Stones of Aran (25 page)

Two similar incidents took place the next year, after which:

As a result the authorities stationed a paddle-steamer in the bay to protect the fishery, several Claddagh boats were seized, and twenty-five of their crew members taken prisoner. However it was clear that only desperate poverty had driven the men to attack boats better equipped than their own, and the Harbour
Committee
suggested a collection be taken up to assist them in acquiring the gear for trawling. Synge himself spoke in favour of this, and a fortnight later the newspaper was able to state,

At the assizes a month later, the prisoners all expressed their regrets, the Crown did not press for prosecution, and the
Claddaghmen
walked free, “loudly protesting their gratitude to the judge,” while Synge had the riot charges against their womenfolk dropped.

It seems probable that Synge’s disinclination to strenuous evangelism, the dangers he shared with his Aran crew, and the magnanimous resolution of the Claddagh cases, made his term in the islands one of relative interdenominational warmth. If so, the arrival of the young Rev. William Kilbride, who replaced him in 1855, must have been felt like a squall of hailstones. Kilbride’s
previous
posting had been at Salrock in the north of Connemara, on the estate of a retired Peninsular War veteran, General Thomson. At that period Connemara was infected by a much more virulent strain of proselytism than Aran had suffered from. An English high-church evangelical rector, the Rev. Alexander Dallas of Wonston in Hampshire, had convinced himself and a number of rich and influential supporters that he was to be the tool of
Providence
in the liberation of Ireland’s peasants from “the anti-Christ of Rome.” The task was one that the established Church of
Ireland
was too well-dressed to plunge into:

Fortunately the Famine, “a direct judgement from God on
account
of the tolerance of idolatry,” had softened that dunghill for his digging:

In Connemara, where untold thousands had died and the
enfeebled
survivors were for years to be dependent on the charity of their betters, Dallas obtained the backing of several Protestant landlords, and most crucially of the Rev. Hyacinth D’Arcy of the Clifden union of parishes (which in fact included Aran until
Synge’s
arrival). By 1849, when Dallas formally founded his Society for Irish Church Missions to the Roman Catholics, he already had a number of mission schools in operation around Lough
Corrib
and Clifden. Substantial churches and rectories followed, around which little communities of converts, shunned by their former neighbours and cursed by their priests, huddled for
protection
. A contemptuous rhyme is still remembered in
Connemara
about the congregation of a church built under the
patronage
of General Thomson:

It was from this background of degradation and bigotry that Kilbride came to Aran in 1855. Soon he was joined by a Protestant schoolteacher, Thomas Charde, who had been involved in
proselytism
in Inishbofin, and in fact was thrown out of that island for
it, according to accusations made against him by the Aran priest some years later.

Dr. James Johnston Stoney arrived soon after Kilbride, in 1858. The younger son of a moderately well-off Anglo-Irish family from Tipperary, he had graduated from Trinity and acquired his
Fellowship
of the Royal College of Surgeons at Edinburgh. As he must have been married and had children at this time (he was to die in 1869, having had fourteen children by two wives), the move to Aran in itself calls for explanation, but nothing in the meagre records suggests whether it was an ideal of service that moved him so to seclude himself, or an addiction to the laudanum that killed him in the end. By the time of Stoney’s arrival Thomas Thompson had succeeded his father George as landlords’ agent, and so all the characters of the next few years’ little tragi-comedies were assembled on the bare stage of Aran.

At that time Thompson was already feeling it necessary to post notices ordering the Catholic clergy to desist from speaking against the Protestants from the altar. Nevertheless, when the potato crop failed in 1861 and another famine threatened, Thompson and
Kilbride
joined with Patrick O’Flaherty and his son James to form a relief committee, and Thompson supplied eighteen tons of meal and fifteen tons of coal for distribution. Stoney declined to join the committee, alleging that priority for relief was being given to those who sent their children to the Protestant school. By the next year the Catholic clergy, who did not join the relief committee, were forbidding any of their flock to supply the Protestants with food, and so Thomas Charde opened a shop himself, which was so successful it forced its only rival out of business. Some
relief-work
was started, for which the wages were potatoes to the value of 6d a day, the potatoes being supplied by Patrick O’Flaherty and the scheme funded by the Digbys, the Protestant Bishop of Tuam and others. Kilbride oversaw the work, and it was alleged that he was forcing religious instruction on his captive
congregation
of labourers. In January 1863 fever broke out, and a doctor sent by the Galway Board of Poor Law Guardians to look into the
state of affairs reported that he had never seen such poverty, that Cill Rónáin and Cill Éinne were filthy and unwholesome, with manure heaps and pools of stagnant water at the doors of almost every cabin, that there were thirty-five fever cases in the island, including the Medical Officer’s daughter, and that he had found Dr. Stoney himself in bed, leaving the sick unvisited. Stoney had explained that he was “utterly prostrated by fatigue and
stimulants
,” which he later glossed as meaning that he had “been obliged to resort to small quantities of stimulants to keep him on his legs on account of the work, and the usual effect of such
stimulants
was to add to the subsequent prostration.”

Other inspectors in April of that year found that there had been thirty-nine fever cases, with two deaths; however, the filthy state of the villages had been exaggerated, and in Cill Éinne there were only three offensive accumulations of dirt, at the backs of the houses. Evidence about Dr. Stoney’s intemperance was
conflicting
: both the Catholic priest and the Protestant minister said they had never seen him drunk, but the proprietor of the Atlantic Hotel claimed that on two occasions he had had to help him home the worse for liquor. On the whole it was felt that the
doctor
had “left himself open to the charge.” The situation of the poor was found to be unsatisfactory. Kilbride was the only active member of the relief committee, and the poor regarded the relief as being given by him personally, while the Rev. Mr. O’Malley accused him of “tampering with the faith of the Catholic poor” and had challenged him to a controversy in the presence of the people at the relief-works. Kilbride agreed that he had read the Scriptures to the relief-workers, but that none had objected or left the works. The inspectors commented that “such a course must have been irritating to the feelings of the poor whose
circumstances
of distress left them no alternative, their poverty obliging them to accept the relief though accompanied by transparent attempts to undermine the religious conceptions in which they had been reared.” Their recommendation was that a Relieving Officer be appointed, to preclude religious discrimination. Thomas
Thompson opposed this on the grounds that it would increase the rates (which, because nearly all the tenants’ holdings in the
islands
were very small, fell almost exclusively on the landlords), and he threatened that the proprietors would “
ease
the islands of the cause of the increased taxation.” The Board of Guardians
debated
what he meant by this, and took it to be “a gentle phrase for extermination … in other words send the poor people adrift.” Nevertheless an officer was appointed, whereupon Kilbride’s committee refused to employ anyone receiving aid from him.

The case of a Thomas O’Brien came before the Guardians in the next Spring. The relieving officer had seen O’Brien digging a field over again after the potatoes had been lifted, “to pick up a stray potato that might have escaped the diggers.” In his cabin there was “no food, no fuel, nothing that could be called
furniture
, hardly the rudest utensil; no appearance of a bed, except a little straw packed up into a corner.” His wife Bridget said that her family was starving since she withdrew her children from the Rev. Kilbride’s school, but that she would prefer to endure any amount of privation rather than have the priest speaking of her family at the chapel. The officer then gave her meal to the value of 3s 9d, and told her that further relief could only be had by
going
into the Galway workhouse. For this, O’Brien claimed, he had been refused work by Kilbride, and other people rejected by Kilbride because they had been relieved by the officer were now begging through the islands. Also, Kilbride had opened a school in Cill Éinne in charge of a Scripture reader, and was giving relief to those who sent their children to it. Kilbride denied that he was doing any more than relieving the children themselves. It seems from this officer’s report that Kilbride’s schools in Cill Éinne and Cill Rónáin had been forced to close, probably because the priest had made parents withdraw their children. The
Galway
Vindica
tor
thought that the officer’s report on the state of society in Aran made it clear that souperism was the greatest persecution
affecting
the Irish peasantry; however there had been only one “
pervert
” and he had now been received back into the church.

In October 1864 Patrick O’Flaherty died, and whatever
affection
and respect the Aran folk had for this representative of the old patriarchal order was not inherited by his son. James O’Flaherty JP soon became hated as a land-grabber and as an
associate
of Thompson’s in his extortionate schemes. One of these was the Irish Iodine and Marine Salts Co., whose story I told in
Pilgrimage.
Having by threat of eviction forced the islanders to sell their kelp to him, at his prices, paid in credit at Charde’s shop, Thompson forbade them to transport the kelp to Galway in any boat except O’Flaherty’s. Similarly, when the main road through the island was to be widened, all tenants except O’Flaherty had to work unpaid on it; and to compensate O’Flaherty for the land he gave up for the road, a tax of one shilling a household was levied on the island. As Antoine Powell puts it in his history of these episodes, the islanders were “
i
ngreim
ag siondacait
,”
in the grip of a syndicate. Dr. Stoney wrote to the newspapers about the kelp racket, and when an increase in his salary was proposed (from £80 to £100 a year) the dispensary committee, which was dominated by O’Flaherty, protested that this would again increase the rates. The Board of Guardians gave in, and Stoney did not get his rise.

In 1868 arose another cause of offense to the Catholic faction. A young widow had emigrated to America, leaving her four
children
in the charge of her father, who had returned from Galway to live with his relatives in Aran. The father soon died, and the widow’s mother and uncles felt the pinch and wanted the
children
adopted. The Catholic priest refused to have them put in an orphanage, so they turned to Mr. Kilbride, who had Mr. Charde take them to a Dublin “Bird’s Nest” (as the institutions in which Catholic orphans were brought up as Protestants were called). The uncles started attending the Protestant church, with the
result
that no one would employ them except Mr. Charde. The Catholic clergy called for a boycott of his newly opened bakery, until the “kidnapped” children should be returned and placed in Galway Workhouse, where they would be brought up in the
Catholic
religion. Thompson and O’Flaherty, joint owners of the
Ar
ran
Yacht,
which brought in goods to the islands, retaliated by refusing to carry either bread or flour for any other outlet. Just before Christmas 1868 the
Galway
Vindicator
published: