by Tim Robinson
Lawrence McDonogh, I have heard an islander say, should be canonized, as he died for his faith just as much as St. Laurence O’Toole. But this philosophical island is also surprisingly understanding of the Black and Tans. According to one of our neighbours, “Some of them were decent men; they were just soldiers, doing their duty.” The same man was told by Mícheál Breathnach that, as he was being marched down to be shipped off to Galway Gaol, he overheard one of the Black and Tans saying to another, “It’s a dirty business, punishing the innocent for other people’s doings.” Indeed: a dirty business, and an unfinished one. Looking at Larry Beag’s little memorial one could speculate how many of the seeds of hatred scattered in a December dawn of this quiet corner of Ireland will have found ample blood-rich ground to sprout in since.
From that uneasy thought I now turn back to the sleepy village. There are two shortcuts linking the north end of Baile an Dúin with the main road. The one nearest town, ancient, twisty and haunted, is called Róidín an Phúca, the little road of the pooka. The brow of the scarp it climbs up is the site of three successive notable monuments: the demolished dún from which the hamlet is perhaps named; the chapel or Mass house, which had gone by the time of the 1839 OS; and, still proudly extant, the pioneer of Aran bungalows, built in the ’sixties by the first island trawler-owner to become a millionaire. The other road, a little farther north, is straight, apart from an initial ramp up the scarp, and comparatively modern, with two pairs of semi-detached cottages symmetrically arranged on either side; they were built by the Congested Districts Board to replace some hovels nearby in 1915, and the only name I have heard for the road is Bóithrín na gCottageachaí, which I suppose one could call CDB-Irish. Either route will bring me back into the mainstream of Aran life.
CLIMBING THE HILL
Now and then if M and I happened to be in Cill Rónáin on dole day we would get a lift home in a pony-trap driven by an acquaintance from the west. Beartla was a proud man who did not like his neighbours to see him drinking in the Oatquarter pub, and so for him Joe Watty’s pub represented the last chance, not only before the dry miles ahead, but before a whole dry week. Nowadays the pub is fashionable among the summer visitors; it has its name up in holiday colours, and a few benches and tables under the tree in its front garden give it an almost continental air. But in the seventies it was as obscure as a public house could well be, no sign betrayed its vocation, and few outsiders ever troubled its stagnancy. Joe Watty himself had passed on at a great age in 1975. I am told that he used to go down the carcair opposite his pub to stand in prayer before St. Rónán’s bed for twenty minutes every day. Perhaps he was so pious because of an early miraculous delivery, for he had been sleeping in one of the fishing-boats anchored in Cill Éinne bay that night in the winter of 1899 when the storm struck and three men were drowned, and he not only survived but slept undisturbed through it all. He died on the same day as de Valera, a fact I remember because when the news spread through the island a neighbour said to me, “They’re both in the same canoe now!” It was his son Pádraic Joe Watty who had the pub thereafter. He was himself elderly by then, and shy—he hung out no inn-sign because he felt he couldn’t handle the tourists—and as he was also more interested in looking after his few cattle than in manning the bar, it frequently happened that the pub was shut when we passed.
Our first visit to Joe Watty’s was for a wake in honour of an old horse called the General, which we had just seen hoisted onto the steamer for Galway. The General had been born on Beartla’s farm in Cill Mhuirbhigh. A big horse by Aran standards, he had harrowed the oatfield and dragged the seaweed cart up the hill year in year out, until he became too unsteady for the stony slopes and was replaced by a neat Connemara pony. On our evening strolls we often stopped to lean over a wall and watch him in one of the little pastures of his retirement; he would stand motionless for hours, it seemed, then turn himself upside down and wriggle like a baby, his huge hooves going in all directions as if he were slithering on an icy patch of sky. His owner had told us that this was called an luí mór, the big lie-down; when a horse had been carting seaweed all day from four in the morning, it would be let loose to do that now and again, and then it would be as fresh as it was at the start. No doubt, at hurried times of the year in the bad old days both horses and humans had to work till they dropped, to provide food for themselves and dowries for the Digby girls, and the idea of keeping an unproductive horse in grass did not arise. Ways of thought that linger past their time are not so easily disposed of, though, and when Horan the Galway butcher, who used to come out on the steamer each Saturday with big wicker hampers of meat and set up shop in Cill Rónáin for a couple of hours, and do a bit of horse-dealing on the side, offered our friend a few pounds for the General, a bargaining was initiated which after many weekly rounds ended in them spitting in their palms and shaking hands on a price. Then we were called upon to see the horse off and (an unspoken understanding) to get our friend out of Cill Rónáin again without too much drink taken. However, as we walked by Joe Watty’s, Beartla’s thirsty eye detected some sign of life in it, and he went up the weed-grown path to listen at the front door, which was locked. He turned to crook a finger at us, saying, “We’ll have but one!,” and we had to follow him round the back, pushing past bushes, and through a derelict porch and the corner of a dark kitchen to the space behind the counter, where Pádraic lifted the flap for us to pass into the public part of the bar. The room was a dingy cell, in which two or three jarvies sat as silent as bottom-fish in a dark pool. It was lit, if not warmed, by a torn-up cardboard carton smouldering in the hearth; the vivid greenery pressing in at the tiny window-pane made it even chillier. M caused some wonderment by asking for a sherry, and Pádraic Joe Watty had to search among piles of this and that in a back room to find a bottle with a bit of sherry left in it, and to grope along a high shelf for an encrusted sherry glass. Then we had to hear Beartla tell and retell the horse’s whole Aran life, down to the last moment in the hold of the steamer, when the General had turned and looked at him climbing back up the iron ladder, and had made a little movement with his head (which Beartla demonstrated for us as a quick salute at the temple with two fingers together), “just as if it was my brother emigrating to America.” It became more and more obvious that the horse should have been left to stand and roll and kick in its familiar fields, instead of being sold on, as Beartla now explained, to some east Galway farmer who would “knock another year or two out of him.” By the time we had drunk our various fills—M’s noxious-looking sip, my two reluctant halfs, Beartla’s four pints of porter effortlessly engulfed—we were all wordless, and we turned our heads to the long climb homewards in a stupor of regret.
The once populous but now derelict area behind this pub is called An Suicín, a name that also occurs in Galway city; the derivation is obscure, but it is probably from something that sucks, like a marshy patch or a swallow-hole. This used to be the poorest quarter of the village, in which a hundred or more people lived in a few long terraces of thatched cottages. Only two of these one-room cottages still stood, the decayed ends of rows which had otherwise been pulled down, when we came to the island, and I believe they too are levelled now. A woman whom we never saw, living in one of those two last fragments, used to shout all day long in passionate disagreement with nobody; we would hear her as we went by, the whole teeming unquiet past of An Suicín condensed into one disembodied voice. Or, if hers was the voice of the accumulated pangs of just the female part of life, then the generations of male voices, their endless sublimation of cramped circumstances into stories and jokes and boasts, are dismissively recorded only by the name of the narrow turning into An Suicín south of the pub, where the menfolk used to lounge about and talk: Coirnéal na mBréag, the corner of lies.
From Joe Watty’s the road out of the village rises in carcair after carcair. The first is Carcair an Jabaire or Jobber’s Hill, and is named from Pat Mullen’s uncle, An Jabaire Beag, the little jobber or cattle-
dealer, whose cottage, on its west side, was “a meeting place for the man from the east and the man from the west,” as I am told. The hill seems to have been the place for faction fights, and people would say of any great fighter, “A better man never walked down Jobber’s Hill.” The little Jobber himself appears in Pat Mullen’s novel Hero Breed, and shows us how to prepare for a stickfight. One can imagine him leaping out into the road here:
The little Jobber was a small man, about five feet in height and ten stone in weight, but he was finely built for all that and he carried a blackthorn stick in his left hand…. His face became as white as chalk as he hurriedly tore off his bauneen and wrapped it round his right arm…. He whirled on the gathering crowd and bounded to where he had a clear space for his stick arm. “Is there any bully among you men that would take a chance of drinking his own blood this day by saying anything to the Morans? If there is, let him get his stick and stand opposite me!” Holding his stick part-way from one end, as a good stickman should, so that the forearm and elbow were protected from the glancing blow of an opponent, he waited eagerly, hopefully, with his eyes darting fire. His fury seemed to have penetrated to the stick quivering in his hand…. The Jobber and his brother, in the meantime, had taken up their positions so that if attacked they would be more or less back to back, with plenty of stick room between them. “It’s not their first fight,” said Shawn in admiration, “See the way they have placed themselves, back to back almost, with that high stone post on one side and that old shed a few steps away on the other. It is hard to rush them. Yes, they have been through a good many fights before.”
Leaving these anachronistic shades to settle their differences, and skirting round a sudden joyous outrush of youngsters from the gates of today’s Technical School a little farther on, I press on up the hill, which brings to my mind now (writing far away from it) so many things seen and tales heard, that the time-dimension itself in that backwards perspective looks no longer string-like, but wide, a road on which creatures of different eras could pass and greet each other. Memories of another Aran faction fighter give a life to the last house of the village, long untenanted now, staring gloomily back down the hill with one gable-end to the road. Breandán Ó hEithir, the writer, broadcaster and despairing but indomitable battler for the Irish language, was born here in 1930; his father was a teacher from Co. Clare, who married Liam O’Flaherty’s sister from Gort na gCapall, and the house is identifiable by its two little upstairs windows huddled under a central peak as one of the teachers’ residences built to a standard design in the 1880s. It was of Breandán I was thinking when I wrote in “Timescape with Signpost” that it is an awesome choice for a writer to entrust a life’s work to an endangered language. I believe the anguish of that decision weighed more heavily on him as he grew older, and may have added some personal bitterness to the last, posthumous, polemics of his career. Shortly before his unexpected death in 1990, he had drawn up an internal report on the state of the Irish language for Bord na Gaeilge, the government body set to watch over its well-being. The controversy was provoked by the leaking of that report in the following year, and especially by its denunciation of the various organizations concerned with Irish as “infested with elderly people who have not let a new idea into their heads for many years in case they might have to change their way of life, which is something they would now be unable to do,” and its deeply pessimistic assessment of the Gaeltachts:
The 10,000 native speakers that are left in the country would only make up the normal attendance at the county final of a small county…. Worse still, many of those speakers live in isolated pockets that are on their last legs and that are with difficulty described as Irish-speaking communities…
Conradh na Gaeilge (the Gaelic League) did not appreciate Breandán’s “typically cynical view of Irish language organizations,” and called his estimate of the number of native speakers “a gross understatement,” claiming that statistics of the £10 grants being paid to Irish speakers in the Gaeltachts suggested a figure more like 30,000. Had he been in a position to flourish his blackthorn stick Breandán would have quoted his own previously published opinion on those grants:
At first you had Irish and you got the grants and after a bit you saw no reason why you should speak Irish to get them or bring up your family through Irish at all. After all you could see that the wind and the tide and the heart of the State were with English; apart from the grants, no doubt, whose purpose was to buy your votes.
M and I first met Breandán at a course he was running for Bord na Gaeilge in An Cheathrú Rua in the autumn of 1978. The purpose of the course was to familiarize journalists with the economic life and institutions of the Gaeltachts. We could hardly claim to be journalists on the strength of the photocopied nature bulletins I occasionally produced for the Oatquarter schoolchildren, but the course sounded as if it might be an opportunity to learn something of this culture into which we had thrown ourselves so arbitrarily, so we put ourselves forward, and to our surprise were accepted without question. We took the boat to Galway, hitch-hiked out to An Cheathrú Rua, rented ourselves a thatched cottage, and reported to the hotel where the participants were to forgather. In the bar was a small and almost inanimate huddle of people, from which Breandan broke like a snipe on seeing us, and hurtled over to thrust an envelope into our hands—the grant cheque—as if it were of desperate urgency. It was clear why we had been so readily accredited; only four journalists had been tempted by the grant away from their metropolitan perspectives to spend a month visiting fish-processing plants and plastic-components production units in rain-sodden Connemara, and our participation made the course a little less of a numerical flop.
The month was not pleasant. M’s determinedly positive attitudes alienated the world-weary, flu-prone Dubliners, who did as much of their research as they could in the numerous bars of the town. It soon transpired that none of us had enough Irish to benefit from the projected programme, and we bowed our heads to a crash-course in the twelve irregular verbs. The mock newsletter we produced for presentation to the Board was so abysmal that Breandán quashed it. Some Dublin ad-men came down to privilege us with a preview of a series of TV advertisements for Irish—“It’s part of what we are…”—which so incensed me I became abusive and told them that the language movement should at least be able to recognize its enemy, i.e. the homogenizing materialism of which TV ads were the epitome. The only good times were those spent listening to Breandán holding forth at full throttle; we could not always quite identify his topics, nevertheless it was exciting to hear an Irish that did not stoop to its half-competent recipients. (Both then and later we sometimes wondered if his unceasing flow of witty reminiscence was a way of holding intimacy at bay.) But he was often morose and distrait; he had just published an English version, Lead Us into Temptation, of his first novel Lig Sinn i gCathú, and reviewers were saying that if this was a sample of the literary riches being produced in Irish, it would have been better for the good name of the language to leave it untranslated. At the end of the month we were each to write a personal response to the course. None of us managed this in Irish, but M and I put together a few thoughts in English on journalism and its own curious sort of opportunistic integrity. Finally there was a formal dinner in the hotel, at which we graduates were much outnumbered by Bord na Gaeilge executives. Breandán, slightly the better for wine, made a speech, which suddenly became emotional, and to our surprise M and I learned that we had written something that was “chomh fíor—chomh tábhachtach—tá sé thíos i mo phóca agam ag an nóiméad seo …” (“so true—so important—I have it in my pocket at this moment…”). But what followed was not comprehensible, and as Breandán did not produce our writing from his pocket and we have forgotten what we had written, I fear this illumination is lost to the world.
Thereafter we met Breandan only at long intervals. When Lilliput Press launched my Pilgrimage in the Peacock Theatre in Dublin, he spoke magniloquently. And when the Times Literary Sup
plement sent the book to Ireland’s poet laureate for review he forwarded it as a matter of course to Breandán, the representative of island literature. Breandán’s affectionate notice is probably the only one the severe TLS has ever published in which the author of the book under review is referred to by his first name. Then, in 1990, on my return to Ireland after a month abroad, I fell into conversation with a stranger on a train, who mentioned casually that she had recently attended Breandán Ó hEithir’s funeral. I am lazy about friendships, and have lived to regret it.
Just beyond the old teachers’ residence the road sidles up to the next scarp it has to climb, which steepens into a vertical rock-face called An Aill Bhriste, the broken cliff, along the left-hand side for a short distance. Here a “grotto” has been made out of a nook of the cliff, with a conventional blue and white Madonna casting her eyes upwards. Once, as I approached, a donkey came to the edge of the cliff and appeared in that visionary space above her, twiddling its huge furry ears in benediction. Another time I glimpsed a minute goldcrest—a rare bird in Aran—flitting in the tapestry of rambling roses and old man’s beard around her niche, the bright streak of its crown appearing and disappearing like stitches of gold thread among the cream and pink blossoms and shadowy greenery, all momentarily rendered as precious as a Crivelli. The last wedge of ground between the road and the scarp here is called Buaile na gCopóg, the pasture of the plantains, as I happen to know, because if I’m climbing the hill in company with some other shopper from the west and I run out of conversation, I fall back on place-name studies. Next, the road bends westwards, makes an effort and gets itself onto the next level by a steep ascent called Carcair na Ceártan, from a ceárta or forge that used to stand on the right of the road, run by a Micil Riabhach Ó Niaidh, a Connemara poitín smuggler of a hundred and fifty years ago. At this point one enters the next townland, Eochaill, which is supposed to mean “yew-wood.” If ever there was a wood in it, nothing could be stonier than one’s first view of it today. An Chreig Dhubh, the black crag, is the name of the great terrace of limestone pavement that comes into view stretching away to the south from the road here, and I have seen consternation in the faces of newcomers who have climbed so far, to find only this desert, and further bare hills rising before them. Old Beartla thinks that it is a disgrace to the island that the Cill Rónáin men didn’t reclaim all this wasteland, instead of spending their days lying in the shelter of a wall and talking. In fact there is something lugubrious about this crag, and although I have often botanized across it and found as much fascination in its crevices as on other great crags to the west, it leaves me drained, as if by some localized side-effect of gravity. But it has a comic aspect too, which I owe to Beartla’s voluminous commentary on every step of our way, on the many occasions I walked with him up this hill, sparing the pony of his side-car. He thinks that this crag, or a part of it, has another name, which sounded like Creig Arry. And what is the meaning of arry? I asked; he didn’t know, but he thought it was somebody’s name, as in Harry Stattle. And who was he? Again Beartla didn’t know—but whoever he was he must have had great brains, because if a man did something very clever you would say “Sáraigh sé Haraí Steatail—He beats Harry Stattle!” It took me a moment to recognize Aristotle, the father of cleverness himself, in this Aran dress. Of course the name of the crag, Creig Earraigh, whatever it means, has nothing to do with the philosopher, but I always think of him as I pass, and think too how Joyce, “bringing to tavern and to brothel / The mind of witty Aristotle,” would have relished Harry Stattle.