The Myths, Legends, and Lore of Ireland

by Blackwell, Amy Hackney

  The dispossessed O’Neills moved out into the hills and lived as outlaws, robbing and murdering travelers. They likened their Catholic troops to an army of Crusaders battling against the Turks, as they saw the Protestant invaders. This did not improve the Protestant opinion of them.

  59 { Religious Tensions in the North

  By the 1630s, the Catholics had regained much of their previous position in Ireland. Under King Charles I, they were allowed to worship fairly freely, they had reclaimed much of the land that had been taken away from them, and the number of Catholic priests had increased. But matters definitely were not peaceful.

  The Protestant clergy resented the Catholic priests, who spoke Irish and were generally more popular with the Irish people. The Protestants thought the Catholic priests allowed the people to live in blind superstition. The Presbyterians in Ulster fervently believed that the Catholic Church was evil and its adherents idolatrous, and equated the pope with the anti-Christ. Groups of them swore to wipe out Catholicism. Ulster Catholics understandably felt threatened by this rhetoric.

  Matters came to a head with the violent attacks of 1641, begun by the O’Neills as a political protest. Catholic leaders at home and abroad encouraged the rebels with the unfortunate suggestion that they kill the heretics or expel them from Ireland, which escalated the conflict into a bloody religious war.

  The English Civil War began the following year, and the Irish Catholics supported King Charles. The Ulster Presbyterians supported Oliver Cromwell and the forces of Puritanism. Charles lost and was executed in 1649. Cromwell declared himself Lord Protector of England and immediately headed to Ireland, where he took revenge on the Catholics for supporting the king and for the violence of 1641.

  Ulster Protestants were especially affected by the events of 1641 and were inclined to feel threatened by the Catholic presence. Because they were Presbyterian, they felt separate from the Anglican government as well and were never sure it wouldn’t betray them; they resented any accommodation the government offered Catholics. This led to political separatism; as much as possible, the Ulster Protestants organized their own local government around their presbyteries.

  Conservative Ulster Protestants were especially likely to evangelize and preach publicly. These preachers were extremely anti-Catholic and told their listeners stories of Catholic atrocities on Protestants. Protestants and Catholics were also separated economically — while the Protestants prospered through the linen industry, the Catholics were left out in the cold.

  This combination of economic imbalance, social separatism, and Protestants’ insecurity about their position has plagued Northern Ireland up to the present day. Protestants have long been the majority of the population, but they still aren’t confident that Catholics will not be allowed to run roughshod over them. Even in the late 1990s, Protestants in Northern Ireland still claimed that the Roman Catholic Church was contrary to the word of God, or was equivalent to the Whore of Babylon, or wasn’t Christian at all — rhetoric that hasn’t changed much since the days of Cromwell.

  The post-famine period in Ireland ushered in something of a devotional revolution. In the late 1840s, the number of priests and nuns increased dramatically at the same time that the general population was shrinking from death or emigration. The Church itself underwent major reforms.

  Father Paul Cullen became archbishop of Armagh in 1849, at the end of the Great Famine, and he spent the next thirty years modernizing the Irish Church. He called the famine a work of God intended to purify the Irish people, whose Catholicism was too steeped in superstition and whose clergy was too tempted by avarice and sex; he also thought there were simply too many Catholics for the existing clergy to serve. He professionalized the clergy and introduced a variety of new rituals, including novenas, stations of the cross, parish missions, and adoration of the Blessed Sacrament. These changes brought the Irish Church more in line with Rome.

  Post-famine Catholics became more devout than their ancestors had been, and Catholic priests had more power over them. People, especially in the eastern counties, enthusiastically joined new religious societies and embraced such devotional aids as the rosary, pilgrimages, shrines, processions, devotion to the Sacred Heart or the Immaculate Conception, and spiritual retreats. Older, “magical” events and events such as wakes, agricultural celebrations, and bonfires became less important.

  60 { Modern Catholicism

  These reforms also gave the Irish a new cultural identity by which they could recognize one another. The older Gaelic society was almost completely gone, and the Church offered a replacement social structure. It went without saying that a post-famine Irish person was also Catholic; the two were almost synonymous. Emigrant Irish took this cultural trait with them, and Irish all over the world were assumed to be devout Catholics.

  This religious identity merged into the Irish national identity. For Irish farmers and laborers, Catholicism became synonymous with political freedom, rebellion against tyranny, and empowerment of the working classes.

  The Catholic Church has remained powerful in Ireland throughout the twentieth century. It played a major part in the emergence of the Irish Free State and still dictates much of the structure of the Irish family. There are still churches everywhere in Ireland, and priests in them say Mass regularly.

  Ireland is more strongly tied to Rome than many other Catholic countries in Europe. When Pope John Paul II visited Ireland in 1979, people traveled for days and camped out overnight in the hope of getting a glimpse of him. Irish Catholicism also has an extraordinary number of links to its Celtic and medieval past. Some religious holidays have direct links to pagan festivals; for example, the annual pilgrimage to Croagh Patrick originated in the Celtic festival of Lughnasa.

  For most of the twentieth century, the Church controlled statesupported schools, which meant that almost all children were educated by priests, monks, and nuns. Some Irish remember the Catholic schools of their youth fondly. Others recall brutal physical punishments and being afraid to tell their parents for fear that their parents would beat them, too, so strongly did they believe in the Church’s authority.

  The Church has been present in family life as well. Irish often have crosses or religious pictures of the pope, Sacred Heart, or a favorite saint in their homes. Most Irish parents name their children after patron saints. Weddings and funerals almost invariably take place in the church; secular services are not popular. The Irish give more money to charity per capita than the people of any other European nation.

  Up through the 1950s, many young Irish people chose religious vocations. Priests have long been honored and respected, and Irish priests have a reputation for being loving and devoted to their parishioners, though they can also be quite strict. Children and teenagers saw priests, monks, and nuns regularly, at church and at school, and the Church maintained a strong recruiting organization. Families who produced priests were praised, and many parents encouraged their children to seek a religious vocation. (Traditionally, it was a status symbol to have a priest or nun in the family, because it showed that the family had enough money to pay for religious education.)

  The Church has played a very active role in modern Irish politics. The Irish Free State was set up in 1922 to be completely secular, but its leaders saw the Church as an Irish institution that distinguished them from the English. The Catholic archbishop Charles McQuaid of Dublin helped Éamon de Valera draft the constitution, which is explicitly Catholic. It guaranteed the Church a “special position” as the guardian of the faith of the majority of Irish citizens (the clause was removed in 1972). It also prohibited divorce and abortion and said in no uncertain terms that a woman’s place was in the home.

  61 { Scandals in the Church

  The Church still has an extremely strong relationship with the government. Many Catholic voters insist that the government enforce their idea of what a family is. Ireland’s leaders have therefore long kept very conservative views on issues such as contraception, abortion
, divorce, and homosexuality.

  Although the Catholic Church still plays a very important role for the Irish people, its power has been on the decline for decades. Fewer and fewer people now attend Mass. More significantly, the priesthood and the monastic vocations have lost much of their stature, thereby leading to a sharp drop in the number of people entering the religious orders.

  The Irish Church has been plagued by some of the same sex-abuse problems that have shocked North American Catholics; the term “pedophile priest” has become disturbingly common. Irish Catholics have accused the upper levels of the Church hierarchy of attempting to cover up the scandals of accused clergy. The Christian Brothers organization, which runs several Irish schools, has publicly apologized for the many cases of abuse that occurred in its schools.

  Birth control and abortion have generated some of the biggest debates in Ireland. For decades, the use of birth control was considered a criminal act. In 1950, a government health minister proposed a “Mother and Child” plan that would have put the state into the Church’s traditional role of providing health care for pregnant women and mothers. Church leaders were afraid that the state might provide family-planning information, so they blocked the plan. The Church leaders got their way, but the resulting national controversy demonstrated that many Irish people were willing to challenge Catholic positions on social issues.

  Between 1968 and 1993 the Irish Parliament passed a series of laws that made contraceptives legal and available. They did this in part with the support of the Irish people, partly because of pressure from the European Union to protect people’s right to privacy, and partly to protect the population against sexually transmitted diseases. Church and conservative leaders opposed the new laws at every step, but the will of the people on this issue was clear. Abortion is still illegal, but thousands of Irish women travel overseas every year to terminate pregnancies.

  Many young people in Ireland today feel alienated from the Church. They complain that the pope is too conservative and doesn’t understand the needs of Catholic laypeople. They find that old-style Catholicism, with all its emphasis on shrines and the Virgin Mary, is irrelevant to modern people.

  Ironically, though, one of the problems many modern Catholics have Ironically, though, one of the problems many modern Catholics have with the Church is that it has become too modern. The Second Vatican Council, convened by Pope John XXIII from 1962 to 1965, introduced a number of reforms into Church practice, including saying Mass in the vernacular and allowing laypeople to participate in Mass. Many Catholics had loved the old Latin Mass and the Gregorian chants in which it was sung and lamented its passing, as they did other forms of ritual that had been common and now are gone from Church practice. For some Catholics, that created a void that has not yet been filled.

  62 { Traditional Irish Life

  By the end of the seventeenth century, England’s political domination of Ireland was complete. Although the English tried to force their language and religion onto Ireland, the Irish culture proved resilient. The Irish people continued to speak their language, play their music, and transmit their beliefs to their children.

  There were great differences between the lifestyles of the Protestant Anglo-Irish ruling class and the Catholic Irish population. In Dublin and in their country estates, the Anglo-Irish gentry led lives very similar to their counterparts in England. The great mass of the Irish, however, led hardscrabble lives as small farmers and laborers.

  Visitors to Ireland remarked on the obvious poverty of Irish farming families. Most families lived in small cottages, frequently with only one room and no floor. People wore simple clothes made of locally produced wool. Most heating came from peat, a brown substance from the bogs that burns for a long time but emits foul-smelling smoke. The diet of Irish farmers consisted of potatoes, milk, and a rare bit of meat.

  The Irish exiled to Connacht had it particularly hard, because the rocky soil there is bad for farming. Their one blessing came from the abundant seafood in Irish waters. Fisherman would row out in currachs (COR-rahs), small boats made of pitch-coated cowhide stretched over a wooden frame. Fishing in these small craft was a dangerous business, but the seafood it produced added valuable protein and vitamins to the diet.

  Despite the poverty that most of the Irish experienced, they still managed Despite the poverty that most of the Irish experienced, they still managed to have fun. Through their language, music, dancing, and sports, they were able to express themselves in distinctively Irish ways.

  63 { Irish Language

  The Gaelic language of Ireland is one of the most distinctive in Europe. It’s one of the few Celtic languages that survived the onslaught of Germanic and Latin tongues. Some of the oldest vernacular literature in Europe was composed in Irish, and an extraordinary range of Irish stories survived into the modern day. Irish is a lyrical language that seems particularly well suited to poetry and metaphor. But it’s lucky to be around today. We have the efforts of many generations of stubborn Irish people to thank for its modern existence.

  In 1500, the great majority of Ireland’s inhabitants still spoke Irish as their first language. The Anglo-Norman families like the FitzGeralds and Butlers spoke both English and Irish, but the farmers and laborers outside the Pale spoke predominantly Irish. With the plantations and conquests of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, however, the language trends began to change.

  Thousands of English-speaking families moved onto Irish land. English policies actively promoted the adoption of the English language. There’s a story that schoolteachers would hang sticks from students’ necks and notch them every time they spoke Irish; for every notch the student would receive a beating. The most powerful force against Irish was the fact that all the wealthy and powerful people spoke English, so a person needed to speak English to have any opportunities for advancement. Between 1700 and 1900, Irish went from being the majority language of the island to a minor tongue spoken by disenfranchised groups in the West.

  While the Irish were pressured to speak English, it was hard for them to learn to read it. The penal laws prevented most Irish children from attending school. But the Irish had a resourceful response to this problem; they created hedge schools — informal schools taught in the open or in barns by volunteer schoolteachers. These schools taught English, Irish, Latin, history, geography, and whatever else they could manage. They didn’t have many books and couldn’t meet all the time, but they did prevent the Irish people from becoming totally illiterate.

  Although it suffered, the Irish language didn’t die out. It lived on in remote places with little English presence, particularly in the West. The English didn’t bother to put schools in backward outposts like the Blasket Islands off the Dingle coast. The province of Connacht, which Cromwell had seen fit to leave to the Irish, remained the bastion of the old Gaelic language. The area where Irish continued to be spoken as a first language was called the Gaeltacht.

  Over the years, the Irish government has instituted a number of programs to preserve the Irish language. Irish is the official language of the Republic of Ireland and a mandatory part of the curriculum for all Irish schoolchildren. For a while, all civil servants had to pass examinations in Irish before they could take their posts. The government has provided a number of incentives to promote Irish-language initiatives in the Gaeltacht, such as Raidió na Gaeltachta, an all-Irish radio station.

  64 { Irish Music

  There has been a major upsurge of interest in traditional Irish music in recent years. Bands like The Chieftains and Clannad have helped develop a worldwide interest in the lyrical sound of Celtic music. Musicians throughout Ireland and its emigrant communities have found opportunities to play for adoring crowds in Irish pubs everywhere. These musicians are continuing in a Celtic music tradition that goes back many centuries.

  Poets and bards were big shots in Celtic societies. A good poet could grant either fame or shame to Celtic nobles, so when one showed up at court and started to sing,
everyone gathered to listen. These bards often played harps and other musical instruments. Brian Boru’s harp — the symbol of Ireland — was supposedly played to rally his troops.

  The singing poets continued their cultural influence after the Norman Conquest. The Anglo-Norman nobles, like the old Irish nobles before them, recognized the power of a good song, so they often sponsored these bards in their courts. Over time, however, the power of the bards waned. With books and letters available, nobles no longer needed poets to spread their fame.

  Irish music is a free-form style. The length, pace, and musical composition of a given piece will change from night to night and from group to group. Traditional musicians almost never play from written music; in the past, many of the best musicians couldn’t even read music. As in Ameri- can jazz, most pieces revolve around group performances that highlight the virtuosic improvisations of individual musicians.

  Despite the free-form style, Irish music has a distinctive sound that makes it immediately identifiable (although Scottish and Welsh music sound similar). The distinctiveness comes largely from the mix of instruments used. The traditional instruments of Irish music are:

  Harp

  Bodhrán drum

  Fiddle

  Flute

  Tin whistle

  Accordion

  Bagpipes or uilleann pipes

  Pretty much anything that can jam

  Traditional music performances are informal. They generally take place in pubs, with the musicians performing only for free beer and the cheers of the crowd. Members of the audience can join in if they have a fiddle, a good voice, or even just a set of spoons to add to the music.