by Tim Robinson
The first season of “distress”—this was the term used for the state of near-famine that recurred throughout the next hundred years—was in 1822, when the ending of the Napoleonic wars had already led to a widespread agricultural depression, and kelp prices had fallen away as European sources of alkali were opened up. In the years of distress small charitable donations from British voluntary organizations were distributed through the clergy and resident gentry, or the Government organized public works on which men and women laboured for a portion of oatmeal. In 1822 many were employed quarrying the huge ashlar blocks used to edge various piers which the engineer Alexander Nimmo was building in Connemara, and a beginning was made on a pier, to Nimmo’s design, to replace Cill Éinne’s aboriginal quay. In 1831 another pier was built, on the south of the harbour at Cill Rónáin. Despite these interventions, life in Aran became impossible for many islanders, caught between the fixity of rents imposed in more prosperous times at the beginning of the century, and the decline in all sources of income. A large group left for America in 1822, and in the three years before 1836 five hundred more went, while others would have gone had they not been disappointed in their arrangements with the ship that was to carry them from Galway. Many exiled Cill Éinne men were employed in fishing between New York and Boston.
By the middle of the nineteenth century whatever prestige Cill Éinne had acquired from the garrison in the fort or the barracks that succeeded to it, or from the residence of the Fitzpatricks and the O’Malleys, was lost, and the Cill Éinne villagers found themselves in a worse situation than the other islanders. Even in the early decades of that century Cill Éinne’s economics were precarious. Its land was on a barren arc of terraces called An Screigín (which means merely the small stony place), west of the Hill Farm’s ample tracts, but many villagers had no land and were totally dependent on fishing, apart from periodic employment in cutting blackweed and shipping it to Kinvara as manure, or carrying the islanders’ cattle to Casla Bay in Connemara, whence they would be driven fifteen miles along the coast road to the September fair in Galway.
In the 1820s the Aran fleet consisted of about forty sail-boats—small hookers of five to ten tons burthen, only five of them half-decked and the rest open, and two hundred currachs. The majority of the sail-boats worked out of Cill Éinne. In January, February and March they pursued the herring shoals; the village must have been festooned with the 120-fathom nets made (from locally grown flax), barked, dried and mended by their families. Through the summer until September cod, ling, pollock, bream, mackerel were caught with spillards (long lines with about three hundred hooks) or hand lines, and the roofs of Cill Éinne were golden-tiled with split-open fish curing in the sun. But bad weather would keep the Aran fleet at home, and the herring could desert Galway Bay for years at a time. When the fishery was good, it was dominated by boats from the Claddagh, the fishing village on the outskirts of Galway; sometimes there were two thousand boats in the bay, and the Aran men complained of the Claddagh men taking away their nets and fish, and beating them if they protested. Salt was in short supply, and often herring could not be got to market in good condition. Buyers were rapacious, insisting on buying the herring in thousands, each of eleven “long hundreds” of 123 fish. Long-line fishing was inefficient, but the Claddagh men forbade trawling, which they feared would disturb the fish and destroy the spawn—sheer prejudice, in the opinion of Alexander Nimmo. In the spring the sunfish or basking sharks were to be harpooned on the banks forty or fifty miles to the north-west beyond Slyne Head, but the little Aran boats were unfit for such expeditions.
When famine and the cholera came to the islands in 1822, and the winter fishing failed, the Cill Éinne people were unable to buy potatoes, and went hungry the following year too. Similarly in 1825 there were reports of Cill Éinne people stealing potatoes. In 1832 a severe outbreak of cholera spread from Cill Rónáin to Cill Éinne; the O’Malleys fled to Cill Mhuirbhigh, the villagers deserted their cottages to live in little caves and huts among the crags, and it was reported that their womenfolk were making coffins out of bed-heads. The Great Famine of the 1840s, strangely enough, was not so severe in Aran as elsewhere; it seems that the fishing was so good during those years that islanders still speak of it as miraculous; nevertheless there was hunger and fever, and a desperate shortage of fuel, for Connemara was too weak to provide turf and Aran had no money or goods to exchange for it. Throughout the rest of the century bad years recurred in every decade, and the Aran fleet dwindled almost out of existence; foreign steam-trawlers appeared on the fishing grounds, guano imports to Galway meant the end of the seaweed-carrying trade, the Cill Éinne boatmen shipping cattle to the fairs found that they could not compete with the new paddle-steamer. Cill Éinne declined into a slum, until the Congested Districts Board brought some tentative relief to the fishing industry, striped the Hill Farm, and built a row of cottages to replace the knot of hovels sheltering in the ruined fort.
Newspaper accounts of these specific years of “distress” are voluminous and pitiful, and the condition of the Aran poor gave rise to many denunciations of the landlords, their agent, and the Government. Even during the unreported in-between years, it is clear that either stormy or rainy or dry or still weather meant less than usual to eat. Malnutrition and overcrowding made the community helplessly vulnerable to disease. There was no doctor until 1845, after which there was intermittently a medical officer serving the three islands from Cill Rónáin, and until the turn of the century the two smaller islands had not even a resident nurse. The ill-lit, smoke-filled, earth-floored cottages were ideal homes for the tuberculosis bacillus, and there was no possibility of isolating the infected, who just had to carry on working as long as they could and then sit in the sun or by the fire until they died. The islanders were fatalistic about an cailín, the girl, as they evasively called it; they thought it was “in the blood” of certain families, with the consequence that people often tried to hide away its occurrence in their own family. As Ruairí Ó hEithir writes, in his study of Aran folk medicine:
In these surroundings the disease took a terrible toll, especially where an adult first contracted it: whereas a child or young person often died quickly, an adult woud hold out for much longer, spreading the disease among others and, in the process, almost insuring their own re-infection if they succeeded in overcoming the original attack. No wonder that whole families were wiped out and tuberculosis was regarded as an inevitable part of every island family’s life.
Folk medicine was largely a cruel delusion; it was not a matter of the herbal remedies we buy in charming bottles for our modern insomnias and hypochondrias. An infusion of mullein leaves was supposed to cure “the girl,” but as an islander remarked bitterly to me—for TB is still not just a memory—“There was a lot of them it didn’t cure.” Other treatments were based on misunderstandings of the nature of the disease, and must have caused unnecessary suffering. Pains in the chest, which might have been the result of anything from heartburn to cancer, were ascribed to a mysterious ailment called cleithín or cleithín do thitim (literally, “fallen chest or breastbone”) in which one of the floating ribs was supposed to have become bent in. The cure was to turn it out again with the fingers. Alternatively a lighted candle-end was placed on the breastbone with a tumbler inverted over it; as the air in the tumbler was consumed the flesh would be dragged into the resulting vacuum, and (in theory) the rib pulled into its right position again.
Midwives and bone-setters were probably the only genuinely effective practitioners in this murk of ignorance. Every village had its wise woman ready with capable if not clean hands at the doors of life, though an especially renowned midwife might be sent for from village to village or even from island to island, bringing comfort and sometimes deadly infection; it is recorded that the famous Róisí Mhór, from Fearann an Choirce, was drowned going to Inis Meáin by currach some time in the 1840s. Bone-setting also demanded deft manipulation, but, being concerned with the dry mechanic
s of the human frame, it was a male vocation. Several islanders could deal with dislocations, a very few could fix up fractures. Synge met an old bone-setter in Inis Meáin in 1898 who was well known throughout the islands and on the mainland; and long after the coming of conventional medicine to the islands people would visit certain famous bone-setters in Connemara. Local accounts of these men show them besting the official experts, in a way that is delightful to those who have suffered the condescension of learned doctors. Thus the blacksmith of Fearann an Choirce tells me of a Dublin surgeon who decided to test the skills of a Connemara bone-setter (probably the well-known Micil Pheaitsín Mhocháin of Leitir Mealláin). The surgeon called at his cottage with a sack containing all the bones of a human skeleton plus one small extra bone, emptied them onto the floor, and challenged him to put them together. This was soon done, and when the surgeon picked up the extra bone and asked, “What about this?” the countryman replied, “You may throw that away.”
Most island medicine was magic, of some shade from white to black. Certain people claimed knowledge of arthaí or charms for stopping bleeding or choking, for curing erysipelas, toothache or the stitch. Migraine (“the little fever”) was thought to be due to a condition that was diagnosed by measuring the head with a tape in various directions; if the measurements did not tally, the skull was open at the top. The cure then was the recitation of an artha in the form of a little sacred narrative:
Saint Peter and Saint Paul were walking the road one day and they sat down on a heap of stones. “What’s wrong with you?” said St. Peter to St. Paul. “Headache and the little fever.” “Three persons I will put to taking it from you,” said St. Peter, “Brigit and her cloak, Michael and his shield, the two bright pure hands of the Virgin Mary.”
There were also one or two women who had the power to transfer a disease from one person to another. The botanist Nathaniel Colgan accidentally learned about this practice during his visit to Aran in 1892:
I was on hands and knees one morning, in search of the rare Milk Vetch, when I was startled by this remark, which came from one of a knot of puzzled Killeany men who had gathered round me to watch my doings with embarrassing patience:
“That’s a very dangerous thing you’re about; I’ve known a man killed that way.” At first I thought the speaker, a grave, middle-aged man, meant to warn me against injury from some poisonous plant, but on close cross-questioning it became evident that he was a firm believer in disease-transference by witchcraft.
His story was shortly this. Some years ago a friend of his, a man named Flanagan, living in the neighbourhood of Oghil, in Aranmore, lay sick of an incurable disease. He had been “given over” by the doctors, and, face to face with death, his fears, after a long struggle, got the better of his religion, and he made up his mind to call in the services of a cailleach, who lived away in Onacht, at the other end of the island. This hag was known to have the power of transfering mortal sickness from the patient, wicked enough to employ her, to some healthy subject, who would sicken and die, as an unconscious substitute. This was her method, evidently a combination of a plant-spell with the gettatura or evil eye. When fully empowered by her patient, whose honest intent to profit by the unholy remedy was indispensible to its successful working, the cailleach would go out into some field close by a public road, and setting herself on her knees, just as I was kneeling then, she would pluck an herb from the ground, looking out on the road as she did so. The first passer-by she might cast her eye on, while in the act of plucking the herb, no matter who it was, even her own father or mother, would take the sick man’s disease, and die of it in twenty-four hours, the patient mending as the victim sickened and died. My informant had known the cailleach well, but had only heard for certain of one case, the case of his friend Flanagan, where she had worked a cure in this way. Unfortunately he could not tell me what the mystic plant was, though he was sure it was not the Milk Vetch, which I had the good fortune to find before we parted. More unfortunate still, the cailleach and Flanagan, as he told me, were both dead.
Another way of passing a disease on to a randomly chosen victim was to deck a cockerel in coloured ribbons and let it loose on the crags, far enough away for it not to return home; the first person to see it would die of the disease, or else his cattle would die, while the patient recovered. A herb-woman called Nellóg, who lived in Corrúch in the last century, was known to practice this method.
The “evil eye” was a constant threat to mental and physical health. A person could put the evil eye quite unintentionally, for instance by praising someone and omitting to add the customary Bail ó Dhia, the blessing of God. The remedy then was to spit on the victim, and if it was not known who had put the evil eye, everyone would have to contribute their saliva. District Nurse Hedderman railed against the custom in her account of her years of duty in Inis Oírr:
I have seen lives ruined and lost that might have been saved, if only means could be found for dispelling this black ignorance when sudden illness attacks the young and healthy. The first resort is the saliva cure, and should the person accused of casting the spell resent the insinuation and not be friendly disposed in that special direction, the patient’s progress and relief from suffering are supposed to be hindered until he enters the sickroom and saturates the bedclothes with this filthy secretion.
Many illnesses, especially of children, were blamed on the fairies, and medical help, even if available, was disregarded in these cases. It was thought that the fairies stole human children, especially boys, and left changelings in their place which soon faded away and died. To prevent this, boys were dressed as girls, in petticoats, up to a certain age. A retarded or deformed baby was likely to be regarded as a changeling, and might be left outside overnight on the blade of a spade for the fairies to take away, or be burned in the mouth with the heated tongs to make it go away of its own accord. The virtue of iron as a prophylactic against enchantment played some part in these horrific practices.
Shortly before the beginning of the sequence of distressful years, a woman came to live in Cill Éinne who was to personify the community’s dealings with birth, sickness and death; Nell an Tower is still vividly present to the islanders, and her legend has already flitted across a page of my first volume. The census of 1821 lists her and her household:
John McDonough, 41, fisherman
Nelly McDonough, 34, woolspinner
Pat McDonough, 6
Ann McDonough, 3
They lived in a cottage built against a small round tower forming a sort of bastion at the south-west corner of the old castle, which has long since vanished, and from which she got her name, Nell of the Tower. Island tradition is uncertain of her origins, but its best opinion is that she was of the Greelish family of Ros Muc in south Connemara, and that she was already married with a son when she came to Aran. Perhaps her husband soon died, for it is as a widow that she is remembered. She may have brought a certain reputation with her, for she was related to a bean feasa or wise woman in Connemara who came into conflict with the parish priest, a dangerous state in those days when priests had magic powers, and was found naked and dying in a field in which the crop had been leveled as if by a gale.
The older Aran people have no doubts about Nell’s supernatural powers; one man said to me “She could fly, though there was no talk of jet planes or scooters in those days!” However the various stories in which a husband comes from a distant village on horseback to bring her to attend upon his wife in childbirth, and Nell refuses a seat on the rump of his horse, saying she will follow him on foot, but still reaches the house before him, do not make it clear how she is thought to have travelled so quickly. She was highly regarded as a herbalist, and no doubt she employed the usual Aran pharmacopoeia of ferns, mosses, flowering plants and seaweeds, some of which, such as comfrey, had genuine curative properties; but it was the ceremonies with which she gathered her ingredients and applied her potions that gave them their effectiveness, and here she was understood to be
doing her best with powers that were not totally in her control. Once, when she was picking a certain herb, she looked out to sea, to avoid transferring the disease she was treating to anyone who might be passing by, but her eye fell on a man rowing a currach, and he died; she was very upset about it, I was told, but she could not help it. Another story confirms her stance on disease transference:
There was a man in Creig an Chéirín who got a sort of stroke—but a very light one, his mouth twisted, as if the sinews had shrunk. The priest and the doctor were coming to him but I think he didn’t get much out of them as he wasn’t very twisted. But he was bad enough for his wife to think he wouldn’t live at all. And she was horrified because he was a good man, and he had three sons. And Nell was sent for. But when she came, she didn’t go to look at him. And the wife was so wild with fear he might die that she started to bargain with her in advance. She was suggesting that she would would rather send off one of the sons and keep the father—that was what the Creig an Chéirín woman had in mind.
“Ah” said Nell, “Isn’t that murder? I couldn’t do that.” Probably she thought she would go to hell! “But” she said, “If you have a sheep or a goat for me to put to death, I wouldn’t think twice about it.” “Well” said the wife, “there’s a heifer that was in calf, that’s all.”
But they say that there never was a night as bad as that with rain, and it was as black as the pot, at twelve o’clock or later, when she had to be on her way.
“Well, I’ll go now,” said Nell, “and I’ll get that beast, and when you shut the door after me,” she said, “on the skin of your ears, don’t any of you open the door whoever knocks, until I knock on it myself.”