by Pat Walsh
To coincide with the political crisis over Miss Dunbar Harrison’s appointment, the Catholic Bulletin ran a historical feature on ‘A Souper Library in Mayo’. The article was actually about a ‘souper school’ in Ballindine rather than a library, but it served the Bulletin’s purpose, reminding those who may have forgotten, of notorious proselytisers like Rev. Nangle.
Rev. Edward Nangle’s Achill mission had actually been established in 1831. The Famine had merely added impetus to his missionary efforts. The local priest claimed that his parishioners ‘were dying of hunger and rather than die they have submitted to his [Nangle’s] impious tenets.’
Rev. Alexander Dallas and his Irish Church Missions were active in Connemara, one of the poorest areas in Ireland during the height of the Famine period. As Desmond Bowen put it, ‘there is no doubt about the terrible purity of Dallas’s motives. He was out to save souls – not to give temporal relief to the suffering Irish people.’
An account by Mrs Dallas of an incident in Errismore gives some insight into his detachment from the suffering happening all around him.
We walked across to Mannin Bay and on our way we saw about a dozen poor famished creatures attempting to work, but too weak to do anything. It was impossible to lose the opportunity of telling the Gospel to these apparently dying men as they stood or sat around me like living skeletons. They listened with fixed attention, as if they were pausing on the brink of the grave to receive a message from heaven as to their journey beyond it. I never set forth the salvation of Christ under so strong a feeling that my hearers would be soon called to experience the truth of my statement.
With such attitudes it is unsurprising that the activities of Rev. Dallas and his Irish Church Missions were the cause of much bitterness in Connacht.
Harriet Martineau, a not entirely unbiased English traveller, visited Achill in September 1852. She remarked on the tension on the island. ‘For a long course of years there was a quietness which might almost be called peace in Achill.’
She put the blame for the unrest squarely on the shoulders of Archbishop John McHale and the combative clergymen he had sent to the island. She gave a vivid account of a particular incident which had occurred.
The admitted facts are, according to the report of petty sessions, that the two priests collected the people in the village of Keel (Catholic, and the largest place on the island); that they supported each other in instigating the attack by which a Scripture Reader was stoned, knocked down among the turf, and beaten; that one of the priests, foaming at the mouth with passion, called the readers ‘damned devils’ , and the Protestants ‘jumper devils’ and ‘stirabout jumpers’; that he charged the parents with sending their children to school to lose their souls, to be ‘justified by stirabout and redeemed by porridge’; that he bade the people ‘scald, scald’ and ‘persecute to death’ the Protestants of Achill; that he pronounced the curse of God on any one who should sell them a pint of milk or a stone of potatoes; that he said he had but one life, and he, ‘would willingly give it to drive out these devils, and see Achill great, glorious and free, as it was before they came.
It was little wonder that Nangle moved from Achill soon after this incident.
Bishop Thomas Plunket became Protestant Bishop of the united dioceses of Tuam, Killala and Achonry in 1839. He was also landlord of an estate in Tourmakeady. He used his power to support both Nangle and Dallas, and in fact gave Nangle a position at the rectory of Skreen in North Mayo.
In the post-Famine years he was heavily influential in the promotion of missionary and evangelical Protestantism in Connacht. The Bishop and his sister, Catherine Plunket, set up a Protestant school in Tourmakeady. He came into conflict with the Catholic priest in the area, Fr Peter Ward, and then with Ward’s successor, Fr Patrick Lavelle.
‘The point of a crowbar’
The struggle between them became popularly known as ‘the war in Partry’. It flared up in 1860. Plunket was accused of using his power as a landlord to proselytise, that ‘he preached his gospel at the point of a crowbar’, that is, that if his tenants refused to allow their children attend Catherine Plunket’s school, they would be evicted.
Plunket’s Tourmakeady estate agent defended him, admitting that, while there had been evictions they were not due to religion. The people evicted were guilty of ‘outrage, conspiracy, incendiarism and murder.’ The incident had come to the attention of the London Times. It was critical of Plunket’s estate policy. As they put it, ‘Lord Plunket applies to all alike a punishment which is too severe for the innocent, as it is insufficient for the guilty.’
In the 1920s, some Protestant ministers made the tentative suggestion that use of the word ‘souper’ was, at the very least, indelicate if not downright distasteful and that it should perhaps be withdrawn from the vocabulary of the Catholic press. Conservative periodicals such as the Catholic Bulletin and the Catholic Mind would have none of it.
In 1906 the contentious issue of Bibles in Irish had been the cause of a minor controversy in Dublin corporation libraries, when two members of the municipal council (one of them the MP T.M. Harrington) had ‘denounced the Hibernian Bible Society for having given, and the Libraries Committee for having accepted’, a Bible in Irish for each library branch. The Hibernian Bible Society was accused of being a proselytising institution. ‘The discussion in the corporation was seized upon by the Dublin press as an event beyond ordinary importance for sale of copy.’ The Books Committee found it necessary to defend itself. It claimed that it had ‘always acted upon the principle that public libraries should be public libraries in fact as well as in name, and consequently that they should not be administered as if by the ignorant in any narrow, bigoted or intolerant spirit: that the libraries are the property of all the citizens.’4
In October 1906, the full meeting of the corporation backed this policy. ‘The report of the Libraries Committee was adopted without a division and by an overwhelming majority. The opponents … could be counted upon the fingers of one hand.’ The controversy quickly fizzled out.
As well as souperism and Bibles in Irish, Seán na Sagart had also been mentioned in the County Council debates. Seán na Sagart’s infamy went even further back in time. He had a fearsome reputation as a demon from Mayo’s folk memory, a bogeyman rendered all the more scary in that he was based on a real person. Seán na Sagart (John of the Priests) had been a legendary priest hunter during penal times. So infamous was he that in America his nickname, Seán na Sagart, was used as a generic name for all priest hunters. Many tales were attached to this legend.
In a Catholic Truth Society booklet from 1946, R.J. Bennett laid out the accepted facts of Seán na Sagart’s life. His real name was John Mullowney. He was a native of Ballintubber Parish, from the townland of Skehanagh, near Ballyheane. As a youth in Mayo he had led a life of dissolution. He had expensive taste that could not be supported by legal means. He was reputed to have two particular vices, drinking and stealing horses. He was only of average height but he carried himself in a fashion that made him seem taller than he really was, while his whole bearing was indicative of strength. Brown-eyed, under shaggy eyebrows, he could be good company. He was free with his ill-gotten gains, always anxious to pour strong liquor down his throat.
John Mullowney was little more than a boy when he was captured and sentenced to death in Castlebar for horse stealing. He was so contemptuous of his fatal sentence that he attracted the attention of the prison authorities. They offered him a free pardon provided he join the ranks of the priest hunters. It was an occupation for which he proved to have an exceptional aptitude.5 It was reported that on one occasion he lured a priest to him by pretending to his sister that he was mortally ill. His sister, Nancy Louhnan, was a devout Catholic. She had been widowed at the age of twenty-five and had two infant daughters. Her brother asked her to find a priest for him so he could repent his sins and confess. When the priest turned up, he promptly turned him in for the bounty. One particular priest he was hu
nting, Andrew Higgins, was reputed to have been killed by a pistol shot as he was being pushed off in a currach near Pulnathacken.
John Mullowney eventually met his end while in epic pursuit of Fr David Bourke. He chased the friar from Ballintubber on through Kiltharshahawn, Derreenfaderring, Skeeh and Furnace, on to the high road towards Cloonach and Ballynew, finishing up at Aill Baile Nuaid near Partry.6 It was there that the tables were turned and the hunter became the hunted. In the ensuing struggle John Mullowney was killed. He was stabbed to death, some say by a relative of Andrew Higgins, the priest he had killed. The place of his death is marked by a tall stone in a wood near Partry. According to Matthew Archdeacon, whose novel based on John Mullowney’s story was published in 1844, ‘The deeply blood-stained priest hunter who seemed through life to have neither loved nor feared God or man’ was interred in a little dismantled chapel adjacent to Ballintubber Abbey.7 Even then he achieved no peace. Outraged locals were said to have dug up his grave and scattered his bones, throwing them into the waters of Lough Carra. The ash tree that shadowed John Mullowney’s grave was long an article of curiosity to Ballintubber visitors. It was a deformed branchless and leafless trunk, ‘an object of awe as well as of wonder among the peasantry of the district.’8 Whatever the precise truth of all these stories there is no doubt they were widely circulated in Mayo.
It might seem excessive to lay the guilt for all this history at the feet of Miss Dunbar Harrison, but Archbishop Gilmartin felt that Mayo’s past had such a strong influence on its current political reality that the wrath of his priests and their flock was justified.
While the government made little progress in their endeavours to solve the specific dispute in Mayo, there were also discussions on the general issue of libraries and how they should be run. A proposal was floated that responsibility for the library system in the Free State be taken out of the hands of the local authorities and run instead by central government. However, the bishops made a counter-suggestion that the library service should be treated in a similar fashion to the school system. In the Free State at the time, schools came under clerical control. Libraries would be subject to a form of denominational apartheid. Protestant libraries for Protestant people, and separate Catholic libraries for Catholic people. If libraries were seen as solely educational institutions, this was perhaps the logical extension of that line of reasoning but it was not one that President Cosgrave could agree to. He threatened to resign if the bishops forced him to make a decision on this issue, as did another member of his cabinet, Desmond Fitzgerald, who had also been involved in the negotiations.
It would be a mistake, however, to believe that the government was without support in its stance. An editorial in the Enniscorthy Echo declared, ‘As a Catholic country we give control of education, so far as Catholics are concerned, to the Catholic church, and from that some people argued that the library service, being an educational service, should be strictly Catholic. But a library service is primarily a social amenity and can no more be called an educational service than a theatre or a picture house.
‘It may and does serve an educational purpose, but unless it is a specialised or propaganda library its educational aspect is only incidental. The average user of a general library reads to amuse himself, not primarily for educational purposes.’9
The Church of Ireland Gazette took a much less combative stance on the dispute than had The Irish Times. In December 1930 the Gazette welcomed ‘various indications that Fianna Fáil is growing more moderate and less prone to adventures. We welcome also the declaration, by some of its spokesmen (in connection with the Mayo librarian case), that they intend to give fair play to all Irish people irrespective of their religious beliefs.’10 One week later the Gazette returned to the issue. ‘The Free State Minister for Local Government,’ it wrote, ‘has given Mayo County Council an opportunity to reconsider its attitude at a meeting to be held by the end of this year but makes it plain that the government will insist on the appointment of Miss Dunbar as librarian for the county.’11 The Gazette seemed content to trust the Cumann na nGaedheal government to protect the rights of the Protestant minority in the Free State. Wary of their place in the newly formed country, they tended to keep a low profile when it came to controversies such as this.
In her book The Church of Ireland Community of Killala and Achonry, 1870-1940, Miriam Moffitt writes that ‘with the establishment of the Free State, the Protestant community felt more isolated from the affairs of state than ever before. The victimisation of Protestants in the early days of the Irish Free State persuaded many to move to Northern Ireland, or to emigrate. Those who remained became, of necessity, a silent minority.’12 Little wonder that it was so, given Miss Dunbar Harrison’s experience in Mayo.
Notes
1.Catholic Bulletin, January 1931, vol. xxi, no. 1, pp.6-7.
2.Brigid Redmond, op. cit., p.173.
3.Ibid.
4.Henry Dixon, ‘The Corporation and the Bible in Irish’, An Leabharlann, March 1907, vol. ii, no. 2, pp.188-189.
5.R.J. Bennett, Seán na Sagart, the priest hunter, pp.5-6.
6.R.J. Bennett, postscript p.21. The author notes that these placenames were related to him by an old storyteller from Tourmakeady, which may account for the phonetic spellings of the townlands.
7.Matthew Archdeacon, Shawn na Soggart, p.415.
8.Ibid.
9.Enniscorthy Echo, 3 January 1931, p.6.
10.The Church of Ireland Gazette, 19 December 1930, p.727.
11.Ibid., 24 December 1930, p.736.
12.Miriam Moffitt, The Church of Ireland Community of Killala & Achonry, 1870-1940, p.10.
Chapter 14
‘The worst thing since Cromwell’
The Irish language, ostensibly the reason for the furore surrounding Letitia Dunbar Harrison’s appointment, tended to get lost in the ensuing debate. Most of the letters published concentrated on Miss Dunbar Harrison’s religion or her Trinity College education. As previously mentioned, Kathleen White had a similar lack of Irish yet this did not prove a barrier to her being appointed as librarian in Leitrim. However, it would be a mistake to think that the language aspect was overlooked entirely. Rev. Malachy Mac Branain, PP, Ahascragh, was one of those who focused on it.
As one who many years ago took a successful part in the fight for compulsory Irish in the National University, allow me to express my wholehearted appreciation of the action of the Co. Mayo library committee in refusing to accept the recommendation of the Local Appointments Commissioners to the effect that a graduate of Trinity College should be appointed as librarian for the Irish-speaking Co. Mayo.
… The Local Appointments Commissioners by their action in this and similar cases are giving a new lease of influence and power to Trinity College and to the West British ideals it was founded to establish.
The procedure is inconsistent with the principle of compulsory Irish advocated by the government of An Saorstát and most unfair to the National University and its constituent colleges … To make the position still more inconsistent the chairman of the Gaeltacht Commission, Gen. Mulcahy, is the member of the government responsible for insisting that the person appointed as librarian for the Irish-speaking Co. Mayo must be a graduate of Trinity College.
It is difficult to understand how our people have tolerated this whole policy of centralisation, which in practice has taken away from our local representatives on public boards whatever powers they had, and transferred those powers to an unknown body in Dublin, who are responsible to nobody.
The policy is opposed to all democratic principles and is the exact opposite of what we would expect from a new government, which after years of foreign domination now claims to have full control of its own affairs … The rights of the people … have been handed over to an intolerant minority, whose real sentiments regarding this country have been so eloquently expressed by the Protestant archbishops of Armagh and Dublin, in their recent pronouncement on the veto of the English Privy Council ov
er all the disputed questions in the Free State.1
The Catholic Bulletin had always taken a hard-line stance when it came to the question of Irish identity. This excerpt from an editorial in 1924 gives a flavour of its attitude. ‘The Irish nation,’ the Catholic Bulletin wrote, ‘is the Gaelic nation, its language and literature is the Gaelic language; its history is the history of the Gael.’2 The question of the Irish language and Miss Dunbar Harrison was by no means black and white. Even the Irish language organisations were split on the issue. As the Cork Examiner reported, the Gaelic League received a letter from Rev. Mac Evilly, Claremorris, in which he stated that in his opinion ‘the appointment of a commissioner for Mayo was the best thing for the Irish language that has happened yet. He had had a conversation with the commissioner, P.J. Bartley, who asked him to suggest two members of the Gaelic League and two members of the Gaelic Athletic Association for membership of the Vocational Education Committee.’
