We have got an excellent committee
That meets upon each Monday night.
Two or three of our members
Most generally end in a fight.
For the one won’t give in to the other,
And, maybe, we haven’t some fun
Away down by the parish of Langfield
In our creamery down at Drumquin.
We have got an excellent committee,
Religion it makes, there’s no doubt.
For we have got JPs and clergy,
And some of them Orangemen stout.
We have two or three ’Ninety-Eight men,
Beneath the same banner they stand,
To represent that same banner
The banner of God Save the Land.
We have got an excellent committee
That lies in close to the town,
Charlie Hall, Tommy Law and Joe Dolan,
Pat Morris and Charlie McKeown.
John Corry that sweeps the Cornmarket,
Jamey Corry from Bomacatall,
Pat the Tip from behind Dooish Mountain,
John Futhy from no place at all.
We have got an excellent reporter,
You all know him well, Quentin Todd,
He reports all affairs to the papers.
That’s something that seems very odd.
For Quentin himself, he’s no writer,
But not one single word could you speak,
But he’d lift and take straight down to Omagh,
To the Tyrone Constitution next week.
So, you farmers and traders of Ireland,
I hope you’ll take care and be wise.
Try and keep up your creamery
Till you see how your parish will rise.
It’ll be one of the finest in Ulster,
It’ll be one of the best ever seen.
It’ll be one of the finest in Ireland,
Our creamery down at Drumquin.
And if you feel up to it you may sing all that to the tune to which the Aghalee heroes marched to the banks of the Boyne.
The Man from God Knows Where
The man from that odd place did not originate in the North of Ireland, nor did the woman who wrote the poem about him come from my own neighbourhood; but for me personally, this piece belongs to Omagh and to its town hall. For at some time in the 1930s Brother Hamill decided that, stupid as I was – as he often told me – I might yet be able to learn off by heart (or head) and recite in public from the town-hall stage the entire poem about Thomas Russell, the United Irishman, the Man from God Knows Where. This elocutionary feat was to be performed during a concert otherwise given over to celebrities from all arts and parts, but mostly from Derry city. Derry people, we were always told, were very musical.
Brother Hamill, besides being brother-in-the-flesh to Mickey Hamill, one of the greatest-ever centre-halves, and himself had been away out there trying to pressurize the Chinese into Christianity, or into soccer-football, or something. So when he told me that I would step out there and recite, little choice had I.
Shivering in the wings I stood, as a doctor from Derry sang in a fine soprano about the merry, merry pipes of Pan. To this day that song frightens me. I hated Pan, whoever he was. For I knew that as soon as the lovely lady was finished, I was doomed to be pushed forward to recite. Which, with the help of God and Brother Hamill, I did:
Into our townlan’, on a night of snow,
Rode a man from God-knows-where;
None of us bade him stay or go,
Nor deemed him friend, nor damned him foe.
But we stabled his big roan mare;
For in our townlan’ we’re a decent folk,
And if he didn’t speak, why none of us spoke,
And we sat till the fire burned low.
We’re a civil sort in our wee place,
So we made the circle wide
Round Andy Lemon’s cheerful blaze,
And wished the man his length of days
And a good end to his ride.
He smiled in under his slouchy hat –
Says he: ‘There’s a bit of a joke in that,
For we both ride different ways.’
The whiles we smoked we watched him stare
From his seat fornenst the glow.
I nudged Joe Moore: ‘You wouldn’t dare
To ask him, who he’s for meeting there,
And how far he has got to go.’
And Joe wouldn’t dare, nor Wully Scott,
And he took no drink – neither cold nor hot –
This man from God-knows-where.
It was closin’ time, an’ late forbye,
When us ones braved the air –
I never saw worse (may I live or die)
Than the sleet that night, an’ I says, says I:
‘You’ll find he’s for stopping there.’
But at screek o’ day, through the gable pane,
I watched him spur in the peltin’ rain,
And I juked from his rovin’ eye.
Two winters more, then the Trouble Year,
When the best that man can feel
Was the pike he kapt in hidin’ near,
Till the blood o’ hate and the blood o’ fear
Would be redder nor rust on the steel.
Us ones quet from mindin’ the farms,
Let them take what we gave wi’ the weight o’ our arms,
From Saintfield to Kilkeel.
In the time o’ the Hurry, we had no lead –
We all of us fought with the rest –
And if e’er a one shook like a tremblin’ reed,
None of us gave neither hint nor heed.
Nor ever even’d we’d guessed.
We men of the North had a word to say,
An’ we said it then, in our own dour way,
An’ we spoke as we thought was best.
All Ulster over, the weemen cried
For the stan’in’ crops on the lan’ –
Many’s the sweetheart an’ many’s the bride
Would liefer ha’ gone till where He died,
And ha’ mourned her lone by her man.
But us ones weathered the thick of it,
And we used to dander along and sit,
In Andy’s, side by side.
What with discourse goin’ to and fro,
The night would be wearin’ thin,
Yet never so late when we rose to go
But someone would say: ‘Do ye min’ thon snow,
An’ the man who came wanderin’ in?’
And we be to fall to the talk again,
If by any chance he was One o’ Them –
The man who went like the Win’.
Well ’twas gettin’ on past the heat o’ the year
When I rode to Newtown Fair;
I sold as I could (the dealers were near –
Only three pounds eight for the Innish steer,
An’ nothin’ at all for the mare!)
I met M’Kee in the throng o’ the street,
Says he: ‘The grass has grown under our feet
Since they hanged young Warwick here.’
And he told me that Boney had promised help
To a man in Dublin town.
Says he: ‘If you’ve laid the pike on the shelf,
Ye’d better go home hot-fut by yourself,
An’ once more take it down.’
So by Comber road I trotted the grey
And never cut corn until Killyleagh
Stood plain on the risin’ groun’.
For a wheen o’ days we sat waitin’ the word
To rise and go at it like men.
But no French ships sailed into Cloughey Bay,
And we heard the black news on a harvest day
That the cause was lost again;
And Joey and me, and Wully Boy Scott,
We agreed to ourselves we’d as lief as not
Ha’ been found in
the thick o’ the slain.
By Downpatrick Gaol I was bound to fare
On a day I’ll remember, feth,
For when I came to the prison square
The people were waitin’ in hundreds there,
An’ you wouldn’t hear stir nor breath!
For the sodgers were standing, grim an’ tall,
Round a scaffold built there fornenst the wall,
An’ a man stepped out for death!
I was brave an’ near to the edge of the throng,
Yet I knowed the face again.
An’ I knowed the set, an’ I knowed the walk
An’ the sound of his strange up-country talk,
For he spoke out right an’ plain.
Then he bowed his head to the swinging rope,
Whiles I said, Please God’ to his dying hope,
And ‘Amen’ to his dying prayer,
That the Wrong would cease and the Right prevail
For the man that they hanged at Downpatrick gaol
Was the Man from GOD-KNOWS-WHERE!
[Florence M. Wilson]
For people who talk familiarly about the Loughshore there is only one lough in Ireland or anywhere else. Those who have the pleasure of living by Lough Erne will mention the name of the lough, but the hardy people who live by Lough Neagh assume that there is One Supreme Lough and that everybody should know as much. The man who wrote about ‘Old Ardboe’ had no doubts on the matter:
Farewell my native green-clad hills,
Farewell my shamrock plains,
Ye verdant banks of sweet Lough Neagh,
Ye silvery winding streams.
Though far from home in green Tyrone
The flora oft I praise
That adorns you Killyclopy
Where I spent my boyhood days.
Shall I ever see those valleys
Where in boyhood days I roved,
Or wander in those June green woods
With friends I dearly loved?
Shall I no more by Lough Neagh’s shore
E’er pass the summer day,
Or hear again the lark’s sweet strain
Or the blackbird’s blithesome lay?
Shall I ever stray by the Washingbay
The wary trout to coy,
Or set my line on an evening fine
By the shores of green Mountjoy?
Will my oars ne’er rest on the wild wave crest,
Will I see the salmon play
While sailing o’er from Tyrone’s green shore
Bount for Antrim’s placid bay?
Shall I e’er behold Shane’s castle bold
Or look upon Massarene,
Will my cot ne’er land on the banks of the Bann,
Coney Island or Roskeen.
Will the autumn gale e’er fill my sail
Or the dim declining moon,
See me tempest-tossed on the shores of Doss
Or the raging bay of Toome.
Shall I ever rove by Belmont’s Grove
Or Carnan’s lofty hill,
Or hear again the fairy tale
Of the rath behind the hill?
Will the nightingale that charms the vale
By me be heard no more,
As I watch at eve the wild drake leave
For the bog of Sweet Dromore?
See where yon ancient structure lies,
Beneath the silent shore,
Where people tell saintly monks did dwell
In the penal days of yore,
And now upon the crumbling walls
The climbing ivies grow.
As alone I stray at the close of day
Through the sweet bogs of Ardboe.
My friends they have in America
All the heart of man desires,
Their pockets filled with dollar bills
And dressed in grand attire.
But they’d give it all for one country ball
Beside the old hearth stone,
Of a cottage near Lough Neagh, so dear,
Our own sweet Irish home.
But I hope to gaze on your flowery braes
Ere seven long years come round
And hands to clasp in friendship’s grasp
Of those I left behind.
For you Ardboe my tears do flow
When I think and call to mind
My parents dear, my friends sincere,
And my comrades true and kind.
But since, alas! long years may pass
Still I toast that beauteous isle,
That short or long, o’er that land of song
The star of peace may shine,
May plenty bloom from Bann to Toome
And the shamrock verdant grow
Green o’er those graves by Lough Neagh’s waves
Near the Cross of old Ardboe.
Ballinderry is in the Land of the Loughshore and is mentioned in more than one poem as a place with a name so musical well deserves to be. Samuel Ferguson’s great ‘Lament for Thomas Davis’ begins at Ballinderry but moves on to embrace all of Ireland and many, many years.
I walked through Ballinderry in the spring-time,
When the bud was on the tree;
And I said, in every fresh-ploughed field beholding
The sowers striding free,
Scattering broadside forth the corn in golden plenty
On the quick seed-clasping soil
‘Even such, this day, among the fresh-stirred hearts of Erin,
Thomas Davis, is thy toil!’
I sat by Ballyshannon in the summer,
And saw the salmon leap;
And I said, as I beheld the gallant creatures
Spring glittering from the deep,
Through the spray, and through the prone heaps striving onward
To the calm clear streams above,
‘So seekest thou thy native founts of freedom, Thomas Davis,
In thy brightness of strength and love!’
I stood on Derrybawn in the autumn,
And I heard the eagle call,
With a clangorous cry of wrath and lamentation
That filled the wide mountain hall,
O’er the bare deserted place of his plundered eyrie;
And I said as he screamed and soared,
‘So callest thou, thou wrathful soaring Thomas Davis,
For a nation’s rights restored!’
And alas! to think but now, and thou art lying,
Dear Davis, dead at thy mother’s knee;
And I, no mother near, on my own sick-bed,
That face on earth shall never see;
I may lie and try to feel that I am dreaming,
I may lie and try to say, ‘Thy will be done’ –
But a hundred such as I will never comfort Erin
For the loss of the noble son!
Young husbandman of Erin’s fruitful seed-time,
In the fresh track of danger’s plough!
Who will walk the heavy toilsome, perilous furrow
Girt with freedom’s seed-sheets now?
Who will banish with the wholesome crop of knowledge
The daunting weed and the bitter thorn,
Now that thou thyself art but a seed for hopeful planting
Against the Resurrection morn?
Young salmon of the flood-tide of freedom
That swells around Erin’s shore!
Thou wilt leap around their loud oppressive torrent
Of bigotry and hate no more;
Drawn downward by their prone material instinct,
Let them thunder on the rocks and foam –
Thou hast leapt, aspiring soul, to founts beyond their raging
Where troubled waters never come.
But I grieve not, Eagle of the empty eyrie,
That thy wrathful cry is still;
And that the songs alone of peaceful mourners
Are heard to-day on Erin’s hill;
Better far, if brothers�
� war be destined for us
(God avert that horrid day, I pray),
That ere our hands be stained with slaughter fratricidal
Thy warm heart should be cold in clay.
But my trust is strong in God, Who made us brothers,
That He will not suffer their right hands
Which thou hast joined in holier rites than wedlock
To draw opposing brands.
Oh, many a tuneful tongue that thou mad’st vocal
Would lie cold and silent then;
And songless long once more, should often-widowed Erin
Mourn the loss of her brave young men.
Oh, brave young men, my love, my pride, my promise,
’Tis on you my hopes are set,
In manliness, in pride, in justice,
To make Erin a nation yet,
Self-respecting, self-relying, self-advancing,
In union or in severance, free and strong –
And if God grant this, then, under God, to Thomas Davis
Let the greater praise belong.
From Ballinderry to Baile-liosan is only a jump or a short flight over the water, or a run around the roads. When you get there you are in the world of that great poet Joseph Campbell, the Mountainy Singer:
’TIS PRETTY TAE BE IN BAILE-LIOSAN
’Tis pretty tae be in Baile-liosan,
’Tis pretty tae be in green Magh-luan;
’Tis prettier tae be in Newtownbreda,
Beeking under the eaves in June.
The cummers are out wi’ their knitting and spinning,
The thrush sings frae his crib on the wa’,
And o’er the white road the clachan caddies
Play at their marlies and goaling-ba’.
O, fair are the fields o’ Baile-liosan,
And fair are the faes o’ green Magh-luan;
But fairer the flowers of Newtownbreda,
Wet wi’ dew in the eves o’ June.
’Tis pleasant tae saunter the clachan thoro’
When day sinks mellow o’er Dubhais Hill,
And feel their fragrance sae softly breathing
Frae croft and causey and window-sill.
As I Rode by Granard Moat Page 3