Stones of Aran

by Tim Robinson

  I have heard that at that time the ruling proprietor and magistrate of the north island used to give any man who had done wrong a letter to a jailer in Galway, and send him off by himself to serve a term of imprisonment. As there was no steamer, the ill-doer was given a passage in some chance hooker to the nearest point on the mainland. Then he walked for many a mile along a desolate shore till he reached the town. When his time had been put through, he crawled back along the same route, feeble and emaciated, and had often to wait many weeks before he could regain the island. Such at least is the story.

  One must remember that between the visit of Petrie and that of Synge lay half a dozen famines and the Land War, by which patriarchal attitudes had been starved out and shouted down; the truth about that “first fine day” of Patrick O’Flaherty’s reign had long been left desolate on the shore, bare, unaccomodated, and perhaps forked.

  Petrie was to have the opportunity of thanking O’Flaherty again for his hospitality, and of proposing a toast to that “fine old Irish gentleman,” in 1857, during the British Association’s famous banquet in Dún Aonghasa. O’Flaherty would have been well known to several of the eminent banqueteers, and especially to the director of the excursion, William Wilde. Wilde had visited the islands in 1848, and perhaps on other occasions, and later he built a summer home about thirty miles from Galway, near Cong. He had an O’Flaherty connection through his grandmother, and it is part of the lore of Kilmurvey House that Patrick stood godfather to his son, Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde, born in 1856. (The earlier biographies of Oscar Wilde state that his godfather was King Oscar of Sweden, who it is alleged was treated for an ear complaint by Sir William; more scholarly studies such as Richard Ellmann’s show that this is not so, but leave open the question of who was Oscar’s godfather. If this is a little literary mystery, here is its possible solution.)

  There is certainly some mystery about Patrick’s wife, who is not named in any of the documents I have seen or mentioned in any contemporary accounts. According to the tomb by Port Mhuirbhigh, Patrick’s son James died in October 1881 aged sixty-four; therefore he was born in 1816 or 1817—but neither he nor his mother figure, at least identifiably, in the 1821 census. Gossip has it that when James heard his father was dying he realized that there might be difficulties about his inheritance, came home from Galway in a hurry with a priest, and got the situation regularized.

  By the time James succeeded his father as the island’s chief middleman and JP in 1864, the Hill Farm at Killeany must have been added to the O’Flaherty holdings in Cill Mhuirbhigh and Ceathrú an Turlaigh. If Patrick had enjoyed and dispensed some residual organic warmth of feudal relationship with the islanders, none of it was passed on to his son, who is remembered solely as a scheming exploiter, in league with the proselytizing minister Kilbride and the extortionate agent Thompson. A local newspaper, the Galway Vindicator, alluded to this falling-off in a verse of the anti-souper “Song of the Arranman” I have already quoted in writing about the involved hostilities of the 1860s:

  There was a time, people of Aran,

  When O’Flaherty’s voice would oppose,

  In thunders as clear as clarion,

  The tyrants and tract strewing foes.

  But now, o degenerate son, you

  May lend the vile system a name,

  While they fondle the hope that they’ve won you,

  We’ll think of your conduct with shame.

  At that time O’Flaherty owned the Arran Yacht in partnership with Thompson, and used it in their monopolistic transport trade in kelp, bread and other supplies. He bought a forty-foot smack, the Breeze, in 1870 for £105, and employed a local crew in fishing. In the 1870s many tons of stone were drawn from Carraig an Bhanbháin near Cill Éinne, and Kilmurvey House arose to eclipse the old family home; it is said that James called in a Dublin architect to provide the style requisite to a gentleman’s residence. The stables and high-walled cattle-yard on the other side of the lane past his main gates completed the demesne. From a window in one of the outhouses there James O’Flaherty JP handed down judgment to lesser islanders standing in the laneway. The yard was the fort and stockade of the bailiffs’ Indian Wars. I hear of the exploit there of an Ó Direáin from Sruthán: he had lent his horse to a neighbour to bring back a sack of meal from Cill Rónáin, and this other man was stopped by the bailiff because he owed rent, and the horse and the meal were seized and taken off to O’Flaherty’s yard. When he heard of this, Ó Direáin, who was a big powerful fellow, took his blackthorn stick and walked over to Cill Mhuirbhigh, pushed his way past O’Flaherty’s men into the yard, leaped on his horse, and when they tried to stop him by shutting the gate, smashed it down and rode off. Nothing was done about him at the time, but when next he came to pay his rent it was refused, and he eventually had to leave the island.

  James O’Flaherty’s wife Julia, whom he married in 1848, was the daughter of Thomas and Julia Irwin of Cottage in Roscommon. Julia bore him five daughters: Julia, Mary, Jane, Delia and Lily. James Hardiman was a friend and trustee of the Irwins, and his son married the eldest daughter, Julia (in fact in Galway they say that a boat-load of O’Flahertys threatened to come over and call on him if he did not marry her). O’Flaherty’s mistress was a married woman of Gort na gCapall; he is supposed to have had four illegitimate sons, and their descendants are known by a nickname that nowadays is borne with a touch of pride. In fact James’ extramarital capers won him a nickname too: An Pocaide Bán, the white billygoat.

  Thus James is the original of the man whose reputation makes the old woman cross herself, in Ó Direáin’s “Ó Morna.” According to the poem, he was first led astray by a fawning bailiff who persuaded him that the womenfolk would deny nothing to one of his rank and ancestry; then his lonely eminence on the island and the coldness of his wife drove him into melancholy excesses. (Ó Direáin apparently shares the belief that unenthusiastic couplings result in girl children.) Maddened by the wild spring-tide of desire he storms through the island:

  Ag cartadh báin, ag cartadh loirg,

  Rooting up the grassland, rooting up the fallow

  Ag treabhadh faoi dheabhadh le fórsa,

  Speeding his plough with force,

  Ag réabadh comhlan na hóghachta,

  Breaking the door of virginity,

  Ag dul thar teorainn an phósta.

  Crossing the bounds of marriage.

  But he has a certain satanic dash even in his drunken follies:

  Tháinig lá ar mhuin a chapaill

  He came one day on his horse,

  Ar meisce faoi ualach óil,

  Weighted down with drink,

  Stad in aice trá Chill Cholmáin

  Stopped at Port Mhuirbhigh for sport

  Gur scaip ladhar den ór le spórt,

  And scattered a handful of gold,

  Truáin ag sciobadh gach sabhrain

  Wretches went scrabbling for sovereigns

  Dár scaoil an triath ina dtreo.

  Flung at them by the chief.

  Do gháir Ó Mórna is do bhéic,

  O’Flaherty howled with laughter,

  Mairbh a fhualais sa reilig thua

  The dead of his sept in the graveyard

  Ní foláir nó chuala an bhéic;

  Must have heard that yell from the beach;

  Dhearbhaigh fós le draothadh aithise

  And he swore with a leer of contempt

  Go gcuirfeadh sabhran gan mhairg

  He’d match every louse in their oxters

  In aghaidh gach míol ina n-ascaill.

  With a sovereign and not feel the loss.

  Labhair an sagart air Dé Domhnaigh,

  One Sunday he was named by the priest,

  Bhagair is d’agair na cumhachta,

  Threatened with authority’s vengeance,

  D’agair réabadh na hóghachta air,

  Accused of the rape of virginity,

  Scannal a thréada d’agair le fórsa,

  Blam
ed for scandal to the flock,

  Ach ghluais Ó Mórna ina chóiste

  But O’Flaherty rode by in his coach

  De shodar sotail thar cill.

  Arrogantly trotting past the chapel.

  Eventually the pangs of desire give way to the pains of age, and after lying for a while in his house in the wood, a house in which laughter has been rare, he joins his ancestors in the graveyard, and is eaten by the worm that does not distinguish between high and low degree. “May your sleep be tranquil in the tomb tonight,” prays the poet of this memorial.

  My translation has of course brought the poem into a more literal relationship with Aran history than Ó Direáin may have intended. Perhaps it is the irritation of a single line in it that makes me do so. While Ó Mórna was giving himself to debauch, his land was administered by four abusive and extortionate stewards, says Ó Direáin, and he names them for us:

  Wiggins, Robinson, Thomson agus Ede…

  This is very specific. The first three names are familiar in the island’s history; the fourth is not, but it was probably suggested by that of Charde, the Protestant schoolteacher and shopkeeper. Thom(p)son is of course the land-agent whose misdeeds I have catalogued—but he was agent to the landowners, the Digbys, rather than to O’Flaherty, who was only a middleman, leasing land from the owners and subletting much of it to lesser tenants. Henry Robinson succeeded Thompson in this post in the 1880s; he was agent for a number of estates and in particular for the former Martin estate in Connemara, and he lived in Roundstone, in a house rather grander than O’Flaherty’s. (Since I too live in Roundstone it is sometimes assumed that I descend from him, but it is not so; nevertheless this mention of his name spurs me to redress if not a historical injustice—for Robinson was a great evictor in his day—then a historical over-simplification.) As for Wiggins, the family may or may not have inherited its name and an ever-reducing proportion of its genes from some seventeenth-century Anglo-Saxon trooper gone native, but for many generations they had been smallholders in Cill Éinne under the same conditions as other families. However, the reasons for Ó Direáin’s use of their non-Aranite name for one of his gang of petty villains, rather than that of his kinsfolk and neighbours, Ó hIarnáin, are quite comprehensible.

  The unmasking of these names reveals James O’Flaherty as an actor in the cross-fissured capitalistic society of nineteenth-century Aran, rather than as the survivor from some archaic, amoral and almost heroic age Ó Direáin half-admiringly depicts. He was in shifting alliances with the representatives of other social powers transcending his own jurisdiction, notably the Protestant minister, the police and the land-agent. His implication in the politics of the relief committees and the management of the dispensary, his commerce with fisheries, kelp, cattle-raising and the transport of goods to and from Galway, and above all his role as land-grabber and, finally, victim in the Land War, have brought his name into many chapters of this book. Ó Direáin’s poem, after a splendid beginning that promises so much more than the old crone crossing her forehead could tell us, shirks this perplexed social setting, which leaves his blood-driven and nobly transgressive Ó Mórna both circumscribed and anaemic.

  In the real Aran, James O’Flaherty in his heyday had enough supporters, employees and hangers-on at least to put on a show. The archaeologist Thomas Westropp, describing his own first visit to Aran in 1878, happened upon a scene that could not have been repeated a few years later:

  Kilmurvey is a poor fishing village of little note, behind it is the house of Mr O’Fflaherty—he had been living on the mainland for some years & happened to return that day so the natives (who at this time did not consider a landlord an ex officio target) decorated all the avenue with paper flags & held races & games before the door.

  Within three years of this celebration—which perhaps marked the completion of Kilmurvey House—O’Flaherty was living under the protection of the new police barracks in the village, and had received the terrible blow of his cattle being driven over the cliff. Less than a year after that nightmarish warning as to his own safety he died in a Galway hotel, at the age of sixty-four.

  James O’Flaherty’s successor at Kilmurvey was his daughter Lily’s husband, who had added her surname to his own, calling himself Patrick O’Flaherty Johnston, and was appointed JP in 1882. The Johnstons are reputed to have been a hard-riding, high-living set who married into the junior branch of the Macnamaras, wealthy landowners in County Clare. The Johnston house near Doolin, “Aran View,” had been built by that Francis Macnamara who married Marcella, the sister[?] of Patrick O’Flaherty; Marcella’s daughter Catherine had married Robert Johnston, and their son was Patrick Johnston. The Macnamaras numbered among their forbears the famous eighteenth-century duellist Fireball Macnamara, and the senior branch at Ennistymon House later gave rise to another Francis Macnamara, a bohemian aesthete friend of Yeats and Shaw, for whom the nickname Fireball was resurrected. This Francis used to visit his Kilmurvey relatives and indeed had an illegitimate daughter by one of them. When he abandoned his wife and children, they drifted into the protection of another of his friends, Augustus John, and one of the daughters, Caitlín, married Dylan Thomas—which is the closest connection between Aran and Llareggub I can contrive.

  The Johnstons, as can be imagined, introduced a new tone to Kilmurvey House, which by chance was detected and recorded for us by Violet Martin and Edith Somerville, who passed by during their summer holiday of 1895, after they had surveyed and disapproved the “invertebrate walls” of Dún Aonghasa:

  It is a pleasant descent to the village of Kilmurvey, down through the buoyant air of the hill side; the grass steals its way among the outposts of rock, till the foot travels with unfamiliar ease in level fields. Near Kilmurvey the Resident Magistrate’s house shows a trim roof among young larch and spruce, a miracle of modernity and right angles after the strewn monstrosities of the ridge above; passing near it, a piano gave forth a Nocturne of Chopin’s to the solitude, a patrician lament, a skilled passion, in a land where ear and voice have preserved the single threads of melody, and harmony is as yet unwoven.

  But the world of the Irish R.M. was in decay, as the stories of “Martin and Ross” exhaustively demonstrate. Aran memory is that Patrick Johnston “scattered” the inheritance, shooting, fishing and drinking in Clare. When the Land Court sat in Cill Rónain in 1886, he won a 40 per cent reduction in the rent of the Hill Farm, but by 1897 he was anxious to transfer the lease of it to the Congested Districts Board for the sum of £550. Nothing immediately came of this because Johnston could not get a renewal of the lease from the owners on terms that would have made it attractive to the Board, but he must have given up the Cill Éinne land soon afterwards. A rather desperate-sounding draft letter from him to a solicitor reveals that his wife had just heard that her sister (probably Delia) could not lend her the £500 she had hoped for, and was seeing Fr. Farragher to arrange for the speedy sale of Ceathrú an Turlaigh; as for the Hill Farm, no one would purchase the lease under the present rent, and he could only surrender it to the agent. So both east and west wings of the estate were clipped, reducing the holding to the Kilmurvey House farm alone.

  Patrick and Lily had three sons, one of whom died young, and three daughters. The family was in relatively poor circumstances by then; one son, George Irwin, had to go to the National School, and so grew up an excellent Irish speaker. He joined the Royal Irish Fusiliers and became a Captain (and is remembered as the man who brought the first motorcar to the island; Máirtín Ó Direáin describes how the children of Sruthán marveled at the beams of its headlamps when it was parked up on the hill at the chapel in Eochaill, and argued about whether it ran on oil or coal). Patrick died in 1927; his widow Lily, still remembered as a quiet little old lady—she had suffered a partial stroke—lived on until 1944, the last of the Ferocious O’Flahertys.

  James Johnston, Patrick’s elder son and heir, had gone to Africa, and returned to try and save the farm. He was one of the founders of the Ar
an branch of Fianna Fáil in 1927; the others were the former IRA leader Thomas Fleming and two school teachers, Joe Flanagan (a friend of the candidate they wanted to canvas for, Dr. Tubridy of Connemara) and Pádraic Ó hEithir (from whose reminiscences I have this); James’s reason for joining, it seems, was that he was for anything the parish priest opposed! There is a disturbing portrait of James in Clara Vyvyan’s reminiscences of her stay at the cottage Elizabeth Rivers rented from him in the late 1930s:

  I find it difficult to write of James because I always feel that I never properly appreciated him…. The other three of us all thought he was wonderful. I was just amazed and frightened as I listened to his starkly cynical stories that came out, one after the other, like puffs of smoke from a pipe. There was an unending succession of them, as if with each one he were trying to outdo himself in his own world of extravaganza, and always at the end he would utter a nasal “Heigh!” on a rising note, as if he were calling us to attention or demanding applause. But perhaps he was merely saying; “That’s that, believe it or no.”… James had a larger house and more land than any of the others and he always seemed to have less work to do. In mainland life he would have been, no doubt, the squire of Kilmurvy, but here on Aran there were never any class distinctions, people were only old or young, men or women or children.

  Typical of his stories was one he told her about Gort na gCapall:

  “There was a famous wreck on that coast, a big vessel came ashore on the rocks near the village. No survivors of course. One corpse came ashore held up by its head and shoulders in a lifebelt but when they came to empty the pockets they saw it had no face. However they took what they could find and then they cast it back into the sea. Two more came in together, they could hardly loosen them apart…”