Stones of Aran (26 page)
Authors: Tim Robinson
THE SONG OF THE ARRANMAN
The island in beauty lay sleeping,
Far out on the waves as of yore,
But a feeling of hunger came creeping
O’er us as we sailed for the shore….
We looked for the light which they bade us
Expect in the breadshops of each,
But tho’ darkness was chasing the shadows
No gleam could be seen from the beach.
We flew into one, it was empty,
As if the gaunt famine were there.
A vanithee
*
, haggard, unkempt she
Thus muttered in tones of despair:
“A parson and justice in council
To free trade in bread put a stop.
They decree that we’ll ne’er get an ounce till
We deal in their own little shop.”
Early in the New Year the Rev. Corbett wrote to the owners of the islands, Lady Howth and Miss Digby: “Mesdames—Is it by your wish that the islanders are refused bread unless they buy from a proselytising schoolmaster, who was obliged to fly from Inishboffin for the same reason?” Shortly afterwards Thompson called off the bread blockade, and towards the end of the year the orphans were retrieved from the Bird’s Nest and handed over to the priest, for their mother was to come back from America to collect them. That round seems to have gone to the Catholics, though Thompson’s kelp monopoly continued until 1872, and
even after that he extorted a royalty from the islanders on the kelp they sold elsewhere, until his company went out of business a few years later.
Dr. Stoney died in 1869, of an overdose of laudanum according to his death certificate. (The last of his children, who had been born the year before, was to emigrate to America and there father the future professor, George Stoney.) An old lady of the island told George Stoney that his grandfather the doctor had visited a family in Oatquarter “at the time of the black flu,” had found every member of it suffering from this illness, and soon after
returning
home had come down with it himself. He dosed himself with the same medicine he gave his patients, and died; he was found dead (if he was dead) by a young lad, Peter Gill, who acted as his assistant and pony-trap driver. At the time there were so many people needing funerals (as the old lady put it), that there was no time for a proper laying-out. There followed the hasty burial, and the rumour spreading like another black infection.
I will trudge on to the end of this squalid sectarian history to show how hospitable the holy soil of Aran was to such germs. A few years later in 1877 there was some talk of “distress” in the
islands
after a droughty season had caused the potatoes to fail and stormy weather was stopping the islanders from fishing.
According
to the
Vindicator,
because the tenants were so hard hit, the landless labourers could get no work and would starve unless
relieved
. The Digbys contributed £50 to Kilbride’s relief fund, and Thompson claimed that a famine had been averted by the
minister’s
timely actions, but the parish priest, Fr. Concannon, and the relieving officer denied that there was any distress.
In that year another complex row began, which soon became linked to the national agitation against “land-grabbing” that
culminated
in the Land League crisis. It started with the eviction of a Pat Ganly and his mother from their farm. Pat was the son of the engineer Thomas Ganly who came to the island in 1853 to build the pier and married a Mainistir woman. After being evicted Pat Ganly was readmitted to half of his farm, and the rest of it
was given to the Rev. Kilbride (whose acquisition of “a nice farm of land” near Cill Rónáin was recounted in
Pilgrimage
).
Some months later a stone was thrown through Kilbride’s window, and on another occasion when Ganly saw Kilbride’s man working on what had been his farm, he produced a gun and ordered him off the land. The police searched his house as a result but found
nothing
. Then a bullet was fired through Kilbride’s window. Kilbride about this time handed his half of the Mainistir farm over to Richard Charde, son of the schoolteacher and shopkeeper. The Chardes’ shop window was then broken, and Fr. Concannon threatened to curse anyone who dealt there until the farm was given up. Thompson put out a notice asking people to ignore the priest, saying that if Charde was forced out of business no one else would be allowed to open a shop in his place, and that if the agitation did not cease he would evict the Ganlys from the rest of their farm. Ganly was soon in prison for attacking Kilbride’s workman on the disputed farm again, and while he was there an attempt was made to kill Richard Charde’s cattle by poisoning a water-tank. In June 1879 the authorities announced that if there was any further interference with Kilbride or Charde extra police would be sent to the island, at the islanders’ expense. Despite this, two of Charde’s cattle were found dead on the Ganly farm in December. The Land League came into existence in August of that year, and it seems that an Aran branch was founded soon afterwards by a new Catholic curate, Fr. Fahey. The Land War in Aran was given a particularly vicious twist by the conjunction between the nationwide anti-landlord agitation and the local
interdenominational
feuding (which was an anachronism by then, with the general moderating of evangelical zeal, except in the
parishes
of Kilbride’s former colleagues in Connemara).
That winter, after two generally cold and wet years, there was a threat of famine throughout the land. In Aran the people lacked not only food but fuel, as they were dependent on the turf which was still lying in soaking stacks out on the bogs of Connemara. Frs. Concannon and Fahey set up a relief committee with the
Medical Officer, Dr. Bodkin, and in January of 1880 wrote to the voluntary relief organizations recently inaugurated in Dublin:
Sir, Behind the fragments of the last fortress besieged by Cromwell in
Ireland
stands the village of Killanny with its hundred huts. It is the fishing centre of Aran, and every hut there is a fisherman’s home. Though its
inhabitants
, poor fellows, point to a stone in those battlements against which Cromwell’s nose was rubbed in a brief defeat, and boast of his final repulse from their walls, still worse than all, Cromwell’s curse, we fear, remains. Nothing else could bring on the people such cold and nakedness as we witnessed. No later than today we walked through the village and saw
children
entirely—this is true—entirely, absolutely naked, gathering
themselves
around their poor old granny in the corner where the fire used to be … Returning to the house where we left the old woman and the naked children depending, Berkeley-like, on their imagination for heat at the quenched hearth, we found a strong man, idle and careworn, leaning against the black side-wall … “There are thirty men like myself in Killanny; we are too poor to get anyone to bail us for the fishery money. The people who want money most in those bad times won’t get any from the
Government
Offices, but if we had one pound, each of us, to buy a Spilliard, we’d try to put a fagot of clothes on the children, a spark in the hearth, and a bit in our mouths, with the help of God.” Thinking as we came away on the best mode of seeking succour for this deserving man, we said we will
venture
to write to the three great Relief Funds, and we are sure they will not grudge to spend £10 each on a charity of this kind. These £30 would place the thirty wasting Killanny men in reproductive works. It will give them a chance of gathering, as they say, the riches that are waiting for them at the bottom of the deep.
The policy of the Mansion House Fund, headed by the Lord Mayor of Dublin, was to distribute relief through local
committees
on which clergymen of both denominations would sit,
together
with the medical officer and the “prominent laymen” of the neighbourhood. According to the Mansion House
Committee
’s later report on this period:
In only three instances throughout Ireland, was there found the slightest difficulty in combining the Catholic and Protestant clergy in hearty
brotherhood
, on the Committees. The exceptions were parishes in Connemara where the Protestant clergymen happened to be also members of the Irish Church Mission Society.
But since these parishes were “literally threatened to be devoured by famine,” it was resolved to make grants to separate local
committees
there:
It was the only occasion on which, during six trying months, any shadow of religious division vexed the plain course of charity. It served simply to throw into stronger light the heartiness with which, upon more than eight
hundred
Local Committees in every corner of the country, Catholic, Protestant and Presbyterian were found working side by side with the same unity, loyalty and breadth of sympathy which were the foundation-stones of the Central Committee.
However, things were hardly better in Aran, and the Central Committee soon received complaints from Thompson, that he had been kept off the Aran committee, and from Kilbride, that the Aran committee was “utterly unfit, from its composition, mode of management, and general conduct, to carry on such a work.” A lawyer, Mr. John Adye Curran, was sent down in June to investigate matters on the spot. His report is like a window of intelligence and humanity flung open in the murk of those times; one reads it with a feeling that an emissary from an enlightened age has visited the past, and is telling us the truth of controversies that we could not otherwise have disentangled. I will lay myself open to the risk of delusion, in following Curran.
At first Kilbride and Thompson, who had demanded the
investigation
, refused to participate in it, claiming that intimidation would make it impossible for them to bring forth their witnesses; however Curran in a brisk exchange of letters made it plain he thought that they were shirking the investigation, and on a
Monday morning all parties assembled in a large room of the Atlantic Hotel, and the hearing of the charges against the
committee
began. In the initial skirmishings Thompson stated that the committee was improperly constituted because the Protestant clergyman was not on it, and Curren informed him of the
resolution
of the Central Committee allowing the formation of
religiously
exclusive committees, and that Aran was one of the few cases in which they had had to allow the formation of a
committee
without the participation of the Protestant rector; it had been open to Mr. Kilbride to form a committee of his own, but he had stated that he was able himself to provide for the only two
Protestants
needing relief. Then Curran disposed of Thompson’s
complaint
that he had been studiously kept off the committee; in fact the correspondence of the committee showed that he had been invited to join and had refused. Mr. Kilbride then alleged that none of the committee’s business had been given to Mr. Charde’s shop; Mr. Curran replied that that was a matter within the
discretion
of the committee, unless Mr. Kilbride could show that the poor had in any way suffered from it.
The next charge was one Thompson had preferred in a letter: “… that ten heads of families were put on one list. This was called the ‘Soupers’ List,’ all these were refused relief. The reason
assigned
was that some worked for Mr. Kilbride, others for Mr. Chard, and others again went to his shop.” In evidence Kilbride produced written statements that he said had been made by
parties
now too intimidated to come forward. The committee denied the existence of intimidation, and, Curran reports:
Dr. Bodkin requested Mr. Kilbride to give him the names of these parties he said were so intimidated, and whose attendance he was unable to
procure
. This was done, and in less
than five minutes, the Doctor having picked them out of a large crowd waiting outside the hotel, paraded all the parties named before us in the room, apparently, to my mind, much to the
Reverend
Gentleman’s surprise, if not disgust.
One of these was then called, a Mary Flaherty who worked at the barracks and whose husband worked both for Kilbride and for Charde; she said that she had not had any difficulty in getting her rights from the committee. Mr. Kilbride reminded her of a statement, at variance with her present evidence, to which she had put her mark in his presence and in that of Mr. Thompson. She became very much excited, and Kilbride and Thompson said it was quite clear she had been intimidated from telling the
investigator
the truth. Curran’s report is unambiguous:
I could not help believing there had been a species of intimidation practiced in this case, but not by the parties suggested. One can well imagine a scene enacted during a period of deep distress, in a room in the house of the Rev. William Kilbride, in which this nervous, excitable, poor, ignorant,
uneducated
woman, in the presence of her husband’s employer, standing face to face with the agent to whom her husband had to pay his rent, might easily be induced, if not coerced, by that husband, himself unscrupulous, to make or sign with her mark a statement which, he considered, might be palatable to those two gentlemen, and which they no doubt believed at the time to be true.
Later on in the proceedings the husband, Patrick Flaherty, was examined by Kilbride, and stated that on one occasion when
relief
was being given out he had heard Fr. Fahey say to another man, “Go down to Mr. Chard, he knows what side to put the spoon before you”; also that Fr. Fahey said “Come on now, let us read out the Soupers’ List,” and read out ten names including
Flaherty
’s, who got no relief that day. But it emerged that Flaherty was in employment at that time, and not with Charde or
Kilbride
, and that he and his family had been relieved on other
occasions
. However, a most theatrical interruption then took place: