Stones of Aran (6 page)

Back in the big kitchen built onto the rear of his house,
Pádraicí
n
’s
wife Nora broke off from cajoling the children into bed to make us sandwiches and tea. An eight-year-old daughter,
Caoimhe
, appeared in her nightdress and twisted up her foot to show him the progress of a white lump on her sole. While he filed away at the verruca and dabbed some medicament from a tube onto it, he talked about children. Four households here have clutches of three to five, whereas other villages have few or none coming forward to the primary schools. But fifteen of the nineteen children from Iaráirne and Cill Éinne starting school next year are girls. (“The nights weren’t cold enough!” said an Cill Rónáin man to whom I mentioned this odd fact the next day—which seems to imply that only great hardship drives Aran couples to the comfort of sex with the extra application necessary to create the male.) And since on finishing school girls leave the island more readily than boys, taking jobs in shops and offices, this is not a reassuring statistic. Every year the Vocational School organizes a survey of population that is less subject to chance distortions than the
official
census, and in 1992 for the first time the number of people living in the big island dropped below eight hundred.

Pádraicín is keen on sports and coaching the island children. There used to be a football field or at least a pair of goalposts on the
muirbheach
below the village, but when the thin sward was worn through the wind quickly excavated a sandpit there and exposed bare rock. What he had done to stop further erosion was, he told me, “unsightly but effective.” His youngest son Aodhán
had silently added himself to our conversation, so Pádraicín scooped him into his arms and we went down to look at these works. The piles of old fridges and other rubbish he had brought with his tractor from the dump behind Cill Rónáin a year or two ago to plug breaches in the fringe of dunes around the beach still showed in one place, but in others they seemed to be trapping and stabilizing the blown sand and were already covered. We discussed coastal defences, a topic forced upon the community by the storm of January 1991 which, in near conjunction with a spring tide, ripped away the shore road or heaped it with boulders in various places, so that at Port Chorrúch and Cill Mhuirbhigh big concrete sea-walls are now in building. Was that storm a fluke? Are we squandering money on defences which will never be tested or which are quite inadequate to what is in store for us? Is global warming angering the earth against us, are we
outstaying
our welcome here? On this calm midsummer evening still redolent of disseminated sunlight, it was difficult to feel so. We walked eastwards towards Port Daibhche to see how the marram grass was doing, where during that storm the waves almost broke across the neck of the peninsula. It was too dark underfoot for me to be able to point out the purple milk-vetch, the great rarity among the many unusual plants making up this smooth
flower-spangled
sward. I remembered uneasily almost stepping on a lark’s nest here once, a cupful of life. A few years ago it was proposed to make Na Muirbhigh and part of Barr na Coise into a golf-course; when I heard of it I had hastened to inform the main proponent of the scheme, a Connemara-based politician, of the existence of the purple milk-vetch, and he was less than delighted to hear of it. The proposal was not pressed forward at that time, partly because it seemed no grants would be forthcoming for such a development in the habitat of a legally-protected species and an officially-designated “Area of Scientific Interest,” and also perhaps because some of the twelve commonage holders were unpersuaded that either they or the island in general would much benefit. But the idea is still in the air, and there are powerful arguments for it:
the prospect of increased “quality” tourism, more jobs, more amenities to keep the young at home. When I talk to some of the islanders who are in favour, and try to explain why I think that area should be preserved inviolate, I find myself using wooden language: that “machair” is a rare landform, vulnerable to
touristic
developments such as caravan parks and golf-courses; that we must conserve biotic diversity not just in the rain forests but at home too; and so on. But if I suggest they read “Sand in the Wind,”
Stones
of Aran
, Vol. I, for my deeper feelings about this little wilderness, I am in difficulties, for those pages seem to show that I was lonely and mournful out there, and that nothing would have taken me out of myself better than a game of golf.

By the time we reached the eastern shore, stumbling in the rabbit-holes—though the rabbits are gone; someone introduced myxomatosis, it seems—Aodhán was fast asleep in his father’s arms. We sat among the tussocks of marram above the empty curve of the beach, and Pádraicín told me about the days of his own father, when Port Daibhche was home to eight or nine
currachs
belonging to Cill Éinne and Iaráirne men. They used to row twice a day out to Na Carracháin off the southern cliffs after bream, and when they were seen coming back up the channel the children would rush down from the village on donkeys with pannier-baskets to carry up the catch. The bream were gutted, filleted, salted and laid out flat in the sun on the walls of the fields to cure. When they were hard as boards they were tied up in threes—an undersized fish could be passed off sandwiched between two big ones—and a “hundred” threes, that is three hundred and sixty fish, would buy a boatload of turf from
Connemara.
Hard-working times—those fishermen were also farmers with cattle and potato-fields to tend, and they kept their children busy every hour they were not at school.

What changes in the island since Pádraicín’s childhood! His worries about his own children in these strange times, he told me as we made our way through the twilight back to the village, are those of a city parent. Drugs are coming into the island; young
men coming in for the summer season are sniffing something—he doesn’t know if it’s cocaine or crack or what, but it’s not snuff!—and sharing it with local lads; the gardaí are said to be “watching the situation.” Children might be visiting certain homes where they are allowed to watch who knows what sort of rubbish on videos. Pádraicín often supervises the Hall in Cill Ronáin when there is a dance, and afterwards has found
teenagers
hanging around in the street at two or three in the morning. With thousands of tourists pouring in during the short season, some islanders are so busy they have no idea what their kids are up to; they throw them the most expensive presents to be bought in Galway—but what those children are not getting is love.

Pádraicín, hunched over his burden, was breathing heavily as we climbed the path to his house. Love! It was as if at the very threshold of home he had stumbled on the word we had been searching for through the gathering dark. I could have founded this chapter on it, had I known it was going to turn up.

As one walks the road from Iaráirne towards Cill Éinne, the old farmhouse known as Killeany Lodge comes into view on the
hillside
above the harbour. A pair of tall monuments on a rocky
terrace
below it attracts the attention, obviously with the intention of making a public statement. But it is not easy to get close enough even to gather the nature of this statement, for they do not stand by the present way up to the Lodge, nor indeed by the older way shown on nineteenth-century maps, and when one has scrambled across field-walls to reach them one finds that they are sited so close to the brink of a scarp that viewing the inscriptions on their northern, and clearly frontal, faces, is awkward. They stand a few yards apart like huge gateposts, but there is no easy access to the past through them. However, the name “Fitzpatrick,” repeated in
the inscriptions, catches the eye; clearly these are cenotaphs to people of consequence, who presumably lived in the Lodge or some predecessor of it.

The two monuments are rectangular masonry pillars with
pyramidal
caps surmounted by stone crosses, about twenty feet in overall height and eight by five in plan. Each has four plaques lettered in bas-relief, one set into each face. A few yards to the east is a much smaller monument not noticeable from the distance, with just one plaque.

So one is bidden by the front of the tall cenotaph on the east. Its back says:

The left and right sides ask one to pray for the souls of a Florence Fitzpatrick who died in “Iannary” of that same year, and a
Rickard
Fitzpatrick who died in 1701. Two of the letters “Z” are back to front.

The western cenotaph has rather more elegant lettering, in which the uprights of the letter “H” in the words “THE” and “THEIR” also serve as uprights for the T and E, and the spaces
between the words are marked with a small diamond-shaped point. The front and sides commemorate three Fitzpatrick men who died young: Dennis died in “Disember” 1753 aged 23, John died in “Ianvary” 1754 aged 25, and Peter died in March 1754 aged 17. And on the back:

Surely it must have been the loss of three young men over the winter of 1753–54 that prompted Patrick and Margrett to build this memorial. (A local tradition, that is perhaps no more than an old speculation, is that the three died of typhus.) And perhaps the opportunity was taken of commemorating the loss of an earlier generation at the same time, for the two pillars are so nearly
identical
, apart from the lettering of the plaques, as to suggest that they were built as a pair.

Having puzzled out this much, one turns to the smaller
monument
, which has just one plaque. Above the inscription is an
incised
motif like a downward-pointing arrow, which I take to represent the three nails of the Crucifixion with their points
together
below. The inscription itself is illegibly worn, and only by taking a rubbing does one find, disappointingly, that it
duplicates
the inscription to “
SARAMSWEINY
” on the taller monument beside it. (Uncrabbed, her name must have been Sara
Mac-Sweeney
.)

But how can one pray for a soul of whom one knows so little? Only a believer in a vast essentialist bureaucracy of the hereafter can send up a prayer labelled with a name and a date of decease, and be confident that it will be credited to the right account. The secular equivalent is more difficult. These people, Sara, John, Patrick and the rest, have gone beyond hearing; they will not answer to our historical echo-soundings, and the pious best we can do—for ourselves, not for them—is to inform ourselves enough to
understand
something of them and their times, and so, by
reflection
, of ours.

Of course all biography is potentially interminable, and our brief lives demand brief pieties. Fortunately, without going
beyond
the first few chambers of the archival labyrinth, we can know something of these Fitzpatricks, thanks to the
nineteenth-century
Galway historian James Hardiman. Among the generous stuffing of miscellaneous information in the appendices to his 1846 edition of Roderic O’Flaherty’s
West
or
H-Iar
Connaught.
is this:

Identification of the various places, persons and times mentioned in this skeletal history will add some flesh and much blood to it, even if the resonant title “Seneschal of Ibrickan” may lose some of its spectral glamour. First, the surname Fitzpatrick: this is a pseudo-Norman anglicization of the Irish Mac Giolla
Phádraic
, son of the devotee of Patrick, and the ancient sept of that name was particularly associated with Ossory, in what is now County Laois. Fitzpatricks were prominent in Galway in the
seventeenth
century, and Hardiman’s
History
of
Galway
lists several of that name among the sheriffs and mayors of the city. Nevertheless the above implies that the Aran Fitzpatricks derive not from Galway but from Clare, where in 1642 it appears that a Richard Fitzpatrick was seneschal of Ibrickan and receiver for the Earl of Thomond. (Thomond, from Tuadh-Mhumhain, north Munster, included County Clare, of which Ibrickan was a barony situated
on the coast a little south of Inis Oírr. The Earl of Thomond would have owned most of Ibrickan, and the intermediary between him and his tenants would have been his seneschal or steward and receiver of rents.) And this fact “appears” out of the fog of
slaughter
, for in 1642 there was civil war in England, and Ireland was in rebellion. The Catholic gentlemen who had taken up arms against the King’s Dublin government in 1641 had claimed to be protecting him and themselves against the ferociously anti-Catholic Parliament he was struggling with in England. By October 1642 Parliament had gone to war with Charles I, and had decided upon the final subjection of Ireland; the “Confederate Catholics” had met in Kilkenny to concert the rebellion, but were themselves divided between those who were ready to treat with the King’s forces in Ireland and those who cared nothing for King or
Parliament
but only for the Catholic cause. Barnaby, the Sixth Earl of Thomond, was a descendant of the O’Briens who had ruled
Munster
for centuries before the imposition of the English feudal
system
from which his title derived its legitimacy. But in the native hierarchy of the O’Briens he was not the mightiest, and in the rip-tides of rebellion he had to handle the ship of his own state very carefully, for, according to a contemporary account,

It was Barnaby’s ancestor the Fourth Earl, loyal to his
upbringing
in Elizabeth’s court, who had brought in English settlers to his estates, creating a lasting fear among his Catholic
neighbours
of a Protestant plantation, at their expense, on the Ulster model. Some of these settlers were small yeoman farmers, others
middlemen leasing large areas of land and subletting in smaller lots, and there were thirty or more small castles or towerhouses owned by such Englishmen in the county. The Sixth Earl had refused them permission to form themselves into a force against the rebels, and had warranted the captains of his own Irish army to disarm those of the English who did not dwell in castles. At the outbreak of fighting and pillaging the English inhabitants of
unprotected
farms fled to the shelter of the English-owned castles. When these strongholds were picked off one by one, the survivors in many cases fled to the Earl’s great castle of Bunratty, for he was trying to keep on terms with England—no easy task when its King and Parliament were at war—and at the same time with his powerful O’Brien cousins who had sided with the Catholic
Confederation
.

What might have been the role of the seneschal of Ibrickan—remembering his Old Irish family connections, and his
long-established
daily dealings with his Lord’s English tenants—in such events? As it happens, the only reason Hardiman (
representing
History, for our purposes here) notices the existence of
Richard
the seneschal is that he is named in a deposition given in the following year by a John Ward about the sack of his father’s castle of Tromra in Ibrickan. It was Colonel Edmund O’Flaherty of Connemara (as recounted in
Pilgrimage
)
who led the assault,
sailing
via Aran from Galway where he had been engaged in the siege of the English fort. Ten years later, the rebellion having been crushed by Cromwell’s army, the fate of Tromra was recalled
during
O’Flaherty’s trial. The Colonel confessed as follows: