Endurance

by Dermot Somers

  Brother Michael was not so arrogant as to insult his patron. In an opening dedication, he made a number of things clear: the Franciscans were subject to oppression; four years had been spent collecting material; many ‘honourable gentlemen’ not subject to vows of poverty, had refused to fund the compilation. Not so Toirrdhealbhach Mac Cochlain, son of Seamas, son of Seamas, son of Seamas, son of Seamas, son of Toirrdhealbhach, son of Fedlimidh…and so on back through dozens of generations to Míl Espáine (who seeded the Gaelic race in Ireland), and thence step by step to Noah and to Adam. For his sponsorship of the Genealogy, Mac Cochlain was truly rewarded in kind, with his lineage immortalised on the opening page.

  On completion, the Succession of Kings and Saints was dispatched to Louvain, where it took its place with the earlier work in oblivion for several hundred years.

  BOOK OF INVASIONS

  Ireland was bleak and dangerous in 1631. Franciscan contacts had fled, and the ‘safe houses’ had shut down. The fieldwork was suspended. What O’Clery had collected in the previous four years would have to do. For the moment, his travels ceased, although he would take to the road again, a few years later, in a last great sweep throughout the country.

  He began his masterwork at the beginning (if not before it), by compiling the legendary history of Ireland from the Creation to the twelfth century AD. This involved a synthesis of all the existing versions of Lebor Gabála Érenn, the Book of Invasions, which details the early conquests of the island and the migrations of the would-be Irish from Scythia to Babel, to Egypt at the time of Moses, and finally to Spain, before reaching Ireland as Míl and Sons, around the time of Alexander the Great.

  Again, O’Clery brought his collaborators together, having arranged a patron, Brian Roe Maguire, Baron of Enniskillen. The chief chronicler of the Maguires sat in on the process, to protect the patron’s interests and to assist. They brought the books of their various families and many other texts to bear on the work. O’Clery added a Preface, in which his pride as a professional finally asserted itself without the standard humility. He said that men less skilled in Irish had been about to undertake the task. Their work would have been ‘an eternal reproach and disgrace to all Ireland, and particularly so to her chroniclers ….’

  Brother Michael had reverted to Tadhg an tSléibhe Ó Cléirigh, historian to a line of chieftains. Could he have been competing with this threat for several years in advance, knowing that hagiography was keeping him from his real work? The Book of Invasions was completed in eight frantic weeks at the convent of Lisgoole, on the banks of Lough Erne.

  THE ANNALS

  A month to the day after finishing it, the experts assembled again – this time at the Franciscan convent of Bundrowes. On 22 January 1632, they commenced the Annals of the Kingdom of Ireland, Annála Ríoghachta Éireann. The project – to compile a diary of Ireland’s history, from Creation until their own time – took four and a half years to complete, with perhaps two years of full-time work involved. The revised Book of Invasions slotted in at the beginning of the Annals, giving them a head start in prehistory.

  The annalists were fed and accommodated at the expense of the Franciscan convent, a major burden in a lean time. Fr Bernardinus O’Clery, Michael’s older brother, was superior by then. As if to prove the contemporary appeal of the project, there was again a generous patron – Fergal O’Gara of Sligo. He too has been given the kind of fame that only money can buy. A small-time landowner, he sat as one of the few Gaelic Irish in the Dublin Parliament of 1634. As a ward of the Crown, he had received a Protestant education at Trinity, in an attempt to wean him from his roots. There is a fine irony in his patronage of the Annals, the ultimate affirmation of Gaelic tradition. Perhaps the contradictions in his background should have been seen as a sign of all that Ireland, at its best, would become. But they were not. For centuries, the debate seldom rose above the question of whether O’Gara did, or did not, turn Catholic on his deathbed.

  Brother Michael, who is thought to have secured the sponsorship personally, knew the value of it. Without the money, the work would not have been possible. In a dedication to O’Gara he noted, ‘… should the writing [of the Annals] be neglected at present, they would not again be found to be put on record or commemorated, even to the end of the world.’ This pre-echoes Tomás Ó Críomthain’s famous conclusion to An tOileánach (The Islandman), in which he memorialises his island people in the phrase: … mar ní bheidh ár leithéidí ann arís. (… because our likes will not come again.) The repetition of such a note in major works of Irish literature is ominous, suggesting a raven’s quote or a requiem bell at the heart of the culture.

  All available texts were brought together at Bundrowes, but the annalists were cut off from southern connections by the political circumstances. The Annals show a heavy dependence on Ulster and Connacht sources. (Of course, there is no guarantee that such an emphasis would have been avoided in better times.) Nevertheless, they linked together a chain of ordered references, detailing the history of Ireland year by year from the coming of Ceasair, forty days before the Flood.6

  A comparison of all the still-existing sources (four are now lost) with the completed Annals reveals how the annalists worked. They were experts on chronology. They sat around a table with the various books open in their midst. The events of each year, from the beginning of time, were read out from the texts; they were argued, debated, synthesised and compiled into agreed entries. None would have been ready to concede the competing claims of their ancestral books. Their entire existences were predicated on the almost scriptural accuracy of their records. And yet they compressed, selected, double-entered, shifted delicately…Judging by the variety of handwriting in the Annals, they took it in turns to act as scribes. Among the faults for which they are criticised was the uniform ‘house style’ they imposed – the stylised language of their trade, which retained none of the original flavour of lost sources.

  There is something eerie about their deep and systematic delving into the past at that moment in Irish history, as if they could find some hidden flaw, reconstruct a noble pattern, without reaching a state of exile and dispossession in the present – as if the glory of the written past could exorcise the future threat. But that is to romanticise their motives. Perhaps, for them, the only real future was the past. As historians (chroniclers, to be precise) they had an overwhelming obligation to their profession, like astronomers who would examine the stars most keenly during a meltdown of the heavens.

  The last words of the Annals (a eulogy for Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone) were written on Sunday, 10 August 1636. A double-set had been produced – one for O’Gara, one for Louvain. The text was prepared with print in mind, laid out for publication. Michael O’Clery would not see it reach that stage.

  CROSS-COUNTRY

  Although it was mid-autumn, he set off immediately on a ritual journey throughout Ireland, bringing a copy of the manuscript with him to receive the approval of major scholars and ecclesiastics. It is tempting to imagine him scorching along the familiar roads, shouldering an enormous wedge of text, dumping it in front of startled bishops.

  However, the entire manuscript would have been a very bulky load. And if it was one of only two copies, then it was a valuable load indeed, at a dangerous time. Perhaps he brought an edited selection with him rather than an original. He stayed nowhere long enough to have the complete manuscript examined. A benevolent scan and he was gone, in pursuit of the next imprimatur. No one complained or found fault. Not yet.

  He travelled continuously during that winter, and the work was received everywhere with approval. The principal historians he visited were Flann MacEgan in Tipperary, and Conor MacBrody, just beyond the town of Gort. The visits were brief. No complaint of a northern bias was made.

  Next, he went on a galloping tour of the bishops – first to Galway, then to the Bishop of Elphin; from there to Kildare and on to Dublin, where Thomas Fleming, the Franciscan archbishop, signed the manuscript in mid-February. A
nother of the bishops visited was Baothghalach Mac Aodhagáin, whose school Tadhg an tSléibhe had attended as a student. Afterwards, Brother Michael rejoined the deep rut he had personally worn in the road to Donegal.

  BACKLASH

  A vicious row broke out almost immediately over the accuracy of the Annals. The complaint was made and circulated, not by any rabid southern poet, but by Tuileagna Ó Maolchonaire, who was not only related to one of the annalists but was a Franciscan himself. To compound the double stab in the back, Tuileagna (flood of knowledge) would later describe himself as historian-general of Ireland. He claimed to have found five major flaws in the Annals. The books, he said, were not read, or were only partly read, in the rush to get signatures. Shouting from the rooftops, he asserted that MacBrody and MacEgan, the senior historians, had withdrawn their approval, and he demanded that publication be withheld. If he knew as much of the present as he claimed to know of the past, he would have had the wit to realise that there was little danger of publication.

  Tuileagna’s five arguments are all noise and no content. Trivial issues of lineage and nomenclature, they sound insane outside the context of their own time. Even then, they must have reeked of bombast and rhetoric. In the fifth argument, he tried to enlist his own province of Connacht on his side, by disputing a claim in the Annals that the O’Donnells of the north had levied rent in Connacht. (They had.) Even if they had levied it in a portion of the province, he argued, that would make the manner of the statement an insult to the whole of Connacht.

  RESPONSE

  After a delay of several years, Fearfeasa Ó Maolchonaire responded to his kinsman’s arguments, on behalf of the annalists. ‘To be brief,’ he wrote at length, ‘as I was unwilling that anyone of the name he bears should be publicly shown to be in manifest error, I told him privately the rights of the case before going to plead it in the presence of the judges.’

  They had been summoned before a General Chapter of the Franciscans in Multyfarnham, for adjudication. Tuileagna did not accept the judgement, and his claims were even more loudly discussed than before, ‘from mouth to mouth in every part of Ireland’. Fearfeasa said that Brother Michael himself had already answered the objections, but ‘… as many people are more eager to have error disseminated among them than the truth, the erroneous and bitter statements of Tuileagna are more widely scattered over Ireland than the plain, sensible, dignified and substantial reply to them by the Brother.’ Therefore, Fearfeasa was publishing his own response in order to put an end to the ‘disgrace, contempt and reproach’ which had begun to accrue to the annalists.

  Having shafted his opponent from every direction, Fear-feasa then pulled a masterstroke. He announced that he would adhere to the ancient manner and make his rebuttal in bardic verse rather than in prose. From that point on, the issue was incomprehensible. Time stood still. If anything, it went backwards. Eventually, if only for the sake of continuity, the future judged in favour of Brother Michael.

  EXILE

  With bitter arguments ringing in his ears and his manuscript under his arm, Brother Michael left Ireland never to return – like many a writer since. He set out by boat from Carrick-fergus to Louvain on his last long journey, in July 1637. In his late forties by then, he had been absent for eleven years. He produced one more work: a dictionary of obscure terms in Old Irish, which was published in Louvain in 1643. A key to complex translations, it was the only one of his works to be published in his lifetime. Later that year, in his early fifties, he died and was buried in Louvain without trace.

  Michael O’Clery never knew he was chief of ‘The Four Masters’. That term was devised by a later generation, recalling a Franciscan tradition of quattuor magistri. It is typical of his life that his remains should have disappeared without celebration or trace, although his work has become a byword for the past. To conceive, to set up, and to pursue the work to conclusion was an enormous challenge at a time when resources of all kinds were diminishing. O’Clery’s reference to the ‘end of the world’, a rhetorical flourish in the dedication, caused later generations to believe that Gaelic culture had been on the edge of an abyss then. It was thought that the annalists had recognised the crisis, and that, poised on the lip of the fracture, they had achieved a miraculous act of salvage. Charged with emotion, such beliefs continued to have a symbolic effect for centuries. That effect, however false, was useful to the survival of the culture. Now that the symbolism has become threadbare, a new kind of belief is necessary if survival is to grow into actual recovery – some strange blend of independence and self-confidence perhaps.

  Notes

  1. The exact location of the settlement has long been a source of heated speculation, as if it might somehow retain an essence of the campaign, but the absolute disappearance of any trace is typical of O’Clery himself and of his reluctance to intrude on the physical record

  2. There were reported to be fourteen Catholic churches and eighty priests in Dublin, plus a further three thousand throughout the country. This comes from a Protestant account which complains that the people groaned under the burden of priests. A little earlier, in 1623, the Catholic Archbishop of Dublin estimated eight hundred priests in Ireland. To these he added ‘about two hundred Franciscans, who are especially to be recommended because they never suffered themselves to become extinct in the kingdom.’

  3. Actually, Ussher was an outstanding scholar, taking to a logical conclusion the dating conventions common to historians at the time, based on genealogy and the Old Testament. Although he was anti-Catholic, he worked closely with Gaelic counterparts on antiquarian research.

  4. This was the ancestral home of the O’Tooles, the house Red Hugh O’Donnell reached on his first escape from Dublin (see Chapter 1).

  5. A separate entry for St Patrick is worth quoting.

  (m = mac/son of) Patraicc m Calpuirn m Fodaighe m Oduis m Coirniuil m Liber m Mercuit m Oda m Oricc m Muricc m Oircc m Leo m Maxim m Otraicc m Erise m Peliste m Ferine m Briotáin m Ferghasa leithdercc m Nemhidh m Agnamain – (who goes straight back to Adam.)

  6. The books present were: The Book of Clonmacnoise; The Book of the Island of Saints (Lough Ree); The Book of Seanadh Mic Magnusa in Lough Erne; The Book of Clann Ua Maolchonaire; The Book of Ó Duibhgheanáinn; and The Book of Lecan Mac Firbisigh.

  END NOTES

  INTRODUCTION

  1. Derived from Brassica, the Latin term for cabbage, praiseach has come to mean a slovenly mess in Irish.

  I GREAT ESCAPE

  1. Kidnap and Jailbreak: Red Hugh O’Donnell

  1. According to the ‘Life’ by Ó Cléirigh. The captain is named elsewhere as John Bermingham.

  2. The Rev. Paul Walsh, whose commentary on the ‘Life’ is responsible for popular opinion on the route, opts lightly for Glenasmole, Lough Bray, Sally Gap, and the Valley of the Annamoe.

  3. The present fourth storey and the battlements were added in 1814.

  4. O’Sullivan’s Latin account has serica tela, which has been translated as silk coverlets or curtains. Hard to trust the knots in such material.

  II SURVIVAL MARCH

  2. The Hungry Road: March of O’Sullivan Beare

  1. In O’Sullivan’s time, Keimaneigh was a rugged defile, clenched between steep slopes and cliffs, with mountains rising on both sides. To put it behind him on the first day would be a decisive move; he would enter a different region – Muskerry – home of the MacAuliffes, O Keeffes and MacCarthys.

  An older route crossed the east shoulder of the pass, without the threat of ambush. O’Sullivan’s convoy entered Muskerry late in the day, filing steeply downhill well to the east of Gougane Barra, the great mountain corrie sacred to St Finbarr, where the River Lee rises. They were in a kind of internal exile then. In a country of warlords, garrisons, shifting allegiances, there was no continuous state under their feet when they crossed from one territory to another.

  2. George Carew, Lord President of Munster, had posted a price of £300 on O’Sullivan’s head, which
must have stirred the bounty hunter in his neighbours.

  III POWER-JOURNEYS: KINGS & QUEENS

  4. Medb and the Cattle-raid of Cooley

  1. Fergus mac Róich is a well-known character in the ancient literature, quite apart from the Táin itself. His virility is reported to have been of equine proportions. This explains why he was drafted into the Táin as the story developed: to match the reputation of Queen Medb. At one stage of the Táin journey, King Ailill spies on the entwined lovers. He steals Fergus’s sword and has it replaced with a wooden one in a piece of symbolism from comic burlesque.

  2. There were major fords up and down the river, which might have suited better. Further south (near Clonmacnoise), a gravel-ridge cut the Shannon. This was the Eiscir Riada, a bank of moraine deposited by receding ice and crossing Ireland from Dublin to Galway. Where it was breached by the river, sections of higher ground remained between the strands of the current, creating a logical ford. The Shannon Commissioners dredged and deepened the main channel in the 1840s, lowering the level of the river in the process.

  3. The culture of Ireland in the Pagan Iron Age is characterised by features recognisable from the European Celts, such as the use of chariots. This culture would reach a climax and then collapse. Its lore and legends would remain fixed at a certain point in time. It was replaced by a later culture whose folk heroes, na Fianna, would continue to develop in the imagination right through to modern literature.

  4. Their confinement has been read as a classic case of couvade, a common practice of primitive tribes whereby men go into labour and upstage their pregnant women. The practice also occurs in modern culture.