Poet, Madman, Scoundrel

by David Slattery

  When the final curtain came down and the theatre emptied out after three standing ovations, our lunatic found himself all alone. Just before panic or madness could set in, his minders came staggering through the front doors, completely inebriated. After chastising them, the revolutionary lunatic forced them into a cab and begged them to make an effort to appear sober to prevent them being fired. They reached the safety of the lunatic asylum without further incident.

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  The history of Irish rebellion leaves me with one question – where would we be now if our rebels had heads and our attorneys had hearts?

  2

  Saints and Sinners of the Irish Tradition

  Pity Palladius, the first Christian bishop to come to Ireland. He was fascinated by the subtleties of theological heresy but, when he landed in Ireland, he immediately found himself armpit deep in unsophisticated pagans. Who can blame him for dying on his first day on the job? He probably expired from dismay.

  Someone whose name we don’t know followed him to Ireland. We can assume that he was also theologically effete because he didn’t last long either, and probably died from pagan-related shock. Patrick was the third, and perhaps last, choice because it was clearly time for a lowbrow Christian. Patrick was more robust than Palladius and his anonymous successor. On his own, he managed to convert the lot of us and also banish our snakes.

  Patrick (c.420–490?) is our national saint. We know quite a lot about him because he wrote an autobiography called Confessions at the end of his life as a defence against his critics. In this opus he tells us about his life as a slave and his undemanding brand of religion, and he bemoans his poor education. He never recovered from his resentment that his studies had been cut short by being kidnapped, which must be one of the better student excuses of all time. He details his escape from Ireland back to his home and his ultimate return to Ireland to convert us. He tells of his disappointment when he initially failed to become a bishop. Patrick also wrote the Epistole as an open letter of excommunication against the soldiers of Coroticus, who was either a fearsome Briton warrior or a Roman soldier living in Ireland, who had killed some of Patrick’s converts. But there are several significant gaps, or missing years, in Patrick’s story.

  We do know that Patrick was born in Roman Britain. He came from a comfortable background with land, houses and his own slaves. But during his lifetime, and for centuries afterwards, no one cared about his trip to Ireland because the Western Roman Empire was collapsing under an onslaught of barbarian hordes. Everyone was trying to keep their heads – literally. Not only was Patrick unrecognised in his lifetime, he was also quickly forgotten both inside and outside Ireland shortly after his death. It wasn’t until the seventeenth century that he acquired the baroque clothes of a Tridentine bishop. He had to wait until 1727 for his symbol, the shamrock. His feast day of 17 March wasn’t included in the Roman Breviary until 1631 and didn’t appear in the Revised Roman Calendar until 1632.

  Patrick had a really big secret. When he was fifteen, he tells us, he did something extraordinarily appalling that haunted him for the rest of his life. However, annoyingly, he doesn’t tell us what it was. It is difficult to guess what this terrible thing could have been, given the standards of the fifth century when running amok with an axe was regarded as light entertainment. It was a lot more than accidentally killing the cat, an awful lot more. His contemporaries knew what it was because he told them, but they wouldn’t or couldn’t bring themselves to tell us.

  Naked Irish pirates kidnapped Patrick from his home in Britain when he was sixteen. In those days, Irish pirates went on raids stark naked so that brambles and branches wouldn’t get caught in their clothes and impede their swift movements. They seem to have been indifferent to anything else catching on brambles. Tough men! Patrick thought that he deserved to be hauled away by pirates because of whatever it was he had done the year before. This was the first sign of his Stockholm syndrome.39 At that time he was indifferent to religion. The experience was traumatic for him, and marked the beginnings of his religious piety.

  Patrick was sold to a slave owner near Killala in Co. Mayo. He was put to work as a shepherd. But Patrick was no Spartacus. For six years he was an abjectly submissive and obedient slave. He turned to religion in his crisis and began to pray non-stop. One night a sheep told him, apparently in a dream, that he should prepare to go home, and that a ship was waiting for him in a port 200 miles away. He set off to find a boat loaded with pagan pirates who were willing to take him home. They sailed away together. We learn a fifth-century phrase from him – to “suck someone’s nipples”, meaning to make friends. He tells us that he was unwilling to suck these pirates’ nipples. I don’t believe him because after they landed in Gaul he spent some time marauding with these pirates, providing us with yet more evidence of his Stockholm syndrome. He was enslaved again for sixty days before the Lord set him free. He returned home eventually to his parents’ house in Britain.

  His parents welcomed back a changed Patrick: he had become an obsessive Christian. The Celtic church with which Patrick became more and more involved was less interested in theology and abstract thought than in keeping away from women. At home he had a dream that a man called Victorius brought him letters, asking him to return to Ireland to convert the native pagans to Christianity. Patrick spent the next twenty years training to be a bishop so that he could go back to Ireland to do just that, ignoring his parents’ pleas for him to stay.

  Patrick’s many critics in the British Church, suspicious of his intentions, accused him of being motivated by greed and wanting to fleece the Irish natives, probably in revenge for his kidnapping. Not only that, he also operated without Papal authority. To counter these accusations, Patrick tells us that he actually spent his own money converting Irish pagans. Irish pagan women used to throw their jewellery onto the altar when he was saying Mass, a cultural practice that in later centuries evolved into throwing underwear onto the stage at rock concerts. He tells us that he gave back the jewellery and asked the women to control themselves. Patrick probably toured the country in a tent, like a circus, with a bodyguard of Irish princes that he paid for, again out of his own funds. He claimed divine rather than Papal authority, which theologically made him the first Protestant in Ireland.

  The nomadic tribe the Visigoths had sacked Rome in 410, which caused Patrick to believe, or, more likely, fervently hope, that the end of the world was nigh. From his writing we learn that he seemed ready and willing, extremely willing, to suffer martyrdom. But, as we all know, when you want something so badly no one will give it to you.

  He died of old age but we don’t know when because at the time nobody cared. He may have died in or around 490, and he may be buried in Downpatrick in Co. Down.

  Saints of the Irish Tradition

  Irish history is crowded, unsurprisingly, with saints of the Irish tradition. In that convention, a person became a saint by converting pagans and opening churches, as opposed to a saint of, for example, the Italian tradition, who would have gained his or her sainthood by being eaten by a lion.

  There are loads of saints in Irish history but sainthood had only a relatively narrow window of opportunity between the fifth and seventh centuries. After that you could forget it, unless you were exceptional. Some of the most boring people on Earth were saints precisely because they were allowed to do nothing except pray, build churches and convert the local pagans. For some, like Abbán (d. 520), it was a family business because his brother, Gobnait, was also a saint. I wonder what their parents were like? After Patrick, each county or region in Ireland liked to have its own saint. A candidate would move to a vacancy and found a church, but usually after a stint as a hermit in the local hedge.

  The priests and monks liked to nominate just one person as being responsible for converting everyone. They tended not to give historical credit to the extras. Hence, Patrick converted all of us on his own, and Colum Cille conver
ted all the Picts in Scotland in singlehanded retribution.

  Saint Colum Cille (521–597) was related to the O’Neill royal dynasty of Ulster. He was tall and handsome with a ferocious temper. When he became a monk, life in the monastery adapted to its noble guest because an angel used to grind the corn for him and do his other chores when it was his turn. He was also a Latin poet, a scholar and a warrior.

  His comrades, the soldiers of Ulster, used to have a favourite joke: they would say that they would only fight for their king if a certain man called Donnbo would fight with them. This was funny because Donnbo was known for never leaving his mammy’s house. In one of his earlier saintly interventions, Colum Cille promised Donnbo’s mammy that nothing would happen to her son if she allowed him to fight the fierce men of Leinster with Ulster’s king, Fergal. Colum Cille guaranteed her, as a prospective saint, that he would bring Donnbo home to her safe and sound. Donnbo’s mother reluctantly agreed, so Donnbo, King Fergal and the soldiers of Ulster marched off to fight against the men of Leinster, of whom they were actually terrified. Colum Cille, perhaps knowing something the rest of them didn’t, chose not to join them on this occasion because he was needed for supervising his angel’s chores back at the monastery.

  The night before the battle, King Fergal asked Donnbo for a song because he had a considerable reputation as a musician. Donnbo declined because his nerves were at him but he did promise that, come what may, the next night he would sing for his king. The next day, Donnbo, Fergal and 9,000 soldiers of Ulster were slaughtered.

  The night after the battle, Murchad, son of the King of Leinster, promised his armour and chariot to anyone who would bring him back a memento from the battlefield. As all the Leinster men were afraid of the dark, a Munster man volunteered to go. When he got there he found Donnbo’s head singing songs to King Fergal’s headless body because Donnbo was keeping his promise to his king to entertain him, come what may. The Munster man carried Donnbo’s head back and set it up on a post in the corner of Murchad’s house to provide entertainment. Donnbo sang wild songs and sweet music the likes of which they had never heard before. This was before television was invented.

  There is no record of the conversation between Colum Cille and Donnbo’s mammy when she discovered that her precious Donnbo’s head had been turned into a jukebox.

  Colum Cille had to leave Ireland as a penance precisely because of this kind of rash promise-making and inept interference in military affairs and battles. He also had problems with illegal copying of intellectual property. His former master, Finnian, loaned him a Psalter.40 He copied this without permission. It was not a simple oversight because this was before the invention of photocopiers. It took months, and sometimes years, to make a copy of a Psalter. But Colum Cille was a fantastic reader and copier of books. He learned Greek in order to talk with the angels because they didn’t know either Irish or Latin.

  Colum Cille also left Ireland because he needed to get away from his family, an often-ignored reason for the popularity of emigration out of Ireland. He founded a successful monastery on the island of Iona that became one of the most influential monastic settlements in Europe. It was so important that it was the first Irish monastery to be attacked by Vikings, ever, in 795. What an honour! Many of his kinsmen eventually followed him to Iona, becoming abbots in charge of a growing number of monasteries and establishing the Irish tradition of following family members abroad. These relations went on to establish new monasteries in Scotland.

  Bridget (439–524) is the female patron saint of Ireland and our first woman bishop. When Bridget’s mother became pregnant with her, her father, who was a warrior, sold Bridget’s mother to a poet but retained ownership over the unborn child. The poet, in turn, sold the mother to a druid in whose house Bridget was eventually born. The druid kindly sent Bridget back to her father where she became involved with dairying. She had a form of lactose intolerance because she could only drink milk from white cows with red ears. She was also obsessed with fire and was possibly an undiagnosed pyromaniac. She wanted to commit herself to the celibate life, which was an ambition that dismayed her parents.

  After many family rows, her father eventually allowed her to become a nun. She immediately established a convent in Kildare. As abbess, she was accorded the status of bishop. This was an accepted role for women until the twelfth century, when there was a collapse in feminist consciousness. Her convent developed into a “double monastery” of monks and nuns. She invited a local would-be saint, Dál Messin Corb, to become co-bishop with her. We can only imagine the nervous tension amongst the monks with all those nuns around. The silence of the monastery night was regularly broken by the sound of the lash of a whip on flesh as the monks flogged themselves for penance, and perhaps the nuns also just to be sure.

  Bridget has a reputation for being especially kind to cows and the poor. She carried out her missionary work from a chariot, performing many miracles including “resolving” an unwanted pregnancy. Sometimes she overdid it with the spells. Once, she gave a man “love water” to give to his wife who had stopped having sex with him. He put the water in his wife’s food, drink and bed, as instructed by Bridget. Soon the wife couldn’t keep her hands off him. She would chase him everywhere for sex. One morning she woke to find that he had fled from the bed early. She tracked him down the road to the seashore and saw him across the water on a peninsula, where he was trying to hide. She threatened to drown herself if he didn’t come back. As he swam ashore, I imagine he was muttering to himself that he would never ask Bridget for help again.

  Many things that Bridget made increased in size. For example, she wove the first cloth in Ireland and, when a rich landowner promised he would give her, rent free, the grazing for her cow that her handmade cloak would cover, she spread the cloak on the ground. He should have known better, given the times in which he was living. The cloak just spread and spread, as you might expect.

  Saint Brendan the (Not-so-Accurate) Navigator (484–577) was born in Kerry. He is one of the most daredevil saints of the Irish tradition. He had adventuring genes because his family was descended from Niall of the Nine Hostages, who had fought the Romans and was the prime suspect in Patrick’s kidnapping. He wanted to become a soldier like his famous ancestor, but, being the eldest in his family, he was obliged to become a monk and hence a saint. Like many in Ireland, the nuns taught him. A particular nun, Ita, helped him in later life with his voyages. He learned a form of navigation from Bishop Erc, who was also a druid and was therefore familiar with astronomy and mathematics. An angel visited Brendan in a dream to reassure him that he would guide him across the ocean to the paradise of Hy-Brazil and would look after him on his voyages, bringing him, if not his entire crew, safely home again.

  Before Brendan, a monk called Mernoke had sailed west off the Irish coast in search of an isolated place where he could be an undisturbed hermit because Ireland was crowded with hermits at that time. Mernoke discovered an island paradise with all the herbs, fruit trees, gold, silver and jewels that a hermit could ever need. A native on the island told Mernoke that Jesus had helped him to find that place. He spent a year and a half there and was so happy that he thought it was just half an hour. We all know what that feels like when we come home from being on holiday. He eventually sailed home and told Brendan, who became insanely jealous. Immediately deciding that he just had to go there too, Brendan chose the twelve best monks in his monastery and set sail in a small boat. This first voyage was a disaster, so he built a larger boat to try again.

  Before the second attempt, Brendan fasted for forty days and forty nights. Since Moses, this was the standard unit of miraculous time in Christian thinking; nothing significant, interesting or exciting could happen to a monk, saint or prophet in less than this length of time. Ita, the nun, advised him against using leather sails on the principle that you shouldn’t sail into paradise with dead animals on your masts. She also advised him to carry blue sea holly with
him as a precaution against scurvy. He took his pet raven for his shoulder, not having yet discovered the parrot. Two more monks begged to go with him when the shipload of holy men was about to set sail. Brendan agreed that they could both come but prophesised that one of them would be genuinely sorry that he did. I assume something horrible happened to that monk, but sadly we have no details.

  We know what happened on this voyage because an oral account was handed down verbatim until the tenth century, when it was finally written down. As Brendan would not have expected to reach land in any shorter time frame than forty days and forty nights, regardless of winds and currents, he had provisioned accordingly. Sure enough, after that period sailing, they came to a rocky island. A friendly dog guided them to a house with a table laid for dinner. They ate, drank and slept in the prepared beds. On the next island they saw sheep the size of oxen. An old man told them that it was the land of sheep – perhaps it was New Zealand if Brendan was an even worse navigator than we assume. He told them that if they kept going they would eventually arrive at the Paradise of Birds.

  One time, Brendan and his crew mistook a sleeping whale for an island. They landed and lit a fire. Not surprisingly, the whale woke up with near fatal results. This is a true story because not long ago the same thing happened to a crew of Kerry fishermen. They found a shell-encrusted island where an island had never been before, landed on it and lit a fire to make a pot of tea. When the “island” woke up and plunged into the sea, they were nearly drowned. This sort of thing seems to happen to people from Kerry.

  On another island Brendan met Paul the Hermit, who had been living in isolation for forty years. During that time an otter was feeding him. They had a conversation about which one of them was holier, each insisting that the other was: “You are the holiest”; “No, you are.” There is no record of any discussion about which one of them was crazier.