Blood-Dark Track

by Joseph O'Neill

  Meanwhile in Iskenderun, where the Dakak family lived, trouble started after rumours spread from Adana of violent Armenian insurrection. On 17 April, Muslims – Turks, Kurds, Circassians – armed with revolvers, long knives, and guns plundered from military stores, began to march about the town in white turbans and to terrorize the rural Christian populace; houses and hamlets in the hills surrounding Iskenderun could be seen in flames. That evening, the British Honorary Consul, Joseph Catoni, reported, ‘A large number of families left Alexandretta by the Austrian mail steamer for Cyprus.’ In the steamer, it could safely be inferred, travelled Caro and Basile Dakak and their three children – who included, of course, my nine-year-old grandfather.

  On 30 June 1909, the representatives of the Christian communities – Gregorian, Armenian, Protestant, Roman Catholic, Syrian, Greek Catholic, and Chaldaean – made the following public declaration:

  The Christians of the district and city of Adana desire to express their deep regret concerning the great misfortune which has befallen them, and the false imputation raised against them. They desire to make declaration as to their real position.

  We, the Christians of Adana and adjacent districts, have been faithful to the constitution from the time of its proclamation, and we earnestly desire its continuance and success. As true Ottoman subjects, our desire and effort has been to protect the constitution and to be found on the side of those who love and serve it. We emphatically protest against all imputations of rebellion made against us. We have never rebelled, and the idea of rebellion has never entered our minds. We, although loyal subjects, have suffered and been persecuted, and we have been sacrificed to the envy and malevolence of bigoted and evil-minded persons. We are the victims of machinations and schemes which caused heaven and earth to weep and wonder. Our loyalty to the Government is proved by the fact that in the very beginning of the troubles we appealed for Government protection, and later, on the first possible opportunity, we renewed our appeal.

  We again declare our loyalty to the constitution. We are ready and eager to make any sacrifice for the true welfare of our beloved land, and we declare also that we cherish no spirit of revenge, notwithstanding the suffering which we have endured. Our earnest plea to our Muslim fellow countrymen is that they should work in harmony with the various other communities which compose the Ottoman Empire. May the goodwill and fellowship which appeared at the time of the proclamation of the constitution appear again!.… Let unity, fraternity, equality and justice prevail.…

  As I read this pathetic announcement – all the more poignant if one looked back on it, as I later did, with knowledge of the apocalypse looming for the Armenians – I felt ashamed that I’d always held against my Turkish family and friends their aloofness from such issues as the oppression of Turkish Kurds. I’d had no real idea of the cost of political action in Turkey or of the abysmal hazards that faced a Christian Turk.

  As for Joseph, I realized that, like Jim O’Neill, he had grown up in a malignant, dreadful world that had marked him in ways I had yet to evaluate.

  A few days after returning from the north of Ireland with Brendan, I drove out to West Cork to take a stroll by the river. However, when I reached Manch, the scene of so many famous poaching adventures, I impulsively swung the car through the gates of the Manch estate. Somewhere in these woods, in some Big House I’d never seen, lived the Conner family, whose exclusive fishing rights over stretches of the Bandon had been persistently violated by generations of my own family. For all I knew, nobody in my family had laid eyes on the house, at least not from the perspective of a visitor winding his way up the drive to make a social call. I drove past a meadow and then slowly up a driveway that curved through rhododendron bushes and thick forest. Manch House appeared in a clearing in the woods. It stood at the far end of a small fairway, a large, graciously proportioned, pale-stoned building with a tower and a view of the valley that, by a trick of landscaping, was unreciprocated.

  I had barely stopped the engine before a cat and three dogs, including an enormous Irish wolfhound, had surrounded the car. A white-haired, white-bearded fellow in his late fifties, who later introduced himself as Con (Cornelius) Conner, came out slowly with his hands in his pockets and asked if he could help me. I explained that I was a member of the O’Neill family, from Ardkitt, and that I was researching my grandfather’s poaching antics on the river. Conner, a quiet-spoken, glumly humorous man with a soft English-Irish accent, did not know about any Ardkitt O’Neills, but he confirmed that his family owned about two miles of fishing rights. His father had given over a stretch of the river to the public in the hope of dissuading poachers, he said, but it was a crappy stretch and of course the ploy didn’t work. A jeepload of bailiffs still wandered around the river now and again, Conner said gloomily. Their duties were diffuse these days, and they even went out to sea in a fast boat that came courtesy of the EC. There wasn’t much poaching at all any more, Conner said, although needless to say there were still some idiots who took disproportionate risks, including some who engaged in an obscene competition to catch the most trout using a worm bait. There weren’t the number of fish there used to be and the incentive to poach disappeared once salmon farming made the fish available to the masses. In the old days, things were different. He could remember selling an 18lb salmon for £5 in 1952, when land cost £50 an acre.

  Con Conner mentioned that he was The O’Connor Kerry – the chief of the O’Connor Kerry clan. ‘We have our own little world,’ he volunteered with an air of faint dismay. ‘We’re West British, really; our cultural feelings would be closely tied to British culture. My father was on the English side to begin with,’ he continued, seamlessly moving on to the subject of the Troubles, ‘but then joined Fine Gael when the British failed to shoot de Valera after they captured him in 1916.’ The family hadn’t always been unionist or pro-establishment in sentiment, he added. The brothers Arthur and Roger O’Connor were leading figures in the 1798 rebellion, and next year a monument was to be erected at Manch to commemorate them and the two hundredth anniversary of the rebellion.

  He invited me into the house, which was built in 1826; the oldest Conner residence, the seventeenth century Carrigmore House, stood elsewhere on the estate. The ground floor living quarters had the chaotic, dustily charming ambience of a jumble sale. There was a clutter of old family portraits, old bits of furniture, and a giant old stove heater; and to complete the picture of decaying Ascendancy privilege, Oriana Conner, Con’s wife, was seated in a corner of the kitchen totting up bills with the help of an associate. Over a cup of tea, I spoke a little about my family’s years of theft on their stretch of the river. Oriana – an Irishwoman with an English accent – laughed, saying that families needed to be fed. We talked amiably for a while longer, and then the Conners showed me around the two self-contained apartments they had created for paying guests. As I left they placed a brochure and advertisement slips in my hand and urged me to tell my fishing friends at the English Bar to come over. Non-fishing guests would also find the Manch House Fishery to their liking, the brochure assured me. Riding, golf, sightseeing, gourmet restaurants and great pubs were all within easy reach. There was fresh organic produce available from the Manch organic farm, where a flock of milk sheep, poultry, and outdoor pigs lived pleasant, non-intensive lives. Over half of the estate was given over to organic farming; the rest of the estate was broadleaf woodland. A signed handwritten message appeared at the end of the brochure: We enjoy sharing with our guests the beauty and tranquillity of Manch and the Bandon river. We want you to have a thoroughly enjoyable holiday and will do our best to make it so. Con and Oriana.

  I drove out of the Manch estate marvelling at the social reduction of these once-so-powerful families, whose way of life, which once turned on fastidious exclusiveness, now depended on the number of strangers they could persuade to stay in their homes. The change was, in its way, revolutionary. Moreover, by my unannounced visit the ancient, quasi-mystical distance that had separated
the Conners and the O’Neills had suddenly shrunk to more normal proportions. They would no longer seem quite as powerful and strange and inhuman, and perhaps we, in the light of day, might no longer figure as purely anonymous shadows moving around the black river.

  I stopped the car a couple of hundred yards away, by the Conner’s West Farm, and parked on the verge of the road. I knew, from a recent visit here with my uncles Brendan and Jim, that the river flowed very close by, unseen behind hedges and greenery. I climbed over a locked gate (no entry was permitted without authorization, a sign declared) and walked through uneven grassland, some of it thigh-high, toward the river. I stepped over the defunct track of the old railway line. I came to the river. A black concrete ridge had in recent years been built into the bank as a fortification against the erosive current. Waste paper and a plastic bottle disclosed that someone had not long ago been fishing here. On the far side of the river were open fields; to the east, about half a mile away by the Curraghcrowley townland, was a wooded height. Kilcascan Castle, the only other Big House in the locality and the former home of the O’Neill Daunt family (no relation), was hidden by the magnificent hilltop trees, in the shelter of which my grandfather’s getaway car had sometimes been parked.

  I was standing by the pool known as the Key Hole, which even in daylight was like a still pool of ink. I tossed a stone into the pool; no salmon moved. I remembered that in the Skibbereen Southern Star of 4 February 1956, there had appeared a report about an action brought by Henry Conner, of Manch House, against Cork County Council in respect of loss suffered as a result of a poisoning of the Key Hole with bluestone by unknown poachers acting out of revenge. Six salmon – valued at £49 16s. 0d. – and 35 brown trout had been killed.

  There was an irony about the poison used, because it was bluestone (a compound of copper sulphate) that finally eliminated the fungus which, in the second half of the 1840s, had repeatedly reduced the Irish potato crop to a black, rotting mess, a catastrophe that led to anything between 750,000 and 1.5 million excess deaths and a million or more emigrations. This part of Cork had not escaped the effects of the Great Famine. The Enniskean parish population fell by 46 per cent from 1841–51, the worst affected being the labourer-cottier class, whose dietary dependence on potatoes exposed them to starvation and whose living conditions – it was not unusual for a family to sleep with its pig on the mud floor of a turf-heated cabin – made them vulnerable to the cholera, dysentery and typhus epidemics that (as in the Mersin of those days) accounted for so many lives. The lack of decent shelter was exacerbated by opportunistic evictions and clearances undertaken by landlords (whose primary residence was often in England) to expand and consolidate their holdings. The townland of Ardkitt, which at that time was poorly drained and contained much more bog and rough pasture than today, saw its population drop by 35 per cent, and the village of Enniskean was depopulated by 53 per cent. The Great Famine was on my mind because, it so happened, its 150th anniversary had been marked earlier in the month by the Great Famine Event, in which President Mary Robinson and other notables had taken part. The Event took the form of musical concerts, readings and historical reconstructions, and the media reported it as a great success much enjoyed by young people.

  It was unclear how the O’Neill family fitted into this scheme of devastation. There wasn’t any family story about the Great Hunger, and I couldn’t even be sure that my ancestors – Jim O’Neill’s great-grandfather’s generation – had lived in this area at the relevant time. At any rate, Jim O’Neill had surely been displeased about the bluestone incident. However much he might have sympathized with the infliction of injury on Ascendancy landowners, he had a great respect for and, more importantly, a direct interest in the welfare of river and its stock; and the Key Hole was perhaps his favourite salmon holding pool.

  I walked east along the bank. The trees grew thicker here and provided more cover than they did in the poaching days, when the railway company kept the branches in check. The bank, at this point a narrow ledge caught between the river and the railway embankment, rose six sheer feet above the water; dragging a net along here in the slippery darkness, from one pool to the next, could not have been an easy or safe business. The bank descended to water-level and I came to another bulge in the river. Here, among dripping alder trees, was the pool known as the Forge Hole. My grandfather used to reckon that if there was salmon in the Forge Hole there would be twice as many in the Key Hole.

  There was something illicit about my solitary stroll, even though I was here with the consent of the Conners. But I would still have had to explain myself had a bailiff appeared and challenged me, and it was odd that I, an outsider with an English accent, might be less suspect in such a situation than a local like my grandfather. Which was not to say that Jim O’Neill was deterred by the laws of trespass or the people who enforced them. As a teenager (Grandma had told me), he was walking through the grounds of Kilbrittain Castle when a woman with a shotgun appeared and said to him, ‘No trespassing.’ ‘I’m not trespassing,’ Jim said. ‘I walked this land before you did and I’ll come and go as I please.’ On an other occasion, Jim returned from the river to his car to see his young son, Jim Junior, in the company of two men. He strolled up and asked peremptorily, ‘Who are you?’ ‘I’m a guard, that’s who I am,’ replied one, stating the obvious. ‘Did you identify yourself to my son?’ Jim asked, noting that the men’s uniforms were hidden under overcoats. ‘I did not,’ said the guard. ‘Well then, what are you doing frightening my boy?’ ‘Dad,’ Jim Junior piped up, ‘he wouldn’t believe me when I told him you were gone into the ditch for a call of nature.’ My grandfather – who to the guards’ knowledge had been gone for over half an hour – looked aggressively at the two men. ‘How long I’m in there is my own business, do you understand?’ Jim’s antipathy for the authorities was such that, in the late ’fifties, he resisted ‘out of principle’ the attempts of John Scanlon, Chief Inspector, Cork Board of Fishery Conservators, to recruit him to the corps of Bandon bailiffs. Indeed, Jim actually succeeded (quite how was unclear) in securing the active assistance of two of the Chief Inspector’s men, who would meet my grandfather in a pub in West Cork and tip him off about the whereabouts of the fish and the patrols. One of the two bailiffs, the story went, was a big bully of a man, but he was scared of Jim O’Neill.

  The last time he went poaching was here, at Manch. It was in 1961, and with him were Jim Junior, Brendan, and Brendan’s brother-in-law Seán O’Callaghan, who had just served seven and a half years in prison. The net was in the water when suddenly the bailiffs appeared. My grandfather and Seán ran for it in different directions, while Brendan – in accordance with precedent and practice and legislation, he told me dryly – assumed the responsibility, as the man on the opposite bank from the bailiffs, of trying to hang on to the net. There was a tug of war, which Brendan won by securing the net around a tree. He hid the net in Glenure farm, where the Kilmichael ambushers found billets, Brendan said. Everybody got away that night, even Seán O’Callaghan, who was picked up by the O’Neills near the Red Fort, outside Ballineen, in the early hours of the morning.

  I stopped in at the Red Fort on my way back to Cork and ordered some lunch. On the wall above my table hung a framed newspaper clipping with a photograph taken of ‘The Boys of Kilmichael’ in 1938. The photo showed two rows of men in trenchcoats, smiling for the most part. All their names were set out, and below their names appeared the lyrics of the famous song about the ambush, ‘The Boys of Kilmichael’: ‘We gathered our rifles and bayonets and soon left that glen so obscure,/And we never drew rein till we halted at the faraway camp of Glenure./Then here’s to the boys of Kilmichael, those brave lads so gallant and true,/ Who fought ’neath the green flag of Erin and they conquered the red, white and blue.’ The most famous Boy of Kilmichael of all was, of course, the man who authorized action against Admiral Somerville – Tom Barry.

  It was quite a coincidence, seeing the photograph here. Only an hour or so b
eforehand I had learned from Oriana Conner that the Ballineen-Enniskean Historical Society, in which she was active, had produced a booklet detailing what eventually became of the men who carried out the Kilmichael ambush. What the Historical Society found, when it looked into the matter, was that the ambush seemed to have had an extraordinarily adverse effect on its participants, many of whom went on to lead unusually difficult and saddening lives; and as I drove back to Cork city from the Red Fort, I wondered if there was any link between the Somerville shooting and my grandfather’s hard life. I reflected that the time had come to take a trip to Castletownshend.

  And so, the next day, my grandmother and I drove into West Cork. It surprised me a little that Grandma, who had never in her eighty-five years in county Cork been to Castletownshend, should have so cheerfully assumed the role of my accomplice in the historical disturbance I was intent on committing. She knew about the Ardkitt gun and the abandonment of the getaway car near her aunt’s house in Rathduff, and it must have been apparent that somebody she knew very well had been involved in the killing.