Ireland

by Frank Delaney

  This system of eviction and plantation had in fact been taking place in Ireland since Elizabeth the First ascended the English throne in 1558. Native Irish people had been losing homes in all the rich counties of Ireland. When it began to intensify throughout the 1600s, those who came in and took over the properties began to grow fearful; even though they now “owned,” the land they remained much the minority of the population. They also knew that they had been tools of a gross injustice, and they feared personal retaliation. So they asked King William of Orange, a Protestant from Holland, for protection. That was how the first Penal Laws came to be passed, as a system of legislation to legitimize what had been happening informally.

  So Mr. MacMurrough was not the victim of the Penal Laws; he was a victim of the policy of plantation—which “planted” strangers in the rich land of Ireland. The Penal Laws merely made it legal to remove any farmer such as Mr. MacMurrough from his land.

  Known also as the Popery Laws or the Popery Code, the Penal Laws attacked the Catholics in a most basic way, because they were designed to remove all power and influence from the Catholic population, no matter how big it continued to be. When the first of the laws was passed, 80 percent of the population of Ireland was Catholic.

  The perniciousness of the statutes also cut deep into the Irish family culture. Again, let me dramatize for the purposes of clarity.

  Take a farmer in county Limerick with many good acres of land; we’ll call him Mr. Kennedy.

  One day, Mr. Kennedy falls ill and suspects he may soon die. He gathers his family around him and tells them so.

  When everyone has stopped weeping, the eldest son says, “We won’t be able to keep our land unless I turn Protestant.”

  They all ask, “What are you saying?”

  The eldest son replies, “A new law is coming into force that says a man cannot inherit his father’s land unless he be of the Protestant faith. If not, the family can be turned out in the air, and the farm given to Protestants.”

  Mr. Kennedy’s eldest son was correct. One of the very first Penal Laws passed stipulated that if the eldest son remained Catholic, the land had to be divided among all the children in equal shares; this would have the effect of making all Irish farms small. Or it could be taken from the Catholic family and given to Protestants.

  Worse lay ahead. The Penal Laws stopped all Catholics from owning a horse worth more than five pounds. Were you a Catholic riding your horse along the road, and were a Protestant to stop you and offer you five pounds for the horse, you had to sell it to him, no matter what its market worth.

  Let me dramatize a further example:

  Mr. and Mrs. Lynch have been married for many years, but they have always argued. One day Mrs. Lynch goes into town shopping, and she hears of a new law. She comes home late because she met some friends, and her husband upbraids her.

  Mrs. Lynch turns on him: “If you don’t keep a civil tongue in your head,” she says to him, “I’ll turn Protestant and I’ll divorce you and I’ll be awarded this house and farm and you’ll be out in the fields.”

  Mrs. Lynch was right. Were you a wife who did not much care for your husband, you could turn Protestant and not only divorce him, but take all his land—that was the law.

  In other countries of Europe, Penal Laws had also been passed; the Reformation had caused a great upheaval. However, marked differences prevailed. Where those European laws were aimed at the people who left their old religion and embraced the new Protestantism, the Penal Laws in Ireland were aimed at those who refused to embrace the new religion and adhered to the old. Also, in Europe the devotees of the new reform were almost always in a minority of the people, whereas in Ireland the laws attacked the majority.

  All strata of the old society became targets. For instance, no Catholic could work in a government or official job or run for elected office or become a lawyer or buy or lease land or accept a gift from a Protestant or trade in any goods or open a shop or live inside a town or within five miles of a town or become a doctor or a lawyer—or vote in any election. A Catholic could not carry a gun or speak the Irish language, the native tongue which all Catholics spoke as their first language; very few spoke English.

  Above all, no Catholic could practice his religion; he could only worship in the monarch’s faith. All Catholic churches were closed down; many were demolished. The priests were banished—but some of them stayed and traveled the countryside in disguise, saying mass on flat rocks out in the countryside, places to this day known as Mass Rocks.

  The laws denied education to Catholics, unless they turned Protestant and went to a Protestant school. No Catholic could attend a Catholic school, open a school, own a book, or go abroad to be educated. As with priests, all teachers became fugitives, a bounty on their heads. Many fled the country but some stayed and became “hedge schoolmasters”—that is to say, they taught Greek and Latin and algebra and geometry to adults and children who huddled under hedgerows in remote places.

  The fugitive priests and schoolmasters hid in caves or holes in the ground so that they might survive long enough to perform their life’s work. Such a life might prove short—one law said they could be shot at sight. Or a priest, if someone preferred, could be branded on the face or castrated.

  These Penal Laws penetrated every corner of Irish Catholic life. Making a pilgrimage to a holy well, a popular countryside rite of worship, became a crime. The saying of the mass was banned, and this led to a colloquial practice still in force today. According to Catholic liturgy, devout Catholics must raise their eyes adoringly at the key moment of the mass, i.e., the consecration. But in the Penal days, those who attended the secret ceremonies at Mass Rocks were allowed to keep their heads down. Thus, if a Redcoat soldier asked at bayonet point, “Did you see mass today?” a Catholic could answer truthfully, “No, I did not.”

  The “letter of the law” encouraged a malign “spirit of the law.” Governing authorities let it be known that they would shed no tears were a Catholic evicted from his land. This paved the way for the crowning humiliation—an oath that all Catholics had to take if they were not to be dispossessed. This oath renounced everything they had once believed in—the sacrifice of the mass; the sanctity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of Christ; the existence of the saints. If they did not swear this oath, they ran in danger of all the penalties the Penal Laws were intended to enforce.

  It has often been observed that, as a nation, the Irish incline toward lawlessness and disrespect of authority. But they had always observed faithfully the old Irish laws. Any disrespect can be traced to the Penal Laws. These measures derived not from just and proper government but from prejudice and injustice, because the British sought to make the Irish into Britons, make them speak and dress like English people. Instead they made criminals of people for doing what they had always done—practicing their religion, exercising their rights and beliefs.

  Spenser? That hoor?”

  Professor T. Bartlett Ryle looked enraged.

  “D’you know what Spenser did? He was one of those civil servants the English sent over here because they had no jobs for them at home. And Spenser wrote an official recommendation as to how the ‘Irish problem’ could be ended. He said there was no need to waste soldiers and money killing us. Cut off their means of farming, he said, destroy their food base, and one day they’ll turn to eating each other and that’ll be the end of them.”

  “Was he bad?”

  “No. But he wasn’t that good, either. Although he wasn’t far wrong about the eating—not that we needed him to tell us to eat each other.” The professor pinched snuff. “And I’ll say another thing for him. He was a helluva poet.”

  His eyes began to dream, and he began to intone. “One day I wrote her name upon the strand/But came the waves and washed it away/Again I write it with a second hand/But came the tide and made my pains his prey.”

  Then he stopped. “Right, that’s enough of that.”

  He had called in his tutees o
ne by one; “Come and see me,” he wrote in the margins of Ronan’s essay—but no grade.

  Rowena Hayes said, “God! I’d hate that. He gave me a High.”

  “That’s very good.”

  “I wanted a Very High.”

  “Better than getting nothing”—and Ronan went glumly to “the Hole,” Bartlett Ryle’s room.

  The professor picked up Ronan’s essay and tapped it.

  “What were you at here?”

  “I thought I was writing an essay on the Penal Laws.”

  “You ‘thought’? You know what happened to Thought; he had a glass arse, and he ‘thought’ if he sat down, he’d break it.”

  Ronan tried to figure out this aphorism and failed.

  The professor peered at the pages and then said, “You’re from a lawyer’s family, aren’t you? Did your father do this for you? The language’s a bit legal.”

  “My father died the week before I wrote it, sir.” T. Bartlett Ryle stopped all his fidgeting and looked across the desk. Winter sunlight lit the detritus that adorned “the Hole”—old bean cans, biscuit packets, ancient shoes everywhere, across, on top of, and underneath crazy piles of books.

  “Died?”

  “Yes, sir.” T. Bartlett Ryle said, “Brothers and sisters?”

  “No.”

  The professor said, “God, I’m sorry.”

  Ronan said nothing.

  “Bloody Death. I hate the bastard. A man’s there one minute with his jokes, and his hands in his pockets, next minute he’s lying white and dead. I hate bloody Death. How old?”

  “Forty-eight.”

  “Men shouldn’t die when they’re only forty-eight, I’m very sorry, O’Mara. I’m very sorry, that’s lousy, forty-eight, I suppose you don’t want to talk about this pisspoor essay now.”

  “I do, sir.”

  “Well, I say ‘pisspoor’—but that’s because I want you to defend it. You tell me what you think’s good about it, I’ll tell you what I think’s pisspoor about it.”

  “Sir, I wanted people to know what it felt like—”

  “Hah! Stop there! You said it—you said the damning word. You said ‘felt.’ History is not about feelings. History is about knowledge.”

  “Does one cut out the other?” T. Bartlett Ryle looked startled. “What d’you mean, ‘Does one cut out the other’? People have to know what went on in the past and how it might still affect us and shape us—that’s what history is for.”

  “But everything affects our feelings,” said Ronan. “I wanted to understand what it felt like to have to sell your good horse to a total stranger for very little money. Or not be allowed to read or improve your mind.”

  T. Bartlett Ryle was arrested enough to rise and pace.

  “So what’s your argument?”

  “My argument is this: the Penal Laws made the Irish easier to control because they destroyed our morale, and that’s what they were meant to do. If your horse made you feel good every time you looked at it, and someone who had no right to it took that horse away from you—they had a better chance of wearing you down. And it’s more difficult to fight back if your spirit is cut down.”

  The professor looked at Ronan as at a hallucination.

  “I never had this conversation in my life before. There’s people in my profession would shoot me for listening to it.”

  “Sir, I know it’s an essay, and it has to obey certain rules—but what I was trying to do was this. When we read history, we get the facts, sure—but we never know how people felt, do we?”

  “Can’t we judge that by the way we act?”

  “Sir, can people tell what you’re feeling from the way you act?”

  Ryle prowled like a tiger.

  “I see, I see. Is this how you want to develop? I mean—if you were to become a professional historian, is this the road you’d take?”

  “Sir, I don’t know yet. All I know is that—when I was writing this, I was thinking, How did they feel? What was it like to lose your farm to a total stranger? And at the same time the essay tells a great deal about the facts, the Penal Laws themselves. If no one had ever heard of Ireland, knew absolutely nothing about us—they’d learn something from it.”

  “You can learn something off the back of a box of matches! The other thing is—if you’re going to write essays, then you’d better learn how to do it. You have to call everything by its full name; you have to list your sources, your footnotes. You give the names of some of the laws here, but you don’t say what date they were passed, what the full title was, how many clauses the main draft of the law had, and in only one instance do you give the date it passed into law.” The professor thought at length about something, then said, “That bastard, Death. Was the funeral itself big?”

  “Very, sir.”

  Bartlett Ryle waxed angry again. “And these people here—how do you know there was a Mr. MacMurrough who was drummed out of house and home?”

  “Plenty were, sir.”

  “But do you know there was a MacMurrough among them? Did you find his name and his townland and its map references?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Well, where did he come from?”

  “I made him up, sir.”

  “You can’t make up history! I mean, you can—but ’tis called something else, ’tis called ‘propaganda’ or ‘the Lives of the Saints’ or ‘autobiography’ or something like that. Listen. You can’t use your imagination when you’re writing a history essay. The imagination has no map references.”

  He stopped and looked at Ronan. “Jesus and his henchmen. I feel like a man who’s just handed over his gun. Ignore that last remark. It’s too dangerous.”

  He scrawled for a long minute in the essay’s margin.

  Bartlett Ryle had written, “In Scottish law they have 3 verdicts; Guilty, Not Guilty, and Case Not Proven. This is a ‘Case Not Proven,’ but if it were proven, I’d give it a ‘Very High.’ And a ‘Very, Very Low’ for academic work, e.g., footnotes, etc.”

  Rowena Hayes, hands on hips, said, “Well? What did you get—come on, let me see.”

  Ronan showed her.

  “Oooh,” she said. “That’s a bit of a downer. You won’t like that, will you? I bet that’s the worst mark he’s ever given.”

  Kate came back to Dublin on New Year’s Eve, still fragile physically and emotionally very low. Her panic had come, not when John died, but weeks before, when she knew the likely toll; that weeping night on the stairs had brought her to the truth.

  As for the question that seared her mind—“What am I going to do without him?”—of whom could she ask it? Not Alison, not Ronan. That day, the train had no heat, and an east wind had come whistling through. Kate sat in the apartment, anxious and cold—and she had a further reason for fearing the night.

  Ronan walked home, mood darkening with the day. Rowena Hayes’s taunt echoed, as did the nasal “pisspoor.” He felt jarred and ill judged.

  Other issues weighed him down. He had looked again and again at the scrap of paper—“Take to the road. Boyne Water”—and failed to crack its code. The priest’s lunch had made him grieve afresh; and he felt invaded that Kate had told Mansfield about the Storyteller. Worst of all, he now knew hour by hour how empty was his father’s space. If he had no one to tell, then his studies had no point; when he could no longer expect his father’s laugh, Bartlett Ryle’s manner palled; where on earth could he find good company now?

  At least the apartment helped—the privacy, the light. As he walked, he made plans to move the Storyteller material into the spare room and make the room a proper study.

  Kate heard him arrive and decided not to delay. Brittle and speaking quickly, she broke the news.

  “I have something to tell you.”

  Ronan looked wary—as did she.

  “We’re taking in a tenant. Not a tenant-tenant—I mean, it’s someone we know, family, sort of. Toby’s brother-in-law’s coming to live in Dublin for a year or so, his job’s sending him here
. I told Toby it’d be all right—we have that big extra room.” She smiled, attempting humor. “He’s very English, he’ll civilize us.”

  Ronan said nothing, went to his desk, opened books, failed to read. Presently Kate appeared in his doorway.

  “Don’t you think you should say something?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “A reaction would be welcome.”

  Ronan looked out of the window. “What’s the point? You’ve all agreed it.”

  “Ronan, it happened very fast.”

  “You’re keeping things from me.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Yes, you are. Toby’s ring. All of you, you all evade things. The packet of photographs.”

  Kate walked away—and came back. “I told you, it was too sad.”

  “There’s some other reason.”

  “There isn’t.”

  “Show the photos to me.”

  Her words stumbled. “I—left them with—I forgot them.”

  “No, you didn’t. That’s a lie.”

  “That’s not very nice of you.”

  “It’s a lie. It’s a lie. It’s a lie!” He roared the third line.

  “Ronan, Ronan—what’s all this about?”

  With one wide arm he swiped every object off his desk. Screaming louder than he or the world had ever heard, he overturned his chair and stamped on the legs of it, breaking the cross rail; he smashed the desk lamp against the wall; he picked up the inkwell and sprayed its contents on the floor, walls, and bed.

  “It’s a lie. It’s a lie. It’s a lie!”

  “What are you doing?!”

  He screamed again. “It’s-a-lie-It’s-a-lie-It’s-a-lie!” and began hauling out the desk drawers. One by one he upturned them or swung them in an arc so that their contents scattered everywhere. He kicked the littered floor, spraying things ever farther, then hurled his father’s “J O’M” piece of rock into the large mirror over the fireplace, smashing the glass into silvered flints. Next he jumped on the bed and began to trample the bedding with his shoes, ripping the fabrics and tearing at the pillows.