Boycott

by Colin Murphy

  He stood staring at the poster on the wall at the side of Brett’s store. A man in the massing crowd jostled him, but he barely noticed.

  THE WEST’S AWAKE!

  Down with the invaders! Down with the tyrants and landlords!

  MASS MEETING

  Irishtown, April 20th 1879

  TO PROTEST THE BRUTALLY UNFAIR INCREASE IN RENTS BY MAJOR JOSEPH BOURKE IMPOSED ON HIS IMPOVERISHED 22 TENANTS

  Assemble in Claremorris Market Square for orderly march to Irishtown.

  Hear the words of John O’Connor Power, Esq., M.P.,

  John Ferguson, Esq. Glasgow, and Thomas Brennan, Irish Patriot.

  We demand the three Fs! Fair rent! Free Sale! Fixity of Tenure!

  THE LAND FOR THE PEOPLE

  GOD SAVE IRELAND

  More people jostled him and still he didn’t move. In many ways it seemed that he, and the rest of Ireland for that matter, hadn’t moved from the same spot in over thirty years. He imagined a new generation of Irishmen reading posters promising an end to injustice long after he was in the ground. The cycle was as predictable as the seasons.

  He turned and looked at the gathering throng in Market Square. He had to concede it was impressive. The swarm of people obscured even the ground beneath their feet. Horses whinnied and reared, unhinged by the unfamiliar sea of humanity. Hawkers yelled in competition to offload hot potatoes and bread, some more surreptitious, unburdening themselves of bottles of poteen, eyes watchful for constables and Fenians alike, who had forbidden alcohol. Children scurried among the sea of legs, dogs scampering in their trail. Women remained largely on the periphery, murmuring in groups as they watched the proceedings as though assembled to bid their men farewell as they departed for war. The thought made him weary. In fact the entire business ached in his bones, whether it be a prelude to another pathetic armed revolt like in ’67, or some more restrained initiative that sought to part the landlords from Irish land and the British from Irish life with mouthfuls of soothing Irish brogue. Some damn hope.

  Talking was all very well, but they’d been talking to the British for centuries and where had it got them? He looked around at the crowd. Their energy was not so much founded in hope as in desperation. Last summer had brought yet another foul harvest, and to compound their problems their crops were worth only a fraction of those of previous years. Summer was approaching and he recognised the sense of foreboding in their eyes that, yet again, God would piss on Ireland for three months and their crops would rot in the ground. And still the landlords demanded their rent without mercy even though the tenant farmers’ income was in freefall. The land agent who lorded it over his own smallholding, Captain Charles Boycott, was no exception. A deep sense of foreboding and memories of another time, when the dead seemed to outnumber the living, haunted people’s thoughts. The farmers were becoming desperate and desperate men are capable even of actions they would normally consider to be within the realm of evil.

  He stood watching a couple of young men, both about eighteen, sharing sips from a flat black bottle. The beverage was imbuing them with a recklessness that is the preserve of young men, as they laughed and loudly recalled nationalist glories for the benefit of a beefy member of the Royal Irish Constabulary who was within earshot. The policeman had shown admirable reserve thus far, calmly watching the young gobshites from the corner of his eye. One of the youths removed his tatty bowler hat, playfully hitting his companion in the chest with it.

  ‘Hey Niall, what is it the three Fs stand for again?’

  ‘Jaysus…let me think…fuckin’ landlords…the fuckin’ English…’

  ‘Yeah. And what was the last one…oh I remember…’ He turned towards the constable. ‘Fuckin’ traitors.’

  The constable visibly snarled and started towards the youths, his right hand slipping around his baton.

  Christ, Owen Joyce thought, that’s all we need. He quickly stepped forward and touched the constable’s arm. ‘Excuse me, Constable, but there’s a man over there selling poteen. I’m a devotee of Fr Mathew myself, but he’ll no doubt corrupt many young men with his evil spirit. You’d be doing us a great service if…’

  The constable looked nonplussed at the outpouring and paused. The youths continued to snigger away, unaware of being under the watchful gaze of another tall, square-jawed man whose expression was one of restrained anger.

  ‘It’s that man over there, with the floppy hat,’ Owen pointed.

  ‘All right, calm down. Go about your business. I’ll take care of the hawker.’ With a final threatening glance at the youths, he reluctantly headed towards his supposed suspect.

  The tall man immediately sprang forward and before the youths realised what was happening, he’d seized them both by the hair and slammed their heads together with an audible crack. One sank to his knees, the other staggered back against a cart.

  ‘You fuckin’ gobshites! No trouble, you were told! And what the fuck is this?’ He seized the poteen bottle and slammed it into the ground where it shattered in a spray of glass and alcohol, the fumes mingling with those of horse shit and sweat that permeated the air.

  ‘Fuckin’ drink will curse this country until damnation.’ He grabbed the two youths by the collars and shoved, sending them stumbling forward. ‘Get the hell out of here! Go home to yer mammies, ye stupid gobdaws.’ He swung a substantial boot at the men’s arses and they took off like skelped dogs. He shook his head. ‘Could have been nasty if that RIC fucker had started batterin’ them. Next thing we’d have a riot. Thanks for steppin’ in.’ He proffered his open palm. ‘Donal Doherty.’

  ‘Joyce. Owen Joyce.’

  They shook hands and eyed each other in silence a moment, Doherty’s expression hinting at some level of puzzlement, staring into Owen’s deep-set, dark blue eyes.

  ‘Are you a Mayo man, Joyce?’

  ‘I am. From Neale, Lough Mask Estate.’

  ‘From Ballinrobe myself, just up the road. Have we met?’

  ‘Don’t believe so. I think I’d remember you.’ Owen smiled as he looked up at Doherty, a good four inches taller than him. He was about forty, Owen guessed, neatly dressed and standing stiffly erect, giving him a military bearing. Doherty was undoubtedly a Fenian; not that he wore a badge or anything, he simply had that air about him. And the Fenians’ devotion to the gun was no secret.

  Doherty laughed. ‘Fair enough. Sure, people are always thinkin’ they’ve met. So you’re under Boycott’s thumb? Another bastard we’ll take care of one of these days. Anyway, I better get these mucksavages into order. Jaysus, how are we supposed to drive the English out with an army of ignorant Connaught farmers?’ Doherty turned into the crowd and started yelling commands.

  Owen’s first instinct was to inform Doherty that he himself was an ‘ignorant Connaught mucksavage’. But he let his vexation recede. Doherty was right. That’s exactly what they were. Ignorant. And it was ignorance that kept them on their knees.

  He looked about. Probably half of those present couldn’t read, write or do simple mathematics. For all the armies of conquest, for all the brutal despots and their cannons and swords that the English had inflicted on his country through the centuries, nothing had been as effective in securing Ireland’s submission as that simple weapon – the denial of the means to provide education on any meaningful level. What hope had a bunch of ignorant farmers from the back-of-beyond against the might of Britain’s educated establishment and its manipulation of law to propagate its own profligate wealthy? They were caught in the insidious, malicious trap of ignorance. And escape from some traps, he knew, could only be rendered by brute force. He felt the acrid, bitter taste of a resentment that had long been stewing. At whom his anger was directed was harder to define. His countrymen, the British, or at his own self? He hadn’t exactly distinguished himself for ‘the cause’ down the years. Maybe he might begin to rectify that today.

  He began to make his way around the small square. The farmers on horses outside Hughes’s Hotel, he guess
ed, numbered in their hundreds. Those on foot in their thousands. Yet no sense of chaos or lawlessness prevailed. The juvenile behaviour he’d seen earlier had been an exception. Tenant farmers, their youth eroded by exposure to the elements and poverty, moved about with a common purpose and sober determination that began to subvert his cynicism about the so-called Land Movement. He’d only reluctantly made the twenty-mile journey here from his home at the insistence of his wife, Síomha. Clearly though, unlike previous land-related meetings he’d attended, this one was not only on a much greater scale, but there was a sense that today was the beginning of something more far-reaching. Men had come from not just Mayo, but accents from Galway, Roscommon and even Sligo and Longford could be heard about the town. Donal Doherty and P. W. Nally, the well-known Fenian activist, along with a number of others, had donned green and gold sashes and, like drill sergeants, were organising crowds of men into divisions, readying them for the march to Irishtown a few miles away.

  Still unsure what he thought of it all, he determined for the present to remain a detached, uncommitted observer. Rather than be caught up in the official march, he decided to retrieve his jaunting car from where he’d left it near the railway station and make his own way to the venue.

  Two minutes later he was driving the car south towards Irishtown. He pulled a chunk of bread from his pouch and chewed it as he gently encouraged Anu, his ageing chestnut brown draught horse, along the dusty track. He couldn’t help wondering how many more seasons the animal could haul a plough through the fields. He had absolutely no means of replacing her. The rents he paid Boycott ate up virtually all his cash and there was barely enough left to feed his family, never mind five pounds to buy a horse.

  The large building rising out of the fields to the east interrupted his thoughts. He immediately felt a chill as sounds, voices, smells and pain resurfaced and begged his inspection, but he denied them and used the crop on Anu’s rump with unintentional sharpness. The pony whinnied and upped its pace, and he turned his gaze away from the grim blackness behind the workhouse windows.

  As the road unravelled before him, he looked out across the rock walls that defined the paltry plots of pasture so desperately clung to by his compatriots. The day was mostly overcast with occasional spits of rain and a mild wind rippling the immature crops. Here and there the shape of a collapsed cottage could be discerned, the occupants long departed from the world or Ireland. And no children filled the void they’d abandoned. He’d travelled this road long ago and could recall several villages of twenty or thirty homes, whole towns wiped from existence, almost from memory. A vanished generation.

  The car trundled across a wooden bridge that spanned the Robe River, its deep, brown waters gently rolling by just as they had decades ago when they’d helped deliver him to freedom and a redemption of sorts. The turbid, peaty flow looked as benumbing now as it had felt then, and he didn’t linger. The road took a sharp turn to the east and, at the bend, a patch of ground had been appropriated by countless other carriages, carts, horsemen or families keen to see the march. He decided to join them and watch the procession, manoeuvring the car about among them to face the road.

  Twenty minutes passed before he heard the first rhythmic, drum-like sound of the approaching men. It echoed off the walls of cottages, accompanied by the rising, high-pitched cheers of women and children. They came around the bend of the narrow boreen in disciplined columns. A hundred men on horseback, Pat Nally to the fore, upright, rigid, his green sash resplendent against his dark coat, eyes fixed ahead as though he held but one destination, one destiny in his sights. Then came two columns of men on foot. They marched past for ten minutes before another group of horsemen spearheaded a second column of men. They walked with pride, self-command, ordinary men of the land, their faces betraying only a steely determination. Still they came, more groups of horsemen followed by marching men, casting their shadows along a mile or more of Irish country road. Donal Doherty, the Fenian he’d met in the town square, led the final group. Doherty allowed his eyes to drift ever so slightly to one side and he made subtle eye contact with Owen, tilting his head in greeting.

  There then followed a protracted train of carriages, open-topped breaks, jaunting cars, drays and buggies of all measure. A beautiful sporty phaeton, yellow-sided with a leather hood and drawn by black ponies, led this cavalcade. Inside sat two gentlemen in dark topcoats and hats, one of whom he recognised as James Daly, the wealthy newspaperman whose Connaught Telegraph had passionately championed the tenants’ cause. In the next carriage he recognised the distinctively ugly, pockmarked face of John O’Connor-Power, the MP loathed by many nationalists, who was sitting beside the avowed Fenian militant, Thomas Brennan. His curiosity was piqued at the sight of such strange bedfellows.

  He quickly roused Anu and had her trotting among the hundreds of other vehicles towards Irishtown. A mile further and the accumulating collection of abandoned vehicles and horses had contracted together like a rockfall at the bottom of a hill. He secured Anu and set off through the crowds. The land about them was the private preserve of Surgeon Major Joseph Bourke, which fed the families of twenty-two tenants, a couple of whom had approached the Land Movement for help when Bourke had decided, despite a pathetically poor harvest, to up his rents, leaving them on the brink of eviction, even starvation. These tenants had begun the avalanche of support that had settled at Bourke’s front door that day.

  He drew nearer to a widening of the road, until the throng proved too dense to make any progress nearer the elevated platform impossible. He glanced about him as the confluence of male bodies swallowed him whole. Young and old men tilted their chins up in an effort to see and hear the address from the platform. The odour of sweat and the land rose up all around him, the crush and the heat making it difficult to inhale. James Daly was addressing the crowd, his introductory words drowned in a swelling, congruent roar of support. When eventually it had subsided, he introduced John Ferguson, barrister and ardent advocate of Home Rule. To a hushed audience Ferguson’s Glaswegian lilt drifted out across the sea of faces. Owen strained to hear.

  ‘…the land of Ireland, like that of every other country, was intended by a just and all-providing God for the use and sustenance of those of his people…’

  Applause. Calls for hush. Coughing. Missing words. Owen cursed.

  ‘…any system which sanctions its monopoly by a privileged class demands from every aggrieved Irishman an undying hostility, being flagrantly opposed to the first principle of their humanity – self-preservation!’

  A huge cheer of approval.

  John O’Connor-Power, who had in recent years addressed the United States House of Representatives, projected his voice to much greater effect, calling for a ‘peasant proprietorship’ to prolonged applause, and concluding with a fist-thumping demand for ‘Irish land for the people of Ireland!’ Men on all sides gritted their teeth and punched the air, as though their simmering anger was finally finding some release.

  A man called Michael O’Sullivan, a teacher and land activist from Galway, was then granted the stage. He strode with purpose to the centre of the platform. O’Sullivan was tall and broad-shouldered and had piercing eyes. His clothes hinted at a man of lesser means than the other speakers and his West of Ireland lilt was a world away from the more refined tones of the MPs and barristers who had preceded him. With his uncomplicated enunciation and his unadorned statement of the facts, he immediately registered with his congregation. His Fenian leanings were also soon evident.

  ‘The past two seasons have been very bad. Does any man consider that the tenant farmers of Ireland can afford to pay exorbitant rents for their lands, or that the lands are worth those rents?’

  They responded as one. ‘They are not!’

  Nodding, palms held outward, O’Sullivan continued. ‘It follows, then, that the present rents being too high, justice demands their reduction! But, judging from the past, we know that there are landlords in Ireland who do not look to what is
just, but to what the law will permit.’

  An old man waved a trembling fist skywards and shouted, ‘Bastards!’, provoking a mixture of laughter and ovation.

  ‘If, then, the landlords who are now demanding exorbitant rents do not lower them to meet the tenants’ altered circumstances, let the tenant farmers themselves consult together and settle among themselves what would be fair, equitable rent. And if that is not accepted by the landlord – why, let them pay none at all!’

  A tumultuous cheer rose into the Mayo sky and some of O’Sullivan’s ensuing lines were lost to Owen in its wake.

  ‘…a great deal of thought. I have seen the Land Question in parliament brought forward with unanswerable eloquence, but with what result?’

  The man standing to his right yelled out through cupped hands, ‘It was kicked out!’ Another voice called out, ‘Waste of time!’

  The speaker resumed, his voice rising as he progressed as though climbing a gentle slope, reaching an apex of pitch as he neared the end. ‘What, then, are the people to do? They cannot pay unreasonable rents. They wish to pay what is fair and just. And it must be accepted. If not, let the landlords take the consequences on their own heads!’

  Another exultation. O’Sullivan didn’t wait for it to abate.

  ‘It is fearful to contemplate those consequences in their fullness – extermination of the people on the one hand, and – extermination of the exterminators on the other!’

  The acclamation left many hoarse and as O’Sullivan left the platform, the crowd heaved and Owen felt himself lifted from the ground and deposited ten yards nearer the stage, only for the surge to recede and sweep him backwards again.

  A further handful of speakers addressed the crowd, including the Fenian militant Thomas Brennan, who suggested ominously that if the landlords didn’t concede to the Land Movement’s demands, they might face a French Revolution-type scenario. And with the sounds of bloody revolution still ringing in their ears, the thousands began to disperse back along the laneways, back to their patches of rough earth and tottering homesteads, but with a newly lit fire in their bellies.