by Frank Gannon
There was one other string. The pope asked Henry to require every Irish person to give the church a small amount of money.
Out of this simple seed, a monstrous tree grew.
Henry II didn’t care much about Ireland. It was little, nearby, and comparatively peaceful. Right after Ireland was “given” to Henry, however, things got a lot less peaceful.
After the death of Brian Boru, there were a series of undistinguished kings. In the year the pope gave Ireland to England, a man named Rory O’Connor had the crown. A thoroughly loathsome Leinster man named Dermot MacMurrough wanted to topple O’Connor, but the Irish people hated MacMurrough, so he went to England and asked Henry to help him. Henry told him that he wouldn’t send any men, but the Leinster man was free to ask any of Henry’s noblemen.
MacMurrough convinced the earl of Pembroke, better known as Strongbow, to help him. Dermot offered him a lot of money (he even threw in his daughter!), and Strongbow said he would help him in Ireland.
Though MacMurrough had been beaten by O’Connor before, when Strongbow joined him they easily defeated the Irish. The Irish had very primitive weapons, and it was an easy, but vicious, victory. They started in Wexford on the southeastern coast and worked their way up, slaughtering Irish people on the way.
O’Connor read the handwriting on the wall and tried to make peace by offering old Dermot the crown if he would just stop the massacre. But it was no longer even an Irish war. Strongbow decided that he liked Ireland, and he wanted to be king. Henry II saw what was happening and paid Strongbow a visit. Strongbow didn’t want to go up against the massive power of England, so he pledged his loyalty to the English crown.
Henry was happy with that, but in 1177, he named his son John “Lord of Ireland.” A few years later, John became the king of England, and it was now official: The king of England was the king of Ireland as well.
Compared with most English monarchs, John wasn’t that oppressive. He even did Ireland some good. He brought the English trial-by-jury system of justice to Ireland, and he minted coins (with harps), but he just wasn’t that interested in Ireland. He let his noblemen run the place. They built and lived in the many castles that are still in Ireland, and they treated the Irish like inferiors, and they stole from them and cheated them. By and large, though, this was the benign era of English-Irish relations.
A lot of the English nobles left their castles empty and just went home to England. This would have been fine with the Irish, but the noblemen still owned everything. There were the infamous “absentee landlords.”
In 1258 the Irish got fed up and proclaimed an Irish king, Brian O’Neill. As you might figure, England came over, crushed the rebellion, and took Brian O’Neill’s head back with them.
Without war, Ireland started to develop a pretty prosperous economy. (This was during the era depicted in the Mel Gibson movie Braveheart.) England, under Edward I, started using Ireland’s resources pretty heavily. Ireland was a good supplier of many commodities, but, to the English, the most valuable was soldiers, which the king used ruthlessly in his battle with Scotland. After Scotland “won” its freedom (the end of the movie Braveheart: They picked a good place to end, a subsequent history muddied up the Scottish “victory”), the Irish asked the Scots for help against England, but they were refused. (No one is going to make a movie out of this because the Scots and the Irish didn’t get along well.)
Continued unrest in Ireland forced Edward III of England to enact an extreme “straighten up and fly right” edict called the “Statutes of Kilkenny” forbidding any interaction between English and Irish. The use of “Irish names” was forbidden. The Irish sport of hurling was forbidden, and even Irish music was against the law.
It was impossible to enforce these laws, but they did arouse even more Irish hostility against England. By the end of the fourteenth century Ireland was a kettle about to boil over. Irish chieftains had just about taken over the island. (Early in the fifteenth century Ireland actually had an Irish ruler again, James Butler.) The only solidly Anglo area was a little strip of land from Dublin to Drogheda called “The Pale.”
Finally, in 1511, England spoke again. Henry VIII sent over a mass of troops. They had trouble with the native Irish fighters who knew the land so well, and they had difficulty establishing a final victory. In 1541, in a “declare victory and leave” gesture, Henry proclaimed that Ireland absolutely belonged to England and that was the end of it, so there, nyah, nyah.
Needless to say, it didn’t “take.” There were many Irish uprisings, and Henry’s daughter, Elizabeth, sent English troops to control the Irish barbarians. Shane O’Neill, an Irish chieftain, was called before her in an effort to establish dialogue. He behaved very “Irish.” O’Neill, when asked to speak, first howled like a wolf for several minutes and then spoke in Gaelic, which no one in Elizabeth’s court understood.
The sixteenth century ended with a series of battles in Ireland. Sometimes the Irish won; sometimes the English. This was followed by the era of the most horrible Englishman of all: Oliver Cromwell.
Most Irish people think there is nothing in their history as horrible as the potato famine, but the Cromwell era comes pretty close. Cromwell was the Puritan leader who gained control of England in the 1640s. Cromwell was an Englishman who regarded the Irish as barbarians, but also as ungodly, which for Cromwell was much worse. Cromwell was a fanatical Calvinist Protestant who looked at Ireland as a sort of “Island of the Damned,” and he acted accordingly.
Cromwell didn’t, of course, exist in a vacuum. Puritan England’s hatred for Ireland was widespread. Consider this extract from a Puritan pamphlet published in the middle of the seventeenth century: “These Irish, anciently called Anthropophagi (cannibals) have a tradition among them, that when the devil showed our Savior all the kingdoms of the earth and their glory he would not show him Ireland, but reserved it for himself.…They are the very offal of men, dregs of mankind, reproach of Christendom, the bots that crawl on the beast’s tail.”
The town of Drogheda lies on Ireland’s east coast a few miles north of Dublin. Today it is primarily known as the town that Oliver Cromwell viciously destroyed. Today some historians try to depict this in a better light, but by all accounts, it was a horrifying massacre. Cromwell’s army slaughtered at least a thousand men, women, and children.
Priests were burned alive in churches. This didn’t bother the hyper-religious Cromwell because, as he wrote, “I am persuaded that this is a righteous judgment of God upon these barbarous wretches.”
Cromwell was so brutal at Drogheda that other Irish towns started surrendering to him as soon as they heard what he did. Wexford, the exception, received the Drogheda treatment. Women and children were not spared. Cromwell left before he was finished, but his officers eventually completely crushed Ireland.
England treated the Irish as if their neighbors weren’t quite human. England employed “mancatchers,” who were paid by the head for rounding up stray Irish people. Women, especially young, breeding women, brought a higher price. The Irish were then herded into pens and branded. Then they were sold into slavery and sent to either the American colonies or the West Indies. Many were given names so that “they might thus lose their faith and all knowledge of their nationality.”
It was very important to Cromwell that the Irish be defeated spiritually. He set about making every surviving Irish person convert to the Protestant side. Many did this to avoid being killed, but Cromwell never got the Irish “hearts and minds.” In the West of Ireland a lot of the people “attending” Protestant services didn’t even speak English.
But, on the surface, Ireland was a Protestant country. Protestants now owned all of the good Irish land. Eastern Catholic owners were forced to give up their good farming land and move to the stony west. Priests were hunted and killed. Going to mass could get you killed. Furtive Catholic services were held outside using large rocks for altars.
In all, about one-third of Catholic Ireland was killed dur
ing the horrible era.
Oliver Cromwell is not a popular man in Ireland. The very sound of his name evoked a reaction like a profanity in Ireland.
When he died, and Charles II became king, things got slightly better for Ireland. About a third of the stolen land was returned, but by and large, life in Ireland was still utterly miserable.
In 1685 James II, a Catholic, became king and tried to return Ireland to Catholicism. Back in England a group that wanted James’s son-in-law, William of Orange, to become king, opposed him.
In 1690 James and his Irish partisans were defeated by William III in the most famous battle in Irish history, the Battle of the Boyne. England tried to make sure that there was no other Catholic uprising in Ireland, and they were utterly ruthless about it. This vast hostility was embodied as the infamous “Penal Code.”
Catholics were barred from the army and the navy and every single civic activity. Catholics couldn’t vote or hold any office. If a Catholic landowner died, and one of his sons was Protestant, that son got all the property. Catholics were not allowed to attend school. Turning in “renegade” Catholics was encouraged. All Catholic priests and Jesuits were banished from Ireland.
“The Penal Code,” as these post–Battle of the Boyne laws were called, was described by the English statesman Edmund Burke as “a machine as well fitted for the oppression, impoverishment, and degradation of a people, and the debasement in them of human nature itself, as ever proceeded from the perverted imagination of man.”
You would think that the Catholic religion would have faded away in Ireland, but it didn’t happen. Ireland, throughout the saddest centuries, hung on to the Catholic faith. Despite prodigious efforts, England never subdued the Irish Catholic faith. Some call this miraculous, while others see it as part of the stubborn Irish national character.
The seventeenth century was very rough on the Irish. In 1649 Catholics legally owned 59 percent of Irish land; by 1714, the number was 7 percent. The Irish now had to pay rent on the land that had always been theirs. They had to support a church that was not theirs, a government that was not theirs.
Late in the eighteenth century, encouraged by the French and American revolutions, Ireland developed a grass-roots revolutionary movement, a group of Irish farmers called the Pikemen. They were named after the metal weapons they had forged. They were also known as the “United Irishmen.”
By 1800, after massive carnage, England finally decided to make Ireland “part of England.” It passed something called the “Act of Union.” There were now Irish people in Parliament. The penal laws were abolished. In 1829 the Catholic Emancipation Act meant that even Catholics could serve in Parliament. Things seemed to be looking up.
But then just when it seemed that Ireland’s long sorrow was ending, things got really, really bad. If God did this, wrote an Irishman of the 1840s, it was difficult to see just what he had in mind.
EIGHT
Becoming a Tourist
We noticed that we were hanging by the ocean, so we decided to venture inland. Mullingar was our destination. We knew some people, Americans, who were staying for a few months for business reasons. They were not at all unusual in this. All over Ireland you will find Americans who are engaged in a prolonged Irish stay for economic rather than recreational reasons. Some of these businesspeople fall in love with Ireland and want to stay permanently. An equal number (generalizing from my limited experience) want to get the hell out of Ireland as soon as possible.
The people who wanted to stay were people who were repulsed by the fast-paced thing that America circa 2000 has become. These people often expressed a sincere loathing for things like answering machines, impersonal, computer-generated “customer service,” both-parents-working-strangers-raise-the-kids weeks, thirteen-hour workdays, and so forth. These people wanted to escape. In Ireland they thought, briefly, that they had found what they were seeking. However, once they stayed in Ireland, they found that Ireland (at least the eastern half of Ireland) is very much like the America they wanted to escape. Even in the west, you see things like a guy taking a break from farming to take a call on his cell phone in the middle of the field. I took a great picture of a sweaty, salt-of-the-earth guy in a field surrounded by sheep with a Nokia glued to his ear.
The Americans I know who hated Ireland inevitably complained about the things that the other Americans were vainly seeking (the sheep, the slowness, the bog, good water pressure in the shower, and so forth).
The truth is, both of these groups, in the long run, aren’t going to like Ireland. The slow Ireland lovers need to look into the Robinson Crusoe/Castaway/Carlos Castaneda area. A smaller uninhabited island is what they seek. The slow Ireland haters already have what they want in America.
The really great thing that you can find in Ireland is very subtle. But it’s over there. In Ireland aka God’s Waiting Room. If you walk into an “Irish” store in America, you will find, on a coffee cup or a piece of linen or a T-shirt, some version of these words: There are two types of people in the world—the Irish and the people who want to be Irish.
That sounds a bit cocky, but after a few days of wandering around in the West of Ireland, I started, in a way, to believe it. But “Irish” doesn’t have anything to do with the gene pool. “Irish” means something else. Many Americans (like Paulette and me) who spend enough time there begin to feel it. It happened to Paulette and me after about a week in Ireland, and it happened to almost everyone I talked to who had visited Ireland. It has to do with time. (I’m not going Stephen Hawking on you.)
In America everyone knows what time it is. They know how much time they have until they get to the next thing they’re going to do. Life is a series of little hurdles. We see them coming. We anticipate them. We approach them. We go over them. Then we do the same thing again in a slightly different form. Some of the hurdles are higher than others. “Work” is pretty high. “School” can be pretty high. “Fun” is low. “Death,” the last one, is a big Marine-style wall.
In Ireland there aren’t any hurdles. You still have to do everything you have to do in America, but you don’t run to hurdles, and you don’t have to jump them. You can just walk around them if you feel like it. You get the overwhelming feeling: This can all happen without me. Pretty soon it will.
You don’t dread leaving the stage, but you don’t want to hurry it either. And, at any time, there’s always time for a cup of whatever.
Mullingar has a bad-sounding name. I can imagine what James Joyce would do with that name. But it’s actually a very nice place: sort of halfway between Mayo and Dublin, in every sense. Mullingar is usually considered a “market town.” It’s set in an area of beautiful peaks and valleys. The Irish type of peak and valley. Very gradual and not too shocking. Something to paint, not climb.
There are a lot of tiny lakes around Mullingar. All of this is “landscape by God” except for something called the Royal Canal. The Royal Canal was Irish made under the gentle guidance of the Brits, hence the name. The idea was to connect Dublin with the Shannon. This made a lot of sense in the eighteenth century because heavy things were then moved on water.
By the end of the nineteenth century, of course, the Royal Canal didn’t have a raison d’être anymore, but it looks nice. Today the banks make a nice place for bicycles, and there are always a lot of them. The old canal is also, apparently (on the day we arrived, at least), big with fishermen. These fishermen, however, looked much more the Dick Cheney variety than the Saint Peter type. They looked like a Lands’ End catalogue.
Mullingar has a beautiful Catholic church. Even among Irish Catholic churches, it’s something. We spent about an hour in it. The hour seemed like five minutes. In a church, I really felt “the Irish Factor.”
In Ireland I slowly noticed that I was responding to things in a different way. Everybody has had the experience of going on a vacation and taking off the watch and seriously slowing down, but in Ireland my experience was much different. I really felt that the old
Frank Gannon was back there a couple of thousand miles away, while this Frank Gannon was a completely different person.
When talking with someone I started to respond in a very non-me way. I would pause a little before replying. I would savor the words I had just heard, and reply in a more measured, oblique way. I would think about every word I said and heard. I found that the “point” of the conversation was the least important part. I started to look at conversation as little dances. Sometimes I would follow, sometimes I would lead. But I gave up the idea of any kind of conversational destination. A conversation in America was a walk in a straight line. A conversation in Ireland was a meandering walk in the woods with lots of detours along the way. And I never thought much about where exactly it was going.
The road is more interesting than the thing at the end of the road. And, after a couple of weeks in Ireland, I found that I had adopted that attitude. Commitments? Expectations? Goals? I gave up on all that and found that it wasn’t missed. I existed in some little, tranquil, directionless state. There was no point in hurrying because where were you hurrying? There was no point in slowing down because why slow down? There was no point in stopping, unless, of course, you felt like it. We drove and we ate and we talked and we went to the bathroom. Our plan now was completely gone. Our modified plan was completely gone. The very idea of having a plan seemed absurd. What good can a plan do you in such an unplanned environment? No plan can help, so the answer seemed clear: Avoid all plans!
We neither reaped nor sowed, like the birds of the air. We slept when tired. We slept where it seemed good to sleep—on the ground, wherever. When I had to go to the bathroom, the bathroom became optional.
I once had a job as a security guard. I had only one duty: Turn on the lights. Yet I forgot this at least 25 percent of the time. I sat there in the dark like an idiot, until it finally hit me: I’ve forgotten something!
