Stones of Aran

by Tim Robinson

  At that time Thompson was already feeling it necessary to post notices ordering the Catholic clergy to desist from speaking against the Protestants from the altar. Nevertheless, when the potato crop failed in 1861 and another famine threatened, Thompson and Kilbride joined with Patrick O’Flaherty and his son James to form a relief committee, and Thompson supplied eighteen tons of meal and fifteen tons of coal for distribution. Stoney declined to join the committee, alleging that priority for relief was being given to those who sent their children to the Protestant school. By the next year the Catholic clergy, who did not join the relief committee, were forbidding any of their flock to supply the Protestants with food, and so Thomas Charde opened a shop himself, which was so successful it forced its only rival out of business. Some relief-work was started, for which the wages were potatoes to the value of 6d a day, the potatoes being supplied by Patrick O’Flaherty and the scheme funded by the Digbys, the Protestant Bishop of Tuam and others. Kilbride oversaw the work, and it was alleged that he was forcing religious instruction on his captive congregation of labourers. In January 1863 fever broke out, and a doctor sent by the Galway Board of Poor Law Guardians to look into the state of affairs reported that he had never seen such poverty, that Cill Rónáin and Cill Éinne were filthy and unwholesome, with manure heaps and pools of stagnant water at the doors of almost every cabin, that there were thirty-five fever cases in the island, including the Medical Officer’s daughter, and that he had found Dr. Stoney himself in bed, leaving the sick unvisited. Stoney had explained that he was “utterly prostrated by fatigue and stimulants,” which he later glossed as meaning that he had “been obliged to resort to small quantities of stimulants to keep him on his legs on account of the work, and the usual effect of such stimulants was to add to the subsequent prostration.”

  Other inspectors in April of that year found that there had been thirty-nine fever cases, with two deaths; however, the filthy state of the villages had been exaggerated, and in Cill Éinne there were only three offensive accumulations of dirt, at the backs of the houses. Evidence about Dr. Stoney’s intemperance was conflicting: both the Catholic priest and the Protestant minister said they had never seen him drunk, but the proprietor of the Atlantic Hotel claimed that on two occasions he had had to help him home the worse for liquor. On the whole it was felt that the doctor had “left himself open to the charge.” The situation of the poor was found to be unsatisfactory. Kilbride was the only active member of the relief committee, and the poor regarded the relief as being given by him personally, while the Rev. Mr. O’Malley accused him of “tampering with the faith of the Catholic poor” and had challenged him to a controversy in the presence of the people at the relief-works. Kilbride agreed that he had read the Scriptures to the relief-workers, but that none had objected or left the works. The inspectors commented that “such a course must have been irritating to the feelings of the poor whose circumstances of distress left them no alternative, their poverty obliging them to accept the relief though accompanied by transparent attempts to undermine the religious conceptions in which they had been reared.” Their recommendation was that a Relieving Officer be appointed, to preclude religious discrimination. Thomas Thompson opposed this on the grounds that it would increase the rates (which, because nearly all the tenants’ holdings in the islands were very small, fell almost exclusively on the landlords), and he threatened that the proprietors would “ease the islands of the cause of the increased taxation.” The Board of Guardians debated what he meant by this, and took it to be “a gentle phrase for extermination … in other words send the poor people adrift.” Nevertheless an officer was appointed, whereupon Kilbride’s committee refused to employ anyone receiving aid from him.

  The case of a Thomas O’Brien came before the Guardians in the next Spring. The relieving officer had seen O’Brien digging a field over again after the potatoes had been lifted, “to pick up a stray potato that might have escaped the diggers.” In his cabin there was “no food, no fuel, nothing that could be called furniture, hardly the rudest utensil; no appearance of a bed, except a little straw packed up into a corner.” His wife Bridget said that her family was starving since she withdrew her children from the Rev. Kilbride’s school, but that she would prefer to endure any amount of privation rather than have the priest speaking of her family at the chapel. The officer then gave her meal to the value of 3s 9d, and told her that further relief could only be had by going into the Galway workhouse. For this, O’Brien claimed, he had been refused work by Kilbride, and other people rejected by Kilbride because they had been relieved by the officer were now begging through the islands. Also, Kilbride had opened a school in Cill Éinne in charge of a Scripture reader, and was giving relief to those who sent their children to it. Kilbride denied that he was doing any more than relieving the children themselves. It seems from this officer’s report that Kilbride’s schools in Cill Éinne and Cill Rónáin had been forced to close, probably because the priest had made parents withdraw their children. The Galway Vindicator thought that the officer’s report on the state of society in Aran made it clear that souperism was the greatest persecution affecting the Irish peasantry; however there had been only one “pervert” and he had now been received back into the church.

  In October 1864 Patrick O’Flaherty died, and whatever affection and respect the Aran folk had for this representative of the old patriarchal order was not inherited by his son. James O’Flaherty JP soon became hated as a land-grabber and as an associate of Thompson’s in his extortionate schemes. One of these was the Irish Iodine and Marine Salts Co., whose story I told in Pilgrimage. Having by threat of eviction forced the islanders to sell their kelp to him, at his prices, paid in credit at Charde’s shop, Thompson forbade them to transport the kelp to Galway in any boat except O’Flaherty’s. Similarly, when the main road through the island was to be widened, all tenants except O’Flaherty had to work unpaid on it; and to compensate O’Flaherty for the land he gave up for the road, a tax of one shilling a household was levied on the island. As Antoine Powell puts it in his history of these episodes, the islanders were “i ngreim ag siondacait,” in the grip of a syndicate. Dr. Stoney wrote to the newspapers about the kelp racket, and when an increase in his salary was proposed (from £80 to £100 a year) the dispensary committee, which was dominated by O’Flaherty, protested that this would again increase the rates. The Board of Guardians gave in, and Stoney did not get his rise.

  In 1868 arose another cause of offense to the Catholic faction. A young widow had emigrated to America, leaving her four children in the charge of her father, who had returned from Galway to live with his relatives in Aran. The father soon died, and the widow’s mother and uncles felt the pinch and wanted the children adopted. The Catholic priest refused to have them put in an orphanage, so they turned to Mr. Kilbride, who had Mr. Charde take them to a Dublin “Bird’s Nest” (as the institutions in which Catholic orphans were brought up as Protestants were called). The uncles started attending the Protestant church, with the result that no one would employ them except Mr. Charde. The Catholic clergy called for a boycott of his newly opened bakery, until the “kidnapped” children should be returned and placed in Galway Workhouse, where they would be brought up in the Catholic religion. Thompson and O’Flaherty, joint owners of the Arran Yacht, which brought in goods to the islands, retaliated by refusing to carry either bread or flour for any other outlet. Just before Christmas 1868 the Galway Vindicator published:

  THE SONG OF THE ARRANMAN

  The island in beauty lay sleeping,

  Far out on the waves as of yore,

  But a feeling of hunger came creeping

  O’er us as we sailed for the shore….

  We looked for the light which they bade us

  Expect in the breadshops of each,

  But tho’ darkness was chasing the shadows

  No gleam could be seen from the beach.

  We flew into one, it was empty,

  As if the gaunt famine
were there.

  A vanithee*, haggard, unkempt she

  Thus muttered in tones of despair:

  “A parson and justice in council

  To free trade in bread put a stop.

  They decree that we’ll ne’er get an ounce till

  We deal in their own little shop.”

  Early in the New Year the Rev. Corbett wrote to the owners of the islands, Lady Howth and Miss Digby: “Mesdames—Is it by your wish that the islanders are refused bread unless they buy from a proselytising schoolmaster, who was obliged to fly from Inishboffin for the same reason?” Shortly afterwards Thompson called off the bread blockade, and towards the end of the year the orphans were retrieved from the Bird’s Nest and handed over to the priest, for their mother was to come back from America to collect them. That round seems to have gone to the Catholics, though Thompson’s kelp monopoly continued until 1872, and even after that he extorted a royalty from the islanders on the kelp they sold elsewhere, until his company went out of business a few years later.

  Dr. Stoney died in 1869, of an overdose of laudanum according to his death certificate. (The last of his children, who had been born the year before, was to emigrate to America and there father the future professor, George Stoney.) An old lady of the island told George Stoney that his grandfather the doctor had visited a family in Oatquarter “at the time of the black flu,” had found every member of it suffering from this illness, and soon after returning home had come down with it himself. He dosed himself with the same medicine he gave his patients, and died; he was found dead (if he was dead) by a young lad, Peter Gill, who acted as his assistant and pony-trap driver. At the time there were so many people needing funerals (as the old lady put it), that there was no time for a proper laying-out. There followed the hasty burial, and the rumour spreading like another black infection.

  I will trudge on to the end of this squalid sectarian history to show how hospitable the holy soil of Aran was to such germs. A few years later in 1877 there was some talk of “distress” in the islands after a droughty season had caused the potatoes to fail and stormy weather was stopping the islanders from fishing. According to the Vindicator, because the tenants were so hard hit, the landless labourers could get no work and would starve unless relieved. The Digbys contributed £50 to Kilbride’s relief fund, and Thompson claimed that a famine had been averted by the minister’s timely actions, but the parish priest, Fr. Concannon, and the relieving officer denied that there was any distress.

  In that year another complex row began, which soon became linked to the national agitation against “land-grabbing” that culminated in the Land League crisis. It started with the eviction of a Pat Ganly and his mother from their farm. Pat was the son of the engineer Thomas Ganly who came to the island in 1853 to build the pier and married a Mainistir woman. After being evicted Pat Ganly was readmitted to half of his farm, and the rest of it was given to the Rev. Kilbride (whose acquisition of “a nice farm of land” near Cill Rónáin was recounted in Pilgrimage). Some months later a stone was thrown through Kilbride’s window, and on another occasion when Ganly saw Kilbride’s man working on what had been his farm, he produced a gun and ordered him off the land. The police searched his house as a result but found nothing. Then a bullet was fired through Kilbride’s window. Kilbride about this time handed his half of the Mainistir farm over to Richard Charde, son of the schoolteacher and shopkeeper. The Chardes’ shop window was then broken, and Fr. Concannon threatened to curse anyone who dealt there until the farm was given up. Thompson put out a notice asking people to ignore the priest, saying that if Charde was forced out of business no one else would be allowed to open a shop in his place, and that if the agitation did not cease he would evict the Ganlys from the rest of their farm. Ganly was soon in prison for attacking Kilbride’s workman on the disputed farm again, and while he was there an attempt was made to kill Richard Charde’s cattle by poisoning a water-tank. In June 1879 the authorities announced that if there was any further interference with Kilbride or Charde extra police would be sent to the island, at the islanders’ expense. Despite this, two of Charde’s cattle were found dead on the Ganly farm in December. The Land League came into existence in August of that year, and it seems that an Aran branch was founded soon afterwards by a new Catholic curate, Fr. Fahey. The Land War in Aran was given a particularly vicious twist by the conjunction between the nationwide anti-landlord agitation and the local interdenominational feuding (which was an anachronism by then, with the general moderating of evangelical zeal, except in the parishes of Kilbride’s former colleagues in Connemara).

  That winter, after two generally cold and wet years, there was a threat of famine throughout the land. In Aran the people lacked not only food but fuel, as they were dependent on the turf which was still lying in soaking stacks out on the bogs of Connemara. Frs. Concannon and Fahey set up a relief committee with the Medical Officer, Dr. Bodkin, and in January of 1880 wrote to the voluntary relief organizations recently inaugurated in Dublin:

  Sir, Behind the fragments of the last fortress besieged by Cromwell in Ireland stands the village of Killanny with its hundred huts. It is the fishing centre of Aran, and every hut there is a fisherman’s home. Though its inhabitants, poor fellows, point to a stone in those battlements against which Cromwell’s nose was rubbed in a brief defeat, and boast of his final repulse from their walls, still worse than all, Cromwell’s curse, we fear, remains. Nothing else could bring on the people such cold and nakedness as we witnessed. No later than today we walked through the village and saw children entirely—this is true—entirely, absolutely naked, gathering themselves around their poor old granny in the corner where the fire used to be … Returning to the house where we left the old woman and the naked children depending, Berkeley-like, on their imagination for heat at the quenched hearth, we found a strong man, idle and careworn, leaning against the black side-wall … “There are thirty men like myself in Killanny; we are too poor to get anyone to bail us for the fishery money. The people who want money most in those bad times won’t get any from the Government Offices, but if we had one pound, each of us, to buy a Spilliard, we’d try to put a fagot of clothes on the children, a spark in the hearth, and a bit in our mouths, with the help of God.” Thinking as we came away on the best mode of seeking succour for this deserving man, we said we will venture to write to the three great Relief Funds, and we are sure they will not grudge to spend £10 each on a charity of this kind. These £30 would place the thirty wasting Killanny men in reproductive works. It will give them a chance of gathering, as they say, the riches that are waiting for them at the bottom of the deep.

  The policy of the Mansion House Fund, headed by the Lord Mayor of Dublin, was to distribute relief through local committees on which clergymen of both denominations would sit, together with the medical officer and the “prominent laymen” of the neighbourhood. According to the Mansion House Committee’s later report on this period:

  In only three instances throughout Ireland, was there found the slightest difficulty in combining the Catholic and Protestant clergy in hearty brotherhood, on the Committees. The exceptions were parishes in Connemara where the Protestant clergymen happened to be also members of the Irish Church Mission Society.

  But since these parishes were “literally threatened to be devoured by famine,” it was resolved to make grants to separate local committees there:

  It was the only occasion on which, during six trying months, any shadow of religious division vexed the plain course of charity. It served simply to throw into stronger light the heartiness with which, upon more than eight hundred Local Committees in every corner of the country, Catholic, Protestant and Presbyterian were found working side by side with the same unity, loyalty and breadth of sympathy which were the foundation-stones of the Central Committee.

  However, things were hardly better in Aran, and the Central Committee soon received complaints from Thompson, that he had been kept off the Aran committee, and from Kilbrid
e, that the Aran committee was “utterly unfit, from its composition, mode of management, and general conduct, to carry on such a work.” A lawyer, Mr. John Adye Curran, was sent down in June to investigate matters on the spot. His report is like a window of intelligence and humanity flung open in the murk of those times; one reads it with a feeling that an emissary from an enlightened age has visited the past, and is telling us the truth of controversies that we could not otherwise have disentangled. I will lay myself open to the risk of delusion, in following Curran.

  At first Kilbride and Thompson, who had demanded the investigation, refused to participate in it, claiming that intimidation would make it impossible for them to bring forth their witnesses; however Curran in a brisk exchange of letters made it plain he thought that they were shirking the investigation, and on a Monday morning all parties assembled in a large room of the Atlantic Hotel, and the hearing of the charges against the committee began. In the initial skirmishings Thompson stated that the committee was improperly constituted because the Protestant clergyman was not on it, and Curren informed him of the resolution of the Central Committee allowing the formation of religiously exclusive committees, and that Aran was one of the few cases in which they had had to allow the formation of a committee without the participation of the Protestant rector; it had been open to Mr. Kilbride to form a committee of his own, but he had stated that he was able himself to provide for the only two Protestants needing relief. Then Curran disposed of Thompson’s complaint that he had been studiously kept off the committee; in fact the correspondence of the committee showed that he had been invited to join and had refused. Mr. Kilbride then alleged that none of the committee’s business had been given to Mr. Charde’s shop; Mr. Curran replied that that was a matter within the discretion of the committee, unless Mr. Kilbride could show that the poor had in any way suffered from it.