From Athenry and its ruins went to Oranmore and its ruins. The poverty
of Athenry deepens into still greater poverty in Oranmore. The country
is under grass, hay is the staple crop, so there being little tillage,
little labor is required. They depend on chance employment to procure
the foreign meal on which they live. Some depend for help to a great
extent on the friends in America.
There is a new pier being built here, for an arm of the sea runs up to
Oranmore. They told me that this pier was being built by the Canadian
money. It will be a harbor of refuge for fishing craft and better days
of work and food may yet dawn upon the West.
Behind the pier are the ruins of a large castle which belonged to the
Blakes, one of the Galway tribes. It was inhabited by the last Blake who
held any of the broad acres of his ancestors within the memory of the
old people. I stood in the roofless upper room which had been the
dancing saloon, penetrated into galleries built for defence lit only by
loop holes, went down the little dark stair into the dungeon, tried to
peer into the underground passage that connected with the seashore,
ascended to the battlements and looked over the lonely land and explored
multitudes of small rooms reached by many different flights of stone
steps.
These people are largely of the Norman blood. Oh, for the time when
peace and plenty, law and order shall reign here; when the peasant shall
not consider law as an oppressor to be defied or evaded, an engine of
oppression in the hands of the rich, but an impartial and inflexible
protector of the rights of rich and poor alike!
A young priest told me here that the clergy about this place were
opposed to the teachings of the Land League--did not countenance it
among their people. A Catholic gentleman in Roscommon told me the same
concerning the bishop and clergy of his own locality.
The tillage about Galway is careful and good, what there is of it. I saw
great fields of wheat that had been cleared of stones, by generations of
labor I should say. I had this fact brought to my mind by some peasants
in the neighborhood of Athenry, in this way: "A man works and his family
works on a bit of ground fencing it, improving it, gathering off the
stones; as he improves his rent is raised; he clings to the little home;
he gets evicted and disappears into the grave or the workhouse, and
another takes the land at the higher rent; improves from that point; has
the rent raised, till he too falls behind and is evicted; and so it goes
on till the lands are fit for meadowing and grass, and the holdings are
run together and the homes blotted out." Of course I do not give the
man's words exactly, but I give his thoughts exactly.
Galway was something of a disappointment to me at first, it had not such
a foreign look as I expected. It is a very busy town, has every
appearance of being a thriving town, every one you meet walks with
purpose as of one who has business to attend to. It is refreshing to see
this after looking at the hopeless faces and lounging gait of the people
of many places in the west. Wherever the tall chimneys rise the people
have a quick step and an all-alive look.
I wandered about Galway, and to my great delight had a guide to point
out what was most worth looking at. Of course I heard of the bravery of
the thirteen tribes of Galway, who snapped up Galway from the
O'Flaherties and assimilated themselves to the natives as more Irish
than themselves. After walking about a little I did notice the arched
gateways and the highly ornamented entrance doors which they concealed.
The first place of interest pointed out to me was Lynch castle. From one
of the windows of this castle Warder Lynch, in 1493, hung his own son.
It is said from this act the name Lynch Law arose. The Lynch family,
originally Lintz, came from Lintz in Austria.
This mayor or Warder Lynch was a wealthy merchant trading with Spain. He
trusted his son to go thither and purchase a cargo of wine. The young
man fell into dissipation, and spent the money, buying the cargo on
credit. The nephew of the Spanish merchant accompanied the ship to
obtain the money, and arrange for further business. The devil tempted
the young Lynch to hide his folly by committing crime. Near the Galway
coast the young Spaniard was thrown overboard. All the friends of the
family and his father received the young merchant after his successful
voyage with great joy. The father consented to his son's marriage with
his early love, the daughter of a neighbor, who gladly consented to
accept the successful young merchant for his son-in-law. All went merry
as a marriage bell. Just before the marriage a confessor was sent for to
a sick seaman, who revealed young Lynch's crime. The Warder of Galway
stood at the bed of this dying man, and heard of the villany of his
beloved son. Young Lynch was arrested, tried, found guilty, and
sentenced. The mother of young Lynch, having exhausted all efforts to
obtain mercy for her son, flew in distraction to the Blake tribe--she
was a Blake--and raised the whole clan for a rescue. When the hour of
execution dawned, the castle was surrounded by the armed clan of the
Blakes, demanding that the prisoner be spared for the honor of the
family. The Warder addressed the crowd, entreating them to submit to the
majesty of the law, but in vain. He led his son--who, when he had borne
the shame, and came to feel the guilt of his deeds, had no desire to
live--up the winding stair in the building to that very arched window
that overlooks the street, and there, to that iron staple that is fixed
in the wall, he hung him with his own hands, after embracing him, in
sight of all the people. The father expected to die by the hands of the
angry crowd below, but they, awed, went home at a dead march. The mother
died of the shock, and the sternly just old man lived on. I looked at
his house in Lombard street. Over the entrance is a skull and cross
bones in relief on black marble, with this motto, which I copied,
"REMEMBER DEATH
Vanitie of vanities, and all is but vanitie."
There is a fine museum in Queen's College, Galway, which I did not see.
Of course there are many things I did not see, although my eyes were on
hard duty while there. I did see specimens of that most beautiful marble
of Connemara. It is worked up into ornaments, in some cases mounted with
silver. As soon as any one enquires for it they are known to be from
America. A book shaped specimen that I coveted was priced at twelve and
sixpence. It is there yet for me. It is of every shade and tint of
green, and is really very lovely. I saw many specimens of it
manufactured into harps stringed and set in silver, with a silver
scroll, and the name of Davitt or Parnell on them in green enamel. There
were brooches and scarf pins of this kind. I did not notice the name of
the great Liberator among these ornaments.
The Claddagh was a great disappointment to me. I heard that it was not
safe to venture into it alone. I got up early and had sunshine with me
when I strolled through the Claddagh. I saw no extreme poverty there.
Most of the houses were neatly whitewashed; all were superior to the
huts among the ruins at Athenry. The people were very busy, very
comfortably clothed, and, in a way, well-to-do looking. Some of the
houses were small and windowless, something the shape of a beehive, but
not at all forlornly squalid. They make celebrated fleecy flannel here
in Claddagh. They make and mend nets. They fish. I saw some swarthy men
of foreign look, in seamen's clothes, standing about. You will see
beauty here of the swarthy type, accompanied by flashing black eyes and
blue black hair, but I saw lasses with lint white locks also in the
Claddagh. The testimony of all here is that the Claddagh people are a
quiet, industrious, temperate and honest race of people. I am inclined
to believe that myself. It is a pretty large district and I wandered
through it without hearing one loud or one profane word. I was agreeably
disappointed in the Claddagh. Claddagh has a church and large school of
its own.
They told me that the Galway coast has the same flowers as the coast of
Spain. I can testify that flowers abound in little front gardens, and
window panes, and in boxes on every window ledge. I did not go to see
the iodine works, where this substance is manufactured from sea weed. I
saw people burning kelp--and smelled them too--on the Larne and
Carnlough coast and in Mayo. They burn the dried sea weed in long narrow
places built of stone. They are not kilns, but are more like them than
anything else I know of. You see stacks and ropes of the sea weed put up
to dry. Kelp burning is not a fragrant occupation, and its manufacture
is not specially attractive.
I think Galway is a very prosperous thriving town. I went to the bathing
place of Salt Hill, a long suburb of pretty cottages, mostly to be let
furnished to sea bathers. I should have gone on to Cushla Bay and to the
islands of Arran, but I did not. I looked round me and returned to
Galway.
There is difference perceptible to me, but hardly describable between
the Galway men and the rest of the West. The expression of face among
the Donegal peasantry is a patience that waits. The Mayo men seem
dispirited as the Leitrim men also do, but are capable of flashing up
into desperation. The Galway men seem never to have been tamed. The
ferocious O'Flaherties, the fierce tribes of Galway, the dark Spanish
blood, have all left their marks on and bequeathed their spirit to the
men of Galway. I met one or two who, like some of the Puritans, believed
that killing was not murder, who urged that if the law would not deter
great men from wrong-doing it should not protect them.
When trade revives and prosperity dawns upon the West the fierce blood,
like the Norman blood elsewhere, will go out in enterprise and spend
itself in improvements.
Land was pointed out to me in Galway for which L4 an acre was paid by
village people to plant potatoes in. This is called conacre. In going
through Galway City, even in the suburbs, I did not see great appealing
poverty such as I saw elsewhere. There was the bustle of work and the
independence of work everywhere, but in the country, there seems poverty
mixed with the fierce impatience of seeing no better way to mend
matters. I heard of evictions having taken place here and there, but saw
none.