From the dark niche under the gray boulder where the violets grow, a
Donegal fairy flew to the mountain cabin to bring a birthday wish to
Patrick Gallagher. The fairy designed not that great good would come to
Paddy, but that great good would come to his people through him. At least
when Paddy grew up, he slew the child-eating giant, Poverty, who lived in
Donegal.
Paddy began to fight poverty when he could scarcely toddle. With his
father, whose back was laden with a great rush basket, he used to pad in
his bare feet down the mountainside to the Dungloe harbor--down where the
hills give the ocean a black embrace. Father and son would wade into the
ocean that was pink and lavender in the sunset. Above them, the white
curlews swooped and curved and opened their pine wood beaks to squawk a
prayer for dead fish. But the workers did not stop to watch. Their food
also was in question. They must pluck the black seaweed to fertilize their
field.
When the early sun bronzed the bog, and streaked the dark pool below with
gold, Paddy and his father began to feed the dried wavy strands of kelp
between the hungry brown furrow lips. They packed the long groove near the
stone fence; they rounded past the big boulder that could not be budged;
last of all, they filled the short far row in the strangely shaped little
field. At noon, Paddy's mother appeared at the half door of the cabin and
called in the general direction of the field--it was difficult to see them,
for their frieze suits had been dyed in bog water and she could not at once
distinguish them from the brown earth. They were glad to come in to eat
their sugarless and creamless oatmeal.
In the evening Paddy ran over the road to his cousin's. Western clouds were
blackening and his little cousin was pulling the pig into the cabin as a
man puts other sort of treasure out of danger into a safe. Paddy listened a
moment. He could hear the castanets of the tweed weaver's loom and the hum
of his uncle's deep voice as he sang at his work. He ran to the rear of the
cabin and up the stone steps to the little addition. A lantern filled the
room he entered with black, harp-like shadows of the loom. While the uncle
stopped treadling and held the blue-tailed shuttle in his hand, the
breathless little boy told him that the field was finished.
"God grant," said the uncle with a solemnity that put fear into the heart
of Paddy, "there may be a harvest for you."
Paddy watched his mother work ceaselessly to aid in the fight that his
father and he were making against poverty. During the month her needles
would click unending wool into socks, and then on Saturday she would
trudge--often in a stiff Atlantic gale--sixteen miles to the market in
Strabane. There she sold the socks at a penny a pair.
In spite of combined hopes, the potato plants were floppily yellow that
year. Their stems felt like a dead man's fingers. No potatoes to eat. None
to exchange for meal. What were they to do?
The gombeen man told them. As member of the county council, he said, he
would secure money for the repair of the roads. All those who worked on the
road would get paid in meal.
"Let your da' not worry," said the fat gombeen man pompously to Paddy.
Paddy had brought the ticket that his father had obtained by a week's work
to exchange for twenty-eight pounds of corn meal. "I'll keep famine from
the parish. Charity's not dead yet."
When Paddy lugged the meal into the cabin, he found his mother lying on the
bed with her face averted from the bowl of milk that some less hungry
neighbor had brought in. His father's gaunt frame was hunched over the peat
blocks on the flat hearth. Paddy, full of desire to banish the brooding
discouragement from the room, hastened to repeat the words of the gombeen
man. But he felt that he had failed when his father, regarding the two
stone sack, said hollowly:
"Charity? Small pay to the men who keep the roads open for his vans."
In the spring, Paddy was nine, and had to go out in the world to fight
poverty alone. His father had confided to him that they were in great debt
to the gombeen man. Paddy could help them get out. There was to be a hiring
fair in Strabane. Paddy swung along the road to Strabane pretending he was
a man--he was to be hired out just like one. But when he arrived at the
hiring field he shrank back. All the farm hands, big and little, stood
herded together in between the cattle pens. A man? A beast. One overseer
for a big estate came up to dicker for the boy, and said he would give him
fifteen dollars for six months' work. Paddy was just about to muster up
courage to put the price up a bit, when a friend of the overseer came up
with the prearranged remark: "A fine boy! Well worth twelve dollars the six
months!"
"What do you want to know for?" asked the gombeen man, when at the end of
Paddy's back-breaking six months, Paddy and his father brought him the
fifteen dollars and asked how much they still owed. The gombeen man refuses
accounts to everyone but the priest, magistrate, doctor and teacher. "What
do you want to know how much you owe for? Unless you want to pay me all
off?"
When Paddy was seventeen he made a still bigger fight against debt. With
the sons of other "tied" men, he went to work in the Scottish harvests. His
family was not as badly off as those of some of the boys. Some had run so
far behind that the gombeen man had served writs on them, obtained judgment
against their holdings, and could evict them at pleasure.
When Paddy married and settled down in Dungloe he found the reason for the
unpayableness of the debt. One day he and his father shopped at the gombeen
store together. They bought the same amount of meal. The father paid
cash--seventeen shillings. Forty-four days later, Paddy brought his money.
But the gombeen man presented him with a bill for twenty-one shillings and
three pence. It did no good to say how much the father had paid for the
same amount of meal. The gombeen man insisted that Paddy's father had given
eighteen shillings, and Paddy was being charged just three shillings and
three pence interest. Or only 144 per cent per annum!
"Why do we buy from him? Why don't we get together and do our own buying?"
asked the insurgent Paddy. After much reflection he had decided on the
tactics of his campaign against poverty and the recruiting for his army
commenced that night as the neighbors visited about his turf fire. There
was doubt on the faces of those tied to the gombeen man. But Paddy
continued: "Let's try it out in a small way, say with fertilizer. That
stuff he's selling us isn't as good as kelp, and he won't tell us what it's
made of."
The recruits fell in. They scraped up enough money to buy a twenty-ton load
of rich manure from a neighboring co-operative society. The little deal
saved them $200 and brought them heavy crops. They organized. They needed a
store. Up in a rocky boreen on his little farm, Paddy had an empty shed.
Again the neighbors explored the toes of their money stockings, and found
enough to pay for filling the shed with flour, tea, sugar and meal. Then,
if they were "free" men, they came boldly to shop on the nights the store
was open--moonlight or no moonlight. But if they were "tied" men, they
crept fearsomely tip the rocks on dark nights only. The recruits recruited.
Financial and social returns began to come in. At the end of the first year
there was a clear profit of over $500. In three years the society was
recognized as one of the most efficient in Ireland and presented by the
Pembroke fund with a fine stucco hall. Jigs. Dances. Lectures.
But the gombeen man wasn't "taking it lying down." He called on his
political and religious friends to aid. First on the magistrate. When Paddy
became the political rival of the gombeen man for the county council, there
was a joint debate. Paddy used reduced prices as his argument. Questions
were hurled at him by the reddening trader.
"Wait till I get through," said Paddy. "Then I'll attend to you."
That, said the trader, was a physical threat! So the gombeener's friend,
the magistrate, threw Paddy into jail. Paddy went to prison full of fear
that dissension might be sown in the society's ranks. But on coming out he
discovered not only that he had won the election but that a committee was
waiting to present him with a gorgeous French gilt clock, and that fires,
just as on St. John's eve, were blazing on the mountains.
But the trader took another friend of his aside. This time it was the
village priest. Bad dances, he said, were going on of nights in Templecrone
hall. What was Paddy's surprise on a Sunday in the windswept chapel by the
sea to hear his beloved hall denounced as a place of sin. Paddy knew the
people would not come any more.
Then, the great inspiration. Paddy remembered how his mother used to try to
help with her knitting. He saw girls at spinning wheels or looms working
full eight hours a day and earning only $1.25 to $1.50 a week. So with
permission of the society, Paddy had two long tables placed in the
entertainment hall, and along the edges of the tables he had the latest
type of knitting machines screwed. Soon there were about 300 girls working
on a seven and a half hour day. They were paid by the piece, and it was not
long before they were getting wages that ran from $17.50 to $5.25 a week.
Incidentally, Mr. Gallagher, as manager, gave himself only $10.00 a week.
When I saw Patrick Gallagher in Dungloe, he was dressed in a blue suit and
a soft gray cap, and looked not unlike the keen sort of business men one
sees on an ocean liner. And indeed he gave the impression that if he had
not been a co-operationist for Ireland, he might well have been a
capitalist in America. He took me up the main street of Dungloe into easily
the busiest of the white plastered shops. He made plain the hints of
growing industry. The bacon cured in Dungloe. The egg-weighing--since
weighing was introduced the farmers worked to increase the size of the eggs
and the first year increased their sales $15,000 worth. The rentable farm
machines.
"Come out into this old cabin and meet our baker," Paddy continued when we
went out the rear of the store. "We began to get bread from Londonderry,
but the old Lough Swilly road is too uncertain. See the ancient Scotch
oven--the coals are placed in the oven part and when they are still hot
they are scooped out and the bread is put in their place. Interesting,
isn't it? But we are going to get a modern slide oven."
After viewing the orchard and the beehives beneath the trees, I remarked on
the size of the plant, and its suitability for his purpose. He said:
"It used to belong to the gombeen man."
The sea wind was blowing through the open windows of the mill. Barefoot
girls--it's only on Sunday that Donegal country girls wear shoes and then
they put them on only when they are quite near church--silently needled
khaki-worsted over the shining wire prongs. Others spindled wool for new
work. As they stood or sat at their work, the shy colleens told of an extra
room added to a cabin, or a plump sum to a dowry through the money earned
at the mill. None of them was planning, as their older sisters had had to
plan, to go to Scotland or America.
"As the parents of most of the girls are members in the society they want
the best working conditions possible for them," said Mr. Gallagher as he
took me out the back entrance of the knitting mill. "So we're building this
new factory. See that hole where we blasted for granite; we got enough for
the entire mill in one blast. That motor is for the electricity to be used
in the plant.
"Northern sky lights in the new building--the evenest light comes from the
north. Cement floor--good for cleaning but bad for the girls, so we are to
have cork matting for them to stand on. Slide-in seats under the
tables--that's so that a girl may stand or sit at her work."
"Soon the hall will be free for entertainments again," I suggested. "Won't
the old cry be raised against it once more?"
"No. We're too strong for that now."
At the Gallaghers' home, a sort of store-like place on the main street,
Mrs. Gallagher with a soft shawl about her shoulders was waiting to
introduce me to Miss Hester. Miss Hester was brought to Dungloe by the
co-operative society to care for the mothers at child-birth. She is the
first nurse who ever came to work in Donegal.
But Mr. Gallagher wanted to talk more of Dungloe's attainment and ambition.
He compared the trade turnover of $5,045 for the first year of the society
with $375,000 for 1918. But there were more things to be done. The finest
herring in the world swim the Donegal coast. Scots catch it. Irish buy it.
Dungloe men wanted to fish, but the gombeen man would never lend money to
promote industry. Other plans for the development of Dungloe were
discussed, but the expense of the cartage of surplus products on the toy
Lough Swilly road, and the impossibility of getting freight boats into the
undredged harbor, were lead to rising ambition.
"Parliament is not interested in public improvements for Dungloe," smiled
Mr. Gallagher. "I suppose if I were a British member of parliament I would
not want to hand out funds for the projection of a harbor in a faraway
place like this. Irish transportation will not be taken in hand until
Ireland can control her own economic policy."
As the darkness closed in about our little fire the talk turned somehow to
tales of the fairies of Donegal, and Mr. Gallagher chuckled:
"Some persons about here still believe in the good people."
Then gentle Mrs. Gallagher, conscious of a benevolent force close at hand,
began simply:
"Well, don't you think perhaps--"
[Footnote 1. "To the Masters of Dublin--An Open Letter." By AE. _The
Irish Times_, Oct. 17, 1913.]
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