When I went back there many years later as adjudicator in a local festival, I found not one festival, but two. The country companies performed before me, and then, with make-up still on, dashed off to the other side of the town to perform before the rival adjudicator, and at the end of the week the differing marks were compared and criticized with such passion that the adjudicators themselves might have become involved, only that by that time they had pocketed their cheques and returned to their wives and families.
I advise anyone who is looking for a really funny film-script to turn his attention to an Irish festival. It is one of those occasions when anything in the world may happen. Once I remember in Dunmanway judging a schoolchildren’s play about the Babes in the Wood, in which the Babes, instead of being covered up with leaves by the birds, as I was always told, were covered by the Blessed Virgin, who appeared, followed by a small boy with an electric torch, which he focused more or less on the back of her neck to represent a halo. A friend in Wexford judged a performance of ‘Everyman’, in which the seven deadly sins were represented in tableaux; Lust was portrayed as a lot of small boys sitting at cafe tables, with small girls on their knees, all singing: ‘Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do’.
I saw nothing so good in Sligo, though some companies ran it close. In one production the scenery was a poster pinned up in the middle of the stage. For the prison scenes the poster had bars painted on it. That was all, and, so perverse and extraordinary an art is the theatre, it was entirely and absolutely satisfying and left me feeling that I never wanted to see a painted flat again.
From THE BACKWARD LOOK
IN 1801 THE Act of Union put an end to the independent parliament of Ireland and made the country part of the United Kingdom. Up to 1801, in spite of the country’s having been ravaged by two middle- and lower-class invasions from England, the people were still largely feudal in attitude. What happened to them happened mainly from above. The Irish parliamentary tree under which they sat was not a satisfactory one and conducted more lightning than it produced fruits, but, for good or ill, things dropped unexpectedly from it. It might be a minor concession to Catholics or a new reign of terror, but they could observe it and speculate on it. At any time it might drop something really worth while, such as Catholic Emancipation or some qualified recognition of the Irish language.
Now the tree had been cut down, and what dropped under the greater tree in London, hundreds of miles away, they could not observe; nor could they anticipate much of it. In other words, the people were left to their own devices, and their devices were unbelievably inadequate. Since the vast majority of them could not really possess either homes or land, they had lost all their traditional skills. Outside of Ulster they had lost even the two skills without which civilization cannot exist – carpentry and cookery. When they went abroad they could neither build nor cook, so they made bad settlers. They were merely a few million unskilled rustics, speaking a half-dead language they could neither read nor write, thrown in with well-educated populations who were highly skilled in industrial techniques. Neither abroad nor at home could they compete; their only hope was to survive, and even this they were in no position to do well. The culminating point of the period is the Famine. ‘Famine’ is a useful word when you do not wish to use words like ‘genocide’ or ‘extermination’. […]
There were three distinct waves of Irish emigration to the United States. The first, up to 1801, was satisfactory enough from the American point of view; and this was not, as historians would have us believe, because the emigrants were all clean-living, hardworking Scottish Presbyterians, temporarily domiciled in Ulster. The second wave, up to 1845, was quite different. The best observer of pre-Famine Ireland, the evangelist Asenath Nicholson, asked what she was doing in Ireland, replied: ‘To learn the true condition of the poor Irish at home, and ascertain why so many moneyless, half-clad, illiterate emigrants are daily landed on our shores.’ The third wave of emigrants, after the Famine, was practically hopeless – illiterate, drunken, and despairing. […]
Nicholson’s Ireland’s Welcome to the Stranger is almost entirely unknown, though in its own right it is one of the really remarkable travel books, like Huc’s Travels in Tartary and Thibet. Like Huc’s book, which describes the experiences of two Catholic missionaries on their way to Lhasa, it has also a certain comic charm, because it is the story of an American Protestant missionary who trudged through Ireland distributing tracts, slept in country cabins, and lived, like the natives, on a few potatoes. What makes the situation funnier is that this stout Protestant seems to have fallen madly in love with the Capuchin priest and temperance advocate Father Matthew. We may even suspect that he fell a little in love with her, because she admits rather coyly that he gave her a gold brooch. Her book is a love song; a Protestant love song to a Catholic people, and it is significant that the preface to the only edition is dated from Dublin on 10 June, 1847. Mrs Nicholson had come back to run a soup kitchen and rescue what poor human fragments she could from the ruin that she had foreseen.
What gives the book its historical importance is that she was a genuine missionary. Unlike the great George Petrie, who was tramping the country at the same time, recording music, poetry and old buildings, she was not in the least interested in culture, and what she reveals of it she reveals unconsciously and without prejudice. The Nicholson family had had nine servant girls all from the one village of Johnstown, County Kilkenny, and she went there to see their relatives and reassure them. There was nothing these poor people could do for her but invite her to join their Sunday dance. This, as a good missionary, she had to refuse, so she went to church instead. But on her return, she tells us, ‘a crowd of all ages walked in, decently attired for the day, and without the usual welcomes or any apology, the hero who first introduced me seated himself by my side, took out his flute, wet his fingers, saying, “This is for you, Mrs N. and what will you have?” ’
Then she goes on:
The cabin was too small to contain the three score and ten who had assembled, and with one simultaneous movement, without speaking, all rushed out, bearing me along, and placed me upon a cart before the door, the player at my right hand. And then a dance began, which, to say nothing of the day, was to me of no ordinary kind. Not a laugh – not a loud word was heard; no affected airs, which the young are prone to assume; but as soberly as though they were in a funeral procession, they danced for an hour, wholly for my amusement, and for my welcome. Then each approached, gave me the hand, bade me God speed, leaped over the stile, and in stillness walked away. It was a true and hearty Irish welcome in which the aged as well as the young participated. A matron of sixty, of the Protestant faith, was holding by the hand a grandchild of seven years, and standing by the cart where I stood; and she asked when they had retired, if I did not enjoy it? ‘What are these wonderful people?’ was my reply. I had never seen the like.
This is something you do not get at all from English descriptions of Irish life at the time and even have to deduce from the work of a native cultural enthusiast like Petrie. The moment the paragraph begins we are right into the score of Don Giovanni: this is a dance of the peasants to welcome the lady of the castle; and we realize that debased, hungry and ragged as they were, the Irish were still a race of artists, ‘But thrown upon this filthy modern tide and by its formless spawning fury wrecked.’
What keeps Mrs Nicholson’s book from depressing us with its suffering and polemic is that, quite unintentionally, it is filled with music and dancing.
I sat down to enjoy [the morning] upon a moss-hillock, and commenced singing, for the Kerry mountains are the best conductors of sound of any I have ever met … I had sung but a passage, when, from over a wide stretched valley, a mountain boy, with a herd of cattle, struck up a lively piper’s song, so clear and shrill that I gladly exchanged my psalmody for morning notes like these.… I listened till a pause ensued, and again commenced; instantly he responded, and though the distance was a mile at least, yet alterna
tely we kept up the song till his was lost in the distance.
It was not that the people were too simple to realize the Dachau-like nightmare of their circumstances, or that Mrs Nicholson, the Puritan Yankee, did not understand the reasons for them, but as she says herself, ‘So fond are the Irish of music, that in some form or other, they must and will have it.’ After the description of her curmudgeonly reception by the O’Connells of Derrynane, she gives us a characteristic picture of the country folk gathering seaweed on the strand below. ‘And all you have for your labour is the potato?’ she says bitterly to one middle-aged woman.
‘That’s all, ma’am, that’s all; and it’s many of us that can’t get the sup of milk with ’em, no, nor the salt; but we can’t help it, we must be content with what the good God sends us.’
She hitched her basket over her shoulder, and in company with one older than herself, skipped upon the sand made wet with rain, and turning suddenly about, gave me a pretty specimen of Kerry dancing, as practised by the peasantry. ‘The sand is too wet, ma’am, to dance right well on,’ and again, shouldering her basket, with a ‘God speed ye on ye’r journey,’ leaped away.
Here, as in so many other passages, the evangelist and reformer almost drops away in sheer delight.
I looked after them among the rocks, more with admiration for the moment, than with pity; for what hearts, amid splendour and ease, lighter than these? And what heads and stomachs, faring sumptuously every day, freer from aches than theirs, with the potato and the sup of milk? This woman, who danced before me, was more than fifty, and I do not believe that the daughter of Herodias herself, was more graceful in her movements, more beautiful in complexion or symmetry, than was this ‘dark-haired’ matron of the mountains of Kerry.
I have, perhaps, stressed such passages unduly, but I feel that if we are to understand the real awfulness of post-Famine Ireland, we need a clearer idea of what the people were like before it. When George Petrie in a passage that should be famous tries to tell us what the effect of the Famine really was, he does not speak of the shrunken population, the hundreds of gutted villages, the Famine pits or the emigration boats. In the Introduction to his collection of Irish music he says:
The green pastoral plains, the fruitful valleys, as well as the wild hillsides and the dreary bogs had equally ceased to be animate with human life. ‘The land of song’ was no longer tuneful; or, if a human sound met the traveller’s ear, it was only that of the feeble and despairing wail for the dead. This awful, unwonted silence, which, during the famine and subsequent years, almost everywhere prevailed, struck more fearfully upon their imaginations, as many Irish gentlemen informed me, and gave them a deeper feeling of the desolation with which the country had been visited, than any other circumstance which had forced itself upon their attention …
[…] Protestant schools were of little interest or use to Catholics, because, as Asenath Nicholson was told when she inspected Lady Wicklow’s school: ‘They are educated according to their rank; they belong to the lower order, and reading, writing, arithmetic and a little knowledge of the maps is all the education they will ever need.’
It was the same all over Ireland, and by the time she reached Kerry Mrs Nicholson was getting very impatient with it.
‘But have they not talents to be cultivated and is this not a professedly Christian school, instituted by missionaries?’ ‘It is,’ she answered; ‘but I must do as I am bidden. They are poor, and must be educated according to their station.’ Again I enforced the obligation imposed on us by Christ to ‘occupy till he come’. She did not understand me; and though she belonged to the Protestant Church, I could not see that her dark understanding had ever been enlightened by the Spirit of God, or that she was any more capable of teaching spiritual things than the Catholics about her whom she viewed as being so dark.
Because they did not wish to be educated according to what Protestants thought their station in life, the people had to turn for education to the hedge-schools – those nurseries of the secret societies – and the very few Church schools, in both of which Latin was taught. […]
Having reviewed Miss Woodham-Smith’s The Great Hunger I realize that it is a subject one cannot discuss without bringing down an old house on one’s head. The word ‘famine’ itself is question-begging for it means ‘an extreme and general scarcity of food’, and to use it of a country with a vast surplus of food – cows, sheep, pigs, poultry, eggs and corn – is simply to debase language. Irish historians, who are firmly convinced that the Famine was all a mistake in the office, explain it in terms of an economic theory called laissez-faire. This is another cock that won’t fight, for the Shorter Oxford Dictionary defines it as ‘a phrase expressive of the principle of the non-interference of government with the action of individuals, especially in trade and in industrial affairs’. Anyone who can believe that the British maintained a garrison of 100,000 men in Ireland for the purpose of not interfering in trade and industrial affairs attaches some meaning to the word ‘history’ that escapes me. The Oxford History of England sums up the Famine adequately in a single sentence: ‘It was the misfortune of Ireland that the fate of Governments was decided at Westminster.’
But behind Irish history for the last fifty years of the nineteenth century looms the shadow of the Famine – not the Famine as historians see it but as ordinary people saw it. In a passage from the autobiography of Father Peter O’Leary he describes a single small family he and his parents were friendly with – Paddy Buckley, his wife, Kate, and their two young children, Sheela and Little Diarmuid.
Then came the Famine, and Sheela, her father, mother and Little Diarmuid had to go down to Macroom and enter the Workhouse. As soon as they were inside they were separated. The father was put among the men, the mother among the women. Sheela was put with the little girls and Little Diarmuid with the infants. The whole workhouse and all the poor people in it were swamped with every sort of serious illness: the people almost as fast as they came in, falling with hunger – God between us and all harm! – dying as soon as the disease struck them. There was no room for half of them. Those who could not get in merely lay out on the river bank below the bridge. You saw them there every morning after the night out, stretched in rows, some moving and some very still, with no stir from them. Later people came and lifted those who no longer moved, and heaved them into carts and carried them up to a place near Carrigastyra, where a big, wide, deep pit was open for them, and thrust them all together into the pit. The same was done with those who were dead in the Workhouse after the night.
The father and mother questioned as much as they could about Sheela and Little Diarmuid … When they found that the two children were already dead, they became so miserable and lonely that they would not stay in the place. They were separated, but they managed to communicate with one another. They agreed on escaping. Patrick slipped out of the house first. He stood waiting at the top of Bothar na Sop for Kate. After a time he saw her coming, but she walked very slowly. She had the disease. They continued up towards Carrigastyra and came to the place where the big pit was. They knew their two children were below in the pit with the hundreds of other bodies. They stayed by the pit and wept for a long time. Above in Derrylea, west of Cahireen, was the little hut where they had lived before they went into the poorhouse. They left the big pit and went north-westwards to Derrylea where the hut was. It was six miles away and night was coming but they kept on. They were hungry and Kate was ill. They had to walk very slowly. When they had gone a couple of miles Kate had to stop. She could go no further. They met neighbours. They were given a drink and a little food, but no one would let them in because they had come direct from the poorhouse, and the wife was ill. Paddy took his wife up on his back and continued towards the hut.…
Next day a neighbour came to the hut. He saw the two of them dead and his wife’s feet clasped in Paddy’s bosom as though he were trying to warm them. It would seem that he felt the death agony come on Kate and her legs grow cold, so he p
ut them inside his own shirt to take the chill from them.
From that passage more than from anything in the history books we can learn what Petrie meant in the passage I have quoted. For the first time in its recorded history a people who loved music had ceased to sing. It is scarcely to be wondered at.
From HOLIDAY MAGAZINE
IF … YOU ask me, ‘Is it a good country to live in?’ I can only reply, ‘How could it be?’ and then, after a moment’s reflection, ‘Anyway, what matter?’ It is a mess, and one which will take more than my lifetime to clear up, but it can be cleared up and is a job worth the doing.
At any rate I am not tempted to live anywhere else. Dublin, where I spend my days, is a beautiful city with the mountains behind it and the sea in front, and what more can a man ask? It has no industries to speak of, except beer and biscuits. It has the worst slums in Europe, which is what happens when you build a great aristocratic capital of four-storey Georgian mansions without the industry to support it. (Families of six and seven people live in one room, with spindly-legged children dragging water up the great ruined staircases from the yard.)
The Best of Frank O'Connor Page 41