiction, notably the
Protestant
minister, the police and the land-agent. His implication in the politics of the relief committees and the management of the dispensary, his commerce with fisheries, kelp, cattle-raising and the transport of goods to and from Galway, and above all his role as land-grabber and, finally, victim in the Land War, have brought his name into many chapters of this book. Ó Direáin’s poem, after a splendid beginning that promises so much more than the old crone crossing her forehead could tell us, shirks this perplexed social setting, which leaves his blood-driven and nobly
transgressive
Ó Mórna both circumscribed and anaemic.

In the real Aran, James O’Flaherty in his heyday had enough supporters, employees and hangers-on at least to put on a show. The archaeologist Thomas Westropp, describing his own first visit to Aran in 1878, happened upon a scene that could not have been repeated a few years later:

Within three years of this celebration—which perhaps marked the completion of Kilmurvey House—O’Flaherty was living
under
the protection of the new police barracks in the village, and had received the terrible blow of his cattle being driven over the cliff. Less than a year after that nightmarish warning as to his own safety he died in a Galway hotel, at the age of sixty-four.

James O’Flaherty’s successor at Kilmurvey was his daughter Lily’s husband, who had added her surname to his own, calling himself Patrick O’Flaherty Johnston, and was appointed JP in 1882. The Johnstons are reputed to have been a hard-riding,
high-living
set who married into the junior branch of the Macnamaras, wealthy landowners in County Clare. The Johnston house near Doolin, “Aran View,” had been built by that Francis Macnamara who married Marcella, the sister[?] of Patrick O’Flaherty;
Marcella’s
daughter Catherine had married Robert Johnston, and their son was Patrick Johnston. The Macnamaras numbered among their forbears the famous eighteenth-century duellist Fireball Macnamara, and the senior branch at Ennistymon House later gave rise to another Francis Macnamara, a bohemian aesthete friend of Yeats and Shaw, for whom the nickname Fireball was resurrected. This Francis used to visit his Kilmurvey relatives and indeed had an illegitimate daughter by one of them. When he abandoned his wife and children, they drifted into the protection
of another of his friends, Augustus John, and one of the daughters, Caitlín, married Dylan Thomas—which is the closest
connection
between Aran and Llareggub I can contrive.

The Johnstons, as can be imagined, introduced a new tone to Kilmurvey House, which by chance was detected and recorded for us by Violet Martin and Edith Somerville, who passed by
during
their summer holiday of 1895, after they had surveyed and disapproved the “invertebrate walls” of Dún Aonghasa:

But the world of the Irish R.M. was in decay, as the stories of “Martin and Ross” exhaustively demonstrate. Aran memory is that Patrick Johnston “scattered” the inheritance, shooting,
fishing
and drinking in Clare. When the Land Court sat in Cill Rónain in 1886, he won a 40 per cent reduction in the rent of the Hill Farm, but by 1897 he was anxious to transfer the lease of it to the Congested Districts Board for the sum of £550. Nothing immediately came of this because Johnston could not get a renewal of the lease from the owners on terms that would have made it attractive to the Board, but he must have given up the Cill Éinne land soon afterwards. A rather desperate-sounding draft letter from him to a solicitor reveals that his wife had just heard that her sister (probably Delia) could not lend her the £500 she had hoped for, and was seeing Fr. Farragher to arrange for the speedy sale of Ceathrú an Turlaigh; as for the Hill Farm, no one would purchase the lease under the present rent, and he could
only surrender it to the agent. So both east and west wings of the estate were clipped, reducing the holding to the Kilmurvey House farm alone.

Patrick and Lily had three sons, one of whom died young, and three daughters. The family was in relatively poor circumstances by then; one son, George Irwin, had to go to the National School, and so grew up an excellent Irish speaker. He joined the Royal Irish Fusiliers and became a Captain (and is remembered as the man who brought the first motorcar to the island; Máirtín Ó Direáin describes how the children of Sruthán marveled at the beams of its headlamps when it was parked up on the hill at the chapel in Eochaill, and argued about whether it ran on oil or coal). Patrick died in 1927; his widow Lily, still remembered as a quiet little old lady—she had suffered a partial stroke—lived on until 1944, the last of the Ferocious O’Flahertys.

James Johnston, Patrick’s elder son and heir, had gone to
Africa
, and returned to try and save the farm. He was one of the founders of the Aran branch of Fianna Fáil in 1927; the others were the former IRA leader Thomas Fleming and two school teachers, Joe Flanagan (a friend of the candidate they wanted to canvas for, Dr. Tubridy of Connemara) and Pádraic Ó hEithir (from whose reminiscences I have this); James’s reason for
joining
, it seems, was that he was for anything the parish priest
opposed
! There is a disturbing portrait of James in Clara Vyvyan’s reminiscences of her stay at the cottage Elizabeth Rivers rented from him in the late 1930s:

Typical of his stories was one he told her about Gort na gCapall: