Meeting the Other Crowd

by Eddie Lenihan

  But that intimate Ireland has all but passed away. Within a single lifetime Ireland has changed from a predominantly rural to a mainly urban society. This fact underlies all. Old people, the tradition-bearers, have become virtual exiles in their own land, disregarded, unvalued. Old lore is no longer passed on, this for a complex of reasons. Partly it is a belief among older people themselves that they are ignorant in comparison to the new “schooled” generation. And yet those same old people have a fierce pride in their specialized knowledge from times past. But so much of it is now seen as useless in practical terms, a museum piece only, a subject for nostalgia—“the good old days,” e.g., horse lore, hay making, hand turf cutting, house dances, stations, blessed-well pilgrimages, American wakes, so many trades (smith, shoemaker, tailor, harness maker, weaver, cooper, basket maker, thatcher).

  There are no tinkers traveling in the old way any more. Their trade (tinsmith) is no longer needed because of the prevalence of plastic. They’ve moved to towns, where their presence is much resented.

  There are no traveling beggar men or women now, either. These were the people who brought stories and ballads from place to place and entertained in return for their overnight keep. Traveling gangs of railway linesmen did the same. But many of the railway lines, especially those in the west, have been closed.

  Cattle fairs are no more, replaced by large, bureaucratic cattle marts. These street fairs attracted all kinds of performers, e.g., ballad singers, reciters, musicians, fortune-tellers, etc. All gone!

  Local race meetings and hare-coursing meets are few and far between now, with the same result.

  Poteen making is almost extinct: There’s no need for it when everyone can afford whiskey.

  Religious beliefs of the older, formal kind have loosened, declined, with a consequent near disappearance of their outward manifestations, e.g., benediction, sodalities, processions, the rosary, holy pictures, statues, etc.

  Fairy belief has declined almost in tandem with these.

  Education and means of travel and roads have improved enormously, therefore people’s attentions aren’t confined to their own localities anymore. Also, education, down the years, tended to frown on real fairy lore and belief, since most education was church controlled. Nowadays, education merely ignores the matter.

  Media pressures have grown vastly, especially in the last decade or so. Advertising is now inescapable, all-pervasive.

  The factual has become ever more pressing (rules, regulations of all kinds) at the expense of the imaginative. That it has had an enervating effect is odd, since our parents and grandparents had to be very factual to survive, yet they retained a vivid faculty for the nonfactual, too.

  The fields, the roads, aren’t being walked nearly as much anymore. One might travel fifty miles at night now in rural Ireland and never meet a single pedestrian. The younger generation knows practically nothing about the personal landscape around them, despite plenty of “environmental education” in school.

  Cuaird (night visiting) is gone and, with it, storytelling.

  Meitheal (communal farmwork) is gone, with the growth of the money economy and the consequent ability to buy services and machinery.

  The coming of electricity (including free phones for old-age pensioners) pushed back the frontiers of night, of the dark. This has had a huge effect on people’s attitudes towards nighttime (when most supernatural occurrences were felt to happen).

  Most things have become immediate—light, heat, communication, food. This has changed people’s perspectives on time. Yet, ironically, today people constantly complain of never having enough time.

  The invasion of quiet, personal time and places by technology (mobile phones, Walkmans, and especially television) has been relentless.

  Practically no one grows food for personal use now, or keeps pigs for bacon, so piseógs have declined—and piseógs were very related to the otherworldly—as well as closeness to the land.

  Place names and their attached lore are practically gone (field names, river-pool names, etc.).

  Calendar custom is very much attenuated.

  Local loyalties have been largely (though by no means wholly) superseded by the international (e.g., Manchester United), maybe because the local hasn’t the glamour, the profile, that wealth can bring—as well as the media attention!

  The retreat of local democracy and services (e.g., court-houses, shops, police stations, post offices) brings decline and a sense of despair to small, rural communities, while fast-growing urban areas absorb more than their share of what the public purse can provide. The huge and relentless expansion of towns has become more and more pronounced, drawing the younger generation from rural areas.

  There has been a precipitate decline in family size, first with contraception, latterly because of the expense of child rearing. Now we have the irony of huge, hotel-sized private houses springing up all over Ireland, lived in by only parents plus one or two children, whereas previously it was mainly the opposite: small houses, huge family. Once, it was children that demonstrated status; now it’s house, car, holiday.

  It is against this background that I have worked at the urgent task of collecting (on audiotape and, in more recent years, on video) what remains. And it has been a rich harvest, though one diminishing at an alarming and steady rate, since in the Ireland of today, inhospitable to most of what fairy belief represents, no new tellers of the tales are emerging and the older ones are inevitably dying off.

  This collection is different from most existing books on the fairies, in that it is based entirely on oral sources, and I have collected all the stories myself. I do not claim that my compilation is exhaustive, but it gives a fair indication of what is still available today, or was until very recently. I do not attempt to cover all of Ireland, and this is deliberate. First, I did not have the resources. Second, in confining myself largely to the southwest (i.e., Clare, Limerick, Kerry, parts of south Galway), I am in the part of Ireland I know best. Yet, it still gives a fair indication of what might be available if a thorough search of all of Ireland were conducted. It is vital that this work should be presented now, for though there has never been an era without change, the present one has seen unimaginable shifts in all kinds of attitudes and within an unprecedentedly short time. A sure sign of this is when those living in a society thus changing are vividly aware of it—and not by any means just its oldest members.

  If there are distortions in this book I hope they will be confined mainly to this introduction, since in the body of it I have let my informants speak for themselves, something they are remarkably well able to do, in all their variety. But who are these people? Rural for the most part, farmers, fishermen, trades-people, laborers. Some of them did not necessarily believe what they were telling me, whereas others’ belief was unshakable (not that I tried to shake it, but by the questions I asked I was able to ascertain clearly enough their frame of mind).

  Which brings me to the matter of skepticism. I am constantly surprised how few convinced skeptics there are in Ireland (rural Ireland, at least, though I suspect the same is true in towns and cities). I make a habit of telling at least some fairy stories every time I have a telling session nowadays, in order to get reaction from members of the audience afterwards—and I never cease to be amazed at how willing most of them are to discuss the subject, often mockingly (in a friendly way) at first, but almost inevitably this soon develops into a litany of personal experiences, or heard ones, of the supernatural/otherworldly/ “strange.” I can categorically say that never have I encountered a hostile group on this subject, though I have actively searched out such people. It is a subject that fascinates Irish people of most ages and shades of opinion—so long as they are approached on the matter with a sense of urgency, frankness, and conviction, and with no hint of jocularity or concession to levity (because, paradoxically, this is what they expect, sooner or later—“You’re only joking, aren’t you!”).

  In strange pubs, after sessions, I usually
go and mix with the audience, get their immediate reactions, opinions. In nearly every case they want to listen, are delighted to be reminded (if they are middle-aged or old) of material familiar from their younger days, which they haven’t heard much of in recent times, and if they’re younger (say, eighteen to thirty) fascinated by something they have never been told much about at all. And many of these younger people I meet are angry that they have been deprived of these stories, and want to know why.

  I enjoy very much seeing such people beginning to question what they have always taken for granted; i.e., that these things were only for children, that they were old-fashioned, “stupid,” out-of-date, and all the other epithets that apply to the scarcely known.

  In February of this year I was at Dublin Airport in freezing conditions, with only the driver in an otherwise empty bus, waiting for air passengers who never showed up because all flights had been canceled due to the bad weather. Rather than just sit there, we made small talk for a while. Then he asked me, almost apologetically, “Haven’t I seen your face before, someplace?”

  “Probably,” I said. “Maybe telling stories somewhere.”

  “That’s it!” He was excited now.

  “I knew it! You’re the lad that do be talking about the fairies.”

  Then he became serious.

  “But do you believe all that ol’ stuff, huh?”

  “I do,” I replied directly. No point in beating about the bush on a subject like this, as I’ve found through long experience.

  “An’ d’you think They’re there?”

  I could sense he was between laughter and indecision.

  “I do. In fact I have no doubt at all about it.”

  He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel, stared blankly out onto the snowy bus park, thinking. It was obvious that he was trying to make up his mind whether he should tell me something or not. To help him, I briefly told him several of my own experiences with old people I had spoken to over the years. He listened to what I had to say of fairy forts,1 paths, bushes. And, as soon as I mentioned these fairy bushes, sceachs, he interrupted me.

  “Did you ever see the tree near the mart in Claremorris?” And for the next five minutes he told me all about it, how on several occasions attempts had been made to cut it down, all ending in misfortune. He finished by advising me to go see it for myself if I didn’t believe him.

  I said I would, and I probably will. I have no reason to disbelieve that the bush is there, though I reserve judgment on its “fairyness” until I inquire further into it.

  But this is not the main point here. The point is that there I was, with this stranger, and because I replied firmly to what might otherwise have been merely a matter for joking, I found out something new, something most likely interesting about Them.

  And it has been thus over the years, and there is a lesson here: You will rarely be turned away if you have a sympathetic ear and a definite approach. And you will discover something else: Most Irish people have some instinctive belief in the world of the fairies, even if sometimes it has to be excavated carefully from under a veneer of busy modernity.

  I cannot claim to be an apostle or prophet of anything—a disciple, rather, of great, though very often “uneducated,” teachers. Yet it gives me much personal satisfaction to be able to put forward with ever-growing confidence my certainty about the reality of fairy belief, a belief that is as old as the Irish people. Fads, fancies, and fashions have and will pass, but this strange conglomeration of respect, doubt, fear, hesitation, and conviction I have discovered in the swirl of modern Irish life, all focused on Them, is something, firstly, to be wondered at, then eagerly grasped. For I am sure that it will not, cannot, survive under the immense pressures and distractions I have already mentioned. Under a different guise, maybe, but not as fairy belief. And what a tragedy that will be, for if the human need for things above and beyond the mundane, the merely explainable (by science or whatever), is to continue to thrive—as no doubt it will—how much more fitting that it should do so as part of an Irish culture, one that is immeasurably old and instinctively recognizable, rather than as a belief in aliens or extraterrestrials merely from other parts of our galaxy or beyond.

  Yet I am not so sentimental as to imagine that people can be other than creatures of their time and place. And our time and place is a world, a society that emphasizes the technological rather than the personal (despite what advertisers might have us believe), the superficial and fleeting rather than the profound, the commercial at the expense of the communal. All these changes have their price, and the casualties we can see all around us.

  My mission, if mission is the correct word, has been and is to attempt, as much as one person with no more than modest private resources can do, to show that the older beliefs, in one of the shapes in which they presented themselves (fairy lore), are not yet dead; rather, gone underground for want of a suitably sympathetic framing context. The episode of the fairy bush (sceach) at Latoon, County Clare, in 1999 was a graphic reminder of the power of these older beliefs to reassert themselves given the assistance, even briefly, of the media to which we have become accustomed (radio, TV, newspapers), rather than the older, almost vanished methods of dispersal—storytelling around the fire at night, or conversation at fair, market, and pub.

  Briefly, what happened was this: Over seventeen years ago I was told by an old man (since dead) at Latoon, near Newmarket-on-Fergus, of a lone whitethorn bush in a field called Lynch’s Crag. He said that the fairies of Munster would gather round it on their frequent journeys northwards to fight the fairies of Connaught. On their way back from these battles they would again collect there, to assess their losses and wait for stragglers, before traveling back across the river Shannon and scattering to their homes.

  On several occasions, very early in the morning, while collecting cattle to drive to local fairs, he had noted lumps of a greenish substance with the consistency of liver in the field around the bush. He knew that it was the fairies’ blood and that a battle had taken place the previous night.

  This information lay on a tape on one of my shelves for years until one day in 1999, on my way home from work in Limerick, I noticed excavation in progress in the field close to the bush. I stopped, inquired the reason, and was informed that the big new Ennis relief road, a $20 million project, was to pass here and an overpass was being built in this very field. I asked what was to happen to the sceach, only to be asked, “What are you talking about?” I pointed it out, but to the engineers it meant nothing. They had plans to complete and that was that, even though I warned them that if the bush were destroyed, the fairies would have their revenge: There would be many accidents, injuries, maybe deaths here as a result.

  I wrote a letter of protest to a local newspaper and was interviewed on the local radio station. This was picked up by national radio, a report which in turn was noticed and carried by the New York Times and, from there, the affair mushroomed, with eventually over forty newspapers in the U.S., U.K., and Europe carrying the story, as well as at least a dozen TV stations in the U.S., Canada, and Europe.

  As a result of all this publicity, and an accession of common sense, Clare County Council and the National Roads Authority agreed to vary the route of the road slightly, sparing the bush. It was a civilized decision, one that illustrates clearly that fairy belief, in spite of all vicissitudes, still has power to influence decisions even at a high official level and where much money is concerned.

  I cannot imagine it happening in most other European countries. So why should it still be possible in Ireland? Because the fairies in Ireland are not a vague, impersonal force. They are people like ourselves. Of a different, a parallel, world, maybe, but similar to us in enough ways to be understood by us sufficiently to make us wary of Them, respectful of their habitations.

  Unfortunately, as this manuscript was going to print, the Latoon fairy bush once again featured in practically all the Irish national daily newspapers, this time for wholly the
wrong reason. Some person, on the weekend of August 9, 2002, took a chainsaw to it and very deliberately cut off every single branch, but left the trunk standing bare. What obscure point this person was trying to make with this cowardly act (done under cover of darkness, naturally) is hard to fathom. But an old man of that locality, one with a deep knowledge of such things, as soon as I phoned him with the bad news, replied, “Is he still alive?” I have no way of knowing that. What I do know—and what this book shows time after time—is that the Good People do not suffer destruction of their property without response.

  The stories in this book will, hopefully, make clear the following about the Good People: • There is considerable and respectable proof of their existence.

  • They have been described in some detail.

  • Their origins have been speculated on.

  • Their amusements are similar to ours—dance, music, games, etc.

  • They have specific dwellings.

  • They protect their property.

  • They travel from place to place.

  • They have specific roads and pathways.

  • They may be good or bad neighbors.

  • They buy and sell.

  • They are sometimes belligerent, but also placatable.

  • They have their own (often mysterious) agenda.

  • They have their fears and dislikes.

  • They can be thwarted.

  • They observe certain holidays.

  • Time is different in their world.

  In Ireland, do we portray Them thus because we project onto Them what we would wish Them to be, i.e., not so different from us, because if They were They would be too strange, unimaginable? At least while They are like us, we have some hope of understanding Them, therefore not offending Them too much. If that is so, it may display a basic fear, an uncomfortableness. Why? Because we’re not sure. We pretend to be so, nowadays, in a world where everything seems to be measurable, open to scrutiny. But that illusion-bubble is popped every time we are confronted by a particularly horrible fatal accident, such as the death of a young person. “Why? How?” will always be with us. Hopefully. Without them we would be reduced to mindless-ness even as we elevated ourselves to certainty. While they are there to taunt us, there are certain aspects of existence we will not be able to take for granted, including the Other World of the Good People.