Stones of Aran (7 page)
Authors: Tim Robinson
Peter Ward’s badger-like desperation in defence dominates this scene of war—war on a horribly intimate and domestic scale, up and down stairs, in and out of chambers—and it is only through his son John, who made conditions for his own life, and survived to make his deposition of 1643, that we glimpse our quarry:
The said Edmond continued siege to the said castle for three daies and three nights … murthered the said Alson and George … caused the castle to be fired … the said Peter Ward was then traytorously murthered, who together
with the said Alson and George was stripped and they three buried in or neere the castle walls, from whence … they were removed and enterred in the parish church. Yeet notwithstanding the Mass-preist caused their corps to be digged up againe and buried without in the churchyard, for noe other cause but that they saide no unsanctified or hereticall corps of protestants (as they tearme them) must remaine within their churches. This deponent likewise saith, that the said Edmond O’Fflahertie was abetted, councilled, and assisted in the said rebellious and traytorous designe, by [among others] Richd. Fizpatrick (seneschall of Ibrackane aforesaid, and then and now
receaver
to the Earle of Thomond within the said Barony). That he saw and observed the said parties in armes at the seidge of the said castle, and divers times consulting and advising howe to surprise the same …
By the end of the Parliamentarians’ vengeful campaign of 1651–52 most of Clare had been left “totally ruinated and deserted by the inhabitants thereof,” and we do not know how Rickard the seneschal came through, or whether he suffered any penalty for his part (if he was actually involved) in the massacre of his
neighbours
and clients at Tromro. The next generation of Fitzpatricks was located, not in Clare, but in Aran. The earliest of them to be commemorated on the Cill Éinne monuments are the John Fitzpatrick who Hardiman says died possessed of a cellarful of riches, his wife Sara and son Rickard. One assumes, without proof, that John is the son of Rickard the seneschal, and therefore, cynically, that the latter had done well out of the war.
Aran, of course passed into Protestant hands after the
Cromwellians
’ victory. By 1686 John and his son Rickard were leasing the islands from a Sir Stephen Fox, former Paymaster of the Forces under Charles II. John was living in “Loughmore,” which is Ceathrú na Locha, the quarter of the lake, the nearest part of Inis Oírr to the Clare coast. Nowadays this would be regarded as an eccentrically reclusive address for a rich man, but at that period seaways were still more passable than land routes, and Inis Oírr, commanding a principal opening of Galway Bay, probably saw much traffic. Infestations of French privateers, though, were
grounds for abatement of rent. John died in February and Sara in November of 1709—but the year began in March until the
calendar
reform of 1754, so it was John, not Sara, who was widowed. Hence no doubt, Sara’s separate little monument, made
redundant
by Patrick and Margrett’s later and grander retrospective memorializing but for some reason left standing.
In the next generation the family fortunes were assured by
intermarriage
with three of the fourteen great merchant families known as the Tribes of Galway. Rickard married Joan French of Spiddal (An Spidéal, a village nine miles west of Galway), a sister married George Morris (one of whose descendants, Lord
Killanin
, takes his title from the Parish of Cill Ainthín, west of Spiddle), and the second son Edmond married Annable, daughter of Richard Martin, the famous “Nimble Dick” who had obtained much of the vast territories confiscated from the O’Flahertys in Connemara and, although a Catholic, had been confirmed in possession of the largest directly owned estate in the Three
Kingdoms
.
In 1713 Fox sold Aran to Edmond Fitzpatrick and Simon Digby, the Protestant bishop of Elphin, and Bishop Digby leased his moiety to Edmond, who thus became effectively the landlord. Edmond died in about 1717, leaving a son, another Rickard or Richard. Edmond’s widow soon married the historian Roderic O’Flaherty’s son Michael. This must have been a troubled
alliance
, for her father Nimble Dick Martin had swindled Roderic out of five hundred acres, the only portion of the former O’Flaherty lands remaining to him after the post-Cromwellian settlement, and Michael was pursuing the matter through the courts at the time. In the event, her husband won his case against her father, and in 1736 assigned the estate to his stepson, Rickard Fitzpatrick.
This Rickard (or Richard, again) became sheriff of Galway in 1730, so he was probably the first of the family to become, at least in form, a Protestant. The trade of the city had been savagely curtailed by penal legislation against its Catholic merchants, and by the Wool Acts passed by the English Parliament in 1689 and
1698, prohibiting the exportation of woollen goods from Ireland. While Rickard was sheriff an attempt was made by the Galway council to persuade Parliament to designate the city as a port for the exportation of wool; this failed, but no doubt the council, which included several people sympathetic to the oppressed
Catholic
interest, turned a blind eye to certain moonlight activities, and in 1737 an informer reported to the authorities as follows:
Richard Fitzpatrick of Aran Esq. has so much a year from the King and he sees all this wool transported and he gives the runners no hindrance, for he has done well by the runners; he gets good bribes from them.
The accusation of corruption did him no harm, it seems, for in 1738 he was elected Mayor and later became one of Galway’s two representatives in the Irish Parliament. In 1744 he sold his moiety of the islands to the Digbys, and died in 1767 without issue.
According to Hardiman, Edmond Fitzpatrick, sheriff of Galway in 1769 and 1797, was the nephew of Rickard, but this
conflicts
with accounts implying that Rickard was an only son; perhaps this Edmond was a son of Rickard’s cousin Patrick (of the monument). Edmond himself had one son, James, who died without issue, and since Hardiman (who was born in 1790 and was the librarian of Queen’s College, Galway) did not know of the existence of any of the family in his own times, it must, as he says, have sunk into obscurity.
But it seems that it was not extinct. There are Fitzpatricks in Aran today—one family in Gort na gCapall and another in Cill Rónáin—and the evidence for a link between the former, at least, and the old “Fitzpatricks of Aran” is tenuous, but somehow
convincing
. I quote from an unpublished history of Aran written by the Parish Priest, Fr. Thomas Killeen, at the behest of his Archbishop in 1948:
There is an Aran tradition that the Fitzpatricks lived in Aran till 1798 in the house later occupied by Martin O’Malley…. Páidín Ó Confhaola of
Inishmaan
,
now nearly 80, told me that one day he was in Clare with his father
a fuireacht
caladh
[storm-bound]. They met a very old man, who asked if any of the Fitzpatricks were still there. Páidín said there was a family of that name in Gort na gCapall. “Yes,” said the old man, “the family had to fly in the year of the Fleet Franncach, and one of them went to Gort na gCapall.” This meeting must have been in 1880—90 and the old man’s birth 1800—10…. What they did in 1798 is unknown.
One might guess that what they did in that “Year of the French” was to harbour rebels, for after the French fleet landed at Killala in Mayo and unleashed an unsuccessful Irish rebellion, many of the “United Irishmen” fled into the mountains of
Connemara
from the yeomanry’s revenge on Mayo, and some even crossed to Aran. It is said that a French officer was hidden by the O’Flahertys of Cill Mhuirbhigh, and if the Fitzpatricks were
implicated
in something of that sort they may well have had to leave the neighbourhood of the Cill Éinne garrison and bury themselves among the peasantry.
By what narrow paths between the gulfs of oblivion does even the basis of this speculation come down to us! An archbishop has the happy idea of asking his clergy to write up the history of their parishes; most of them never get down to the uncongenial task, but the Aran priest finds his vocation in it. An old islander recalls for him a tale heard in his youth while waiting for the wind to drop, in Fisherstreet, which he would have known as Sráid na nIascairí, near Doolin in County Clare. The tale is one an old Clareman remembers being discussed over his head when he was a child, not long after the Year of the French. And the hearsay that has been handed down in this way could well be mistaken, just as the accusation concerning the seneschal at the sack of Tromra could well be false.
As to the rest of the people named on the monuments, by
juggling
dates and ages I arrive at this: of Patrick, that he was, most likely, one of the four sons of Richard the son of John; of the three youths who died in one winter, that they were probably the sons
of Patrick and Margrett (two of their names occur in Hardiman’s account among those of Patrick’s brothers, and whether this means he had evidence unavailable to me, or merely got as confused as I did in this maggoty-headed antiquarian pursuit of the lost
generations
, I cannot tell); and finally of Florence, died 1709, nothing.
What then do I recover of the Fitzpatricks of Aran, by
bringing
my books and arithmetic to bear on the two grey pillars on the hillside? At the best, lacunary personages, short of perhaps a birth-date or a definite relationship to another family member, or of any other of the properties as necessary to full existence as a definite weight or height, or a shadow. A life’s story is completed at or by death, but then begins its career of disintegration. The intangibility of ghosts is our ignorance of the dead; to pray for a soul is to wish it a life whole enough to be recognized.
Recognized
, at least, as one of ourselves, with our meaningless titles and void relationships and self-forgotten histories.
Killeany Lodge stands only a hundred and fifty yards from the Fitzpatricks’ cenotaphs, and according to the tradition preserved by Fr. Killeen was their home until 1798. However, a tale taken down in the 1930s from a Connemara story-teller asserts that it was built by a smuggler called O’Malley from An Caorán on the Ceathrú Rua headland of south Connemara, just opposite Aran. Certainly by the 1820s the O’Malleys had succeeded the
Fitzpatricks
as tenants of the Hill Farm, as the four hundred acres that went with the house were called. There is probably truth in both versions, and perhaps a core of older masonry is to be found in the fabric of the present Georgian farmhouse. This is a plain one-storied building with a small fan-lit porch facing east, and ramshackle outhouses and gapped orchard walls to the rear. High on the north gable-wall, eyeing one’s approach from the village, is a
little diamond-shaped loft window that twinkles with a
raconteur’s
anticipation of a new audience for old anecdotes; it suggests a voice, a tone, that might tempt the past to show itself:
Smugglers and rebels, all those Connemara O’Malleys, descended from Grace O’Malley’s piratical crew, the O’Malleys of Mayo. Odd corners of Connemara—Ballynakill, Streamstown, Bunowen—were thriving in those days; wool going out, wine and brandy and tobacco and silk coming in, common boatmen pluming themselves in
éadach
uasal,
upper-class clothes, tailcoats, knee breeches, silk cravats from Guernsey, the funny old high hats they called Carolines. Máirtín Mór, the great O’Malley of An Caorán, was famous for old-style hospital ity—always a cask of wine in his house, the lid off and permission for all to fill their cup, and when he killed a cow or a sheep the whole beast would be eaten before he needed to salt it. He was only a
ceithearnach
,
a middleman, though; his landlord was Colonel Martin, great-grandson of that Nimble Dick who grabbed all Connemara. The Colonel was a great man in Dublin and in London—it was the Prince Regent nicknamed him Humanity Dick for his kindness to animals—but for the Connemara folk his highest honour was to have O’Malley as his tenant. Tom Moore mentions the Colonel—
Oh! place
me
’
midst
O’Rourkes,
O’Tooles,
The
ragged
royal
blood
of
Tara;
Or
place
me
where
DICK
M-RT-N
rules
The
houseless
wilds
of
CONNEMARA—
—but it was Blind Raftery himself put O’Malley in a poem, and that’s real fame. “Fiach Sheáin Bhradaigh,” the hunting of scoundrely Seán, another wandering ragged balladeer and a rival of Raftery’s. Raftery has him run out by the hunting gentry, tallyhoing him all round Mayo, up Croagh Patrick, down to the butt end of Connemara. Then Séan takes a boat to Aran, O’Malley drives him off to Kinvara, and in the end he’s torn to bits by the hounds of the Galway Blazers.
This O’Malley died in a duel. He had the Bishop of Kilmacduach
to dinner one day—a day of abstinence, so it was fish for the Bishop, but without thinking O’Malley poured meat gravy on it. The bishop just put his plate aside without remark—but his nephew Lord French heard of it and took it as an insult; he challenged O’Malley and killed him with his first shot. Colonel Martin was a great duelist himself—his other nickname was Hairtrigger Dick—but he was sad about this duel. “O’Malley preferred a hole in his guts to one in his honour,” he said, “but there wouldn’t have been a hole in either if I’d been told of it.”
Martin O’Malley, O’Malley of the Hill as they called him, was Máirtín Mór’s nephew. His brother Pat was an excise man, travelling round Connemara collecting taxes, married a low-born Cill Éinne woman Martin disapproved of and sent his children to the hedge-school in Cill Rónáin. Pat’s daughter Mary must have been born in 1840 because she was 68 when the Old Age Pension came in in 1908. Martin O’Malley died some time before the Famine; they say he’s buried somewhere on the Hill. Then his wife—he’d married a Miss D’Arcy of the Dublin Distillery family—had the farm. When she was old and doddery the O’Flaherty of Kilmurvey made her an offer for the lease of it, a hundred pounds a year for the rest of her life. He reckoned she wouldn’t last long, but she hung on for sixteen years, and he was so disgusted with his bargain he never did much with the land.
Then the O’Flaherty died, and his son James died, and James’s son-in-law was drinking the estate. He tried to sell the lease of the Hill Farm to the Congested Districts Board but nothing came of that because the rent was too high and the Digbys wouldn’t reduce it. But the idea that the land should be bought out for the islanders was in the air, and the priest set up a branch of the United Irish League to press for it. They started refusing to pay their rents, and Roger
Dirrane
the bailiff—the fellow who invented those rain-tanks—was frightened to try and collect in case they boycotted the pub he had in Cill Éinne. Roger was in charge of letting out the grass of the Hill Farm. When Fr. Farragher finally persuaded the CDB to buy it out for the poor fishermen, Dirrane felt he should have got the land him self, and he started a quarrel with the priest. That was the Time of
the Saucepans, June 1908. A terrible bang in the middle of the night—they’d bombed the priest’s house! Unfortunately Farragher was away, but his sister and the servant-girl got such a fright they didn’t put their heads out till morning Sittingroom window blown in, plaster dust everywhere—and bits of a saucepan on the windowsill. The RIC searched Dirrane’s shed on the quayside and found the tin cans they’d mixed the gunpowder in. They arrested him and a
relative
, Kilmartin. Dirrane had an alibi—a woman swore she’d seen him in his pub—but he got three years anyway, and the other man got three months. That wasn’t enough revenge for the PP though. He named them from the altar, refused confession to anyone who had anything to do with them or their families. So all the “Saucepans”—the Dirrane faction,
“Lucht na Tincans,”
the tincan lot—stopped paying their dues. Great ructions! It gave Liam O’Flaherty the idea for a book. The PP of course was President of the League, and he used it to get the Tinnies boycotted. One of the Galway newspapers said he was as big an autocrat as the Tzar of Russia!
There were some rebels, though. Costelloe’s donkey needed shoeing, but Costelloe was boycotted and the Cill Rónáin blacksmith wouldn’t do it. Costelloe had hopes of the Oatquarter smith, King. He saw him on the pier one day and tested him out tactfully—walked up and down past him saying he’d have to send his donkey to Galway on the steamer with a label round its neck. “I’ll put shoes on it for you,” said King, “and I won’t do it before dawn either, or after the sun has set, but in broad daylight!”
The boycott divided the island, engagements were broken off and so on; there were lots of old bachelors and maids among the Saucepans in the end. And suicide attempts. Mrs. Macdonagh found her son trying to hang himself, had to get the police to cut him down. He’d lost his job on the hulk the CDB stored ice in because he spoke to a Saucepan, and he was replaced by two members of the League. So politics came into it, and the Unionists took it up. Questions asked in Parliament, even! “Is my honorable friend the Chief Secretary for Ireland aware…?” The Saucepans made Westminster aware of this ridiculous little island! Some of the islanders still respect them for
their defiance—I heard someone saying not long ago the bomber was “before his time”!
Fair play to the Saucepans, though, they stood up to the priests! After he came out of prison Roger Dirrane was walking up the
Carcair
one day, and one of the clergy went by, squeezed himself into the wall to keep as far off him as he could. Roger looked round at him, and the priest turned on him and said “Only for I don’t like, I’d put horns on you!”—people still believed the priests could do that, in those days, maybe some of the priests half believed it too. But Roger wasn’t afraid. “And if you did,” he said, “I’d ram them up your backside!” And once a cow of his died, and a lad from Cill Éinne helped him bury it. Farragher cornered the lad later on—in Bóithrín an Bhabhúin, that little dead-end by the castle—and told him off for helping with the cow. The lad’s father came along, and he said to the priest, “If there’d been an “altar” on it, you’d have been there
yourself
!”—the altar is money collected at funerals for the priest.
So that’s the history of the Hill for you. I suppose we’ll never know if it was really Dirrane that served up the gunpowder sauce to the priest! The fishermen got the stripes of land in the end, the boycott faded out, Farragher was moved to Athenry. The old lodge used to be let out now and again to summer visitors. In the Twenties the “Lá Breás” came and went—teachers doing Irish language courses; all the Irish they had was “Lá breá!,” “fine day!,” so they said it to everybody whatever the weather. Then for the most part the place was empty and falling to bits. Now it’s all spick and span, thanks to Celtic
Spirituality
—but that’s another story.
Those are the tales from the Hill I have picked up here and there—from a book of Connemara folklore, from an old,
bedridden
lady in Cill Rónáin, from the Aran postman met on the road—and strung together as a dinner-table amusement. But such anecdotes handle their subjects so uncaringly, dismissing them with holes in their honour, reducing them to single
utterances
of the sort that acquire a polish through retelling, that even the amateur enquirer into little local histories owes them better
treatment. On professional historians, ambassadors of the past to present times, devolves the solemn duty of representing it in its integrity, but the humblest attaché in the Embassy of the Dead is also sent to lie abroad for his country, and must do his best with scrappy briefings.
While I was mapping the south Connemara coast I looked for traces of the smuggler O’Malley in the townland of An Caorán Beag (which means “the small moorland hill”), a mile or so south of the modern town of An Cheathrú Rua. A side-road serves the few houses of a village still called An Diméin, the demesne, and then becomes a grassy track between granite knolls and boggy hollows criss-crossed by drystone walls, going down towards the sea and the three grey silhouettes of the Aran Islands on the
horizon
. Within sight of the head of an inlet are traces of old walls, the remains of the O’Malley home, which the Ordnance Survey map of 1898 names as “Keeraun House.” I had been told about a chair-like rock called Suístín Uí Mháille, O’Malley’s little seat, from which he used to watch his sloop unloading in the creek below, but I failed to locate it and perhaps it has been removed to straighten the track. Presumably he was elderly when he sat there, no longer relishing the seas, happier dispensing the rough
hospitality
of scoops from the wine-cask and cuts from the freshly killed beast to his admiring followers, or looking forward to a meal intended to be more elegant, with the Bishop of
Kilmacduach
. How did he view his trade? His landlord Richard Martin was a Member of Parliament, first in Dublin and then at
Westminster
, having voted for the Act of Union in 1800. No doubt a proportion of O’Malley’s silks and brandy went to Martin’s house twenty miles away in the wilds of Ballynahinch; in 1796 the Chief Secretary for Ireland was informed that “Mr. Martin’s command of smugglers and fishermen cannot be less than a thousand,” and that the chief under him was “one O’Mealy, an old venerable man.” Such feudal prerogatives merely added the spice of the illicit to the Colonel’s urbanity in the ballrooms of London and Paris, but perhaps for O’Malley, on his bare Connemara foreland,
smuggling had a deeper meaning, and the sloops nosing into the familiar muddy creeks of his black economy had in their sails winds from the age of the unconquered O’Malleys of old.
“Terra
marique potens,”
a power by land and sea, was the motto of his seafaring ancestors; I hear him mumbling it to himself as I stroll down the green track by his little throne in the rock.
O’Malley of the Hill Farm is less recoverable to the
imagination
. The census of 1821 shows him in place: “Martin O Maley, 32, Gentleman Farmer”; also Mary Anne, his wife, his brother Pat, a “gentleman” called Pat Taylor, two servants, and living close by is his herdsman. It is noted that O’Malley holds a large tract of land in the Parish of Kilcummin (this would have been the demesne in An Caorán Beag) plus a large parcel of land in the Parish of
Ballindoon
(and this would have been the O’Malley territory near Slyne Head in the south-western tip of Connemara). Pat, the déclassé brother who married locally, I see as loitering between the Lodge and the village, neither one thing nor the other, ready to latch onto any chance comer. I owe this picture, probably quite false, to George Petrie, who met him in 1821: