Wounds: A Memoir of War and Love. Fergal Keane

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СКАЧАТЬ also the hunger for land. And in this parish, you, and your fathers before you, knew what it was to starve because you did not own your own land – and that has increased; this unappeasable hunger for land … How far are you prepared to go to satisfy this hunger? Are you prepared to go to the point of robbery? Are you prepared to go to the point of murder? Are you prepared to kill for land?6

      The answer is yes. Yes, again and again. Why not when, without it, you are scattered and dissolved? Those whose ancestors had starved to death for want of land, who had been dispossessed at the point of a sword, whose oral history had been embedded in the minds of generations, stressing the shame of being a people without land of their own. Land drove men to blood. It is impossible to understand the War of Independence and the Civil War that followed unless you know the story of the land. It is where the hardest of all memories lay, where the grievance and loss accumulated and became ready to flower into violence.

      At one point this part of north Kerry had been notorious for faction fighting. In the middle of the nineteenth century feuds between clans and villages would be settled in battles between groups several hundred strong. Deaths and terrible injuries were common. It was said that some of the bad blood could be traced to the plantation of families from neighbouring County Clare during the age of plantation. But this was local talk. Faction fighting was a feature of rural Ireland in this period, often reflecting communal divisions over land usage, employment and social status. One account from the early nineteenth century described how ‘in an instant hundreds of sticks were up – hundreds of heads were broken. In vain the parish priest and his curate rode through the crowd, striking right and left with their whips, in vain a few policemen tried to quell the riot; on it goes until one or other of the factions is beaten and flies’.7 The fighting stick, the shillelagh, was often sharpened to ensure the scalp was cut or weighted with lead to bludgeon the enemy. Most often the matter was settled once blood had been drawn, and the wounded man would retire from the field. One of the most notorious blood feuds, between the Cooleen and Mulvihill factions, was said to be rooted in an ancient dispute over land. In 1834 it came to a head as more than two thousand people took part in a savage battle of Ballyeagh Strand, close to Ballydonoghue. Men and women, including mounted detachments, set about each other with clubs, slash hooks, horseshoes and guns. Twenty people tried to escape in a boat, which overturned in a swift current. As the survivors tried to reach shore they were pelted with stones and driven back into the waters to drown. Not even the local parish priest would give evidence at the subsequent public inquiry. Silence was the law of the land.

      The fighting could be exported across the ocean. In the same year as the battle of Ballyeagh, Irish factions fought each other along the banks of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal in Maryland and on the rail lines between Canada and Louisiana – but they fought each other here not for land but for jobs.

      The violence of the land was threaded throughout the stories of my childhood. About a mile up the hill from the old Purtill homestead there is a crossroads from where you can see across the plain to Ballyheigue Bay. It was here that An Gabha Beag (‘the Little Blacksmith’), the local leader of the rebel ‘Whiteboys’, was hanged by the English in the early nineteenth century. His name was James Nolan and Hannah used to tell us that he had to be hanged three times because in his forge he had fashioned an iron collar which he placed under his smock to protect his neck. Eventually the redcoats found it and James Nolan was sent to his maker. According to the stories collected by the Ballydonoghue schoolchildren, the landlord responsible for the blacksmith’s death was a Mr Raymond, whose family would haunt the later history of the area. In one version the hanged rebel’s family come to Gabha’s workshop in the dead of night: ‘At MIDNIGHT, so the end of this terrible story goes, seven of the dead men’s nearest relatives came to the forge and there, by the uncanny light of the fire, cursed Raymond’s kith and kin across the anvil. Their curses … did not fall on sticks or stones.’8 The Raymonds were to be damned for all time.

      The Whiteboys were a cry of revenge against the exactions of landlords and their agents, against parsons and sometimes priests, against those who turned fields where potatoes grew into grazing for cattle, against the men who fenced and enclosed and who demanded tithes and rents. Named after the white smocks they wore in their night raids, they fought for the rights of tenant farmers and against the system of tithes that maintained the Protestant clergy. The tithes could be exacted in cash or kind and provoked bitter resentment among the Catholic poor. The Topographical Dictionary of Ireland (1836) recorded that in Lisselton parish, which included Ballydonoghue, the Reverend Anthony Stoughton who, along with his brother Thomas, owned much of the land in the district was in receipt of tithes worth approximately £10,000 in today’s money. He also received income from several other parishes in the district. After appeals from the tenants, Stoughton and his brother agreed to reduce their tithe demands, earning gratitude ‘for their kind and considerate mode of dealing with us respecting our Tithes; by which one of our heavy burthens has been considerably lightened – and we sincerely regret that all other Proprietors of Tithes do not follow an example which would in a great measure tend to tranquilize the minds of the people at large’.9 The bigger Catholic landowners, as well as priests who charged for their services at funerals and weddings or condemned the Whiteboys from the pulpit, could also be targets. The raiders maimed and killed cattle, terrorised and sometimes assassinated unpopular landlords and their agents. The founder of Methodism, John Wesley, encountered the Whiteboys whilst visiting County Tipperary and saw how they ‘moved as exactly as regular troops and appeared to be thoroughly disciplined’.10 The violence was episodic but caused widespread terror.

      A Whiteboy general, William O’Driscoll, declared: ‘We will continue to oppose our oppressors by the most justifiable means in our power, either until they are glutted with our blood, or until humanity raises her angry voice in the councils of the nation to protect the toiling peasant and lighten his burden.’11 The Whiteboy oath was everything. It gave men a feeling of belonging. And it warned against betrayal. The avenging secret society bound together by oaths became the most powerful force to challenge the established order in early nineteenth-century rural Ireland. ‘I sware I will to the best of my power,’ the oath-taker would declare, to:

      Cut Down Kings,

      Queens and Princes, Earls, Lords, and all such with

      Land Jobbin and Herrisy.12

      The English writer Arthur Young, who toured Ireland in the 1770s, wrote about the Whiteboy insurrections and the oppression of the labouring poor. ‘A landlord in Ireland can scarcely invent an order which a servant, labourer or cottier dares to refuse to execute,’ he noted. ‘Disrespect or anything towards sauciness he may punish with his cane or his horsewhip with the most perfect security.’ Young, who had travelled all over the British Isles, was shocked to observe in Ireland long lines of workers’ carts forced into the ditches so that a gentleman’s carriage could pass by. ‘It is manifest,’ Young wrote of the mounting insurgency, ‘that the gentlemen of England never thought of a radical cure from overlooking the real cause of the disease, which in fact lay in themselves, and not in the wretches they doomed to the gallows.’ He then added with unsettling prescience: ‘A better treatment of the poor in Ireland is a very material point to the welfare of the whole British Empire. Events may happen which may convince us fatally of this truth.’13

      A landlord in Con Brosnan’s home area of Newtownsandes described the situation in March 1786. ‘We are so pestered with Whiteboys in this country that we can attend to nothing else.’ Landlords were restricted because ‘all law ceases but what the Whiteboys like; not a process is to be served, not a cow drove, nor a man removed from his farm on pain of hanging’. The Whiteboys СКАЧАТЬ