by Fergal Keane
* The rebellion was inspired by the ideals of the American and French Revolutions and led by the United Irishmen, many of them Protestants, who wanted to sever Ireland’s connection with Britain. As many as thirty thousand people are believed to have died before the rebellion collapsed after a brutal campaign of government repression. What began, in part, as rebellion to create an Ireland free of sectarian division ended in massacre and deepened alienation between Catholic and Protestant.
* The Fenians enjoyed military victories over mixed Canadian and British forces until the arrival of colonial reinforcements prompted them to return to the United States. The final death toll from the campaign was an estimated thirty-two Canadians, one British soldier and six Fenians.
* The Irish National Land League was founded in 1879 to campaign for the rights of tenant farmers. It evolved into the biggest mass movement since the campaigns for Catholic Emancipation and Repeal of the Act of Union led by Daniel O’Connell. The confrontation with landlords and the government became known as the Land War. Its leaders were Charles Stewart Parnell and Michael Davitt. It is widely credited with effecting major social change in rural Ireland.
2
The Ground Beneath Their Feet
Come all ye loyal heroes wherever you may be
Don’t hire with any master till you know what your work will be
For you must rise up early from the clear daylight till dawn
Or else you won’t be able to plough the Rocks of Bawn …
My shoes they are well worn now, and my socks are getting thin
And my heart is always trembling for fear they might let in
My heart is always trembling from the clear daylight till dawn
I’m afraid I won’t be able to plough the Rocks of Bawn
Anonymous ballad, nineteenth century
I
I walk the land in late October. I am coming down past Ballydonoghue church where my grandmother Hannah was baptised and married, where her father and mother were baptised, married and buried, where her brother Mick hid from the Tans, and where my people still farm and course their greyhounds and cheer Kerry’s Gaelic football team. The wind is in from the Atlantic and growing stronger as the sun sets on Tralee Bay. It is forty years and more since I last walked these lanes. It has been too long. After my parents’ marriage fell apart the trips to Kerry became fewer, and when I did come it was to see my cousins in the town. I keep close to the hedgerow to avoid the gusts. At the end of the hill I turn right towards Lisselton cemetery, which my grandmother would pass on her way to school early in the twentieth century. As the lane curves around towards the graveyard there is a small patch of ground on which lumps of rough-hewn stone are scattered. They are small, each less than the size of a football. There is a sign that reads: ‘Don’t pray for us/ no sins we knew/ But for our parents/ they’ll pray for you.’
This is the Ceallurach, the burial ground of the unbaptised children of the Famine. In Hannah Purtill’s time there was no sign here to mark the land. They didn’t need one. Everybody knew. My grandmother went to school when there were still living survivors of the disaster. Even then, when people sought every patch of ground to work, the little field was left to become overgrown: outside the burial rites of the church but sacred in its own forbidding, heartbreaking way. Nobody would ever use the land.
I am not a stranger to mass graves. In other places I have seen those mounds bulging out of the earth, the shreds of clothing and shards of bone, and humanity reduced to mulch. I have always seen them as an end result. They have been reached after the sermons of hatred, relentless droughts or the advent of some vast pestilence. But at Lisselton the graves of the dead feel like a beginning. They point me in the direction I need to be going. If I am to understand why my people picked up guns and became revolutionaries some of the answer lies here in these Atlantic fields. On this October evening I begin to walk back into my history. Before leaving I pray for the dead.
Remembrance was private, to be kept suppressed in the heart. For with such immense loss, field after field of it across the county, with so many counting the absences, what could they do but face forwards, lean their shoulders into the work of surviving and hold their grief for night-time, after the quenching of lamps.
Hannah Purtill was born about two miles away from the burial place, in 1901. She was one of four children. The family was small by the standard expectations of the Catholic Church. Perhaps my great-grandfather Edmund Purtill decided he would only rear the number of children his small farm could support.
He laboured for the bigger farmers and worked his own few rented acres. Edmund was poor but not dirt poor. There was food on the table each day and his children went to school. I believe the Purtills came originally out of County Clare where the land was some of the worst in the country. I can find records of them in Ballydonoghue as far back as the 1830s. Rocky, marshy fields that gave nothing back without turning men and women old before their time, or driving their children to America. The Purtills were survivors. Famine had been part of their rural existence for centuries. Those who could work took to their feet rather than starve. Sometimes families followed. At some point in the nineteenth century the Purtills migrated across the River Shannon to north Kerry. The migrants were sometimes called spailpíns, meaning labourers. There was a poem we studied at school called ‘An Spailpín Fánach’ (The Wandering Labourer) about the plight of migrant workers in rural Ireland. The man declares he will give up his life of drudgery and serve with the army of Napoleon:
Never again will I go to Cashel,
Selling and trading my health,
Nor to the hiring-fair, sitting by the wall,
A lounger on the roadside,
You’ll not see a hook in my hand for harvesting,
A flail or a short spade,
But the flag of France over my bed,
And the pike for stabbing.
The poem was part of our compulsory school Irish course and I regarded it as a chore. In those days I learned it in Irish, and I had yet to learn a love for the language my father spoke fluently. My Purtill ancestors’ world was too distant and I could not then conceive of a kinship with those hard-pressed men and women of the nineteenth century.
The Purtills owned a couple of cows. The dairy cow had a mortal significance for the small farmer. The Famine had taught them not to depend on a subsistence crop that might fail. My uncle, John B. Keane, said that the ‘the milch cow was goddess … beautiful when she is young … [and] all education, all houses, all food depend on the milk cow, whether we like it or not’.1 The old homestead was still standing when I was a child. By then the Purtills owned some land and a small herd of cattle. I remember whitewash and thatch and the smell of turf burning on the range and a yard spattered with cow dung after the herd had been brought in for milking. I was allowed to milk one of the more docile cows, my grand-uncle Ned urging me on throughout with a cry of ‘Good man boyeen, pull away let you.’
The old cottage was knocked down decades ago and replaced by a modern bungalow. When I last visited, my elderly cousin Willie was in the yard tending to his greyhounds. He lives there alone. As long as Willie can remember the Purtills raced dogs and hunted. There is a shotgun inside his front door for shooting rabbits and foxes, and, I am sure, to deter any intruder who might try and break in. I would call my Purtill relatives ‘hardy’ people. Willie remembers his parents and grandparents, how ‘they worked like slaves’ and were never sick. If you wanted a poem written or a song sung then you asked their in-laws, the Keanes. If you wanted work done or men to fight a war, then go to the Purtills.
The townland of Ballydonoghue occupies around eight hundred acres between the north Kerry hills and the Atlantic. The sea is close by; the Purtills could smell it as they led the cattle to pasture and back. In winter it gave them hard weather and flooded the fields and lanes. Across in the Shannon river direction lies the hill of Cnoc an Óir (the Hill of Gold) where, in my father’s stories, the st
ar-crossed lovers Diarmuid and Gráinne hid from the pursuing Fianna warriors in the world before history. The beautiful Gráinne was to marry the ageing Fionn, leader of the Fianna, but eloped instead with his younger comrade, Diarmuid, the finest of all the Fianna men. Years later, after they are apparently reconciled, Diarmuid was gored by a wild boar while out hunting with Fionn. All Fionn needed to do, my father explained, was to give him a drink of water from his hands to save his life. But he allowed the water to slip through his fingers. The memory of the old betrayal sent Diarmuid to his grave. Memories were long, said my father.
Hannah and Bill, my grandparents (Family Collection)
I revelled in the summer holidays in north Kerry. Legends flickered into life before my eager-to-believe eyes. This world was larger, it was fantastical, and before it my life in the city was reduced to a brittle impermanence. Here a part of my tribe belonged and would always belong. In those days it was not the land-hungry peasantry I saw as my ancestors but, encouraged by my father, a race of warriors and kings and storytellers. My people in Ballydonoghue did not leave behind written accounts of their lives. They passed on stories by word of mouth. They came from a tradition of fabulism. On May eve children were sent to pick up bluebells to place on the hearth to keep away the people of the spirit world who fluttered on the edge of dusk as child-stealers and harbingers of death. It was considered the worst of luck to plough a fairy fort, usually a mound in the middle of a field in which the people of the spirit world lived, waiting their time to reclaim the earth. Fairies controlled the world of the spirits. To cross them was to invite disaster. Foreshadowings of mortality abounded. My grandmother Hannah’s favourite story was about a man who was passing by Lisselton graveyard one night when he heard the sounds of a football match. ‘Will you help out?’ a player asks. ‘We are a man down.’ Like any good Kerryman he joins in and scores several goals. At the end he is approached and told ‘You will be back next week for good’. Within the week the man was dead and buried.
There were legends that hardened into fact, and hard facts that were softened until they became bearable. I found some local schoolchildren’s essays from the 1930s, when Ballydonoghue was little changed from my grandmother’s time. Cottages were still being lit by lamps, short journeys were made by foot, longer ones by donkey and cart; the social life of the parish revolved around Sunday mass and other religious devotions, weekend football games, and conversations at the gates of the creamery. There were dances, but these were often frowned upon and sometimes banned by the priests. A matchmaker by the name of Dan Paddy Andy O’Sullivan brought lonely farmers and prospective wives together. He also ran a dancehall, and in his youth he fought in the guerrilla war against the English alongside my grandmother and my uncles.
‘The name of my home district is Ballydonoghue,’ wrote one of the schoolchildren, eight-year-old Hanna Kelly.2 ‘About fifteen families live there and the population is over a hundred … some of the houses are thatched and some of them are slated. Most of the houses are labourers’ cottages.’ Gaelic was no longer spoken as the people’s tongue. But in everyday speech the translated forms of the old language infused conversation with a lyric intensity. They were heirs to hedge schools and vanished bardic poets and were natural storytellers with a broad extravagant accent that urbane city folk might mock but whose rootedness they quietly envied. The children’s essays noted the departure of young men and women for England and America, and remarked on the handful of Irish speakers who were left in the area. They wrote about the ruins of an old Yeoman’s barracks – a Protestant militia raised during the early 1790s – and about the lost grave of a Dane from Viking times, and of a fort with a pot of gold.
Wide stretches of bog dominated the ground around Ballydonoghue. Willie Purtill used to joke that he graduated from school to the bog at the age of fourteen. Once or twice I footed turf with my cousins. It was backbreaking work for a city boy, and boring for a child who had inherited the Keanes’ capacity for dreaming and being easily distracted. But it was made bearable by the promise of sweets and minerals later. The bog stretched towards the Atlantic and I remember how, if you missed your footing, the mulch below sucked your boots off as you tried to walk out, and how once, after rain at Easter, the bogholes glittered like a thousand broken mirrors in the watery sunlight. At the end of the summer bog cotton flowered: to me it looked like snow or the windblown feathers of swans fallen to earth. It could be picked to be stuffed into pillows and cushions.
Over the years there had been attempts to drain part of the bog and create more arable land and pasture. Between 1840 and 1843 the landlord, Sir Pierce Mahony, a liberal Protestant and ally of Catholic Emancipation, obtained more than £600 in drainage grants from the state. But within a year of the last grant the potato Famine had begun: there were more pressing priorities than drainage and the bog endured. The mid-century traveller Lydia Jane Fisher wrote lyrically of the local landscape, where the green and blue flax flower contrasted ‘with the golden oats, the brown meadows, and the dark green of the potato – all uniting to make the grand mosaic of Nature particularly beautiful at this season. The foxglove, the heath, and the bog myrtle refreshed our senses.’3 But a more realistic appreciation was given by James Fraser who saw that ‘the soil is generally poor, and still more poorly cultivated. The houses of the gentry are few and far between, and the huts of the peasantry are miserable.’4 Those who worked the land, like the Purtills, would not have seen any romance. It was the Keanes, their book-loving future in-laws in the town of Listowel, who would be able to rhapsodise to their hearts’ content about the joys of spring fields.
I recall listening to my father, Eamonn, and a Purtill relative discussing the subject one afternoon in Ballydonoghue. ‘What you have, you hold,’ said my father. ‘Do you hear that boy?’ he said. ‘What you have you hold.’ Land defined the borders of the imagination. To be a man of substance you needed to own the ground underneath you. My father spoke of a relative who was a middleman at cattle fairs but he had no fields of his own. He was famous for his ability to strike bargains between farmers. To show that he was a man of substance he once pinned a five-pound note to his coat. It might seem a comical gesture until you think about the longing that lay behind it. He had no land and never would have. He would always be the dealer in other people’s livestock.
The hunger for land warped men’s spirits. It could drive them to acts of malice. If a cow died on your rented acres you might dump it on your neighbour’s holding to transfer the bad luck. In her eighties one old woman recalled how a row between two hay mowers at the height of the threshing led to one being deliberately poisoned so that he had acute diarrhoea. ‘It was arranged to put something in his tea. In no time he had the runs. There was nothing for it but take off his trousers and work away [for] he was not going to be stopped.’5
My uncle, John B, wrote a play called The Field about a man who kills an interloper in a dispute over the purchase of a field. The field is invested with a sacred quality whose importance can only be understood by those who work its soil. After the murder, a Catholic bishop addresses locals at mass:
This is a parish in which you understand hunger. But there are many hungers. There is hunger for food – a natural hunger. There is the hunger of the flesh – a natural understandable hunger. There is a hunger for home, for love, for children. These things are good – they are good because they are necessary. But there is also the hunger for land. And in this parish, you, and your fathers before you, knew what it was to starve because you did not own your own land – and that has increased; this unappeasable hunger for land … How far are you prepared to go to satisfy this hunger? Are you prepared to go to the point of robbery? Are you prepared to go to the point of murder? Are you prepared to kill for land?6
The answer is yes. Yes, again and again. Why not when, without it, you are scattered and dissolved? Those whose ancestors had starved to death for want of land, who had been dispossessed at the point of a sword, whose oral hist
ory had been embedded in the minds of generations, stressing the shame of being a people without land of their own. Land drove men to blood. It is impossible to understand the War of Independence and the Civil War that followed unless you know the story of the land. It is where the hardest of all memories lay, where the grievance and loss accumulated and became ready to flower into violence.
At one point this part of north Kerry had been notorious for faction fighting. In the middle of the nineteenth century feuds between clans and villages would be settled in battles between groups several hundred strong. Deaths and terrible injuries were common. It was said that some of the bad blood could be traced to the plantation of families from neighbouring County Clare during the age of plantation. But this was local talk. Faction fighting was a feature of rural Ireland in this period, often reflecting communal divisions over land usage, employment and social status. One account from the early nineteenth century described how ‘in an instant hundreds of sticks were up – hundreds of heads were broken. In vain the parish priest and his curate rode through the crowd, striking right and left with their whips, in vain a few policemen tried to quell the riot; on it goes until one or other of the factions is beaten and flies’.7 The fighting stick, the shillelagh, was often sharpened to ensure the scalp was cut or weighted with lead to bludgeon the enemy. Most often the matter was settled once blood had been drawn, and the wounded man would retire from the field. One of the most notorious blood feuds, between the Cooleen and Mulvihill factions, was said to be rooted in an ancient dispute over land. In 1834 it came to a head as more than two thousand people took part in a savage battle of Ballyeagh Strand, close to Ballydonoghue. Men and women, including mounted detachments, set about each other with clubs, slash hooks, horseshoes and guns. Twenty people tried to escape in a boat, which overturned in a swift current. As the survivors tried to reach shore they were pelted with stones and driven back into the waters to drown. Not even the local parish priest would give evidence at the subsequent public inquiry. Silence was the law of the land.
