Stones of Aran (28 page)

Walking on from this obscure corner associated with unknown saint and absentee landlord—two figures reduced to abstractions and invested with essential goodness and badness respectively, perhaps only by our ignorance of their humanity—one comes into a quietly pleasant quarter of the island, in which one might imagine nothing had ever happened, but which has in fact been disturbed by two events, rather alike in their murderous futility, bearing dates 1584 and 1920. (Perhaps, all the same, one should not complain about just two such incidents, over the last four hundred years; these fields are less blood-soaked than many!) Where the road running north-westwards through Baile an Dúin emerges from the last of the village, it opens up a view on the right hand, of low-lying sandy pasturage divided into small plots, stretching to the seashore half a mile away. This area is Log na Marbh, the hollow of the dead, and in a field a couple of hundred yards below the road, by a modern water-tank, is a squarish mound with traces of stone kerbing and a small upright stone, in which, I was told, nine murdered Connemara men lie. The invaluable Fr. Killeen noted down the more detailed tradition still current in
the 1940s, identifying the event with a battle recorded by no lesser authorities than the Four Masters. I give their account of it in all its antique tangledness, so expressive of the nature of this, the last outbreak of clan warfare in Iar-Chonnacht:

To make what passes for sense in a murderous world out of this, one should remember that the divisions between the two
branches of the O’Flahertys were fomented by Queen Elizabeth’s statesmen-soldiers, the better to control the rebellious clan. The chief of the eastern branch, Murchadh na dTua (of the
battle-axes
), had been recognized by the English as head of the clan, whereas under the old Brehon Law the rightful head was a member of the western branch. The latter had five castles around the coast of Connemara and a central one on the lake-island of
Ballynahinch
. Murchadh na dTua (who was now Sir Murrough O’Flaherty, having traded in his Gaelic identity for feudal rights and title) seized Ballynahinch and installed his son, Tadhg; this Tadhg then had to defend Ballynahinch against the sons of two famous chieftains of the western branch with the intimidatory names of Tadhg na Buile (of the rage) and Dónal an Chogaidh (of the war). Some of the western party then went to Aran, where they were set upon and slaughtered by the Tadhg of the eastern branch. In the end it seems the English re-established the
westerners
in Ballynahinch, but it was Sir Murrough who in the year 1587 received a grant of all the lands and castles of Iar-Chonnacht “to hold to him and his heirs for ever by the twentieth part of a knight’s fee, as of the manor of Arkin in the Great Isle of Aran.” This scheming was a tiny part of Elizabeth’s European strategy, in itself a part of the vast upheaval of the Reformation. A fraction of the dire energy of that centuries-long storm broke up the old world of Connemara; a vicious little eddy from that wreck span itself to death in this backwater of Aran.

The quiet little road goes ambling on from “the hollow of the dead” towards the bay at Mainistir, a summer’s day stroll
margined
with wild-flowers and tall grasses, with a reminder of
winter
rain-storms in its torn-up surface. After a quarter of a mile it passes a small stone plaque set among the stones of the field-wall on the left, which the stroller may well not notice:

The “Crown Forces” were the Black and Tans, a body of
licensed
ruffians scratched together and put into heterogeneous uniform by the British government earlier in that year, to throw into the campaign of murder and retaliation the RIC was losing against Sinn Féin. Fifty of them came to Aran, in search of three armed members of the Volunteers who had fled from Galway to hide out with friends and relatives in the island. An old man early awake in Cill Rónáin saw in the dim winter dawn a man-of-war in the bay and soldiers landing from rowing-boats, and ran to warn his neighbour, Pádraig Ó hIarnáin, who had been
sheltering
one of the fugitives. I am told that a woman in another
household
heard the Black and Tans coming into the town and thought at first it was Connemara men bringing in cattle to winter. She looked out of the window and saw armed men, and just had time to hide her money-box under her petticoats before they burst into the house. They turned the place upside down in search of drink, and went roaring off again, one of them wearing the veil he had torn from a large statue of the Virgin. (The Black and Tans seem to have had an urge to add feminine touches to their motley—in their drunken night of murder and arson in Clifden three months later they broke into a haberdashery, and went dancing through the streets wearing corsets over their uniforms!) Ó hIarnáin had run off to hide in a crevice of the Creig Mhór, taking his gun with him, but the Black and Tans arrested his brother, who was in bed with flu, and left him tied up on the quay all day. Later they found a horse they mistakenly thought was Pádraig’s, and shot it between the eyes. Detachments of soldiers, obviously acting on information, hurried east and west along the main road to certain other houses. Pádraig Mac Giolla Phádraig of Cill Éinne, who had sheltered another of the Galway men, was arrested, and in Eochaill, where a Pádraig Ó Domhnaill was the target, his
next-door
neighbour was taken by mistake, but managed to escape from his captors. Máire Gill tells me that two uncles of hers were seized and dragged behind the Minister’s gate in Cill Rónáin, and her grandmother was brought out to see them shot; one of the
islandmen had connections with the Irish Republican
Brotherhood
, the other did not, and it is indicative of the complexity of conflicting loyalties that it was a third uncle, home on leave from the British armed forces, who came by in his uniform and got them off.

Later that morning some of the Mainistir people were on their way to chapel in Cill Rónáin, when they were turned back by two of the Tans. One lad, Larry Beag, determined not to miss the Mass, went down to the coast road and tried to creep along to Cill Rónáin in the shelter of the wall; one of the Tans saw him from the main road, aimed with the telescopic sight of his rifle at a gap in the wall, and shot him. Larry died a few days later, on the 23rd of December.

Another warship came into Port Mhuirbhigh that dawn, and soldiers visited houses in the west of the island. One man arrested in Fearann an Choirce was Máirtín Breathnach, who had been training the island Volunteers. (There were about seventy of them, I have been told; they had no arms, but they drilled on the roads and in Johnston’s big fields in front of Kilmurvey House, no doubt to the annoyance of Johnston himself, who was by no means a supporter.) In Gort na gCapall the Black and Tans were looking for the chief of the Aran Volunteers, Thomas Fleming. Thomas’s father had come to Aran as a young mason, building the teachers’ residences, and had married a sister of Liam O’Flaherty, and it was in the O’Flaherty house that Thomas and his wife were living. It was four in the morning, and he would have been caught but that his mother-in-law was heating milk for the baby when the soldiers arrived; she opened the door with the baby in her arms, and delayed them for a couple of seconds while Thomas ran upstairs and squeezed out of the gable window. He had to hang from the window ledge by his fingertips for a moment until a soldier with a flashlamp went inside, then he dropped to the ground and took off for the crags. (We used to hear the details of this adventure from Thomas himself, whom we knew as a spry old man who would hop off his bicycle to sit on a wall with us and
chat. He told us whom he suspected of having informed on him: a
poitín-
drinking
Fearann an Choirce man who often visited Galway and seemed to have mysterious access to ten-pound notes, and who once showed him a poem in praise of a brave Black and Tan fallen in battle; this man soon afterwards left the island, and was followed to Tipperary, and shot.)

The three Galway Volunteers, who had been spending most of their time hiding in a store on the Hill Farm, were not betrayed and the Black and Tans did not find them, which perhaps spared the island a gun battle and further retribution. But they were
saddened
by the trouble they had brought down on their protectors, and soon decided to move on. Early one morning, after receiving communion from the curate Fr. Mártan Ó Domhnaill, a
supporter
of the cause, they were smuggled aboard the
Dun
Aengus
and sailed back to Galway. That ended Aran’s direct involvement in the War of Independence, which was terminated by the Truce of July 1921.

Lawrence McDonogh, I have heard an islander say, should be canonized, as he died for his faith just as much as St. Laurence O’Toole. But this philosophical island is also surprisingly
understanding
of the Black and Tans. According to one of our
neighbours
, “Some of them were decent men; they were just soldiers, doing their duty.” The same man was told by Mícheál Breathnach that, as he was being marched down to be shipped off to Galway Gaol, he overheard one of the Black and Tans saying to another, “It’s a dirty business, punishing the innocent for other people’s doings.” Indeed: a dirty business, and an unfinished one.
Looking
at Larry Beag’s little memorial one could speculate how many of the seeds of hatred scattered in a December dawn of this quiet corner of Ireland will have found ample blood-rich ground to sprout in since.

From that uneasy thought I now turn back to the sleepy
village
. There are two shortcuts linking the north end of Baile an Dúin with the main road. The one nearest town, ancient, twisty and haunted, is
called Róidín an Phúca, the little road of the
pooka. The brow of the scarp it climbs up is the site of three
successive
notable monuments: the demolished
dún
from which the hamlet is perhaps named; the chapel or Mass house, which had gone by the time of the 1839 OS; and, still proudly extant, the pioneer of Aran bungalows, built in the ’sixties by the first island trawler-owner to become a millionaire. The other road, a little farther north, is straight, apart from an initial ramp up the scarp, and comparatively modern, with two pairs of semi-detached
cottages
symmetrically arranged on either side; they were built by the Congested Districts Board to replace some hovels nearby in 1915, and the only name I have heard for the road is Bóithrín na gCottageachaí, which I suppose one could call CDB-Irish. Either route will bring me back into the mainstream of Aran life.

Now and then if M and I happened to be in Cill Rónáin on dole day we would get a lift home in a pony-trap driven by an
acquaintance
from the west. Beartla was a proud man who did not like his neighbours to see him drinking in the Oatquarter pub, and so for him Joe Watty’s pub represented the last chance, not only before the dry miles ahead, but before a whole dry week.
Nowadays
the pub is fashionable among the summer visitors; it has its name up in holiday colours, and a few benches and tables under the tree in its front garden give it an almost continental air. But in the seventies it was as obscure as a public house could well be, no sign betrayed its vocation, and few outsiders ever troubled its stagnancy. Joe Watty himself had passed on at a great age in 1975. I am told that he used to go down the
carcair
opposite his pub to stand in prayer before St. Rónán’s bed for twenty minutes every day. Perhaps he was so pious because of an early miraculous
delivery
, for he had been sleeping in one of the fishing-boats anchored in Cill Éinne bay that night in the winter of 1899 when the storm
struck and three men were drowned, and he not only survived but slept undisturbed through it all. He died on the same day as de Valera, a fact I remember because when the news spread through the island a neighbour said to me, “They’re both in the same canoe now!” It was his son Pádraic Joe Watty who had the pub thereafter. He was himself elderly by then, and shy—he hung out no inn-sign because he felt he couldn’t handle the tourists—and as he was also more interested in looking after his few cattle than in manning the bar, it frequently happened that the pub was shut when we passed.

Our first visit to Joe Watty’s was for a wake in honour of an old horse called the General, which we had just seen hoisted onto the steamer for Galway. The General had been born on Beartla’s farm in Cill Mhuirbhigh. A big horse by Aran standards, he had
harrowed
the oatfield and dragged the seaweed cart up the hill year in year out, until he became too unsteady for the stony slopes and was replaced by a neat Connemara pony. On our evening strolls we often stopped to lean over a wall and watch him in one of the little pastures of his retirement; he would stand motionless for hours, it seemed, then turn himself upside down and wriggle like a baby, his huge hooves going in all directions as if he were
slithering
on an icy patch of sky. His owner had told us that this was called
an
lu
í
mór,
the big lie-down; when a horse had been carting seaweed all day from four in the morning, it would be let loose to do that now and again, and then it would be as fresh as it was at the start. No doubt, at hurried times of the year in the bad old days both horses and humans had to work till they dropped, to provide food for themselves and dowries for the Digby girls, and the idea of keeping an unproductive horse in grass did not arise. Ways of thought that linger past their time are not so easily
disposed
of, though, and when Horan the Galway butcher, who used to come out on the steamer each Saturday with big wicker hampers of meat and set up shop in Cill Rónáin for a couple of hours, and do a bit of horse-dealing on the side, offered our friend a few pounds for the General, a bargaining was initiated which
after many weekly rounds ended in them spitting in their palms and shaking hands on a price. Then we were called upon to see the horse off and (an unspoken understanding) to get our friend out of Cill Rónáin again without too much drink taken.
However
, as we walked by Joe Watty’s, Beartla’s thirsty eye detected some sign of life in it, and he went up the weed-grown path to listen at the front door, which was locked. He turned to crook a finger at us, saying, “We’ll have but one!,” and we had to follow him round the back, pushing past bushes, and through a derelict porch and the corner of a dark kitchen to the space behind the counter, where Pádraic lifted the flap for us to pass into the public part of the bar. The room was a dingy cell, in which two or three jarvies sat as silent as bottom-fish in a dark pool. It was lit, if not warmed, by a torn-up cardboard carton smouldering in the hearth; the vivid greenery pressing in at the tiny window-pane made it even chillier. M caused some wonderment by asking for a sherry, and Pádraic Joe Watty had to search among piles of this and that in a back room to find a bottle with a bit of sherry left in it, and to grope along a high shelf for an encrusted sherry glass. Then we had to hear Beartla tell and retell the horse’s whole Aran life, down to the last moment in the hold of the steamer, when the General had turned and looked at him climbing back up the iron ladder, and had made a little movement with his head (which Beartla demonstrated for us as a quick salute at the temple with two fingers together), “just as if it was my brother emigrating to America.” It became more and more obvious that the horse should have been left to stand and roll and kick in its familiar fields,
instead
of being sold on, as Beartla now explained, to some east Galway farmer who would “knock another year or two out of him.” By the time we had drunk our various fills—M’s
noxious-looking
sip, my two reluctant halfs, Beartla’s four pints of porter effortlessly engulfed—we were all wordless, and we turned our heads to the long climb homewards in a stupor of regret.

The once populous but now derelict area behind this pub is called An Suicín, a name that also occurs in Galway city; the
derivation is obscure, but it is probably from something that sucks, like a marshy patch or a swallow-hole. This used to be the poorest quarter of the village, in which a hundred or more people lived in a few long terraces of thatched cottages. Only two of these one-room cottages still stood, the decayed ends of rows which had otherwise been pulled down, when we came to the
island
, and I believe they too are levelled now. A woman whom we never saw, living in one of those two last fragments, used to shout all day long in passionate disagreement with nobody; we would hear her as we went by, the whole teeming unquiet past of An Suicín condensed into one disembodied voice. Or, if hers was the voice of the accumulated pangs of just the female part of life, then the generations of male voices, their endless sublimation of cramped circumstances into stories and jokes and boasts, are
dismissively
recorded only by the name of the narrow turning into An Suicín south of the pub, where the menfolk used to lounge about and talk: Coirnéal na mBréag, the corner of lies.

From Joe Watty’s the road out of the village rises in
carcair
after
carcair.
The first is Carcair an Jabaire or Jobber’s Hill, and is named from Pat Mullen’s uncle, An Jabaire Beag, the little jobber or cattle-dealer, whose cottage, on its west side, was “a meeting place for the man from the east and the man from the west,” as I am told. The hill seems to have been the place for faction fights, and people would say of any great fighter, “A better man never walked down Jobber’s Hill.” The little Jobber himself appears in Pat Mullen’s novel
Hero
Breed,
and shows us how to prepare for a stickfight. One can imagine him leaping out into the road here:

Leaving these anachronistic shades to settle their differences, and skirting round a sudden joyous outrush of youngsters from the gates of today’s Technical School a little farther on, I press on up the hill, which brings to my mind now (writing far away from it) so many things seen and tales heard, that the time-dimension itself in that backwards perspective looks no longer string-like, but wide, a road on which creatures of different eras could pass and greet each other. Memories of another Aran faction fighter give a life to the last house of the village, long untenanted now, staring gloomily back down the hill with one gable-end to the road. Breandán Ó hEithir, the writer, broadcaster and despairing but indomitable battler for the Irish language, was born here in 1930; his father was a teacher from Co. Clare, who married Liam O’Flaherty’s sister from Gort na gCapall, and the house is
identifiable
by its two little upstairs windows huddled under a central peak as one of the teachers’ residences built to a standard design in the 1880s. It was of Breandán I was thinking when I wrote in “Timescape with Signpost” that it is an awesome choice for a writer to entrust a life’s work to an endangered language. I believe the anguish of that decision weighed more heavily on him as he grew older, and may have added some personal bitterness to the last, posthumous, polemics of his career. Shortly before his
unexpected
death in 1990, he had drawn up an internal report on the
state of the Irish language for Bord na Gaeilge, the government body set to watch over its well-being. The controversy was
provoked
by the leaking of that report in the following year, and especially by its denunciation of the various organizations
concerned
with Irish as “infested with elderly people who have not let a new idea into their heads for many years in case they might have to change their way of life, which is something they would now be unable to do,” and its deeply pessimistic assessment of the Gaeltachts:

Conradh na Gaeilge (the Gaelic League) did not appreciate Breandán’s “typically cynical view of Irish language
organizations
,” and called his estimate of the number of native speakers “a gross understatement,” claiming that statistics of the £10 grants being paid to Irish speakers in the Gaeltachts suggested a figure more like 30,000. Had he been in a position to flourish his
blackthorn
stick Breandán would have quoted his own previously
published
opinion on those grants:

M and I first met Breandán at a course he was running for Bord na Gaeilge in An Cheathrú Rua in the autumn of 1978. The purpose of the course was to familiarize journalists with the
economic
life and institutions of the Gaeltachts. We could hardly claim to be journalists on the strength of the photocopied nature
bulletins I occasionally produced for the Oatquarter
schoolchildren
, but the course sounded as if it might be an opportunity to learn something of this culture into which we had thrown ourselves so arbitrarily, so we put ourselves forward, and to our surprise were accepted without question. We took the boat to Galway, hitch-hiked out to An Cheathrú Rua, rented ourselves a thatched cottage, and reported to the hotel where the participants were to forgather. In the bar was a small and almost inanimate huddle of people, from which Breandan broke like a snipe on
seeing
us, and hurtled over to thrust an envelope into our hands—the grant cheque—as if it were of desperate urgency. It was clear why we had been so readily accredited; only four journalists had been tempted by the grant away from their metropolitan
perspectives
to spend a month visiting fish-processing plants and plastic-components production units in rain-sodden Connemara, and our participation made the course a little less of a numerical flop.

The month was not pleasant. M’s determinedly positive
attitudes
alienated the world-weary, flu-prone Dubliners, who did as much of their research as they could in the numerous bars of the town. It soon transpired that none of us had enough Irish to
benefit
from the projected programme, and we bowed our heads to a crash-course in the twelve irregular verbs. The mock newsletter we produced for presentation to the Board was so abysmal that Breandán quashed it. Some Dublin ad-men came down to
privilege
us with a preview of a series of TV advertisements for Irish—“It’s part of what we are…”—which so incensed me I became abusive and told them that the language movement should at least be able to recognize its enemy,
i.e.
the homogenizing materialism of which TV ads were the epitome. The only good times were those spent listening to Breandán holding forth at full throttle; we could not always quite identify his topics, nevertheless it was exciting to hear an Irish that did not stoop to its half-competent recipients. (Both then and later we sometimes wondered if his unceasing flow of witty reminiscence was a way of holding
intimacy at bay.) But he was often morose and distrait; he had just published an English version,
Lead
Us
into
Temptation,
of his first novel
Lig Sinn
i gCathú,
and reviewers were saying that if this was a sample of the literary riches being produced in Irish, it would have been better for the good name of the language to leave it untranslated. At the end of the month we were each to write a personal response to the course. None of us managed this in Irish, but M and I put together a few thoughts in English on journalism and its own curious sort of opportunistic integrity. Finally there was a formal dinner in the hotel, at which we graduates were much outnumbered by Bord na Gaeilge executives. Breandán, slightly the better for wine, made a speech, which suddenly
became
emotional, and to our surprise M and I learned that we had written something that was “
chomh
fíor
—
chomh
t
á
bhachtach
—
t
á
sé
thíos
i
mo
ph
ó
ca
agam
ag
an
nóiméad
seo
…” (“so true—so important—I have it in my pocket at this moment…”). But what followed was not comprehensible, and as Breandán did not
produce
our writing from his pocket and we have forgotten what we had written, I fear this illumination is lost to the world.