Wounds

by Fergal Keane

  The fighting could be exported across the ocean. In the same year as the battle of Ballyeagh, Irish factions fought each other along the banks of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal in Maryland and on the rail lines between Canada and Louisiana – but they fought each other here not for land but for jobs.

  The violence of the land was threaded throughout the stories of my childhood. About a mile up the hill from the old Purtill homestead there is a crossroads from where you can see across the plain to Ballyheigue Bay. It was here that An Gabha Beag (‘the Little Blacksmith’), the local leader of the rebel ‘Whiteboys’, was hanged by the English in the early nineteenth century. His name was James Nolan and Hannah used to tell us that he had to be hanged three times because in his forge he had fashioned an iron collar which he placed under his smock to protect his neck. Eventually the redcoats found it and James Nolan was sent to his maker. According to the stories collected by the Ballydonoghue schoolchildren, the landlord responsible for the blacksmith’s death was a Mr Raymond, whose family would haunt the later history of the area. In one version the hanged rebel’s family come to Gabha’s workshop in the dead of night: ‘At MIDNIGHT, so the end of this terrible story goes, seven of the dead men’s nearest relatives came to the forge and there, by the uncanny light of the fire, cursed Raymond’s kith and kin across the anvil. Their curses … did not fall on sticks or stones.’8 The Raymonds were to be damned for all time.

  The Whiteboys were a cry of revenge against the exactions of landlords and their agents, against parsons and sometimes priests, against those who turned fields where potatoes grew into grazing for cattle, against the men who fenced and enclosed and who demanded tithes and rents. Named after the white smocks they wore in their night raids, they fought for the rights of tenant farmers and against the system of tithes that maintained the Protestant clergy. The tithes could be exacted in cash or kind and provoked bitter resentment among the Catholic poor. The Topographical Dictionary of Ireland (1836) recorded that in Lisselton parish, which included Ballydonoghue, the Reverend Anthony Stoughton who, along with his brother Thomas, owned much of the land in the district was in receipt of tithes worth approximately £10,000 in today’s money. He also received income from several other parishes in the district. After appeals from the tenants, Stoughton and his brother agreed to reduce their tithe demands, earning gratitude ‘for their kind and considerate mode of dealing with us respecting our Tithes; by which one of our heavy burthens has been considerably lightened – and we sincerely regret that all other Proprietors of Tithes do not follow an example which would in a great measure tend to tranquilize the minds of the people at large’.9 The bigger Catholic landowners, as well as priests who charged for their services at funerals and weddings or condemned the Whiteboys from the pulpit, could also be targets. The raiders maimed and killed cattle, terrorised and sometimes assassinated unpopular landlords and their agents. The founder of Methodism, John Wesley, encountered the Whiteboys whilst visiting County Tipperary and saw how they ‘moved as exactly as regular troops and appeared to be thoroughly disciplined’.10 The violence was episodic but caused widespread terror.

  A Whiteboy general, William O’Driscoll, declared: ‘We will continue to oppose our oppressors by the most justifiable means in our power, either until they are glutted with our blood, or until humanity raises her angry voice in the councils of the nation to protect the toiling peasant and lighten his burden.’11 The Whiteboy oath was everything. It gave men a feeling of belonging. And it warned against betrayal. The avenging secret society bound together by oaths became the most powerful force to challenge the established order in early nineteenth-century rural Ireland. ‘I sware I will to the best of my power,’ the oath-taker would declare, to:

  Cut Down Kings,

  Queens and Princes, Earls, Lords, and all such with

  Land Jobbin and Herrisy.12

  The English writer Arthur Young, who toured Ireland in the 1770s, wrote about the Whiteboy insurrections and the oppression of the labouring poor. ‘A landlord in Ireland can scarcely invent an order which a servant, labourer or cottier dares to refuse to execute,’ he noted. ‘Disrespect or anything towards sauciness he may punish with his cane or his horsewhip with the most perfect security.’ Young, who had travelled all over the British Isles, was shocked to observe in Ireland long lines of workers’ carts forced into the ditches so that a gentleman’s carriage could pass by. ‘It is manifest,’ Young wrote of the mounting insurgency, ‘that the gentlemen of England never thought of a radical cure from overlooking the real cause of the disease, which in fact lay in themselves, and not in the wretches they doomed to the gallows.’ He then added with unsettling prescience: ‘A better treatment of the poor in Ireland is a very material point to the welfare of the whole British Empire. Events may happen which may convince us fatally of this truth.’13

  A landlord in Con Brosnan’s home area of Newtownsandes described the situation in March 1786. ‘We are so pestered with Whiteboys in this country that we can attend to nothing else.’ Landlords were restricted because ‘all law ceases but what the Whiteboys like; not a process is to be served, not a cow drove, nor a man removed from his farm on pain of hanging’. The Whiteboys had erected gallows in Newtownsandes, Listowel and Ballylongford with ‘their entire aim … levelled at the tithes’.14 Traditions of violent resistance were becoming embedded. A decade later a local man, Phil Cunningham, became a leader of the United Irishmen rebellion in County Tipperary. Transported to Australia he died leading a rebellion against the British in 1803.

  The fear of a native revolt accompanied by French invasion loomed large in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century politics, as the Whiteboy attacks created panic among local Protestant populations. One informer’s account refers to a ‘meeting of the White Boys at Myre [in Tipperary, where] it was resolved on to burn the houses of the Protestants, and to massacre them in one night, after a landing made by the French, as was expected’.15

  Government retribution was harsh. Hundreds of rebels or suspected rebels were transported to Australia. Public hangings were often carried out in the rebels’ home districts. Con Shine, a local carpenter, recalled an execution by soldiers near Listowel in 1808, as told to him by his family: ‘They drove 2 poles in the ground below at the cross and put another pole across they then put him standing in a horse’s car put a rope around his neck then pulled away the car and left him hanging there. He was hanging there all day. The soldiers use to come often and give him a swing for sport and leave him swing away for himself. All the doors were shut that day. You would not see a head out the door.’16

  Around Ballydonoghue the Catholic Church condemned the Whiteboy attacks and pledged ‘firm attachment to Our Gracious King and to the Constitution … we will not enter into conspiracy against the laws of our country’.17 A priest in Listowel went further and urged his flock to collect £26 as a reward for anybody giving information on those responsible for the burning houses in the parish. The state archives for the period reflect the efforts made by local priests to discourage support for the Whiteboys. The Listowel magistrate, John Church, records parish meetings across north Kerry and praises the efforts of the clergy while noting claims by the church that the disturbances were caused by poverty and poor weather ‘more than any political motive as maliciously insinuated in some publick Prints’.18 By the late 1820s the campaign for Catholic Emancipation led by Kerryman Daniel O’Connell was on the threshold of success. The church did not want chaos and violence. From the time of the Reformation Catholics had faced a range of restrictions. But in the wake of Cromwellian (1649–53) and then Williamite (1688–91) wars, the repression intensified and a wide range of ‘Penal Laws’ was gradually introduced, targeting Catholics, as well as Presbyterians and other dissenters from the Anglican order. The laws were meant to ensure the ascendancy of Anglicans, with restrictions on Catholic landholding, worship, education, and even a prohibition on Catholics owning a horse worth more than £5. This last imposition was t
o ensure that strong swift beasts that would be useful for cavalry were kept out of the hands of Catholics. Enforcement varied in different places and with the passage of time some of the most punitive laws were rescinded, but by the 1820s Catholics were still excluded from Parliament and from being judges or senior civil servants. The effect was to make religion synonymous with the power of the minority. Very soon the reverse would obtain. The campaign to achieve Catholic Emancipation galvanised the Irish poor and gave Europe its first great campaign of peaceful mass protest. By 1829 the battle for religious liberty was won and the confessional demography of Irish life had been asserted. The Catholic Church emerged as the most powerful force in Irish life, a role it would not willingly relinquish for the next century and more. But the Church would struggle to control the unrest which arose from the poverty and injustice of the times.

  The Whiteboys were succeeded by the ‘Rockites’ in the 1820s, inspired by the millenarian writings of Signor Pastorini, the pseudonym for the English Catholic bishop, Charles Walmesley, who predicted the imminent demise of Protestantism. The north Kerry poet Tomás Ruadh O’Suilleabháin saw the coming deliverance of his people from landlordism and English rule:

  It is written in Pastorini

  That the Irish will not have to pay rent

  And the seas will be speckled with ships

  Coming around Cape Clear.19

  The local landlords around Ballydonoghue were frightened by the threats of a Protestant apocalypse. In nearby Tarbert one landowner learned of Pastorini’s tract being read ‘among the lower orders of Roman Catholics, who … expect to have the Protestants exterminated out of this kingdom before the year 1825’.20 An agent working for Reverend Stoughton was battered with stones, stabbed to death and then had his ears and nose cut off and placed on public display by his attackers.21 The Rockites, like the Whiteboys before them, were suppressed with customary brutality while O’Connell succeeded in diverting the mass of the rural poor into peaceful campaigning. When the Bill for emancipation was voted into effect on 13 April 1829, the people of Ballydonoghue could look up and cheer the flaming bonfire of triumph on top of Cnoc an Óir. Five years later they gathered for the opening of their new church, a stone building that spoke of permanence and where the Purtills still observe the rites of their faith. The campaign for religious freedom awakened people to the power of their numbers. But the hunger and the structural injustices of rural life ensured that violence would come again. Tithes remained a bane of local life and when they prompted an outbreak of agrarian violence a decade later the Stoughtons were targeted.

  In January 1833 the Morning Chronicle recorded that a bailiff working for the Reverend Anthony Stoughton and his brother Colonel Stoughton of Listowel was murdered by being ‘struck on the back of the head with a stone and received about twenty bayonet wounds’.22 On another occasion a horse belonging to the brothers was cut in two. The so called ‘Tithe War’ witnessed a familiar ritual of midnight raids but also the politics of highly organised intimidation, not just aimed at the clergy but against those who agreed to pay their tithes. State retribution was harsh, with instances of troops shooting on protesting crowds. But the conflict marked the beginning of the end of the Church of Ireland as the established church and in 1838 the government acted to transfer responsibility for the upkeep of Anglican clerics to the landlords.*

  Poverty is not a necessary precondition for civil strife, but mix it with memories of dispossession, in a system based on the supremacy of a minority, and the emergence of groups such as the Whiteboys, and others in years to come, seems utterly logical. They were men and women with nothing to lose and the raw courage of youth. They did not fight for a nation state, or the republican ideals of Wolfe Tone and the United Irishmen. They fought for the ground beneath their feet.

  * The final phase in the decline of Church of Ireland power came with the Irish Church Act of 1869 which did away with the payment of tithes and replaced them with a life annuity.

  3

  My Dark Fathers

  My Dark Fathers lived the intolerable day

  Committed always to the night of wrong,

  Stiffened at the hearthstone, the woman lay,

  Perished feet nailed to her man’s breastbone.

  Grim houses beckoned in the swelling gloom

  Of Munster fields where the Atlantic night

  Fettered the child within the pit of doom,

  And everywhere a going down of light.

  Brendan Kennelly, ‘My Dark Fathers’, 19621

  I

  The Earl was well pleased with his welcome. The gentry had assembled, as had the local clergy, including the formidable Father Jeremiah Mahony, parish priest of St Mary’s, who delivered a vote of thanks to his Protestant counterpart, Reverend Edward Denny, ‘for his dignified conduct on this, and every other occasion, when called on’.2 The occasion was a welcome party for the new Earl of Listowel, William Hare, and the language was indicative of something more than the ritual flattery reserved for visits of the mighty. The priest had reason to welcome the Earl, who had been a supporter of Catholic emancipation and provided land for the new Catholic church on the square directly opposite the Protestant St John’s. His liberalism on religion put him at odds with several powerful fellow landowners in the area. The formal address urged the Earl to make his visits ‘frequent and prolonged’ and sought his ‘protection and tutelage’ for ‘a grateful tenantry’.3 At that moment, seated behind the ivy-clad walls of the Listowel Arms Hotel, among the smiles and handshakes of the men of property, within yards of the Protestant church and its new, taller-spired Catholic counterpart, the Earl might have hoped for a tranquil residence. But beyond the Feale bridge on either side of the road towards Limerick, by the Tarbert road and the road to Ballydonoghue, in every field in north Kerry where potatoes were planted, a catastrophe was taking root.

  They were used to hunger. Seven Irish famines of varying extremes had struck since the middle of the eighteenth century. Outside the rapidly industrialising north-east the country was mired in poverty with average income half that of the rest of the United Kingdom. The rural population had grown rapidly, encouraged by the nourishment provided by the widespread cultivation of the potato, and the growing trend to marry young. In the twenty years before the Famine the number of people subsisting in the area increased by nearly two thousand souls.

  By the summer of 1839, two years after the new Lord Listowel was welcomed to the town, there were warnings of crisis. At a public meeting in Listowel, the gentry and the clergy (Protestant and Catholic) and prominent townspeople heard reports of the ‘increasing difficulties of the labouring classes of this district from the enormous prices which the commonest provisions have reached; agricultural labour, about the only source of employment, has now already terminated’.4 The meeting noted ominously that the potato crop of the previous harvest had failed. Public works schemes to alleviate the distress of the poor were already under way and 4,000 people each day received rations of oatmeal. The novelist William Makepeace Thackeray passed through Listowel in the same year and saw a town that ‘lies very prettily on a river … [but] it has, on a more intimate acquaintance, by no means the prosperous appearance which a first glance gives it’.5

  The writer, at best a condescending witness to Irish travails, went on to record the poverty of the scene, the numerous beggars (their number undoubtedly swollen by the growing hunger in the countryside), the appearance of ‘the usual crowd of idlers round the car: the epileptic idiot holding piteously out his empty tin snuff-box; the brutal idiot, in an old soldier’s coat, proffering his money-box and grinning and clattering the single halfpenny it contained; the old man with no eyelids, calling upon you in the name of the Lord; the woman with a child at her hideous, wrinkled breast; the children without number’.6 The following year the Kerry Evening Post recorded the failure of the potato crop in the north of the county. A landowner near Ballydonoghue noted in his journal: ‘we were concerned to hear many complain
of a dry rot appearing more extensively than hitherto … The farmers are very apprehensive of it.’7 In early February the first of the destitute were admitted to the workhouse in Listowel.

  The Purtills and their neighbours watched as a vast withering engulfed the fields of north Kerry in the late summer of 1845. The land agent, William Trench, gave a vivid account of his first encounter with the blight:

  The leaves of the potatoes on many fields I passed were quite withered, and a strange stench, such as I had never smelt before, but which became a well-known feature in ‘the blight’ for years after, filled the atmosphere adjoining each field of potatoes. The crop of all crops, on which they depended for food, had suddenly melted away, and no adequate arrangements had been made to meet this calamity, the extent of which was so sudden and so terrible that no one had appreciated it in time, and thus thousands perished almost without an effort to save themselves.8

  Soon the smell of the rotting crop was thick around Ballydonoghue. It would be followed soon enough by the smell of corpses.