by Tim Robinson
The western O’Flahertys, on the other hand, did not recognize the Composition, and neither did the Burkes of Mayo, who rebelled against the ruthless efforts of the new Lord President of Connacht, Sir Richard Bingham, to impose the settlement. But the Mayo rebels were soon suppressed, and Sir Richard Bingham sent his brother John into Iar-Chonnacht in pursuit of rebels there. Owen, the son of Gráinne and Dónal an Chogaidh, took no part in the rebellion but withdrew his men and cattle to the island of Omey, where a local chief Tibbot O’Toole kept a house of hospitality. (Omey is on the west coast a little south of Renvyle; it is accessible over the sands when the tide is out.) When Bingham could not find the rebels he came to Omey and was entertained there, and in the middle of the night his men seized Owen and eighteen of his followers, and took them, with four thousand cows, five hundred stud mares and horses and a thousand sheep (the figures are from a deposition made later on by the aggrieved Gráinne), to Ballynahinch. There Owen was stabbed to death and the others, including the nonagenarian O’Toole, hanged.
The Binghams’ violent policies failed to make a reality out of the Composition, however, and Owen’s younger brother, known as Murchadh na Maor, “of the stewards,” from his extensive domains, remained in control of the western coastline and the castle of Bunowen. When the rebellion led by Red Hugh O’Donnell broke out in the north, Murchadh was commanded to join with the O’Malley sea-lords to ship the English troops from Galway to Sligo. However he chose to join the rebels, and brought his men to Munster with O’Donnell; but after the defeat of Kinsale he returned peaceably to Bunowen, where he died in 1626. His eldest son was Murchadh na Mart, “of the beeves,” so called from his custom of fortifying himself against the rigours of Lent by “killing and devoureing in his one house, among his servants and followers everye Shrove Tuesday at night fifty beeves.” There is a tradition that the Earl of Strafford, Lord Deputy of Ireland, made the dangerous journey into the depths of this Murchadh’s territory in 1637, but found on arrival at Bunowen that Murchadh was absent on some expedition against “his enemies of Galway”; Strafford waited patiently for his return and was then “received with all the rude profusions of Irish hospitality.” On this occasion Murchadh was knighted, but it is said that the true object of Strafford’s journey was to spy out the land with the intention of robbing him of it.
However it was not until the defeat of the rebellion of 1641 that the O’Flahertys, of both east and west, were finally thrown down. The long-boats of Sir Murchadh na Mart had protected the western coast on behalf of the rebels, and he had joined his younger brother Col. Edmund, in bringing their hundreds of “rude kearns” against the fort at Galway. What befell Edmund after the Cromwellian victory I have already told; Sir Murchadh was luckier, in that he lost his lands but was allowed to retire to Aran, where he died in 1666 and was buried in Teaghlach Éinne. As to the opportunist eastern O’Flahertys who had so prospered in Elizabethan times, they also took the Catholic Confederate side in the rebellion of 1641, and lost all. The castle of Aughnanure, which had passed down in Murchadh na dTua’s line, was confiscated, and both castle and land were granted, like so much else, to the Earl of Clanrickard.
The Moycullen O’Flahertys, although they regarded themselves as loyal to England, fared little better. Roderic O’Flaherty the historian was of this branch; he was only two years old when his father died, and by the time he reached his majority the patrimony had been confiscated. Even after the Restoration he received back only 500 acres, a tiny fraction of the territory, and by then he was so deep in debt they did him little good. “I live a banished man within the bounds of my native soil,” he wrote, “a spectator of others enriched by my birth-right; an object of condoling to my relations and friends, and a condoler of their miseries.” The unfortunate “Ogygian” was yet to face further impoverishment. Fearing that he would lose even the rump of his estate through the oppressions that followed King William’s defeat of King James, he signed it over to his friend the lawyer Richard Martin, who had wangled an exemption from confiscation. When the danger had passed and Roderic asked for his land back, Nimble Dick asserted that it had been a genuine sale, and the historian was left with just his cottage and his view of the Aran Islands. The great Celticist Edward Lhuyd visited him there in 1700, and later sent him a book and a letter, observing to another correspondent that “Unless they come frank, [O’Flaherty] will, I fear, be unable to pay the postage.” Nine years later another antiquary, Sir Thomas Molyneux, wrote,
I went to vizit old Flaherty, who lives very old, in a miserable condition at Park, some three hours west of Gallway. I expected to have seen here some old Irish manuscripts, but his ill fortune has stripp’d him of these as well as his other goods, so that he has nothing now left but some pieces of his own writing, and a few old rummish books, printed.
Roderic O’Flaherty died in 1718. Hardiman records a tradition that his son Michael was a fool, and had him buried within the house, thinking that that would strengthen his own claims to the land. A humble scrap of oral lore I picked up in Connemara indicates that his unknown grave is at least very near the house, for the potatoes were put on to boil before the funeral left, and they were not yet cooked when the mourners returned.
By chance we have an Englishman’s view into the lifestyle of the western O’Flahertys of the post-Cromwellian generation, for in 1698 a John Dunton took a “ramble” around Ireland and was bold enough to visit Iar-Chonnacht, in which, he found, “the old barbarities of the Irish are so many and so common, that until I came hither, I looked for Ireland in itself to no purpose.” A Galway gentleman gave him a recommendation to Murchadh na Mart’s son Brian, “the most considerable man in this territorye.” Brian O’Flaherty, he found, “had converst among the English, had been at Dublin and was sensible enough of their one barbarous way in living, but sayd it was a thing soe habitual to them that it could not be suddenly removed.” The political upheavals had not upset the ancient pattern of the Celtic year, and O’Flaherty entertained Dunton in a temporary residence at a buaile or milking-pasture, to which he and his followers had removed with their cattle for the summer season; it must have been in north-east Connemara, because on the following day they took him to hunt the red deer in Gleann Glaise, a remote valley of the Maumturk Mountains.
This gentleman was among a greate company of his relations, as being the chiefe of the clan or family, when I arrived at his house, which was a long cabbin, the walls of hurdles plaister’d with cow dung and clay. They were a parcel of tall lusty fellows with long haire, straite and well made, only clumsy in their leggs, theire ankles thicker in proportion to their calves than the English, which is attributed to theire weareing broags without any heels; but this I leave to the learned. The men after the old Irish fashion as well as the weomen weore theire haire verie long, as an ornament, and to add to it the weomen commonly on a Saturday night, or the night before they make theire appearance at mass or any publick meeting doe wash it in a lee made with stale urine and ashes, and after in water to take away the small, by which their locks are of a burnt yellow colour much in vogue among them.
There was a mutton killed for supper, half of which was boyled and the other half roasted, and all devour’d at the meale. After supper the priest, who as I suppose was a sort of chaplaine to the family called for tables to play for an halfpennorth of tobacco, but was reprimanded by the lady of the house for doeing it before he had return’d thankes. I made the priest a present of my tobacco which was welcome to them all; even the lady herself bore them company in smoakeing and excus’d it by urgeing the need they were in of some such thing in that moist country, which I could not contradict…. One thing I saw in this hous perhaps the like not to be seen anywhere else in the world, and that was nine brace of wolfe doggs or the long Irish grey hounds, a paire of which kind has often been a present for a king. They were as quiet among us as lambs without any noys or disturbance….
The house was one entire long roome without any partition. In the midd
le of it was the fire place with a large wood fire which was in no way unpleaseing tho in summer time. It had no chimney but a vent hole for the smoake of the wood, and I obseerv’d the people here much troubled with sore eyes; which I attributed to the sharpe smoake of the wood, and they also allowed it but sayd that they had newly put up this for a Booley or summer habitation, the proper dwelling or mansion house being some miles farther neare the sea, and such an one they commonly built everie yeare in some one place or other, and thatch’d it with rushes or coarse grass as this was; we all lay in the same roome upon greene rushes…. I wonder’d mightily to heare people walking to the fire place in the middle of the house to piss there in the ashes, but I was soone after forced to doe soe too for want of a chambrepot, which they are not much used unto.
Other O’Flahertys of this generation abandoned the old Connemara life and went to England; among them a son of Colonel Edmund’s, also called Edmund, who became an army captain. He returned after the Restoration and took a lease of some land at Renvyle, that had been confiscated from his father and was now held by absentee landlords, the Blakes of Lehinch in Mayo. His son used to be famous as Éamonn Láidir, Edmund the strong; folklore celebrates his many horseback sword-fights with Richard Martin, then the principal landowner in Connemara, and his followers. One sees this “Nimble Dick” as the epitome of those who had eeled their way to fortune under the new dispensation, and Éamonn Láidir, hacking his way out of the circle of Richard’s men, as the doomed but obdurate O’Flaherty spirit. He died in poverty in about 1749, and later on his gigantic bones were exhumed and exhibited as objects of curiosity in the old chapel of Ballynakill near Renvyle.
Éamonn’s descendents continued as middlemen to the Blakes until about 1811, when Henry Blake first made the arduous journey by horse through the mountain pass of Maumturk and by boat down the Killary to visit his estate. That the O’Flaherty way of life still preserved much of its antique flavour, after yet another century in the retracted Celtic margin of the kingdom, is shown by Blake’s description of the state kept by Anthony O’Flaherty JP, “a middle-man, possessing an income of 1500l per annum, arising from his good management of profit rents, utterly unconscious of any other claims on the land”:
“The big house,” then, was a thatched cabin about sixty feet long by twenty wide, and to all appearance only one storey high. It ostensibly contained an eating parlour and a sitting-room, from each of which opened two small bed-rooms. We had oral evidence in the night, that there was other accomodation in the thatch, but those who had the benefit of it were placed far beyond our ken. Conceive then our surprise at being gradually introduced to at least two dozen individuals, all parlour boarders. There was mine host, a venerable old man of eighty-six, his young and blooming wife, a daughter with her husband, three or four gay young ladies from Galway, two young gentlemen, two priests, and several others, evidently clansmen and relations…. A room full of company, the fumes of a large dinner, and the warmth of a bright turf fire, rendered the heat almost insupportable, and during the feast, amid the clatter of knives and forks, and the mingled voices of our party, we were indulged ad libitum with the dulcet notes of the bag-pipe, which continued its incessant drone until the ladies retired from the table. I need not expatiate on the wine and spirits, though both had probably been imported duty free many years before, and were certainly good enough to tempt the whole party to pay a sufficient devotion to the jolly god.
But Mr. Blake soon soured the jollity by announcing that he no longer intended to allow a middleman to stand between him and “the immediate cultivators of the soil.” Soon he was to take over the house as his family seat, thus ending the last substantial presence of the O’Flahertys in the west.
Antony O’Flaherty was not without reserves, however. For £7000 he bought a property that had been confiscated from his forebears, Knockbane near Moycullen. His son, another Antony, became MP for Galway, and his house was much admired in accounts of the neighbourhood: “Nothing that modern taste and capital could effect in rendering this one of the most charming residences in the country has been omitted.” But on his retirement it passed to his sister’s husband, a descendant of the Fitzpatricks of Aran, who eventually could not repay a mortgage, and so “the Congested Districts Board came in 1900 and swallowed him up, striped his land, pulled down Knockbane House, and left not a trace of Fitzpatrick or O’Flaherty at Moycullen.”
Some eastern O’Flahertys still hanging onto the tatters of antique glory by conforming to the established Protestant church also renewed their standing in a more urbane mode. In 1687 the Earl of Clanrickard had leased Aughnanure to a Brian O’Flaherty, son of its previous owner, who later bought the freehold with a borrowed £1600. Unable to repay, he lost the castle and most of its land, and retired to Lemonfield nearby. His grandson married Jane Bourke, daughter of Viscount Mayo, and their son Sir John, an army captain and deputy governor of the county of Galway, built a mansion; he even had a descendant of the O’Canavans, the medical ollaves of the old Maigh Seola days, as his personal physician. The Lemonfield O’Flahertys were large landlords down to the CDB era, and held onto the mansion until the 1930s. They also had property near Ballyconneely in the west, where the last of them is remembered still as “Bojo.” He was gay, and handsome—the name was from his beaux yeux—and thought he was a filmstar, and was fleeced by a bogus company that set him up in front of an empty camera.
Such, then, was the dispersal of the seed of Éremón, into feuding warlords, politically unfortunate grandees, and foolish playboys. Just one line preserved something of the O’Flahertys’ quintessential westernness down to not much more than a hundred years ago. From what I hear in Kilmurvey House it must have been in the late eighteenth century, when the rest of the Aughnanure O’Flahertys were turning Protestant, that a branch of the family took itself off with priest, chalice, vestments and missal, to Aran. The ferocious heritage of myth, history and folklore they imported to the Aran story—perhaps unwittingly, like a lizard that had crept into a corner of their linen-chest—is summarized above.
THE BIG HOUSE
I had hoped to present here a restoration of lapsed connections, an account of the Connemara origins of the Kilmurvey House O’Flahertys. On behalf of their memory I have run up an inordinate postage and phone bill and piled my desk with research notes and transcripts of old documents; yet, in a forest of criss-crossed branches, I cannot find the family tree. If the truth I seek were known, it would most probably be dull—Patrick O’Flaherty of Aran was the son of so-and-so, who was the cousin of so-and-so, of such-and-such an address in history. Unknown, it continues to preoccupy me, this absent fact, this handful of dust in an unopened chamber of my labyrinth.
O’Donovan, after summarizing the pedigree of the Lemonfield O’Flahertys in his letters to the Ordnance Survey, states that:
The other branches of this family now respectable are O’Flahertie of Knockbaun a very respectable gentleman; O’Flaherty of Kilkenny, the next heir to Lemonfield; P. O’Flaherty of Aran, who never married; Mr. O’Flahertie of Oughterard the Post Master and High Constable, is supposed to be the representative of the family of Moycullin.
Documents I have seen show that there were close if acrimonious relationships between the Aran O’Flahertys and those of Lemonfield, but none of the obvious sources (such as Patrick O’Flaherty’s death notices in the newspapers) specify them or even mention who his father was. The reason for this null testimony may lie in the religious ill-feelings dividing the eighteenth-century generations, the conforming of most branches of the clan to the established church and the cleaving of the Aran branch to Catholicism.
The O’Flahertys are said to have brought their own priest with them from Aughnanure, and if so it seems likely that he was the Fr. Francis O’Flaherty whose tomb, with the O’Flaherty crest and motto, in the graveyard at Cill Éinne I described in Pilgrimage. He was born in about 1757 in Aran, where his father, Beairtli-méad, had a “half-quarter” of land near Cill Rón
áin, of which the name, Leath-cheathrú Bheairtliméid, is still known to one or two antiquarian-minded islanders. Francis was educated in Spain, like so many young men of family in those days when Catholicism was only just emerging from proscription, and served as a curate somewhere in Connacht before being appointed Parish Priest of the islands some time before 1800. The census of 1821 shows him, aged sixty-four, living in Cill Rónáin with his widowed sister Mary Broughton (the Broughtons were Catholic landowners of Inis Leacan, an island near Roundstone) and her three young children, his curate, a pilgrim called Mary Coen, a house servant and a seventy-eight-year-old beggar. In the porch of the chapel in Cill Rónáin is a medieval plaque of the crucifixion which Fr. Francis is said to have brought from Rome; it was passed down in the Gill family—one of his sister’s daughters married a Gill—until Fr. Killeen carried it off for the church in a high-handed way that is still remembered with resentment. The Gills have a little shop in Cill Rónáin, two doors to the west of which, opposite the old rectory gates, is a long-empty two-storey cottage; this was Fr. Francis’s home, and his mounting-block used to be pointed out at its gable. George Petrie, visiting the Aran Islands for the first time in this same year of 1821, met the “venerable pastor,” and noted two traits strongly marked in his physiognomy: the courage requisite to his ministry in “a cluster of islands washed by the waves of the Atlantic,” and the purity of his mind, deriving from a total ignorance of the vices of humankind outside the innocency of Aran.