Stones of Aran

by Tim Robinson

  The next charge was one Thompson had preferred in a letter: “… that ten heads of families were put on one list. This was called the ‘Soupers’ List,’ all these were refused relief. The reason assigned was that some worked for Mr. Kilbride, others for Mr. Chard, and others again went to his shop.” In evidence Kilbride produced written statements that he said had been made by parties now too intimidated to come forward. The committee denied the existence of intimidation, and, Curran reports:

  Dr. Bodkin requested Mr. Kilbride to give him the names of these parties he said were so intimidated, and whose attendance he was unable to procure. This was done, and in less than five minutes, the Doctor having picked them out of a large crowd waiting outside the hotel, paraded all the parties named before us in the room, apparently, to my mind, much to the Reverend Gentleman’s surprise, if not disgust.

  One of these was then called, a Mary Flaherty who worked at the barracks and whose husband worked both for Kilbride and for Charde; she said that she had not had any difficulty in getting her rights from the committee. Mr. Kilbride reminded her of a statement, at variance with her present evidence, to which she had put her mark in his presence and in that of Mr. Thompson. She became very much excited, and Kilbride and Thompson said it was quite clear she had been intimidated from telling the investigator the truth. Curran’s report is unambiguous:

  I could not help believing there had been a species of intimidation practiced in this case, but not by the parties suggested. One can well imagine a scene enacted during a period of deep distress, in a room in the house of the Rev. William Kilbride, in which this nervous, excitable, poor, ignorant, uneducated woman, in the presence of her husband’s employer, standing face to face with the agent to whom her husband had to pay his rent, might easily be induced, if not coerced, by that husband, himself unscrupulous, to make or sign with her mark a statement which, he considered, might be palatable to those two gentlemen, and which they no doubt believed at the time to be true.

  Later on in the proceedings the husband, Patrick Flaherty, was examined by Kilbride, and stated that on one occasion when relief was being given out he had heard Fr. Fahey say to another man, “Go down to Mr. Chard, he knows what side to put the spoon before you”; also that Fr. Fahey said “Come on now, let us read out the Soupers’ List,” and read out ten names including Flaherty’s, who got no relief that day. But it emerged that Flaherty was in employment at that time, and not with Charde or Kilbride, and that he and his family had been relieved on other occasions. However, a most theatrical interruption then took place:

  Just as the witness had given the last answer, there was a commotion at the door and Mrs. Flaherty sprang in, caught hold of her husband in a manner less polite than determined, and calling out that she would allow him tell no more lies, disappeared with him in her grasp. The entire incident occupied less time than it has taken me to narrate the circumstances. After the disturbance had subsided, Mr. Kilbride informed me, that after such an exhibition of intimidation, he could not possibly proceed further with that branch of the inquiry. I saw no evidence of intimidation in the act of Mrs. Flaherty, but I did see evident signs of deep anger on her part against her husband for telling, what she believed to be, a false story, and against those who, she thought, were backing up her husband in his acts.

  Having considered this case and several others in which witnesses did not confirm the written complaints against the committee to which, Kilbride alleged, they had previously put their marks, Curran found as follows:

  I believe that a list of names was made out from week to week by the Committee, not of “Soupers,” for, with one exception, they were all Catholics, but of men and women who were at the time earning money: these parties were refused, and properly refused, relief. The Rev. Kilbride and Mr. Chard were two of the principal, if not the principal, employers on the Island, and it followed as a necessary result that many persons must have been refused relief from time to time as a consequence of their working for either of these two gentlemen…. but recollecting the ill-feeling between the clergy of both denominations, and the evident anxiety of the Catholic Clergy to prevent as much as possible members of their flock being brought into contact with either the Rev. W. Kilbride or Mr. Chard, I have no doubt but that the list made out from time to time of those who were working for those two gentlemen, became to be known commonly among the Islanders as the “Soupers’ List.”

  Curran finally concluded that some islanders who had quite properly been refused relief, took advantage of the ill-will between the Catholic and Protestant clergy to impose upon Mr. Kilbride; that their written statements had been exaggerated by anger and disappointment, and that Kilbride should not have been surprised that in calmer moments they had reverted to the truth, which was harmless; finally, that the Aran Committee had thoroughly cleared themselves of all charges.

  A new barracks was opened in Cill Mhuirbhigh in that year of 1880, and six extra policemen were brought in, but the Land War continued to skulk up and down the twisty boreens. The Chardes, or their animals, were the principal sufferers of the Land Leaguers’ twilight deeds; their mare was backed over a cliff at Mainistir in April, and in June their sheep and lambs went the same way. In September, when Thompson had imposed fines on certain villages for taking stones from the disused lighthouse buildings in Eochaill, the Catholic clergy called a public meeting outside his office; it was, according to the new curate, the Rev. McLoughlin, the first time in seven hundred years that the people had come together in their hundreds to call their agent “a public, infamous and scandalous liar.” As Thompson had rejected their demand for reductions in rent in consideration of recent bad fishing seasons and the failure of the kelp and pig markets, they would appeal over his head to Miss Digby and the Government. A young German visitor addressed the crowd too, and told them they were honest, hardworking and over-rented people; he was the philologist Heinrich Zimmer. An islander reminded the crowd of how they had been forced to make roads and buy Charde’s bread, and had had their parcels searched for Galway bread, and exhorted them to stand shoulder to shoulder against tyranny and proselytism, for now they were awakening from their slumber at last.

  About this time it was found that the rent-books had been stolen out of the Cill Rónáin courthouse, making it difficult to prosecute for arrears of rent. Dr. Bodkin suggested that perhaps they had not been stolen by the tenants but by Thompson himself, to cover up his crooked dealings over kelp; however the doctor may have been trying to divert suspicion from himself, for oral history says that Pat Ganly got him drunk, borrowed the dispensary keys from him, and broke into the rent office next door through the common roof-space to steal the documents. Soon afterwards a house used as a courthouse in Cill Éinne was burned down, and Kilbride’s boat was damaged. Then, just after the New Year of 1881, the famous cliffing of James O’Flaherty’s cattle took place, and in April more sheep and lambs of Charde’s were driven off the Mainistir farm and drowned. Pat Ganly’s brother Thomas, secretary of the local Land League branch, was arrested with another man on suspicion of their part in the killing of O’Flaherty’s cattle, and taken off to Galway Gaol. The bailiff Ó hIarnáin was shot at, and a Gort na gCapall man was arrested and imprisoned for it; the alleged motive was that his father was in arrears, and that since the rent-books had been stolen the bailiff was the only person who could swear to this. Minor acts of vengeance against the “land-grabbers” continued, and a calf of Charde’s was found stabbed in the belly. The last deed of the Land War in Aran was at harvest time in 1882, when a field of rye on Charde’s half of the Mainistir farm was cut and the rye removed to Ganly’s half. After that, as economic stress was moderated by the Land Courts’ reduction of rents and then the development of the fisheries, sectarianism lost its fire. Personal antagonisms were outlived, or were carried off to the respective graveyards of their faiths.

  Curiously enough, the most lasting memorial of Protestant evangelism in Aran is a stirring profession of Catholicism, written
by an Aran poet and still occasionally to be heard as a song. The story goes that one day Kilbride met the poet, Séamas Ó Chonchúir, going to collect his pension, and promised him both land and money if he would write a poem against Catholicism. According to another version of this incident, it was Thompson who demanded the poem, and when he received this spirited answer, evicted the poet, who had to go to America with his nine small children! Here is the first verse of Ó Conchúir’s lengthy reply, with a translation:

  Dá bhfaighfinnse culaith éadaigh a mbeadh ór ag sileadh léithi

  As ucht dán a dhéanamh do thaobh chreidimh Gall,

  Ní thiocfadh le mo chlaonta sliocht Liútair a moladh ar aon chor,

  A d’iompaigh ar an lámh chlé agus a thréig Máthair na nGrást.

  Nár dhona an cara domhsa, tráth m’anam a bheith á scrúdadh,

  Cnagaire den dúiche seo ar chuntar dá bhfaighinn

  Mo chreideamh féin a phlúchadh, ar nós an mhadaidh dúchais,

  Agus mé a bheith go brónach, tráth mbeadh cúntas le tabhairt ann.

  If I got a suit of clothes with gold dripping from them

  As payment for a poem in support of the foreign faith,

  It wouldn’t suit my inclinations to praise the breed of Luther

  Who took the evil turning and forswore the Mother of Grace.

  What a worthless friend when my soul is to be tried,

  A cnagaire of this land, if I’d been given it

  For smothering my faith like a dog gone mad,

  And me to be in sorrow when called to judgement for it.

  Kilbride seems to have played little part in the belated end of the islands’ dark ages; he probably concerned himself with his farm. His wife died in 1891, and it is ironic that her tombstone, the nearest thing we have to a memorial to Kilbride, names him in a rather strange Irish, as “Uilliam Mac Giolla Bhrighde, bhiocar Aránna.” The perception of the one or two old-timers who remember him is that he had learned Irish only to accomplish his evil purposes of perverting the people’s faith. (His Irish versions of the Psalms had been published by the Society for Irish Church Missions back in 1863, at the height of his proselytising activities.) Kilbride himself died in the winter of 1898–99; J. M. Synge received a letter from one of his Inis Meáin friends telling him that the minister’s boat had been on anchor in the harbour and that the wind blew her to Black Head and broke her up after his death. In 1907 Peter Gill, Dr. Stoney’s driver of long ago, returned from years in America, and discovered to his distress that the doctor’s grave was unmarked. He carved a tombstone himself, and set it up in its obscure position. His nephew, then a boy, remembers sitting on the churchyard wall that day; it was snowing—a rarity in Aran—and when his uncle removed his black felt hat in reverence to his long dead master, the youngster shied a snowball and hit him on his bald head.

  Little is remembered of later Protestant pastors; as their congregation dwindled they evidently had less and less of an influence on island affairs. By the time the last minister left in 1921 the only Protestants in Aran were two of the Charde family, for an elderly islander tells me that most of the later coastguards were English Catholics, and he remembers going to school with their sons. Later on, the roof of the disused church was removed so that rates would not have to be paid on it, an act which is still resented by those old natives who remember its last days, for they fear that visitors suppose the Aran people had wrecked the church out of bigotry, whereas “we never touched a window of it.” The empty shell of St. Thomas’s stands to this day, a stark reminder of seventy years of barren ministry.

  * Bean an Tí, housewife.

  BACKWATERS

  Heading out of Cill Rónáin with our shopping, we have to make up our minds whether to take the coast road, which is level but rough, or to face the steep hills of the main road. The point of choice comes just beyond the rectory grounds, opposite a pub called Joe Watty’s, where a turning to the right dips into the shade of the Protestant sycamores, and within a few dozen yards swings left again into a sheltery backwater of the town, separated from the main road by a scarp, with a row of cottages and a few little barns and stores and roofless walls representing an earlier, more stunted generation of cottages. This is, or was, the hamlet of Baile an Dúin; so called either from a dún or cashel, or, according to other equally unverifiable sources, from a chapel or domhnach, perhaps Cill Rónáin or Rónán’s church itself. Both cashel and chapel are untraceable today (the OS map of 1898 marks the site of a church about 150 yards north of the turning, which was probably a mass house or some relatively recent precursor of the present Catholic chapel), but Baile an Dúin (nicknamed Sleepy Hollow) seems to harbour a number of abolished histories, so I will look around it before heading for the west.

  The turning down to Baile an Dúin is Carcair an Atharla, the slope of the burial ground, because St. Rónán is said to be buried at its foot. Leaba Rónáin, Rónán’s “bed” or grave, is a plot about four yards square, delimited by a low wall, where the road turns right. There is a small altar in it, on which stands a stone inscribed with a cross and the name “St. Ronane,” very like another in Teampall Macduach in Cill Mhuirbhigh which is the work of a local stonecutter of the last century, John Burke. Up to perhaps fifty years ago it was the custom for people to sleep in the leaba on the eve of the saint’s day, the 15th of August, and one or two old folk remember seeing crutches left there after the lame had been cured by such vigils. They tell me too that an Englishman once uprooted an elderberry bush there, saying it was a limb of St. Rónán, and was smitten with a stroke.

  In 1947 the parish priest, Fr. Killeen, decided to have the leaba cleared out so that one of the outdoor benedictions of the Whit Sunday procession of the Blessed Sacrament could be held there. Fr. Killeen was devoted to processions; in fact Dara the postman tells me that he was always making the route longer, “going up and down narrow boreens with the people banging themselves on the walls, so that everyone was jaded by the time we reached the church; if he had stayed on the island any longer we would have ended up walking to Bun Gabhla!” At that time there was a small forest growing in the enclosure in place of the one alder tree O’Donovan had noted there during his 1839 researches. Fr. Killeen describes the felling:

  The people talked. It was not right to cut the trees down. Alders grew wherever the saints were. It was no use telling them that the use of the Leaba for Benediction would give more honour to St. Rónán than any old tree could. I gave the hatchet to Fr. Patrick Delaney and told him to go himself and do the work. He set to it with a will. A crowd stood on the road about thirty yards away looking at the priest whaling away with his axe, and apparently waiting for something to happen to him. They were thinking of the last man who tried to cut the trees down. He was a Scotch Presbyterian and a first class bigot. His clearly expressed reason for interfering with the Leaba was to show contempt for the holy place. But it fared ill with him. He had no sooner begun to use his hatchet than he broke his leg. That settled him. (This story appears to be quite true.) As the priest continued to remain unharmed, first one young man and then another broke away from the crowd and came down to help. Then they all came and made a first rate job of the clearance. That year too the custom of saying the Rosary at the Leaba on the eve of the Assumption was revived.

  This passage is from the history of Aran Fr. Killeen put together at the behest of his archbishop, a work of a hundred folio pages in typescript, particularly copious on all the saints ever mentioned in connection with Aran in the most obscure of ancient sources, a topic he poured his scholarly heart into. But even Fr. Killeen cannot tell us anything about St. Rónán. I need not quote the lengthy reasons he gives as to why our St. Rónán is not to be identified with Rónán of Locronan in France, Rónán of Kilronan in Roscommon, Rónán Finn of Laind, Rónán Finn of Uí Eachach or Rónán mac Beraigh of Dromiskin. Perhaps his name was really Crónán, perhaps he is not buried here at all (O’Donovan thought he was not), perhaps he never existed—but on
e thing is certain, he was a mighty saint.

  Just west of the leaba, according to early nineteenth-century maps, stood another monument to a most obscure facet of the island’s history: Digby House, of which I believe not a trace remains. The Digbys are the great absence in Aran’s history, not only as being for the most part absentee landlords of the classic sort, syphoning off the islands’ tiny capital resources to be spent as the small change of a metropolitan, high-society lifestyle, but as blanks in the island record. What history of them I can put together here has been pieced together out of widely scattered references, and as to the islanders’ own knowledge of them, that is and was virtually nil. When Synge in the late 1890s asked who owned the islands, the answer he got was “Bedad, we’ve always heard it belonged to Miss Digby, and she is dead.”

  The Digbys, as I have mentioned, acquired Aran in the first half of the eighteenth century. In 1713 the Cromwellian Sir Stephen Fox sold the islands for £8200, in two “moeities”; one to Edmund Fitzpatrick of Aran, and the other to the Rev. Simon Digby, Lord Bishop of Elphin, in Roscommon. The bishop leased his moeity to the Fitzpatricks for £280 per annum, but in 1744 the next generation of Fitzpatricks sold their own moeity for £2050 to the Digbys, then represented by a Robert Digby of Landenstown in Kildare. Perhaps this name Robert is an error in the source, for the bishop’s son was called John, and it is recorded that John Digby was the proprietor in 1745, and that in 1754 he demised Inis Oírr to a William McNamara of Doolin (on the Clare coast opposite the island), for thirty-one years at £90 per annum.