From the Great Blasket to America

by Michael Carney

  The first member of my family to leave for America was my father’s aunt, Nellie Carney, who emigrated to Springfield, Massachusetts. She was certainly a very brave woman to come over to a whole new world all by herself. She paved the way for the rest of us to follow. While Nellie was courageous, she was also a very quiet woman. She did domestic work and never married. She kept to herself. She was eventually followed to Springfield by my uncle Michael Carney, the first of my father’s generation to emigrate.

  Mike Carney’s father, Seán Tom Ó Ceárna, emigrated to America twice but eventually married and settled down on the island.

  My father was anxious for a change from the island. He wanted a different kind of life. So he thought he would join his brother Michael in America. He was only nineteen at the time. It was just after the turn of the twentieth century. Later, two of my father’s other brothers, Maurice and Thomas, went to America. That made four Carney brothers in Springfield, including my father. We always said that they were like wild geese, following one another.

  Like so many others, my father went to Springfield on a ship from Cobh to Boston. He stayed with his brother Michael and his wife on Everett Street, near Mercy Hospital.

  It was not easy to get jobs when my father first came out to America. At that particular time, jobs were scarce. There was also lots of job discrimination against emigrants from Ireland. There were infamous signs that said ‘No Irish Need Apply’. It was not a good situation.

  My uncle Michael came up with a plan to get my father a job on the Boston & Albany Railroad. Michael was a ‘ganger’, a foreman, for the Boston & Albany. There was a man who worked for him who was not very punctual and he used to overdo it with drink over the weekend. One Monday morning, my uncle brought a pint of vodka to work. He said to the man, ‘How do you feel this morning?’ ‘Not too good,’ he said. He must have enjoyed himself too much the previous night. So my uncle gave him the vodka bottle and told him to go down the line and take a few swigs of it to get rid of his hangover. Naturally, the man couldn’t resist the temptation and drank the whole bottle.

  Then the big boss came along and found him drunk and sleeping down along the boxcars. So the boss fired him on the spot. And, just as planned, the big boss immediately hired my father in the new vacancy. As a result of this clever strategy, my father worked for the Boston & Albany for many years. My father always said that working for the railroad was very hard, back-breaking work. But the pay was pretty good for the times, so it was worth the effort.

  My father’s best friend in those days was an islander named Mike Keane (Micheál Ó Catháin), the son of the King. They had emigrated to America together.

  One day, my uncle Michael came home for lunch and his wife announced that my father had gone back to Ireland that very morning. My father all of a sudden upped and went back, simply because his friend Mike Keane had just gone back and he missed him.

  My uncle was shocked and even a bit aggravated at the situation. I suppose they went back for sentimental reasons. Keane and my father were both island-sick. Maybe my father didn’t want to admit his yearning for the island to his brother after all he had done for him.

  But my father found very little work back home on the island except fishing. Then, when Mike Keane went back to America again, my father went back to America with him. And when he got to Springfield, my father went back to work for the railroad. He was fortunate enough to get his old job back. Obviously, my father and Keane were very close friends.

  Everything in them days was done on the spur of the moment. That’s the way they operated. No hesitation, just take off …

  Mike Keane used to play a violin out on his front porch on Carew Street, one of the main streets in Springfield. People called him ‘The Fiddler’. He played Irish songs and the music for set dances and people walking by would stop and listen. They loved the music, even though they did not understand the words of the songs. Eventually, The Fiddler started a small band and they played Irish music for various events in the Springfield area.

  When The Fiddler went back to the island from Springfield, he brought his fiddle home with him. But when he returned to America, for some unknown reason he left it in the attic of a pub on Goat Street in Dingle. About a hundred years later, that same fiddle was discovered and its history was tracked down. It has now been restored to its original beauty by The Fiddler’s descendants. It is now on display in the Blasket Centre in Dunquin. It is certainly a very well-travelled instrument with a lot of history to it.

  The grandchildren of Mike ‘The Fiddler’ Keane, great grandchildren of ‘The King’, in 2007 with the famous fiddle from the island and Springfield. (L–r) Jack Kane, Joanne Jacob, Mary Kane and Larry Kane.

  After another couple of years of working in America, my father came back to the island for good. This time, he came back because he maintained that he had a stomach problem and the food in America did not agree with him.

  My father had some form of a stomach ulcer. He was always complaining of a ‘gastrated’ stomach. But on the island, the food was home-cooked and it was totally agreeable to my father’s stomach. Unfortunately, I think I inherited my father’s stomach.

  My father got a silver watch from the railroad as a token of appreciation when he went back to the island the second time, a Hamilton watch engraved with his name. He was very proud of it. That watch is now on display at the Blasket Centre.

  But the second time my father came home to the island from America, Mike ‘The Fiddler’ stayed in Springfield for good. The two best friends went their separate ways.

  When my father came home he had a new ivory tooth right in the front of his mouth where everybody could see it. It was quite a thing in America in them days. He had some kind of a toothache and the dentist pulled his tooth and put in an ivory tooth in its place. The islanders got a big kick out of it too. They’d say ‘Seán Tom Ó Ceárna is home from America with an ivory tooth!’ They even gave him the nickname of ‘Tooth.’

  It took my father quite a while to settle down. He had tried living in America twice, but he eventually settled and lived most of his life on the island.

  Seán Tom Carney and Nellie Daly

  A couple of years after my father came back to the island from America for the last time, he got married to a girl named Neilí Ní Dhálaigh from Coumeenole. The wedding was on 2 March 1917, at St Vincent’s Church in Ballyferriter. My mother was twenty-one and my father was thirty-five. The difference in their ages was not at all unusual at the time.

  The marriage was arranged by my mother’s father. I think my father had met my mother once or twice. He might have met her in church or when he was visiting in Coumeenole. But it wasn’t like they met in a dance hall and fell madly in love. In fact, I’ve heard that my mother may have fancied another man from Coumeenole.

  It was fairly common for men from the island to get married to women from the mainland. There just weren’t that many eligible women on the island. Of course, everybody thought it was great for a girl to marry a man who had been to America. It was quite a thing.

  My father was six foot tall, a well-built man. He had a long jaw. He was more of a handyman than a fisherman. He could do anything with his hands. I’d say that he would have made a good carpenter if he went about it. He was a hard worker and a good provider. But in them days, there wasn’t much work on the island except for fishing and raising sheep.

  My father was tough. He was very strict. If you did not do what you were told, you would pay a good price. He had a leather strap, and a big stick and a strong hand. And I got my share of all three!

  Mike Carney stands in front of the building in Coumeenole where his mother was born. It is now a gift shop.

  My father was educated on the island. He spoke only Irish on the island, but picked up quite a bit of English while living in America. He was an all-round man. He thought carefully before he said anything. But when he said something, you had better listen. He didn’t say much unless you asked him a questi
on. My father was a lamenter, I suppose. He seemed to have lots of regrets.

  As for my mother, she was a pretty easy-going woman. She didn’t have too much to say either, but she sang to herself all the time. She was a beautiful singer. She was about five foot seven inches tall with a pretty face and dark hair. To tell the truth, I don’t believe that my mother ever wanted to go into the island to live. But in those days when a girl got to a certain age, it was time to leave the house. She did not have much choice.

  Fortunately, my mother did not have far to go to visit her family back in Coumeenole. She would go over to the mainland to visit her family once in a while and they would come into the island to visit her from time to time. Her family’s house in Coumeenole overlooked the Sound and the island. It is still there today and is now used as a gift shop for tourists.

  But as I remember my mother talking, I’d say she would rather have stayed on the mainland. She had lots of family there and she missed them very much. My mother’s constant singing was a way of lightening her burden, I think. She too had regrets.

  The Carney Home

  Our family home was in the middle of the village, next to the schoolhouse and was handed down to us from my grandfather. The ownership of the houses was passed down within the family. If the owner passed away, then the oldest son or daughter occupied the house. It was a traditional thing.

  My father owned the Carney family home. His older brother, Pats Tom, as the eldest, would normally have inherited the house but he already had a house of his own up on the top of the village. Years earlier, Pats Tom had applied for one of the Congested Districts Board houses from the Kerry County Council. And he got it! So my father got the family house.

  I really don’t know whether we paid any taxes. The islanders were barely scraping by, so they couldn’t afford to pay taxes in any event. The government always seemed to have a battle with the islanders, saying that the residents should pay something on their homesteads. But the islanders maintained that, since they were 3 miles out from the mainland, they were outside of any government jurisdiction. But, of course, the islanders had no problem taking an old-age pension from the government. There was no 3-mile limit on pensions!

  Space was pretty tight in our house. We had only a combination kitchen-cum-sitting room and two bedrooms plus the loft. My parents raised a family of nine of us, seven boys and two girls, in that little house. We were overcrowded, to say the least.

  At some point, my father put an addition on the house, so we had four rooms. Still, there were four of us sleeping in one bed. If you were the last one to get into bed, you had to sleep across the bottom. Then you were all black and blue in the morning from the pounding of everybody’s feet during the night.

  Seán Tom Ó Ceárna, Mike Carney’s father, stands in front of his house. In the foreground is the school and farther down is the Ó Catháin house.

  My father built the addition himself. He got the stones up on the hill or down near the Gob, the point of rock that ran out into the ocean, and he built the walls and put a roof on it.

  We had an open fireplace where my mother did all the cooking. There was a cast-iron oven in the fireplace where she made fine big cakes, sometimes with raisins. She would put the cake outside on the windowsill to let it cool. When we were children, we used to sneak by and grab a chunk off and eat it. My mother used to chase us all around for doing that.

  My mother and father had one bedroom and all the children used the other bedroom. My sister Cáit slept in the loft. You could see the ocean from the window in the loft; it was a beautiful view across the Sound. You could hear the rain and the wind hitting the roof.

  One night, the wind blew the roof right off the addition my father built on our house. They called it ‘the night of the heavy wind’ (oíche na gaoithe móire). The wind took the roofs off a lot of the houses that night, even though most of them had ropes and stones to hold them down. I was only an infant when it happened. But it was a story that was told and retold in our family many times over the years.

  Neilí Uí Cheárna, Mike Carney’s mother, holds his baby sister, now Maureen Carney Oski.

  The Carney Children

  We had a big family with ten children. My mother, the poor woman, had a baby about every year. I think it took a toll on her. There were mostly big families on the island. Ours was not unusual in that respect.

  My sister Cáit was the oldest of the family. My brother Maurice (Muiris) was second, the oldest of the boys. Then there was me. Next came Paddy (Peaidí), John (Seán), Tom (Tomás), Martin (Máirtin), my sister Maureen (Máirín), and finally Billy (Liam). We also had a brother, James (Seámus), the last to be born, who died at only two months of age. He was buried on the island in the small, unblessed graveyard at the bottom of the village.

  Cáit was our leader, an amazing woman. Maurice was about a year older than me. He was a fix-it man. He was handy and used to build naomhóga. He wasn’t much interested in fishing. But he caught some lobsters from time to time. Maurice was like my father in many ways. He and I were different, but we were very close. I never qualified for that handyman stuff. I was the talker of the family.

  Paddy was a nice, quiet fellow, a fisherman. He never got married. He had a delicate stomach, like me and my father. Martin was pretty quiet. He was a good fisherman and handyman. He was very strong and liked to play sports. Seán was usually called ‘Seáinín’, meaning ‘little Seán’, to distinguish him from my father. I was closest to Cáit, Maurice, Paddy and Martin. The others were a lot younger than me.

  When I was a teenager, I went to Coumeenole and stayed with my mother’s family on their farm every year for a couple of weeks or so – until they got tired of me, I suppose. I would help out on the farm, picking potatoes, stacking hay, and tending the sheep. It was a kind of working holiday. There is a beautiful beach in Coumeenole at the bottom of a tall cliff. It has gorgeous white sand bordered by huge black rocks. The waves are huge and people go surfing there today.

  Like all youngsters, we got into devilment of all sorts on the island. There was an old woman who lived all alone in the house next door to us, Neilí Ní Chatháin. She used to go up the hill by the Fort to get turf for her fire. While she was away, Maurice and me would sneak into her henhouse and take some of her eggs.

  Then Neilí used to complain that her hens were not laying. We used to tell her we had plenty of eggs and we’d sell her some of her own eggs back for a penny a piece. She was on an old-age pension and she had plenty of pennies.

  Island boys stand for a photo. Standing (l–r) Mike Carney, Muiris Ó Catháin, Thomas Ó Cearna (no relation) and Maurice Guiheen; sitting (l–r) Mike’s brothers Tom, Martin and Paddy Kearney.

  My family’s way of living was very spare. We didn’t have money to travel here and there by any means. It was hard living, but we got by and we really didn’t know any better anyway.

  My Mother’s Death

  My mother was a happy person, despite the fact that she had no love for the island. She was young when she got married and, sadly, she was young when she passed away. She died on 1 July 1933, at the age of thirty-seven, leaving a husband and nine children. It was the year after the International Eucharistic Congress was held in Dublin.

  Once in a while, she mentioned pressure in her chest. She talked about stomach problems too. Some people said she cut herself on a briar while digging turf and got an infection.

  My mother was a woman who never wanted to let on that she was sick. She mostly kept it to herself. It was typical. The island people did not complain a lot; they kept things to themselves.

  She took sick on the island and they took her to Dingle for treatment, then to Tralee, and then even to Dublin.

  She had to go to Tralee and to Dublin by ambulance from Dunquin. It was a huge expense, and my father did not have the money to pay for it. He gave the ambulance bill to the parish priest in Ballyferriter, hoping that he would find a way to help pay it. And the priest gave it right back to him. Then
he gave the bill to a visitor to the island, a Protestant minister named Frank Roycroft, who had come to the island to improve his Irish. My father gave it to him to see what he could do about it. And my father never saw the bill again. What a relief!

  Anyway, my mother died in Dingle Hospital after receiving the last rites from the priest. I am not sure exactly how she died, whether it was a blood clot or stomach cancer or an infection or something else. My father kept the whole thing within himself. He just did not talk about it.

  The night she died, my mother’s relatives from Coumeenole lit a signal fire on Dunmore Head over on the mainland to let the islanders know that she had passed away. It was before the wireless was installed on the island. I was only thirteen years old.

  Her body came back from the hospital the next day and stayed in St Gobnet’s Church in Dunquin overnight. There was no wake. The funeral was the following day and she was buried in the old cemetery, right next to the church. Children were not allowed to go to funerals in them days. I was too young.

  I remember clearly the day my mother was buried. I stood on the island and looked across the Sound at the church in Dunquin. It was a beautiful clear and calm summer day. I could see the bright reflection of the sun on the handles on her casket, the poor woman. I cried and cried. Cáit went to the funeral as the oldest of the children. She cried her heart out.

  When my father came back home from the funeral, he was heartbroken. His eyes were all red from crying. But he never said too much about it; he always kept it to himself. It was the island way. Unfortunately, he was never the same again.