Obviously, any ugly, red-faced mewling baby was a changeling who had to be brought to Biddy Early for a swap because no normal couple could have such a monster naturally. Any sudden changes in mood were deemed cases for Early. For example, a wife falling out with her husband after he slapped her around was obvious proof that she had been swapped with a replacement wife under the management of fairies. She would have to visit Early for treatment. Early also healed sick animals.
As a traditional healer, she didn’t charge a fee but accepted gifts of food and alcohol from her clients. She used her famous “dark bottle” as a crystal ball for foretelling future events, such as imminent murders. She married an unknown number of men who all died from alcohol abuse, which unaccountably she didn’t specialise in curing.
Ireland was a fairly humourless place in 1865, the year she was accused of witchcraft. She was put on trial in Ennis. However, she wasn’t convicted because witnesses were reluctant to testify against her. Also, while we know she owned a bottle, there is no record of her owning a cat, and we know that all witches have cats.
Her final husband, who was much younger than her, died soon after their wedding. She died in poverty in 1874, having dedicated her life to helping others and the promotion of health, especially relieving the locals from possession or kidnap by fairies.
A Man Walks into a Bar …
Our world-beating achievements in science are not exhausted by physics, chemistry, mathematics, engineering, medicine, “medicine” and healing. We have also achieved wonders in philosophy, which is regarded as the “mother of the sciences”.
Do you ever look out the window of an airplane at 36,000 feet and find it impossible to imagine that the people down below in the tiny towns and villages are real and have real lives like you? If so, then you are at the starting point of an important philosophical awakening, or disorder, depending on your point of view.
Worries about the reality of other people bothered philosopher George Berkeley (1685–1753). Perhaps only an Irish person could funnel such an individual anxiety about the existence of other people into a philosophical question – if a tree falls in the forest when no one is there to hear it, does it make a noise?
Berkeley was born near Kilkenny. He went to Trinners in 1700, where he studied mathematics, logic, philosophy, Greek, Latin, French and Hebrew. Berkeley’s fame rests on his acclaimed book, A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, which appeared in 1710. He developed his philosophy, known as idealism,149 essentially because he didn’t believe that other people were real.
Here is how his philosophy works in practice (though you might be wondering why I’m bothering with this at all because on the basis of this argument you don’t exist either): stand beside a man at the bar in your local pub, preferably someone big, and tell him that you are convinced, because of idealist principles, that he doesn’t really exist, despite the fact that you are talking to him, which might seem like a contradiction. Don’t worry about these small annoying details because contradictions are the life-blood of philosophy. We can ignore the small, if significant, quirks in what would be an otherwise coherent argument. Assure the large man at the bar that you know from Berkeley that general ideas, like “other people”, are merely a product of the operation of the mind – your mind, in this case. Berkeley believed that God’s mind produced all of our ideas. This is typical of philosophy in the eighteenth century. Every time a philosopher got his philosophical knickers into a contradictory twist, he dragged God into the argument as a kind of metaphysical trump card. Why bother, you might ask. Why not just call on God to strike your philosophical opponent down with a bolt of lightning? I presume God was rolling his eyes, but not up to heaven exactly. Anyway, I digress, as one should do in philosophy. But digression is vitally important to the progress of human thought. If you doubt that, then you just don’t have the wherewithal to appreciate the subtleties of modern philosophy.
At this point in the pub you might laugh smugly to yourself at your complex metaphysical thoughts, which even you don’t understand because they are so bewildering. Once you have thus proved to your own satisfaction that the large man at the bar doesn’t exist, his standard response should be the subtle metaphysical antithesis of hitting you in the face. He might politely enquire if you now think he doesn’t exist as you slump to the floor clutching your broken nose. Perhaps this traditional response to the merits of metaphysical debate in the Irish pub reveals the reason for our relative historical philosophical retardation. Surely it is this kind of gauche impulse that has made us so bad at philosophy. But what about the tree, you are probably still wondering: does it make a noise or not? It is not as simple as yes or no. It never is, or philosophers would be out of business. An ideal tree does make noise in an ideal forest, probably neither of which exists. How would I know? I will let you work out the details.
Berkeley’s materialist150 rivals accused him of being insane or hilarious, as you do when you are a philosophical rival. He ignored them. He wrote his ideas in a new book that took intellectual London by storm. He was invited to write for The Guardian newspaper, to take coffee with wits and to dine at Oxford, where the conversation was famously superior to the food. Ah, sweet success! Being a wit is another historically redundant profession no longer appreciated by the contemporary boorish pub goer. Berkeley toured extensively in Italy before travelling to America with a plan to establish a college in Bermuda. While his plans ultimately failed, the state of California later established its university in a town named after him.
In 1734 he was made bishop of Cloyne. He returned to Ireland to commence his medical idealism phase. While bishop, he championed the plight of the poor, encouraging local industries in workhouses. He even opened a spinning school, which was practical for such a famous idealist. The foundation stone of his medical idealism was his belief in the virtue of tar-water as a cure-all remedy. Tar-water is a particularly disgusting medieval medicine, even by the standards of medieval medicines, composed of pine tar and water. But tar-water may have been better than nothing in the context of there being no medical infrastructure whatsoever at that time. He wrote Siris, A Chain of Philosophical Reflections and Inquiries, Concerning the Virtues of Tar-Water in 1744, which sold extremely well. He loved concerts. He retained the famous Italian musician Pasquilino for four years to give concerts in his house in Cloyne.
Berkeley’s philosophical contemporary competitors included Sir Richard Bulkeley (1660–1710), who was one of the earliest members of the Dublin Philosophical Society, founded in 1683. He spent most of his time there trying to convince his fellow members to use a singular carriage of his own invention. This carriage had the appealing feature that it could not be turned over under any circumstance. Picture the scene during a typically contemplative evening at the Society, when Bulkeley interrupts the abstract lectures to drag the members out to the street to vainly attempt, en masse, to capsize a sample carriage. He is definitely the answer to critics of philosophy who protest that the discipline should be more practical.
Berkeley is Ireland’s greatest philosopher. However, Ludwig Wittgenstein, who may be the world’s greatest philosopher, came to Ireland in 1947. He sat on the steps in the glasshouse of the Botanic Gardens in Glasnevin, Dublin and had thoughts. The steps bear a plaque marking the site of this rare esoteric thinking in Ireland, which tells us that the Viennese philosopher “liked to sit and write at these steps”. Thankfully it doesn’t say “write on these steps” because Wittgenstein was a philosopher of language: one must be exactly precise in describing their behaviour.
*
J.B. Hall, in his Random Records of a Reporter,151 wistfully recalls how the famous Greek philosopher Socrates used to turn up at a highly respectable séance in Dublin at the end of the nineteenth century speaking poor English with a Cork accent. Who could have imagined that Socrates would have moved to Cork after drinking the hemlock in Athens in 399 BC?
Postscript: Giants of Irish History
High King of Ireland Brian Boru had supposed descendants who he could look up to because they were, literally, giants. One alleged descendant was Derryman Charles Byrne (1761–1783). While alive, his height was estimated to be 8 feet. He was actually 8 feet, 4 inches when measured after his death. He formed a double act with the 3-foot Count Joseph Boruwlaski. Boruwlaski was obviously another descendant of the great king, only shorter.
Byrne made a lot of money from exhibiting himself as O’Brien Boru. But he invested all his earnings in one £700 bank note that was stolen from his pocket while he drank in a pub in April 1873. He was carrying the equivalent of approximately €40,000 of today’s money while he drank in a pub. Understandably he was upset, though you would wonder who would ask for change from a £700 note.
He died in June of that year, apparently from excessive drinking brought on by “vexation at the loss of his savings”. Fortunately, vexation is one of those historical conditions that don’t affect us any more.
He was terrified of the anatomists.152 He wisely requested that he be buried at sea. However, his wishes were ignored. When he died, surgeons surrounded his house in London like a peasant mob. After frantic bidding, his corpse was purchased by the famous anatomist Doctor John Hunter for either £500 or £800. Byrne could have sold himself in advance to recoup his lost bank note and thereby have alleviated his vexation. He obviously had poor financial advisers. His skeleton is preserved in the museum of the College of Surgeons in London.
Patrick Cotter (c.1760–1806), from Cork, reached a height of over 7 feet while he was still a teenager. He worked as a plasterer and roofer because he could plaster walls and slate shed roofs without using a ladder. His father was bribed by a showman in 1779 to allow Patrick to be shown as an exhibit in a fair. Patrick fell out with that showman when he discovered that he had been sublet to another show. His original manager had him thrown in gaol for breach of contract because Patrick was sulking. He was released through the kind intervention of a man called William Watts, who was obviously a supporter of the tall. Patrick eventually became a popular attraction at fairs in Bristol. He was amazed to make £10153 a day on his first three days. He invested the money in a pub called The Giant’s Castle.
Cotter also took the stage name O’Brien Boru and claimed direct descent from King Brian Boru. However, according to his detractors, while Byrne may have been a descendent, Cotter only saw a way of cashing in on an association with the name.
His advertising claimed that he was 9 feet tall but he never allowed himself to be measured. Sober audience members guessed his height at 7 feet, 10 inches. As this O’Brien Boru became rich from his showings, his health deteriorated. Fearing that the dreaded anatomists would dig him up after death, he arranged to have himself buried in three coffins placed inside each other like Russian dolls. These coffins were then buried in a 12-foot grave protected by iron bars. Even though he was buried at 6.00 a.m., 2,000 people attended the funeral. His grave plaque gave his height as 8 feet, 4 inches.
However, curiosity about his genuine height did not decline. Public debate raged on, with guesses putting him between 6 feet, 10 inches and 8 feet, 1 inch. It was like a national lottery. He had to be dug up in 1906 and again in 1972 just to satisfy public curiosity. Measurements of his skeleton showed that he was between 7 feet, 10 inches and 8 feet, 1 inch tall. We do know that his walking stick was 53 inches.
For the record, Patrick Murphy (1834–1862) who, unconventionally, did not claim descent from Brian Boru, outgrew both Byrne O’Brien Boru and Cotter O’Brien Boru. According to parish records, Murphy reached a height of 8 feet, 1 inch, or, in other estimates, 8 feet, 10 inches. He refused to allow himself to become a paid exhibit, and walked freely around Dublin to the delight of passers-by. He amused children by lighting his pipe from the village gas lamp. Only once did he settle a dispute in a football match by hoisting the two quarreling players into the air and banging their heads together. However, he was eventually persuaded to tour Europe in a travelling circus, becoming a celebrity in France. He died of smallpox which he caught while touring in Marseilles. Just the bad luck of the Irish giant!
Notes
1 Pamphleteering was the popular habit of putting thoughts on any subject into the public arena in the form of a brochure, usually paid for by the author. The best pamphlets were written as self-justifications for the most outrageous actions, opinions, inventions, remedies, cures or beliefs. A pamphlet war frequently broke out when a pamphleteer attacked the sentiments of another, forcing a pamphlet response in kind. Vitriolic pamphlet wars were popular with the reading public.
2 The term “attorney” is derived from the Anglo-Norman French attorner, which means to turn or to put in the place of, or to substitute one for another. The term was used in Ireland as a generic description for all those involved with the law (except the accused or the litigants) between 1541, when the Kings’ Inns was founded, and 1877 when an Act of the Supreme Court of Judicature (Ireland) united court structures by amalgamating the state courts and the chancery courts, which had their origins in religious jurisdiction. After 1877 a stringent naming rule was confirmed, assigning definite separate roles to barristers and solicitors. This had the added benefit of allowing lawyers to generate law cases against each other for misuse of these new terms. As most of the lawyers in this book predate 1877, I use the term “attorney” for them, and “barristers” or just “lawyers” after that date. America never had a legal amalgamation because they never had a split between state and religious jurisdictions, and this is why we still have attorneys in American television dramas.
3 I refer throughout to Trinity College Dublin by its popular name “Trinners”. As the oldest university in Ireland, it is the institution from which many people in Irish history graduated, were expelled or just dropped out.
4 Now known as the Hawaiian Islands.
5 The United Irishmen were a political alliance formed by the Catholic and Presbyterian middle classes. The union was initially created to bring about political reform but evolved into a military organisation.
6 About €53,000 in contemporary currency values. It is difficult to calculate relative monetary value over centuries. Economists try because we like to ask “How much would that be worth now?” Some economists use the notion of buying power where they compare, for example, the number of sheep we could buy then and now for a given amount of money. But sheep can fluctuate in price and are not as central to our shopping list as they once were. Others use wages where we can compare how many days of a weaver’s time we might expect for an amount of money then and now. But it is difficult to imagine how well-off a weaver is compared to, say, an attorney or a plumber. I have relied on currency value rather than buying power or comparative wages throughout this book. Currency value gives an interesting, if unscientific, idea of the amounts involved. Considering economists disagree amongst themselves over the notion of value, calculations should be treated with caution or even skepticism because amounts have to be transformed from imperial into decimal currencies, across regions, and then across currencies from pounds into euro where rates are also subject to fluctuations. I have included a value because I like to know how much a pound from hundreds of years ago is worth today, especially when someone is buying a wife or paying a fine!
7 The lord lieutenant of Ireland, also known as the viceroy, was the British monarch’s representative and effective head of the Irish Government.
8 The French Directory was the Executive Government of the First French Republic from 1795 to 1799, when Napoleon toppled the Directory and replaced it with the Consulate with himself as First Consul.
9 Thomas Paine had a typical mix of competencies. He was a pamphleteer, journalist, inventor and revolutionary. Author of the influential Rights of Man, he can also be regarded as the father of the American Revolution.
10 Louis Philippe Joseph d’Orleans, who was King Louis XVI’s cousin, a
ctively supported the French Revolution. He adopted the name “Equality Philip” to demonstrate his republican credentials. Despite his great courage as a noble revolutionary, he was guillotined during the Reign of Terror in November 1793.
11 Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s political philosophy directly influenced the French Revolution because in his 1762 treatise The Social Contract he argued for the legitimacy of republicanism. He also provided a radical philosophy of education, arguing that right and wrong was learned from experience rather than custom. This philosophy of education came to life in FitzGerald.
12 The Iroquois League, better known from Western films as the Six Nations, and less known by the name they call themselves, the Haudenosaunee, were formed from a confederation of six tribes of indigenous people of North America, which included the Seneca nation and Mohawk tribes.
13 One, the College Historical Society (the Hist), mentioned earlier in this chapter, claims to be the oldest student society in the world, tracing its origins to 1747. The other is the University Philosophical Society (the Phil), which also considers itself to be the oldest student society in the world, tracing its origins to 1683. I will leave them to debate the issue amongst themselves.
14 About €80,000 in contemporary currency values.
15 A pike is a long spear that was used by infantry soldiers. It was not intended to be thrown. Instead, it was used to thrust at individual cavalry soldiers or in large formations against a cavalry charge.
16 Captain William Bligh (1754–1817) of “Mutiny on the Bounty” fame came to Dublin, between mutinies, in 1800. He spent three months in the Hibernian Hotel on Dawson St while he mapped Dublin Bay as part of an engineering project that ultimately made the port safe for navigation. Through popular portrayals in films, Bligh has become a by-word for cruelty and tyranny. But in reality he was a man of extraordinary abilities. Bligh was an exceptional cartographer, an extraordinary navigator, a naturalist, a scientist and an illustrator. But he did have anger management issues because he set himself high standards. On the Bounty he was recorded as saying “infamous scoundrel”, “audacious rascal”, “vagrant”, “you are a disgrace to the service”, “God damn you, sir what are you about?” and, the worst, “dastardly villain”. All this was enough to utterly demoralise any crew member, especially if they were pining after the scantily clad ladies of Tahiti that Bligh had unreasonably insisted they leave behind, instead taking his precious cargo of breadfruits. No wonder there was mutiny.
Poet, Madman, Scoundrel Page 25
