The Great Shame: And the Triumph of the Irish in the English-Speaking World

by Thomas Keneally

  Waiting, the common prisoners conversed in Irish, for in western Ireland more than 80 per cent of the people still spoke the native language. In Irish, the Gaelic language, men from one ward might cry to women in another. Their cries of grief and separation rose up the walls.

  The annual crisis of 12 July, the Glorious Twelfth, on which the Orange Lodges paraded in celebration of the Protestant victory of the Boyne in 1690, came round as Hugh Larkin awaited trial. Sir William Gossett, Senior Constable of Ireland, this year tried to dissuade the Lodges from marching. But Orange fear of a Papist takeover of civic institutions—sustained in Ulster into modern times—energised the Orange Lodges to march in the July of Hugh’s imprisonment, celebrating their ancestors’ valour with banging of drum, jauntiness of pipe and flute, and some gestures of threat.

  The robust Orange pipe music, behind which lay a ferocious pride and anxiety, would have penetrated the stones of the county gaol as Hugh filled his time with regret and discreet, impotent promises to Esther, come 35 miles at great expense to see him and to his widowed mother and Esther’s brothers. In his straw-strewn ward, he may have been jigging one of his infant sons for the last time on his knee as Orangemen processed rowdily in Galway.

  On 18 July, The Times correspondent attributed the general peace of the day to the ‘prudent advice of Roman Catholic clergy.’ But an affray developed in Coote Hill, County Cavan. There the Orange procession turned riotous and four Catholics were killed. As often happened in Ireland, the police magistrates had gone missing from the town on the day of the march, and remained in hiding for some days after. Three days later, the 12 July killings of Catholics were dismally avenged. ‘An innocent Protestant’ was beset by 200 Catholics and beaten to death.

  The Englishman Inglis, travelling in Ireland that summer, talked of ‘the military air’ of courts: ‘the armed police in military uniform, guarding the avenues, and stationed throughout the court.’ Justice, after the waiting, was brisk though. The young French nobleman de Tocqueville, journeying in Ireland two summers later, wrote in some astonishment: ‘The same man was often indicted by the Grand Jury, found guilty by the Petty Jury, and condemned by a judge in the course of an hour.’ Larkin seemed to get that sort of treatment, and after the jury had found him guilty of ‘assaulting habitation and being in arms,’ Justice Torrens, presiding judge at the Assizes, whose journeys around Ireland for court-sittings permitted him to indulge a passion for fox-hunting, informed Hugh that his outrage had earned him a lifetime sentence of transportation.

  By comparison, the manslaughterer Bartholomew O’Donnell was sentenced to only twelve months’ hard labour, and the disparity seems at first confusing. But O’Donnell had been implicated in a faction fight: death of a participant at an all-in brawl between clans, rival parishes or baronies at a county or local fair was often considered bad luck and a result of exuberance. ‘An English murder is a private act,’ said Inglis, ‘perpetrated by some ruffian for the sake of gain.’ In Ireland, homicide was committed ‘by a crowd of demi-barbarians … who have no other reason for fighting, than because one half of the number are called O’Sullivan and the other O’ something else.’

  Justice Torrens, inured to the grief of the relatives of prisoners, to the keening of women like Esther and Widow Larkin, and to the closed hostile faces of men, noted that the number of prisoners had been small, and that there seemed to be diminished unrest in Galway compared to the previous summer.

  The Irish nationalist Galway Free Press of Wednesday 31 July remarked, after mentioning Larkin, that ‘There were no other trials or convictions of any importance with the exception of one, wherein a man named Hessian was found guilty of Terry-Altism and sentenced to immediate transportation for life.’ The Free Press continued: ‘After sentence was pronounced he [Hessian] was instantly removed from the dock and conveyed under strong escort of the 60th Rifles, to Gort.’ But Larkin and the Strahanes remained in Galway. Removal of Hessian to the orderly garrison town of Gort might have occurred because of risk of disturbances and even rescue attempts by his friends and family.

  Because of the contempt of the Irish peasant for the court system, the accusation that one man might have informed on another was, and is to this day, a serious matter. According to a modern member of the Larkin family, in one version of Hugh’s story, a shadow of that accusation hangs over Hugh himself. In this account, a well-regarded Terry Alt named John Lohan is said to have fulfilled his oath in the case of Hugh’s grievance and come down from Ahascragh, well to the north of Ballinasloe, to attack Seymour’s property. For Ribbon oaths might include a clause like the following: ‘I hereby swear to go 15 miles on foot or 21 on horseback, when called upon by a brother upon lawful occasion or unlawful.’

  I was told that Larkin was the junior member of what could be called a troika of East Galway Ribbonmen: Lohan, Coonahan, Larkin. Ribbonism was an abomination not only to landlords but to the parish priest of Hugh’s parish of Clontuskert, the Pope having condemned such secret societies in a decree of 1825. Thus, according to this version, in 1832 Coonahan was sent to the army in Ballinasloe with a note from the priest, and on arrival was shackled, marched back home and lynched in his garden.

  Lohan is said to have been a party to an earlier Whiteboy outrage. An apparently empty house had been set afire, and a servant in a rear room had been accidentally killed. Afterwards, Lohan spoke to Larkin about the incident and expressed guilt and regret. When Larkin was captured, transported in chains by canal barge to Ballinasloe, struck, bruised, threatened with imminent lynching and revenge against his family, news of Lohan’s involvement in the earlier house-burning was forced from Larkin. On Hugh’s evidence then, Lohan was at some stage taken back to his village of Ahascragh and hanged, and then Hugh himself received a life sentence. ‘I wanted to make sure you knew what a terrible place Ireland was then before I told you this story,’ a modern Larkin explained to me.

  But there is no evidence for this account. No Coonahan was hanged in the early 1830s—it would have made the Galway and Dublin papers had he been. If a Lohan from Ahascragh accompanied Larkin to the back door of Somerset House, there is no record of his trial or of his public execution, as again there would certainly have been. He is absent from Hugh’s Assizes and those for the previous year. Some Ribbonmen of course simply vanished, summarily conscripted into one of the overseas battalions of that very 60th Regiment of Foot which provided the escort for Hessian on the way to Gort. But they were not put into the 60th if they had caused a death.

  And the idea generated by this story that Larkin was one of a small body of East Galway Ribbonmen is not borne out by the facts. In April 1833, there was so much Ribbon activity in the barony of Longford, Hugh’s neighbourhood, that Lord Clancarty, the Church of Ireland Bishop of Clonfert and the local magistrates sought the imposition on the area of the Coercion Act, enabling summary arrest and punishment. In Eyrecourt, only six miles from Lismany, the rebellious feeling of tenants was described as ‘formidable if not checked in time.’

  It is possible that the tale of the East Galway Ribbonman Ned Lohan, condemned to death at the Galway Assizes of August 1820 and hanged in his own village, was grafted over time on to the Larkin one—and an Irish historian I spoke to told me that similar graftings occurred in oral history. Therefore, Hugh’s record, however sullied from Justice Torren’s point of view, remains utterly unblemished from the point of view of Terry Alts.

  After weeks of imprisonment, Hugh was aching for familial squalor. He would never again feel the warmth of cottage peat smoke or smell the turf fire, turf being a large element in the peasant view of earthly paradise. Turf or peat, cut with spades called loys, was composed of ancient trees, fallen into Ireland’s primeval swamps and partially carbonised, on their way to becoming coal. There was a bog a short walk to the south of Lismany, and a succession of them near the Laurence estate of Belview, not more than 3 miles down the road from Larkin’s cottage, near the village of Laurencetown. Convivial turf warmed t
he Irish family in a land where the woods were owned by landlords and unavailable as legal fuel. It filled Hugh’s chimney-less cabin with smoke, rendering clothing disreputable. De Tocqueville remarked that he would have thought himself back in the company of his friends the Iriquois of Upper New York, except that the interior of the Iriquois habitations had a smoke hole: ‘which gives a decided advantage to the architecture of the Iriquois.’

  But all of it, house, fire, peat-reek, pig, child, song, sportiveness, painfully dear to Hugh! His condition was captured in a Gaelic song about an imprisoned Ribbonman:

  O a year from tomorrow I left my own people,

  I went down to Ardpatrick, the ribbons in my hat.

  Some Whiteboys were there then, they were fighting the English

  And now I’m sad and lonely in the jail of Clonmel.

  My bridle and saddle are gone from me this long time,

  My hurley long hidden behind my own door,

  My slither’s being played by the boys of the valley

  The one I could hit a goal with as good as another.

  One of the central rituals Larkin was leaving and might miss most was the wake of the dead, of which modern Irish wakes are merely a shadow. In an early chapter of a didactic novel published in Dublin that year, Irish Cottagers, a Scots land steward asked an Irishman whether at a particular wake there had been a lecture from a minister of religion. He was told instead that first and foremost the dead were honoured with drink and games named Five and Forty and Hunt the Slipper and that the wake was held as much for the sake of courting as for mourning. The Scot asked whether all this profligacy went on in the house where the dead man lay? He was told a ‘dead wall’ was placed between the corpse and the party. As for the widow and family in their grief, no one ‘hindered them from crying their full … and a good right they had to cry.’

  Two years past, the Archbishop of Dublin had forbidden ‘disorderly vigils for the dead’ but said that ‘they are to be gradually abolished.’ That unusually lenient adverb, ‘gradually,’ indicated how endemic was this great ritual of riotous mourning, song, licensed drunkenness, sexual playfulness and renewal. Some of Hugh’s and Esther’s courting was inevitably conducted at wakes, ‘where the young of both sexes meet, and the night is generally consumed in drinking whiskey, smoking tobacco and playing different games of romps, etc.’ A wake game named Flimsy-flamsy, in which girls sat in turns on a man’s knee and were asked, ‘Flimsy-flamsy, who’s your fancy?,’ was singled out for special clerical condemnation, but Hugh and Esther were likely to have played it.

  Of another game named Boat, the antiquarian Prim wrote that it ‘was joined in by men and women who all acted a very obscene part which cannot be described.’ In Drawing the Ship out of the Mud, men appeared before the rest of the group totally naked. Mock Marriages, Building the Fort and Hold the Light were other games Hugh and Esther may have played when separated from the dead by a mere screen.

  Larkin was to be deprived of a landscape of mysteries too, some kindly, some more threatening, but all familiar. A spirit world—quite separate from the spiritual cosmos of Catholicism—abutted upon the seen world of pasture, wood, bog and farmland. Hugh and Esther knew which types of bush were believed to be sacred to the fairies and to be left severely alone in the midst of cultivated fields. Johann Kohl, a German visitor, noticed that although the Irish would remove wood from a landlord’s plantation, they never took wood from the growth that covered ‘fairy-mounds,’ prehistoric mound tombs. The water of holy wells protected the individual soul from curses or fairy tricks, and from Geasa Dravidacht, the sorcery of the Druids.

  Hugh’s cherished landscape did not lack known perils then. A person betrayed into praising a child or an animal needed to add, ‘God save him,’ and spit immediately after. Women incurred ill fortune if they did not sweep the floor towards the door; candles were not to be lit before making the sign of the cross; an oatcake was not to be consumed before a piece was nipped off and thrown away. The worst danger was that changelings, homunculi or imitation humans, might be left in the place of children who had been abducted by fairies. To ‘put the fairy out’ of a child required harsh treatment. Eight-year-old Ann Moorhouse of Rathvilly, County Carlow, would die in 1837 as a result of bluestone, copper sulphate, administered to her by a servant who believed her to be a fairy. But all these—curses, fairies, changelings—were known risks and they could be wisely combated.

  And through tales of other places carried home to Ireland by old soldiers, sailors or itinerant workers, a man like Hugh implicitly knew that whatever his conditions of land tenure were, a peculiar grace reigned at the Irish hearth, while the outer world was vicious. O’Connell had reflected on this when he said that despite the crowded conditions of the Irish household, incest was extremely rare—any man accused of it became ostracised and universally condemned. In Lismany Hugh knew where he was with sexual morality. Despite all the concerns of reforming visitors to Ireland about earthy liberties at wakes, the famed traveller de Tocqueville, dining with the Catholic Bishop of Ossory, was told that twenty years in the confessional had made the bishop aware that sexual misconduct was very rare, and amongst married women almost unknown. Yet de Tocqueville would find that virtue was exercised with a high degree of rustic informality. Of the west of Ireland he would write: ‘I have seen young girls bathing naked in the sea a short distance from young men.’

  Now Hugh suspected that, in passing on a ship through some blazing latitude, he would lose the balance of good order and good fun, the complex of teasing ardour, wild games and securely fixed behaviour. And lose too the outward sign of that viability, the sacraments of the Church, and all the markers of his year. He would lose 1 February, St Brigid’s, when crosses of rushes or straw were hung over any small outhouse or scalp that contained seed, and also in the cabin for health and fertility of humans and livestock. He would lose 1 May, when tenancies began and ended, and cattle and sheep were joyfully transferred from their byres to the open fields. He was slated for a Christ-less place where all these customs and calendar references, sacred and profane, would be either reversed—summer being winter—or meaningless.

  On a Monday morning, 19 August, Hugh and 21 others were taken in the clothes in which they had been arrested out of their wards, chained at wrist and ankle and then to other weeping, cursing or bewildered transportees, and placed in four carts, all under the supervision of a detachment of the 30th Regiment. Like a similar procession witnessed two years before in the square outside Galway gaol, the procession of carts moved slowly, the military escort crowded in by weeping relatives, wives and children, wives being permitted to raise infants for a last paternal kiss, but all others being kept back, moaning and cursing and crying farewells. The hope Esther had harboured that a ship would not be available to take Hugh off proved futile. In fact the carts of the Galway men were merely joining an already existing convoy of Mayo transportees from the gaol at Castlebar.

  Sometimes wives tried to walk along with the column, persuading constables and soldiers to permit a last tearful intimacy. But the Esthers of Ireland soon enough had to turn back, to go back to their landlords, work and children. Returned to her parish of Clontuskert, Esther needed to go on labouring for the Seymours and sometimes for the Lawrences of nearby Belview, from whom Laurencetown took its name. Hugh’s mother and wife had not been thrown out of their cottage, a sign both of humanity on Seymour’s part and maybe even of a fear of Ribbonman reprisal.

  That same summer and early autumn cholera had appeared in Connacht. The New South Wales emigration agent for Galway, Mr Logan, competing with the far greater, mass-volume emigrant trade to the United States, chose this season of epidemic, hardship and political turbulence to advocate emigration to Australia. He submitted letters, supposedly written by Australian settlers, which spoke of fine weather, prime beef costing only 2 pence a pound and an acre of land 5 shillings. But Hugh was facing involuntary emigration.

  Larkin and his company travell
ed about a hundred miles south to the Cobh of Cork. Apparently Hugh’s longest journey yet, these miles were minor compared to the distances which waited to be traversed. In Gort the convoy of carts had collected young John Hessian. Already in the carts were the two brothers Strahane, John and Michael, twenty-four and twenty-two years, both single, guilty of the Ribbon offence of illegally storing arms—as Galway gamekeepers, they had been conveniently placed to do so. Patrick Qualters, 28-year-old father of two, who had posted a Ribbon notice, was also on the chain, with Darby Goode, a farm servant, and Patrick Kelley, both of whom had stolen firearms. The sentences of these five were only seven years each: they might have had the notion of an ultimate return to Galway. But they must have known in their blood that the resources required for a return over that global distance were not within their reach.

  Others amongst the chained Galway men had committed minor and conventional crimes. James McKeon, 34-year-old shoemaker, had received stolen goods; John Allen, groom, and an English cabinet-maker named George Botham had stolen cloth and flannel. John Concannon took a sheep (life sentence); Patrick Healy, unemployed weaver and father of two, likewise. Edward Coghlan was a young forger; 14-year-old farrier and groom Timothy Cusack had lifted cash; George Hefferman, a butcher, carried a life sentence for manslaughter; and William Kelley, a shepherd, life for stealing a horse.

  Their path skirted the limestone desert, the Burren of Clare, on one side, and the Slieve Aughty Mountains on the other, through Ennis itself, past the Gaelic ruins of Bunratty, and over the Shannon. At night they were accommodated in county or city gaols. Their jokes, curses, coughs and prayers were absorbed by the stone walls of counties previously unknown to most of them. They were by turns watchful for improbable escape, cowed by the guards, chastened by the miles of the journey, and the harm chains did to wrist and ankle. And though Cusack the 14-year-old farrier must have affected worldliness, he needed the protection of older men. There is a mass of evidence that Irish rural first offenders did not practise gaol rape. But blows, ironies, cruel songs and harsh mockery to cover one’s own loss of a place in the world—these were common.