(Susan McCorry could not be more obscure but I’d like to think she might have left something commensurate with the twang of her name – a needlework sampler of the 1820s, say, painstakingly embroidered with a red plain-fronted house, three windows and a door, and perched on the chimney of its slanting roof, an exotic bird, twice the size of the door. On the right-hand side, a tree filled with smaller birds, and another, like a parrot, charmingly out of scale; and beneath the tree, a pair of storybook figures, male and female, in Georgian get-up, dwarfed by an enormous flowerpot. The whole quaint picture worked within a decorative border round the linen rectangle, with the letters of the alphabet across the top and right at the bottom, a small perky dog, and perhaps more flowers in flowerpots. And the signature of the youthful stitcher: Susan McCorry Aged 12 Years. 17 August 1827. ... I’m making this up. Still, I suppose young Susan might have attended a local interdenominational school run by some charity or other, and sat among a roomful of good little girls from Moyraverty, stitching away at a pious verse or maxim to show her needlework skills. She might have depicted a pair of angels hovering above a church, like those on a sampler in my possession, the work of a Susanna Cottrill in the relevant year, 1827. ... On the other hand, it’s unlikely that a child of impeccable Catholic lineage, as her daughter Ellen Jordan asserted, would have been let near a classroom filled with potentially proselytising Protestants. No, I think I have to let her return to the chores of the day: fetching water, carrying turf, digging potatoes, gathering wild strawberries or mushrooms in the fields with a string of younger children behind her.)
Cromwell. When I was sixteen the first volume of Walter Macken’s historical Irish Trilogy was published. I don’t remember how it came to my attention, but it wasn’t long before a copy of Seek the Fair Land came into my hands. I’d arranged to borrow it from the handsome Carnegie Library on a dusty stretch of the old Falls Road, one of my haunts. From the opening section of Macken’s story, in which the life of a roaring Connaught chieftain is saved by a mild man living in Drogheda, I was enthralled. By chapter three, and the ominous date of September 1649, when the mild man stumbles on his wife lying dead in a blood-rippled street in the wake of the Ironsides’ onslaught on the town, I knew I was reading a version of history – fictionalised or not – that chimed with my deepest beliefs about the suffering Irish and exterminating English. It was an old and emotional way of thinking. You couldn’t but be on the side of the desperately wronged and courageous population. ... And it did no harm to Walter Macken’s sales figures that his novel is an adventure story, a survival story. That mild man from the North, Dominick McMahon, leads his remaining family, a young daughter and son, out of despoiled and perilous Drogheda towards the sanctuary of the Gaelic west. It requires immense resourcefulness to evade the Cromwellian depredators along the way.
To make matters even more difficult, Dominick is burdened with a fugitive priest, Father Sebastian, who more than once endangers the little party by stopping to perform some rite of the Catholic church, administering the last sacrament or digging a grave for the dead. Gradually, however, Dominick’s exasperation with Sebastian turns to admiration for the priest’s continuous affirmation of a Catholic spirit, a national virtue. Dominick’s children, his sparky daughter Mary Ann and mute son Peter, take the priest to their hearts unequivocally. It is clear that it’s Sebastian’s virtues, his goodness, selflessness and obeisance to a higher power, that will save the nation, if it’s to be saved at all. Some alternatives to his priestly humility are proffered and found wanting – a fighting determination in the face of oppression, the carousing instincts and sexual license of great Connaught Gaels like the O’Flahertys. No, in Macken’s book, it’s the spiritual dimension that defines the true Irish. This novel, with its two sequels, adds up to an unabashed romance of the Catholic nation.
Macken is a great storyteller, and, on one level, his books remain gripping even for a reader as sceptical as myself. You accept, while you’re reading it, the premise of his plot. Cromwell looms in the background furnished with every excess Irish history decreed; and not far behind him in the monstrosity stakes is Sir Charles Coote, persecutor of Catholics extraordinaire. ... What happens? After many reprieves in the course of the narrative, saintly Sebastian finally falls into the clutches of Coote and is burnt at the stake. A witness to this event, Peter McMahon, regains thereby the voice he lost as a child following a blow to the head during the massacre at Drogheda. It is, of course, a Catholic, indeed a priestly, voice that’s restored to Peter. Sebastian’s successor, he promptly sets off for Louvain and a clerical education to help keep the fires of the true faith burning at home (and never mind what else burns in the process). You can, if you will, equate Peter with the Irish nation, wounded, belittled, indomitable, and destined for recovery with its essence of an indigenous spirituality intact. Well!
In 1652, an Act of Parliament had decreed the removal of Catholic landowners (and some Protestant Royalists), with their families, to the wild and unproductive territory west of the Shannon. Those officially dispossessed, and also unofficial refugees like the McMahon family in Walter Macken’s novel, undertook the sorry trek into poor lands, where some would rebuild their lives with a measure of confidence, and some would not. It’s one of the many sorrowful set-pieces of Irish history. A contemporary poet, Fear Dorcha Ó Mealláin, has a word of advice for the harried and defeated Catholic deportees. He counsels them to take it stoically.
If they call you ‘Papishes’
accept it gladly for a title.
Patience, for the High King’s sake.
Deo Gratias, good the name!
When I was sixteen and my head was teeming with images of desecrated Ireland, I was happy to take credit (along with my great-grandmother) for vague ancestral stoicism and fidelity to the Catholic faith. I’m not sure, though, how far I’d have gone along with Ó Mealláin’s recommended passivity, if I’d been aware of his poem at the time; what he conjures up is a line of cowed and beaten people creeping westwards on their last legs, every jot of defiance knocked out of them. It’s not an inspiriting picture. These are the people among whom the popular novelist found his characters – but the way Walter Macken builds them up they’re far from being a lumpen mass of misery. It’s a highly sentimental ideology he’s upholding, indeed, but his skill is such that you swallow it and deplore it all at once. In capitulation to the mood of the narrative, you applaud the restoration of Peter’s vocal faculty and its religious implications even while your secular hackles are bristling.
Another Gaelic poem, well known to me in my youth is ‘Cumhadh na Mathara fa’n Leanbh’, ‘The Mother’s Lament for her Child’. This was written probably in the eighteenth century, long after the events evoked, and it’s been attributed to the south Armagh poet Peadar Ó Doirnín (born c.1684). Recent commentators have praised this poem for breaking decisively with the strict and cumbersome bardic traditions of the past, striking instead a bold new ‘modern’ note with its economy and immediacy. In simple plangent terms it confronts the agony of a mother witnessing the slaughter of her infant, piked to death with the blessing of Cromwell. The outpouring of grief proceeds as if issuing from the mother:
They tied me to a tree
To watch what was done to you,
Child of the branches.
You were on the end of the pike
And I heard your cry
And it tore my heart
Child of my breast.
It’s an image to set against the women with up-flung arms being pitchforked into the River Bann from the bridge at Edenderry, or the burnt remains of Planters at Lisgoole. But, prone as I was to selective outrage, I thought the second or anything like it was a figment of someone’s inflamed Orange imagination, while the Peadar Ó Doirnín poem (if he was indeed the author) was consistent with the historical facts as I knew them. As everyone knew them; everyone abominated the actions of Cromwell. There was no denying it.
There were things I’d have l
iked to deny, if they’d come to challenge the nationalist certainties of my teenage years, and my own entitlement to a largely Irish identity. If someone had suggested to me then that an ancestor of my own had allied himself with Cromwell’s Ironsides, I’d have growled and snorted and repudiated the nonsense. (It wouldn’t actually have made much difference if Thomas Tipping had been a Royalist like his brothers; these were all English Planters, not the fior-Gaels I’d have relished among my maternal forebears.) If it had then been shown beyond doubt that it wasn’t nonsense, that Thomas Tipping had really existed in his seventeenth-century army uniform, with steel helmet and leather breeches, riding about on a horse quelling Royalist and native Irish alike – well, then, my next state would have been a very sheepish one, very taken aback and wishful to keep the awful information dark. I mean, this wasn’t the Craig side of the family, whose ancestral non-Irishness I had long accepted. I could have turned up marauding Scots or raving Calvinist preachers among bygone Craigs without turning a hair (well, more or less). But my grandmother Brady’s family I’d considered sacrosanct, as far as good Catholic genes were concerned. Never, never would I have suspected the republican Tippings of ancestral Protestantism.
The ethnically dodgy Tippings (as I’d have viewed them in my purist days) came out of the Cromwellian wars rather better than they’d gone into them. All were granted lands in Ireland in lieu of army pay. By the time the final land allocations are ratified by the restored King Charles II in 1666, Thomas has acquired portions of townlands in County Down and County Westmeath; John is also a landowner in County Down and County Cavan; while William – though his name doesn’t occur in the list of recipients of royal grants – has somehow come into possession of Ballynarea in south Armagh. Harry Tipping suggests that Thomas may then have sold his County Down windfall to speculators, and leased Ballynarea from his brother William; at any rate, he and his family seem to have settled there, while William is found at nearby Creggan.
Creggan: this is a district strongly associated with the poet Art Mac Cubhthaigh, or MacCooey (c.1715–c.1773), whose life overlapped with Peadar Ó Doirnín’s, both of them prominent in the nest of singing birds whose songs and verses enhanced the pungent Gaelic ethos of south Armagh. Ó Doirnín, though, was a schoolteacher and respected as such, and Art MacCooey, much lower in the social scale, led a luckless life as a jobbing gardener and agricultural labourer, while bolstering himself up with visions of reversals of fortune, both for himself and for his chosen patrons, the O’Neills of Glassdrummond. Even while trundling cartloads of dung about the countryside, MacCooey can’t be stopped from composing verses in praise of the O’Neills or against his enemies, mean-spirited priests and Protestant grandees alike. ... But it was ‘Ur-Chill a’ Chreagain’, ‘The Graveyard of Creggan Church’, his eloquent exercise in the aisling or vision mode, that made MacCooey’s name. This poem strikes every romantic chord you could ask for: the poet at his lowest ebb falling asleep in the old secluded churchyard, the fairy woman enticing him away from a life of miseries and humiliations, the classical garnish, the deep historical sense, the lament for the ruined Gaels and their emblems of an ordered world. All evoked with a lyrical grandeur and aplomb. And when ‘Ur-Chill a’ Chreagain’ is sung unaccompanied by a great traditional singer like Mary Harvessy or Pádraigín Ní Uallacháin, it illumines for an instant the strangeness and incomparable richness of the culture from which it emerged.
A culture, though, in no position to succour its exponents. Enrí Ó Muirgheasa, who put together a collection of Art MacCooey’s works in 1916, notes the ratio of Protestant to Catholic families in the parish of Creggan during the eighteenth century. Protestant 259, Papist 718 – but, of course, with the former very much in the ascendant. MacCooey was briefly employed as a gardener by one of them, the Reverend Hugh Hill of Mounthill, rector of Creggan between 1728 and 1773. ‘Mounthill’, as well as being the name of a house, was also the new name of the townland previously known as Ballinaghy (it seems there was more than one Ballinaghy in County Armagh: this is not the same as the one originally acquired by Valentine Blacker in the mid seventeenth century). And in it, according to Ó Muirgheasa, lived another Protestant family, ‘of such consequence’ – and here my genealogical instincts perk up – of such consequence that one of them is appointed a churchwarden of Creggan parish in 1741. The name of this exalted officiary is Thomas Tipping, junior. Could he have been a great-grandson of the William who settled in Creggan around 1670 (even though we don’t know whether William had any direct descendants at all)? Or of the elder Thomas who was born in Stratford-on-Avon? There’s nothing to go on but the name – but it’s enough to attach him, if precariously, to this branch of my family tree. Perhaps I can hook him to it by the seat of his churchwarden’s trousers, like a bad boy strung up by his classmates in an old-fashioned school story. At any rate, it pleases me to visualise this Thomas Tipping, Esq., passing the time of day with the lowly farm labourer Art MacCooey – one a bit resentful of the other’s airs and graces, perhaps, the other unaware of the rough fellow’s learning and poetic expertise. Their paths must have crossed, in such a small community, and especially with Creggan church a place of refuge for the poet. But the ways of the Gaels remained as alien to Planters as the ways of faery hosts in their raths and souterrains. It was as if an intangible barrier divided two exclusive zones, each primed to repel any interchange.
It was never as clear-cut as that, of course, and time would make it considerably less so. Proximity, common ground, the attractions of exogamy, all worked to blur the edges of the sharp divide. But what resulted was never going to be a smoothly blended community. Well – let me modify that assertion. What resulted was never going to be perceived, either from the inside or the outside, as a smoothly blended community. For I would argue that the latter is precisely what we have achieved, even if we don’t know it; that all of us in the north of Ireland, Protestant, Catholic or what-have-you, are a compound of the same good and bad elements from brave hearts to stiff necks.
Bloodlines got diluted, or enriched if you prefer it, almost from the moment the Planters set foot in Ireland, individuals throwing in their lot with the side they hadn’t been born to. Papists en masse renouncing the Mass, and plain Presbyterians opting for Catholic ritual. If these people were looked at askance, either as traitors to the tribe or as dubious recruits – well, within a generation or two their descendants would be thoroughly assimilated into the host faction, with never a notion of any genetic or doctrinal inconsistency to agitate them. And so it has gone on right down to the present, with the wretched factions – ‘accursed systems’, William Carleton labelled them – flourishing side by side, and their noisiest adherents often unaware of their less than absolute entitlement to denominational integrity. It’s the names, of course, that furnish an obvious pointer: a notorious butcher of Catholics from the Shankill Road in Belfast called Murphy; a president of Sinn Féin with the English name of Adams. A Protestant poet – I’m using these terms in a descriptive, not a religious sense – called Mahon, and a Catholic poet called Carson. Another poet, Paul Muldoon, has a pointed small reminder of local complexities and ambiguities:
... Today he remarked how a shower of rain
Had stopped so cleanly across Golightly’s lane
It might have been a wall of glass
That had toppled over. He stood there, for ages,
To wonder which side, if any, he should be on.
If any. Muldoon is referring specifically to the border between North and South, but you can extend his words to apply to the immemorial border between Catholic and Protestant, Gael and Planter, Orange and Green.
The twentieth-century Lurgan Tippings knew which side they were on, but to arrive at it they’d had to accommodate a long-ago episode of recusancy. I’ll get to this eventually; but, for the moment, we’re still in the Protestant seventeenth century, the 1670s to be precise. Here we have Thomas Tipping, ex-soldier, nearing the end of his life in the rainy upland
s of south Armagh, with his family around him. Thomas had come a long way from his beginnings in Stratford-on-Avon, with its half-timbered Englishness and Holy Trinity Church presiding over the lives of its good Protestant populace. He was born, we remember, in 1605 and enjoyed a life-span of seventy years. When he dies in 1675 his eldest son, also called Thomas, takes over the running of the Ballynarea estate. (To digress very briefly: this second Thomas engenders a further succession of Thomases who keep on stepping up and up the social ladder, until they find themselves established as minor members of the County Louth aristocracy, with family seats at Castletown, Beaulieu and Bellurgan Park. But as for the descendants of my particular ancestor among Thomas I’s progeny. ... We shall see. Harry Tipping puts it succinctly in his account of the family: ‘You take the high road and I’ll take the low road.’)
The first Thomas had six children. The youngest of these, John, was born around 1650 and called after his paternal English grandfather who may or may not have been still alive. His other grandfather wasn’t, as we have seen (see Chapter 1). Harry Tipping again: ‘As a child at his mother’s knee, John Tipping, ... founder of our north Armagh branch, must often have heard the horrific and tragic tale of how his maternal grandfather, Edward Allen, was callously murdered by the native Irish in the 1641 uprising.’ And doubtless young John was endowed with an antipathy towards the perpetrators of this crime. Remembering the events of that recent year was enough to send shudders down every Protestant spine. And the worst of it was, they were still around, the inimical Irish, wolfish predators in the hills and woods, ready to do murder again at the flare of a beacon.
A Twisted Root Page 7