By 1914, St Dominic’s had 161 pupils, all of whom would have come from well-to-do families; most children at the time didn’t receive secondary education at all, and in the Falls Road area you would have had ‘half-timers’ (i.e. those whose days were divided between the classroom and the mill) learning the rudiments of English, arithmetic and so forth, in a school such as St Vincent’s, run by the Sisters of Charity and accommodating up to five hundred pupils in four classrooms.
We’re all appalled nowadays by enormities of the past, insupportable living conditions, hair-raising ills, unimaginable deprivations. In compensation, though, we might note the tendency to applaud the spirit of people who tholed all these, and more, and more – and the Falls district, in particular, entertains the strongest possible sense of its industrial and political past, charged with culturally assertive energies. The cluster of red-brick streets, some named topically after battles of the Crimean War (Sevastapol, Omar, Balaclava) nurtured all kinds of insurrectionary affiliations. There was more to the Falls than men in duncher caps discussing greyhound racing at street corners, shawlies scurrying towards the local pawn shop, exuberant young mill-workers taunting stodgy looking passers-by, street games involving lamp posts and paving stones, loquacious grandmothers and brazen youngsters hitching dangerous rides on the back ends of lorries, or defrauding the management of the Clonard Cinema – though these ingredients of Falls Road life were far from being figments. Parts of the road were semi-suburban, though its core was anything but; it was rich in local lore and indigenous repartee, and harboured a fraternity of the self-taught whose spiritual home was the fusty public library on the corner of Sevastapol Street. Catholicism and nationalism pervaded the air it generated – with the odd gust of socialism just to keep things polemical. Religion and its rituals shaped the life of the area: Sunday masses, Holidays of Obligation, evening devotions, weekly confessions, Men’s Confraternity meetings, Children of Mary, May altars, Corpus Christi processions, the family rosary and what-have-you. The Dominican convent was only one of a score of religious buildings dotted along the road, though its elevated position – pace the Ulster Examiner – enabled it to take a haughty view of itself.
The further you penetrated into the Falls’s hinterland, the narrower the streets became, the rougher the brickwork; flat paving stones gave way to cobbles, with ruts in the roadway where the wheels of tradesmen’s handcarts trundled through. Front doors were dingier and windows constructed to let in only the smallest shafts of light. Families living here either clung with desperation to the remnants of an imagined respectability, or had given up altogether and thought nothing of sticking their knickers and petticoats out through a front-room window to dry in the tainted air. Photographs from the early part of the last century suggest that about half the children from these areas went barefoot.
I think of the Falls as distilling its strongest back-street flavour between the 1890s (say) and the late 1940s: sixty-odd years of fearsome privations, raucousness, clan solidarity and disaffection. It would be an interesting cinematic exercise to show its built-up areas dwindling bit by bit as you go backwards in time, until nothing was left but the original fields and ponds. Bóthar na bhFál: the road of the hedges. Before 1840, indeed, as we’ve seen, the buildings beyond Townsend Street could nearly be counted on the fingers of one hand: a linen factory, a flax mill, a bleach works, two houses and a pub. Closer to the town centre, however, there were plenty of built-up, run-down localities to outrage the sensibilities of a social commentator such as the Minister of the Congregationalist Church in Upper Donegall Street, the Revd W.M. O’Hanlon, whose Walks Among the Poor of Belfast was published in 1853. ‘We advanced along Durham Street,’ writes O’Hanlon in his study of Belfast’s nineteenth-century riff-raff, ‘peering … into all manner of courts and entries.’ You get the sense that he and his companions, in this rough area, advanced very gingerly indeed. Possibly its inhabitants weren’t beguiled by the clergyman’s shock-horror exposé of their living conditions. O’Hanlon made no bones about telling them what was what. As far as he was concerned, poverty and debauchery went hand-in-hand; and he’d have liked nothing better than to effect a cleaning-up of morals along with living quarters. Drunkenness is O’Hanlon’s chief horror; counting no fewer than twenty-two public houses in the vicinity of North Queen Street, he succumbs to an appalled disbelief. Prostitution, sodomy, incest, not to mention feckless procreation … all these, and worse, he believes, can be laid at the door of drink. No wonder the strains of a lewd song issuing from a slum makes his hair stand on end.
I can’t resist poking fun at O’Hanlon – however, as a would-be reformer, he was more in the Mayhew than the temperance- propaganda tradition. What he recommended as a lower-class modus operandi was simply an industrious, orderly, sober, well-scrubbed routine. It’s just that the practice of obtruding his sniffy clerical nose into all manner of hovels makes him a target for moderate ridicule. He’s not at all akin to MacNeice’s mad preacher (for example) who embodies the sour, black, rebarbative, life-withering aspect of Ulster religious practice:
Among old iron, cinders, sizzling dumps,
A world castrated, amputated, trepanned,
He walked in the lost acres crying ‘Repent
For the Kingdom of Death is at hand’.
We Catholics, secure in the rationality of our own brands of denial, don’t scruple to point the finger at such potty forms of Protestantism; but in truth – as we’ve seen – there are pleasure-quashers of equal intensity on both sides of the religious split, who together add up to a demented fraction on the edge of normal life. And how you react in the end to the restrictions of your upbringing is as much a matter of temperament as indoctrination. Most sensible grown-up people, all along, would have worked out some personal compromise between churchly obligation and worldly inclination.
It’s only in the last decade or so that we have really grasped the extent to which the religious edifice in Ireland was a superstructure imposed over a basis of ordinary laxity. Even priests, it seems, were never as holy en masse as we once assumed. Some Church dignitaries allowed themselves more leeway than they meted out to their flocks – or so the spate of scandals flummoxing Irish Catholicism would suggest. One lurid misdemeanour after another has come to light: we’ve had bonking bishops popping up all over the place, clerical brothel-haunters, priests and nuns running off in droves, and revelations of the sexual abuse of children by clerics on such a scale that the thing has become a commonplace. The randy Christian Brother has all but succeeded the Scout Master as a joke sexual predator.
I suppose all these, and other transgressions, have been going on all the time, only kept very carefully under wraps. (Even Paul Blanchard, for all his investigator’s nose, accepted that church fathers practised what they preached, and that their parishioners gave them credit for their abstinence.) They can’t be peculiar to the present – though no doubt the current moral climate makes it easier for celibates to step out of line. Well, you’ve only to take the name Taggart, or McTaggart, to understand that priests didn’t always stick to celibacy (Mac an tSagairt, the priest’s son). But it still seems strange to me to envisage those in religious orders as sexual beings in any sense. In my experience, they’d so surrounded themselves with an aura of fortitude and holiness and ascetic segregation that it seemed an impertinence to suspect them of bodily functions at all. They were a group apart, and in a self-elected monitoring relation to the rest of us.
Possibly the most brutal, rancorous and disagreeable of the nuns I remember were actually taking their sexual frustrations out on us, their charges; but fortunately no overt sexual molestation was ever inflicted on us alongside the other vexations of the school day. Indeed, such a thing is utterly unimaginable. No lesbian or lecherous nuns ever crossed our paths to scare the wits out of us. The aim of our Dominicans was to keep their nubile pupils out of men’s clutches, never to get them into their own. (A ludicrous and revolting thought.)
As for
priests – they celebrated Mass and heard confessions, and that was all I knew of them. I didn’t come from one of those church-besotted families who had them constantly in the house. No priest whatever had any personal contact with me. In fact, I never met a priest socially until 1998, when the Jesuit brother of a friend came to visit us at Blackheath. I only saw them in their full regalia performing some ritual or other. Of course, like everyone else above the age of fourteen, I was cross-questioned in the confession box about minor sexual delinquencies; but if my embarrassed disclosures were having an arousing effect on the pastor in question, I’d never have noticed. I wasn’t very observant. Indeed, extremes of self-abuse could have been going on under my nose; and if I’d been aware of anything out-of-the-way at all, I’d have attributed it to some innocuous cause such as trouble with undergarments or a flea in the cassock.
It must be tough on a priest who, while trying to abstain from fleshly pleasures himself, has to sit in a darkened confessional, hand cupped to his ear, as half his congregation sorrowfully parades its fumblings, erections and ejaculations before him.
This observation comes from Cal McCrystal’s spirited memoir of 1997, Reflections on a Quiet Rebel – one of the recent autobiographies which alert us to the fact that Catholic schoolboys in the middle part of the last century actually had it worse than girls, when it came to a confrontation with unbefitting sexual conduct (well, unless you were a Magdalen inmate and consequently fair game for any rapacious priest). They do, however, seem better equipped to make light of these matters. For the memoirists at least, sexual eccentricities were hardly more alarming than other teachers’ foibles. It was almost de rigueur for boys’ establishments to include a weird bod or two among the teaching staff. Pupils soon grasped the identities of those it was best to steer clear of, outside lessons:
He was in his early thirties and affable enough, but the boys tended to give him a wide berth, fearing a call to his room … This was the priest who seemed to enjoy thrashing boys with a cane while in their pyjamas, and had strange nocturnal wanderings … One night I was awakened by a slight movement of my bed … He seemed to have trouble with his breathing. What appeared to be a white handkerchief fluttered in the vicinity of his waistband. I squeezed my eyes shut, pretending to be asleep.
Cal McCrystal, at the time, was a boarder with the Marist Fathers of Dundalk; this, c. 1950, was the school from which a boy named Daly was expelled ‘for climbing a wall to kiss a town girl’. I have a lot of sympathy for this unknown boy called Daly. And for Tom Campbell, who, some years earlier, left St Patrick’s College, Armagh, in similar circumstances. Campbell’s innocent jingle,
I have a dainty girlfriend
And this you’ll comprehend,
Every time she bends her knee
I see the Promised Land,
transcribed in a friend’s album and spotted by a ravening Dean, got him expelled from the school for indecency. This incident is recalled in John Montague’s biting sequence of poems about his years at the college – ‘a harsh, boorish, ignorant’ regime – pointedly called Time in Armagh:
Endless games designed to keep us pure –
‘Keep your hands out of your pockets, boys’ –
We wore togs even in the showers.
Daly, Campbell: I wonder how many of us, thirty, forty, fifty-odd years ago, were given the boot at the behest of some puritanical maniac?
By the 1960s, things were changing; or perhaps it was just that some boys’ schools accommodated an unusual degree of oddness in their employees. An unabashed sexual enthusiast, for example, slaked his lusts quite openly at the Christian Brothers school attended by the novelist and short-story writer Dermot Healy. (Again, recalling our decorous classrooms, I find it hard to envisage such smutty goings-on.) Healy’s illuminating memoir, The Bend for Home (1996), saddles the town of Cavan with a merry sexual ferment. Joining in, with his own mode of hanky-panky, is a Brother Felim who turns his roll-calling duties to his own ends:
… he brought you in behind his desk and felt your mickey as you called out the names … He undid a button, then another, and curled a finger round your member …. You could feel through his dress the hump of his erection against your thigh … He suddenly let you go like a bad thing. Did your buttons up …
The cheery tone suggests that no lasting damage was done to the objects of this lewd quirk. It was only a
minor annoyance of school life. And yet – one can’t help wondering if clerics all along, while upholding chastity with one hand, were actually undermining it with the other. It is possible that a schizophrenic approach to life, either overtly or subliminally, has been bred in those of us exposed to such contradictions.
All the different forms of blight afflicting Northern Ireland might suggest to the onlooker a society spectacularly lacking in resources for tranquillity or civility. It’s one way of looking at it, indeed, but not the only way. There are others who’ve portrayed things differently. The province has never been short of verses (for example) to keep the spirits up. ‘I take my stand by the Ulster names,’ wrote John Hewitt,
each clean hard name like a weathered stone;
Tyrella, Rostrevor, are flickering flames:
the names I mean are the Moy, Malone,
Strabane, Slieve Gullion and Portglenone.
And there are other ways of naming names in order to strike an affirmative note. There’s Tom Paulin: ‘I lay claim to those marshes, / The Lagan, the shipyards, / The Ormeau Road in winter.’ Heaney’s Toome and Moyola, Mahon’s north coast, Longley’s Lisburn Road or Portavogie with its prawn fishermen, Ciaran Carson’s obliterated Falls: all these, and more, add up to a kind of communal exercise in re-creation, or appreciation, betokening the strongest understanding of a community about which there is more, much more, to be singled out than its savageries and miseries.
Most people of Healy’s [Dermot Healy; see above] generation will remember summer trips to colleges in the Gaeltachta, the Irish-speaking regions of the country, which were supposed to inculcate a reverence for the Irish language and the rural way of life, the twin obsessions of Eamonn de Valera. Of course, they became occasions for explosions of adolescent hormones and doomed love affairs with people otherwise impossible to meet. In a strange way they probably achieved a connection between the Irish language and sexuality, which could only be good for the language.
The above passage, from Catriona Crowe’s review of Dermot Healy’s The Bend for Home in the London Review of Books (31 July 1997) neatly sums up both the ideological colouring of these extramural courses, and the actual subtext. Of course the Irish language summer school goes back some way before de Valera. The practice was initiated under the auspices of the Gaelic League, and to begin with, the schools were attended by adults; it was only after Padraig Pearse and St Enda’s had identified the potential benefits to a younger contingent that senior pupils got in on the act.
Ballinageary, County Cork, started the whole thing going back in 1904: a time when convent schools still taught deportment to their girls, when ‘patriotic dress’, complete with embroidery copied from the Book of Kells, drew jeers from Dublin fishwives in the streets (‘Them Irishers are going daft’), when Springfield in Belfast was described as an old, old, stone-built hamlet and optimists in the North believed that bigotry was on its last, though still strongly kicking, legs. Tourmakeady, County Mayo, Spiddal, County Galway, Cloughaneeley, County Donegal, and Omeath near Carlingford in County Louth were other early venues for summer-school high-mindedness and conviviality.
Rannafast was a late addition to these prestigious localities, with its Coláiste Bhrighde coming into existence in 1926 as a replacement for Omeath, whose Irish-speaking populace had dwindled to the point where the place could hardly be termed a Gaeltacht at all. One of Omeath’s directors, Father Lorcan Ó Muirí (Larry Murray), decided to move the enterprise to Donegal’s Atlantic coast, where the language waxed eloquent and undiminished. Ó Muirí, priest, folklorist and indefatigable
song-collector, could count among his attributes the distinction of having been expelled from Maynooth, after his superiors took it on themselves to brand him as a bad influence. (He was subsequently ordained in America.) The Rannafast undertaking did not get off to a painless start. Funding was obtained – after prodigious efforts on the part of Ó Muirí – a site was chosen and the college buildings slowly went up. Coláiste Bhrighde was about to open its doors to students when a huge wind suddenly blew up and swept the whole thing out into the Atlantic Ocean, as an eagle might have carried off a baby in a blanket. Father Murray’s second brainchild must have had stronger foundations, for it is still there (as far as I know), dispensing Irish and amusement to those enrolled in its courses, though perhaps not so enticingly as in the past.
Not every commentator, though, is attuned to that bygone Gaeltacht ambience. According to Michael Tierney, biographer of one of the Gaelic League’s founders, Eoin MacNéill, ‘it is difficult now to recapture even in imagination the spirit of the summer schools with their plain living amid beautiful surroundings, their open-air classes, their students living in Irish-speaking homes, their ceilis, their excursions, often by the sea, to visit historic monuments and places of antiquarian interest, their endless discussions and the deep and lasting friendships to which they so readily gave rise …’ Well, he makes it all sound fearfully decorous and antiquated: it wasn’t like that in our day, and even in the distant past it’s unlikely to have been so staid – though you can’t quarrel with his list of Gaeltacht pursuits. Tierney’s po-faced prose is simply not equipped to communicate the uniquely exhilarating atmosphere he touches on.
Asking For Trouble Page 21