by Bury, Robin;
Sheila’s refusal to obey the Ne Temere summons up all the Protestant virtues of free thinking, free will, conscience and a direct line to God telling her what is right and wrong. When she is confronted by this ultramontane reality that must have been triggered in a woman who is a descendent of Palatine refugees a question of where does this end was asked? She had a conscience and she believed that it was up to her and her husband to make the decision. One day, someone was going to say no; this is unfair, this happens in no other country in Europe, nor even in the Catholic heartland of Latin America. It is an Irish solution to an Irish problem. Sheila must have been brought up not to say anything in case it upset the priests and the Catholic neighbours. Normally it is the role of poets, writers and intellectuals to dissent from that cultural fog. But this was a woman in a little village who decided ‘no; I’m not taking this’. Her actions speak louder than any words. My contention is that she also revolted against the whole system that was destroying the Protestant community in the Republic at that time and undermining its sense of itself, its sense of equality, its sense of history. If Yeats said they were ‘no petty people’, by the 1950s they were. They were a poor, pathetic people.
Gregg added:
Orkney was then light years removed from the Irish Republic in terms of morality. For instance, if you fancied a woman and she fancied you, you were encouraged to live together for six to twelve months and that was in the fifties. So she would have been exposed to a form of Christianity that was liberal, pluralist, non judgmental, believed in live and let live.
Conor Cruise O’Brien ‘isolated three people who deserved the credit for creating intellectual space that a lot of people began to inhabit in the ’60s. The three individuals who stood up for the imagination and arguably the principles of the Reformation were Seán Ó Faoláin, Owen Sheehy-Skeffington and Hubert Butler.’
Seán Ó Faoláin was President of the Irish Association of Civil Liberties and wrote to Fisher on 26 June 1957, enclosing a letter to the ‘national newspapers’ in which he asked the local clergy, TDs and councillors to end the boycott. These stand in stark contrast to the silence from the Protestant churches.
What about political Ireland? Brendan Corish, the local Labour TD, said he spoke first as a Catholic, and when de Valera made his condemnatory speech in the Dáil on 5 July, Corish asked him ‘to ensure people will not conspire in this part of the country to kidnap Catholic children’. De Valera ignored the remark. A Methodist Fianna Fáil TD, Lionel Booth, addressed a Methodist conference in Dublin on 11 June; shamefully he declined to criticise the Catholic Church or call on the government to act. Instead, he used mealy-mouthed words about giving leadership. Jimmy Kennedy was the local Fianna Fáil TD in New Ross and he supported the boycott. John Joe Ryan, meanwhile, had been a colleague of de Valera since 1916, and he was quietly opposed, writing to de Valera to explain why the boycott was senseless. Sir Antony Esmonde, the Fine Gael leader, said nothing which Gerry Gregg could find. However, Archbishop McQuaid became concerned, and the Vatican was contacted through the Papal Nuncio and by the Irish Ambassador in the Vatican. Gregg pointed out that: ‘de Valera was in a situation where a Jewish Lord Mayor, Bob Briscoe of Dublin, had been in America saying that Jews were very well treated in Ireland so Fethard was giving the opposite picture as far as the Protestant minority was concerned.’
There was also the fact that ‘international journalists were descending on the village in south-east Ireland and sending reports on an outbreak of Counter-Reformation-style intolerance in a modern western democracy. De Valera was embarrassed by a furore that cast a poor light on the Republic’s claim to be a more tolerant society than bigoted Ulster. In July he described the events in Wexford as ‘this deplorable affair’. It was a cautious phrase, ‘but it took some of the wind out of Catholic claims to be fighting for justice’, in the words of Marcus Tanner.24 De Valera did not ally himself with the boycott, so the State refused to get into bed with the church, and thus avoided ‘playing with this ju-ju and letting it out of the bag’, in Gregg’s words. Gregg thought that: ‘The forces of democracy were just about strong enough to hold in and restrain the forces that would have unleashed a Milosevič-style ethnic cleansing. Imagine if Charles Haughey had been in power at that time as he had no respect for the State that was created.’
The local IRA commander was a composite figure in the film:
Local members of the IRA had been excommunicated in the 20s for taking an anti-treaty position and could never reconcile themselves, and that character was the compendium figure in our film. IRA members had never reconciled themselves to the church and may have believed that the church had contaminated their view of what a republic should be. There was a local IRA man called Andy Bailey who was involved in the IRA in the 1920s and he had no time for that sort of sectarianism.
Bishop Brendan Commiskey of Ferns did apologise full-heartedly in 1998, 41 years later; he asked for forgiveness and expressed ‘deep sorrow’. He condemned the ‘church leadership’ at the time.25 But Gregg commented on this as follows:
When you look at the crimes that were done in the name of Ireland in the 1970s, 80s and 90s, this little boycott pales. In terms of the island it took the culture nearly forty years to deal with the challenge of Sheila Cloney. She walked away from the confessional state and all the requirements the Protestants were required to meet. So now I hope things will change as there are new Protestants here from Nigeria, 50,000 Chinese and 30,000 Muslims.
Gregg eloquently ended the interview by estimating that at least half a million people saw this film and:
it gave them the opportunity of what it meant to be Irish and the scary thing is that still forty years after it is a challenge to call yourself Irish and not be of the Catholic faith, not be of the Gaelic tradition, and not be of the political persuasion that looks to nationalism as the panacea for the island’s solutions. We could ask the question for a contemporary Ireland, what does it mean to be Irish? Irish identity is now about race and ethnicity of a complex nature, and other things, so the challenge posed in 1957 by Sheila when she dissented must be met by a new generation of Irish people and I hope they meet it better that they did in 1957.
And what about the effects of the film? Eileen Kehoe is strong on this.
When the film came out, no one mentioned it. People avoided us. I went on Gay Byrne’s radio programme and on Pat Kenny and no one locally would mention it. This was forty years later. Some would even say, ‘That never happened’. People who visited Fethard as summer visitors were told nothing had happened. No guilt admitted.
As to the effect on Eileen and her sisters? She believes that they were considered to be ‘weird’ and ‘unacceptable’,‘something to do with religion … very serious and no one talked about it’. They were in denial.
After all of Sheila’s efforts to have her children raised in the Church of Ireland, Eileen has turned her back on organised religion, or what she calls ‘man-made religion’. She is taken locally for a member of the Church of Ireland, but is not. She has cut the grass in the graveyard where her sister Mary and her grandfather, Tom Kelly, are buried but does not go to Mass in the church where all the trouble began. Her husband is a Roman Catholic, and to avoid more rows, they brought the children up as Catholics. But none of her children show any interest in the Catholic Church. Her daughter never goes and her partner has ‘no time for his (Catholic) church’. Yet they had their daughter christened in the Catholic church in Kilmeaden, Co. Waterford. They ‘need to place her somewhere’, according to Eileen.
But for Eileen, the real lesson of Fethard was clear. Her beliefs are between herself and her Maker. She passed a turning point some time ago and she now feels immensely relieved. I could detect this in her voice. She told me she ‘feels blessed at this stage’; it is ‘brilliant’ and it ‘comes with age’.
Revd Adrian Fisher and his wife left Ireland for good. They applied to other Irish parishes but according to the Fishers, fear of the boycott sp
reading was a major factor in their not getting another parish. Fisher joined the Royal Army Chaplain Department and retired to Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire. He died there on 15 April 2014, aged 90.
Sheila Cloney died aged 83 on 27 June 2009 in Wexford General Hospital. She was a brave, strong woman.
6
Some Protestant Voices
A great deal has changed in Ireland since my parents returned in 1947. The country has moved away from the conservative, illiberal moral pieties of de Valera’s dreamland to a more secular Ireland, which is part of the multiregional North Atlantic group of islands. Nationalist ideology taught in Catholic schools proclaims that revolution was needed to overthrow British colonialism, to set the country ‘free’ from 700 years of oppression, mainly based on myths and imagined wrongs, wounds nursed and paraded to innocent peoples around the world. Yet essential freedoms were denied after independence by the very victors who fought and died for ‘freedom’. I have dealt with this in some detail in the first few chapters. Liberal changes became almost inevitable once British television arrived, and later on free secondary and tertiary education. Those changes came about gradually, however, and not through pressure from the tiny Protestant community, but rather because Roman Catholics – mainly women – had had enough of the imposition of narrow Roman Catholic doctrines. Censorship, divorce and contraception were tackled and reformed. The special position of the Roman Catholic Church was removed from de Valera’s constitution in 1972, a constitution which recognised all other Churches as not having such benefits.
Ireland became an increasingly multicultural society, today characterised by a workforce of many immigrants from Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine and China. It is a country that claims to be pluralist by virtue of the fact that it has in its midst so many foreign workers speaking different languages. Far more Chinese and Polish is spoken today in Ireland than Irish.
Yet how pluralist is modern Ireland? How do modern Protestants view it? Are they becoming more outspoken? Or does the trauma of the 1920–23 period still cast its shadow over present-day Protestants? Have they metamorphosed into green Irishmen? Are they part of the seamless Irish society that Senator Martin Mansergh has proclaimed?
I decided to try to find out by interviewing some Protestants in various parts of the country to get some individual testimonies as to how they felt about Ireland. Are they outsiders, or an established class? I went to interview a few Protestants in the 1990s in the border areas, where Protestants ended up on the wrong side of the border following partition, and to others in Wexford and Limerick.
Let me start with a young married man named Charlie, a cultural development worker for the Ulster Scots community near Cavan, and also a member of the Orange Order. He has a strong Protestant voice, not typical of most Protestants generally in the Republic. On the strong feelings that arose during and after some of the Orange Order parades in the North, he believes the series of Drumcree parades in particular brought a huge propaganda victory to Sinn Féin in the south:
It was a total disaster from the point of view of the way people view the Orange Order this side of the border. It endorses the view that Orangemen are violent thugs. We are finding it increasingly difficult now to bring in new members because anybody that is a wee bit middle-of-the-road will steer away. I know families that were all for joining the band, maybe two, three or four youngsters in a family, and when this thing blew up around Drumcree they wanted nothing to do with us. It is going to kill some of the Orange groups. Younger people going to work in a factory are going to feel very uncomfortable if they ask for a day off on 12th July to go and play with the band. It is harder for us to get a good turnout of the band on 12th July than on any other day of the year. If a Protestant is taking that day off, even if they wanted that day off for something else, they would be slow to ask.
Charlie explained the social nature of the Orange Order, emphasising that the Order has given opportunities for Protestants to mix while playing in a band or playing games.
Referring to parades in the counties of Cavan and Monaghan, Charlie mentioned that the closest you would get is in some small village like Drum, where there would be a church parade before or after the service. These parades were not welcomed in some areas, particularly the larger towns. Many feared that they would be ‘targeted’.
There is a reason for this. Up until 1931, Twelfth of July parades had passed off peacefully in counties Cavan and Monaghan. But in 1932, all July demonstrations were cancelled in Donegal, Cavan and Monaghan due to the destruction of the railway line in Cootehill in 1931, as well as the election of a new Fianna Fáil government, which did not give official assurances of the right to parade. Thereafter, ‘Orange activities in counties Cavan and Monaghan were restricted to church services and private meetings, and Lodges attended the Twelfth of July parades in Northern Ireland.’1 In Co. Donegal, Orange parades were held in Rossnowlagh, a coastal village where some of the Cavan and Monaghan Lodges went.
We drove to a monument dedicated to the IRA outside the courthouse in Cavan. The inscription on the memorial reads: ‘Volunteer, Kiaron Doherty, TD, Cavan-Monaghan, died in Long Kesh, 2nd August 1981, after 73 days on hunger strike.’ On the front of the memorial was written: ‘In commemoration of those men of the Irish Republican Army who gave their lives in the defense of the Republic.’ Names are given of those who died between 1920 and 1924, presumably during the guerrilla war waged by Michael Collins, as well as on the side of the Irregulars during the civil war. On the back of the memorial is written:
Volunteer Patrick Dermody, Hilltown, Castlepollard, killed in action, 30th September, 1942, aged 33. Patrick McManus, OC South Fermanagh, IRA, died 15th July, 1958 in defence of the Irish republic, aged 28 years. James Carson, Banboy, Sinn Féin organiser murdered by British forces, 25th August 1956, aged 26. Jack McCabe, QMC, 30th September, 1971, faithful and fearless to the end.
‘Very inclusive, isn’t it?’ said Charlie, as we drove away. There was no mention of the Irishmen who fought in the two world wars. He went on to talk about the Orange Halls, many of which were:
… cold with nowhere to park the cars except on the side of the road, you have roofs that need to be replaced, toilets normally none at all. One of the halls was burnt two years ago and they actually know where the petrol was bought and they suspect the man who did it. But no arrest was made. Sad thing is the best way to get a hall modernised is to have it burnt. They [the local council] won’t fund a religious organisation. The Orange is not a singular religious organisation but consists of all branches of the Protestant religion, of like-minded people. They have the Protestant ethos of work, trying to avoid Sunday sport, in line with their religion. When you go into the mainstream Catholic community centres when concerts are going on, or whatever, that’s not comfortable for Protestant people. The halls were the original community centres for the Protestant community.
According to Charlie, when applications for funds are made for a Roman Catholic community centre, the application form will state that Protestants will make use of it, when they ‘have no intention of using that centre’. In one interview he gave concerning a request for a grant for a Catholic centre, the woman interviewing him was changing his answers as he responded:
‘Well, that would mean you would be going to play badminton in that hall.’
‘No, I would play somewhere else.’
‘Ah, but you might.’
And she would put down that I will. So I told her straight, ‘You are not putting down what I tell you. Protestants would not use a cross-community hall.’
Much of the money for community centres comes from the Lotto, but an additional problem he raised was that some Protestants will not accept Lotto money, as they consider money raised from the Lotto to be gambling money. ‘Presbyterians have serious problems with that. If they do draw down the money, it will divide the members and they would lose some, so to avoid that you do without it. That is why some applications don’t go in. If we can’t meet
the criteria, it should be changed to be more welcoming to all opinions.’
However, since the interview with Charlie, the Department of Foreign Affairs in Dublin has provided funding to the Orange Order, particularly in Co. Donegal, and Minister Eamon O’Cuiv of Fianna Fáil opened an Ulster-Scots centre in east Donegal. He has been most supportive of the Donegal Orange Order Lodges.
Asked if his fellow Orangemen were associating with more militant Orangemen in the North, Charlie said, ‘This side of the border I know no one who is an Orange militant and I know a lot of them. They are a community group that supports the bands and community activities.’
I moved on to ask about the Irish language. Charlie was ‘not comfortable’ learning Irish as ‘it was not part of me’. He resented it being forced on him. He also played GAA games, and as he did not know the rules, he was made fun of. Again, it was not part of his culture. Charlie believes that the GAA games all revolve around alcohol, sponsorship coming from drink companies. There are bars in many of the clubs. He was also concerned that so many Irish activities revolve around the consumption of alcohol, from engagement parties to marriages to funerals. In contrast, Charlie believed that the Protestant community does not make the consumption of alcohol the centre of its social activities, and generally socialise over cups of tea.