by Tim Robinson
What then do I recover of the Fitzpatricks of Aran, by bringing my books and arithmetic to bear on the two grey pillars on the hillside? At the best, lacunary personages, short of perhaps a birth-date or a definite relationship to another family member, or of any other of the properties as necessary to full existence as a definite weight or height, or a shadow. A life’s story is completed at or by death, but then begins its career of disintegration. The intangibility of ghosts is our ignorance of the dead; to pray for a soul is to wish it a life whole enough to be recognized. Recognized, at least, as one of ourselves, with our meaningless titles and void relationships and self-forgotten histories.
TALES FROM THE HILL
Killeany Lodge stands only a hundred and fifty yards from the Fitzpatricks’ cenotaphs, and according to the tradition preserved by Fr. Killeen was their home until 1798. However, a tale taken down in the 1930s from a Connemara story-teller asserts that it was built by a smuggler called O’Malley from An Caorán on the Ceathrú Rua headland of south Connemara, just opposite Aran. Certainly by the 1820s the O’Malleys had succeeded the Fitzpatricks as tenants of the Hill Farm, as the four hundred acres that went with the house were called. There is probably truth in both versions, and perhaps a core of older masonry is to be found in the fabric of the present Georgian farmhouse. This is a plain one-storied building with a small fan-lit porch facing east, and ramshackle outhouses and gapped orchard walls to the rear. High on the north gable-wall, eyeing one’s approach from the village, is a little diamond-shaped loft window that twinkles with a raconteur’s anticipation of a new audience for old anecdotes; it suggests a voice, a tone, that might tempt the past to show itself:
Smugglers and rebels, all those Connemara O’Malleys, descended from Grace O’Malley’s piratical crew, the O’Malleys of Mayo. Odd corners of Connemara—Ballynakill, Streamstown, Bunowen—were thriving in those days; wool going out, wine and brandy and tobacco and silk coming in, common boatmen pluming themselves in éadach uasal, upper-class clothes, tailcoats, knee breeches, silk cravats from Guernsey, the funny old high hats they called Carolines. Máirtín Mór, the great O’Malley of An Caorán, was famous for old-style hospital ity—always a cask of wine in his house, the lid off and permission for all to fill their cup, and when he killed a cow or a sheep the whole beast would be eaten before he needed to salt it. He was only a ceithearnach, a middleman, though; his landlord was Colonel Martin, great-grandson of that Nimble Dick who grabbed all Connemara. The Colonel was a great man in Dublin and in London—it was the Prince Regent nicknamed him Humanity Dick for his kindness to animals—but for the Connemara folk his highest honour was to have O’Malley as his tenant. Tom Moore mentions the Colonel—
Oh! place me ’midst O’Rourkes, O’Tooles,
The ragged royal blood of Tara;
Or place me where DICK M-RT-N rules
The houseless wilds of CONNEMARA—
—but it was Blind Raftery himself put O’Malley in a poem, and that’s real fame. “Fiach Sheáin Bhradaigh,” the hunting of scoundrely Seán, another wandering ragged balladeer and a rival of Raftery’s. Raftery has him run out by the hunting gentry, tallyhoing him all round Mayo, up Croagh Patrick, down to the butt end of Connemara. Then Séan takes a boat to Aran, O’Malley drives him off to Kinvara, and in the end he’s torn to bits by the hounds of the Galway Blazers.
This O’Malley died in a duel. He had the Bishop of Kilmacduach to dinner one day—a day of abstinence, so it was fish for the Bishop, but without thinking O’Malley poured meat gravy on it. The bishop just put his plate aside without remark—but his nephew Lord French heard of it and took it as an insult; he challenged O’Malley and killed him with his first shot. Colonel Martin was a great duelist himself—his other nickname was Hairtrigger Dick—but he was sad about this duel. “O’Malley preferred a hole in his guts to one in his honour,” he said, “but there wouldn’t have been a hole in either if I’d been told of it.”
Martin O’Malley, O’Malley of the Hill as they called him, was Máirtín Mór’s nephew. His brother Pat was an excise man, travelling round Connemara collecting taxes, married a low-born Cill Éinne woman Martin disapproved of and sent his children to the hedge-school in Cill Rónáin. Pat’s daughter Mary must have been born in 1840 because she was 68 when the Old Age Pension came in in 1908. Martin O’Malley died some time before the Famine; they say he’s buried somewhere on the Hill. Then his wife—he’d married a Miss D’Arcy of the Dublin Distillery family—had the farm. When she was old and doddery the O’Flaherty of Kilmurvey made her an offer for the lease of it, a hundred pounds a year for the rest of her life. He reckoned she wouldn’t last long, but she hung on for sixteen years, and he was so disgusted with his bargain he never did much with the land.
Then the O’Flaherty died, and his son James died, and James’s son-in-law was drinking the estate. He tried to sell the lease of the Hill Farm to the Congested Districts Board but nothing came of that because the rent was too high and the Digbys wouldn’t reduce it. But the idea that the land should be bought out for the islanders was in the air, and the priest set up a branch of the United Irish League to press for it. They started refusing to pay their rents, and Roger Dirrane the bailiff—the fellow who invented those rain-tanks—was frightened to try and collect in case they boycotted the pub he had in Cill Éinne. Roger was in charge of letting out the grass of the Hill Farm. When Fr. Farragher finally persuaded the CDB to buy it out for the poor fishermen, Dirrane felt he should have got the land him self, and he started a quarrel with the priest. That was the Time of the Saucepans, June 1908. A terrible bang in the middle of the night—they’d bombed the priest’s house! Unfortunately Farragher was away, but his sister and the servant-girl got such a fright they didn’t put their heads out till morning Sittingroom window blown in, plaster dust everywhere—and bits of a saucepan on the windowsill. The RIC searched Dirrane’s shed on the quayside and found the tin cans they’d mixed the gunpowder in. They arrested him and a relative, Kilmartin. Dirrane had an alibi—a woman swore she’d seen him in his pub—but he got three years anyway, and the other man got three months. That wasn’t enough revenge for the PP though. He named them from the altar, refused confession to anyone who had anything to do with them or their families. So all the “Saucepans”—the Dirrane faction, “Lucht na Tincans,” the tincan lot—stopped paying their dues. Great ructions! It gave Liam O’Flaherty the idea for a book. The PP of course was President of the League, and he used it to get the Tinnies boycotted. One of the Galway newspapers said he was as big an autocrat as the Tzar of Russia!
There were some rebels, though. Costelloe’s donkey needed shoeing, but Costelloe was boycotted and the Cill Rónáin blacksmith wouldn’t do it. Costelloe had hopes of the Oatquarter smith, King. He saw him on the pier one day and tested him out tactfully—walked up and down past him saying he’d have to send his donkey to Galway on the steamer with a label round its neck. “I’ll put shoes on it for you,” said King, “and I won’t do it before dawn either, or after the sun has set, but in broad daylight!”
The boycott divided the island, engagements were broken off and so on; there were lots of old bachelors and maids among the Saucepans in the end. And suicide attempts. Mrs. Macdonagh found her son trying to hang himself, had to get the police to cut him down. He’d lost his job on the hulk the CDB stored ice in because he spoke to a Saucepan, and he was replaced by two members of the League. So politics came into it, and the Unionists took it up. Questions asked in Parliament, even! “Is my honorable friend the Chief Secretary for Ireland aware…?” The Saucepans made Westminster aware of this ridiculous little island! Some of the islanders still respect them for their defiance—I heard someone saying not long ago the bomber was “before his time”!
Fair play to the Saucepans, though, they stood up to the priests! After he came out of prison Roger Dirrane was walking up the Carcair one day, and one of the clergy went by, squeezed himself into the wall to keep as far off him as he could. Rog
er looked round at him, and the priest turned on him and said “Only for I don’t like, I’d put horns on you!”—people still believed the priests could do that, in those days, maybe some of the priests half believed it too. But Roger wasn’t afraid. “And if you did,” he said, “I’d ram them up your backside!” And once a cow of his died, and a lad from Cill Éinne helped him bury it. Farragher cornered the lad later on—in Bóithrín an Bhabhúin, that little dead-end by the castle—and told him off for helping with the cow. The lad’s father came along, and he said to the priest, “If there’d been an “altar” on it, you’d have been there yourself!”—the altar is money collected at funerals for the priest.
So that’s the history of the Hill for you. I suppose we’ll never know if it was really Dirrane that served up the gunpowder sauce to the priest! The fishermen got the stripes of land in the end, the boycott faded out, Farragher was moved to Athenry. The old lodge used to be let out now and again to summer visitors. In the Twenties the “Lá Breás” came and went—teachers doing Irish language courses; all the Irish they had was “Lá breá!,” “fine day!,” so they said it to everybody whatever the weather. Then for the most part the place was empty and falling to bits. Now it’s all spick and span, thanks to Celtic Spirituality—but that’s another story.
Those are the tales from the Hill I have picked up here and there—from a book of Connemara folklore, from an old, bedridden lady in Cill Rónáin, from the Aran postman met on the road—and strung together as a dinner-table amusement. But such anecdotes handle their subjects so uncaringly, dismissing them with holes in their honour, reducing them to single utterances of the sort that acquire a polish through retelling, that even the amateur enquirer into little local histories owes them better treatment. On professional historians, ambassadors of the past to present times, devolves the solemn duty of representing it in its integrity, but the humblest attaché in the Embassy of the Dead is also sent to lie abroad for his country, and must do his best with scrappy briefings.
While I was mapping the south Connemara coast I looked for traces of the smuggler O’Malley in the townland of An Caorán Beag (which means “the small moorland hill”), a mile or so south of the modern town of An Cheathrú Rua. A side-road serves the few houses of a village still called An Diméin, the demesne, and then becomes a grassy track between granite knolls and boggy hollows criss-crossed by drystone walls, going down towards the sea and the three grey silhouettes of the Aran Islands on the horizon. Within sight of the head of an inlet are traces of old walls, the remains of the O’Malley home, which the Ordnance Survey map of 1898 names as “Keeraun House.” I had been told about a chair-like rock called Suístín Uí Mháille, O’Malley’s little seat, from which he used to watch his sloop unloading in the creek below, but I failed to locate it and perhaps it has been removed to straighten the track. Presumably he was elderly when he sat there, no longer relishing the seas, happier dispensing the rough hospitality of scoops from the wine-cask and cuts from the freshly killed beast to his admiring followers, or looking forward to a meal intended to be more elegant, with the Bishop of Kilmacduach. How did he view his trade? His landlord Richard Martin was a Member of Parliament, first in Dublin and then at Westminster, having voted for the Act of Union in 1800. No doubt a proportion of O’Malley’s silks and brandy went to Martin’s house twenty miles away in the wilds of Ballynahinch; in 1796 the Chief Secretary for Ireland was informed that “Mr. Martin’s command of smugglers and fishermen cannot be less than a thousand,” and that the chief under him was “one O’Mealy, an old venerable man.” Such feudal prerogatives merely added the spice of the illicit to the Colonel’s urbanity in the ballrooms of London and Paris, but perhaps for O’Malley, on his bare Connemara foreland, smuggling had a deeper meaning, and the sloops nosing into the familiar muddy creeks of his black economy had in their sails winds from the age of the unconquered O’Malleys of old. “Terra marique potens,” a power by land and sea, was the motto of his seafaring ancestors; I hear him mumbling it to himself as I stroll down the green track by his little throne in the rock.
O’Malley of the Hill Farm is less recoverable to the imagination. The census of 1821 shows him in place: “Martin O Maley, 32, Gentleman Farmer”; also Mary Anne, his wife, his brother Pat, a “gentleman” called Pat Taylor, two servants, and living close by is his herdsman. It is noted that O’Malley holds a large tract of land in the Parish of Kilcummin (this would have been the demesne in An Caorán Beag) plus a large parcel of land in the Parish of Ballindoon (and this would have been the O’Malley territory near Slyne Head in the south-western tip of Connemara). Pat, the déclassé brother who married locally, I see as loitering between the Lodge and the village, neither one thing nor the other, ready to latch onto any chance comer. I owe this picture, probably quite false, to George Petrie, who met him in 1821:
The proprietor of the islands is of course an absentee. The aristocracy may be said to consist of two gentlemen, who claim the title more from ancient family rank than from wealth or landed possessions. We had no opportunity of becoming acquainted with Mr. O’Mally. His brother, a worthy Araner, met us on the shore at our landing, and conducted us to the house of Mr. O’Flaherty, to whom we had previously signified, through a friend, our intention of becoming his guests, and in the free spirit of the place, stayed with us for some days to add to our hilarity and comforts.
By 1857, according to Griffith’s Valuation, Hill Quarter was occupied by a Maryanne O’Malley; presumably this is the Mary Anne of the census, now a widow. I have no image of this dowager, long withering out O’Flaherty’s bargain; perhaps she retired to Dublin on the strength of his hundred pounds per annum and enjoyed her uncalled-for longevity there.
Other protagonists in the later anecdotes of the Hill Farm, such as the Kilmurvey O’Flahertys and Fr. Farragher the Parish Priest, will figure in various contexts further on in this book. The Saucepan episode was filled out with a bitter realism about island mentalities by Liam O’Flaherty, in his novel Skerrett, and Roger Dirrane, deservedly or not, will have to live with the character O’Flaherty gave him in this roman-a-clef (the key to which is simple enough: Moclair is Farragher, Ardcaol is Cill Éinne and Griffin is Dirrane):
This young man was very ambitious and greedy, quite of the priest’s own kidney; so that, at first, they got on very well together…. Now Griffin, becoming bailiff of the Ardcaol estate through Father Moclair’s influence, suffered his ambition to develop into a mania, like the frog that tried to swell into an ox. He wanted the estate for himself.
Liam’s childhood coincided with the period in which Fr. Farragher was beating the island like a recalcitrant donkey along the road to modernity; he served as altar-boy to the priest, while his schoolmaster, David O’Callaghan, was the original of Skerret, the progressively unhinged champion of “Republican nationalism, anarchism, and the cause of the Irish Language.” According to Fr. Killeen, Liam’s family, the O’Flahertys of Gort na gCapall, supported the Saucepan faction, and “as a result developed a bitter anticlerical attitude. Liam’s filthy novels illustrate the fact. Possibly there was unnecessary antagonism on the side of the angels.” But there are no angels in Liam O’Flaherty’s world; it is the violent and overbearing who are the carriers of history. In his version of the Saucepan events, which he uses to precipitate the culminating struggle between priest and schoolmaster, the origin of Griffin’s swelling ambition is clear:
[Moclair’s] avarice made life unpleasant and set an evil example to these simple islanders, who were quick to imitate their pastor’s character. Indeed, great though the beauty of a march towards civilisation may be, whether on a gigantic scale like that of the Greeks and of the Elizabethan English, or on a small scale, like that of this handful of islanders, the beauty is always stained by the demons which the advance lets loose. It seems a people cannot progress without losing their innocence in the cunning necessary for ambitious commerce; and that avarice brings in its train dissention, strife and manifold corruption.
So it was the demons of progress that puffed up the simple frog to its pathetic little explosion.
When the land was subdivided the Lodge was sold off by the Land Commission to a Mr. Smith, the representative of a British trawler company resident in Cill Rónáin, and later sold on by him to the McDonaghs of the pub by Cill Rónáin harbour. It was briefly the home of Coláiste Gaeilge Mhic Phiarais, which had been founded in Galway in 1919, and after a few years in Cill Éinne moved to Na Forbacha six miles west of Galway. In more recent years, left to the damp in the winter and subjected to raucous holiday lettings in the summer, it became more and more delapidated. Then, suddenly, in 1986, these deleterious atmospheres were replaced by the holy and the ecologically sound. The Lodge became the headquarters of an interdenominational community called Aisling Árann (roughly, Aran vision), led by Fr. Dara Molloy and inspired by the early Celtic Christianity whose memorials are all around one in Cill Éinne. Now it has been beautifully restored, and offers its hospitality to anyone ready to share its frugal and spiritual lifestyle.
But that took place after I had left the island, and for this and other reasons I do not feel competent to assess the transformation. Therefore, to end with, I go back to another vision of Aran, from the Lodge’s dozy middle years. In May 1895 two ladies in their thirties took it for a fortnight’s holiday: Edith Oenone Somerville and her cousin Violet Martin. Each was the daughter of a Big House, Edith of Drishane in Castle Townshend, Cork, and Violet of Ross House on the Galway side of Connemara. (The Martins of Ross were the senior line, from which that of Ballynahinch had diverged in the time of Nimble Dick.) The literary partnership of “Somerville and Ross,” which through the medium of Edith’s “automatic writing” was mysteriously to outlive Violet herself, had then been in existence some six years. Their equally longer-than-life love, which perhaps only revealed itself in the automatisms which haunt all writing, breathes in their account of this vernal fortnight, when “land and sea lay in rapt accord, and the breast of the brimming tide was laid to the breast of the cliff, with a low and broken voice of joy.”