IAR CONNAUGHT
WE were ready to say good-bye to Galway and to fare westward into far
Connaught, most primitive of Irish provinces; but on Sunday there is
only a single train each way, and the westbound one leaves Galway at six
in the morning. We managed to catch it, somewhat to our surprise,
crossed the Corrib River on a long bridge and viaduct, and were at once
in Iar Connaught--West Connaught, the domain of the wild O'Flaherties,
from whom the dwellers in Galway every Sunday besought the Lord to
deliver them.
The train skirts the shore of Lough Corrib, and one has beautiful
glimpses of the lake and the hills beyond; and then it plunges into a
wild and desolate country, strewn with great glacial boulders, some of
them poised so precariously on hill-side and cliff-edge that it seems
the rattle of every passing train would bring them crashing down.
And then we came out upon wide moors, crossed by innumerable little
streams, and then ahead of us the great Connemara mountains began to
loom against the sky--gigantic masses of grey granite, bare of
vegetation, even of the skin of turf which can find foothold almost
anywhere, but which is powerless against these masses of solid rock. The
Maamturk Mountains are the first to be seen, rugged giants two thousand
feet high, and the road mounts toward them over a pass, and then dips
rapidly to the station at Recess, which was our stopping-point.
It was still so early that there was nobody about, and when we got to
the hotel we found it locked; but the porter hastened to open the door
in answer to our ring, and we found ourselves in one of the nicest
hotels we had encountered anywhere in Ireland. We had already made up
our minds to spend that Sunday climbing Lissoughter, a mountain just
back of the hotel, famous for the view from its top; and so, as soon as
we had disposed of our luggage and eaten a most appetising breakfast, we
inquired how to get to it. And Sheila was summoned to tell us--Sheila
with a complexion like peach-bloom, and the brightest of blue eyes, and
the fluffiest of brown hair, fit to pose as the prototype of Sweet
Peggy, or Kathleen Bawn, or Kitty Neil, or any other of the lovely girls
the Irish poets delighted to sing. Not the least of the attractions of
this hotel at Recess are the girls who work there--as bright and
blooming a lot of Irish lasses as one could wish to see--and Sheila, I
think, was the flower of them all. She told us how to go, and we set off
happily through the soft, bright air of the morning.
Our road, at first, lay along the margin of a placid lake, then turned
off sharply to the right, and the climb began. It was an easy climb,
with beautiful views over bogs and lakes and mountains opening at every
step. There was a wet bog on either side the road, and at a place where
the peat was being cut, we walked out to take a closer look at it. And
as we stood there gazing down into the black excavation, we felt the
ground trembling beneath our feet; and when we looked up, there was a
man striding upward toward us, two hundred feet away, but at every
stride shaking the bog so that we could feel the tremor distinctly. The
bog shook more and more as he approached and passed us; and then the
tremor grew fainter and fainter as he went on his way. Unless I had felt
it, I would never have believed that the footsteps of a single man could
have created so wide a disturbance, and I understood how serious were
the difficulties the railways had to face in getting across the bogs of
central Ireland.
Half a mile farther on, we came to a cluster of little cabins clinging
to the hillside, and we paused to ask the way of a man who was pottering
about them; and, after a moment, we found that we were talking to Mr.
Rafferty, who with his brother, both bachelors, own the only quarry in
the world which produces Connemara marble; and when he offered to show
it to us, you may well believe we assented.
From the very first moment, I had perceived an air about Mr. Rafferty
which puzzled me. He was undoubtedly Irish, and yet his manner of
speaking was not precisely the Irish manner I had grown accustomed to;
his intonation was not precisely the Irish intonation, his choice of
words and acquaintance with slang was surprisingly wide for a man born
and reared in Connemara, and there was a certain alertness about him
which was not Irish at all. And then, when he started to tell us his
story, I understood, for he had been born in New York and spent the
first fifteen or twenty years of his life there. Not until then did I
realise in how many subtle, scarcely recognisable ways does the American
Irishman differ from the Irish Irishman.
His father was a Connemara man who had gone to America in the decade
following the great famine and settled in New York, where the son who
was talking to us was born. The father had come back to Connemara,
again, for some reason, and had settled at Recess, and, by mere
accident, one day discovered the vein of marble high on the side of
Lissoughter. There was no railroad in the valley then, and nobody
supposed the vein would ever be of any value, so he managed to get
control of it, and his sons came back from America to help him work it.
Its development was very slow and difficult, for the only way of getting
the marble to market was to haul it along the mountain roads to Galway,
forty miles distant.
But since the coming of the railroad, all that is changed. Some
primitive machinery has been installed, larger blocks can be handled,
and already more than one office building in New York has its vestibule
embellished with the beautiful green stone. Even the fragments are
carefully saved and worked up into small ornaments and novelties to sell
to tourists--round towers and Celtic crosses and such things.
We were at the entrance to the quarry by this time, and he took us
through and explained its workings to us. It is a surface vein, as you
will see from the photograph opposite page 322, which I took next day,
and no one knows its depth or its extent. Enough has been uncovered to
last for many years, at the present rate of quarrying. Of course if it
was in America, a great company would be formed to exploit it, and
modern machinery installed, and it would be yanked out by the thousands
of tons a day; but since it is in Ireland, I doubt if the rate of
production will ever be largely increased.
We bade Mr. Rafferty good-bye at last, and took up the climb again
toward the summit of the mountain which loomed before us; up and up,
with the view opening more and more. Away at the bottom of the valley
ran the white ribbon of a road, with a cluster of thatched roofs huddled
near it, here and there; and beyond the valley towered the granite sides
of the Twelve Pins of Bunnabeola, the loftiest and most picturesque
mountains in these western highlands.
We came to a cabin, presently, away up there by itself on the mountain
side, and we stopped long enough to leave the specimens of marble which
Mr. Rafferty had given us, for they threatened to become embarrassingly
heavy before the climb was ended. The family who lived there came out to
show us the best way up the hill, and stood watching us as we climbed
on. The path for a time lay along the bottom of a brook; then we came
out upon the bare hillside, with an outcrop of granite here and there
and dripping bog between, and no living thing in sight except agile,
black-faced sheep, who peered down at us curiously from every crag. The
way grew steeper and steeper and the stretches of bog more wet and
treacherous; but always the view was more magnificent, especially to the
west, where the Twelve Pins were, and to the south, where the plain
stretched away, gleaming with innumerable little lakes. I never saw so
many lakes at one time as I saw that day--there must have been two or
three hundred of them between us and the far horizon, each of them
gleaming in the sun like a polished mirror.
After an hour of this steep and slippery work, Betty declared that she
had had enough; but the last grey escarpment of the mountain loomed just
over our heads, and I hated to give up with the goal so near. She said
she would wait for me while I went up alone, so, leaving her cosily
seated in a niche in the cliff, I scrambled on, along the granite wall,
on hands and knees sometimes; and at last I came out upon the very
summit, with one of the most beautiful views in all Ireland at my feet.
Lissoughter stands exactly at the end of a great transverse valley, with
the Maamturk Mountains on one side and the Twelve Pins on the other, and
at the bottom of this valley gleam the waters of Inagh and Derryclare;
and the granite hills stretch away as far as the eye can see, one behind
the other, rugged and bleak, without a sign of vegetation--far more
impressive than the green-clad hills about Killarney. The day was
gloriously clear, and I sat there for a long time, gazing first this way
and then that, and I can shut my eyes now and see again that glorious
landscape. The top of Lissoughter is a ring of granite, with a bog in
the depression in the centre; and on the highest point of this ring some
one had heaped up a little cairn of stones. Feeling something like Peary
at the north pole, I tore a leaf from my note-book, wrote my name and
address upon it, with greetings to the next comer, and placed it under
the topmost stone of this cairn. I did not suppose that it would ever be
discovered, but when I got home, I found a postal awaiting me from an
Irish girl, who had climbed Lissoughter with a party a week later, and
found my note where I had left it.
When we got down again to the cottage where we had left our marble, we
found the man of the house out in front, and stopped for a chat with
him. Yes, it was a fine day; very wet it had been, but a few more such
days as this would do the potatoes a world of good, and one could get
into the bogs again to cut the winter fuel. As we talked, children
gathered from various directions, until there were ten standing about
staring at us, and Betty asked him if they were the neighbours'
children.
"They are not, miss," he answered, grinning. "They're all mine."
"All yours!" echoed Betty, and counted them again.
The man turned to the eldest girl.
"Mary Agnes, go bring the baby," he said; and Mary Agnes disappeared
indoors, and came out presently with number eleven.
How they manage to live I don't know; but they do live, and, so far at
least as the children are concerned, even grow fat. Their bright eyes
and red cheeks spoke of anything but undernourishment, and it must take
a large pot to hold enough to satisfy that family! How the pot is filled
is the mystery.
Their home was typical of Connaught--and of the poorer part of all
Ireland, indeed: a low cabin, built of stones and whitewashed, with two
rooms, a dirt floor, a few pieces of rude furniture, a pile of straw and
rags for a bed, and hardly enough clothes to go around. In fact, below
the age of ten or twelve, it was impossible to tell the boys from the
girls, for they were all dressed alike in a single garment, a sort of
shift made of homespun flannel, and usually, I judge, cut out of the
mother's old red petticoats; and boys and girls alike have their hair
cropped close. All through Connemara we saw this fashion--a single
rudely-made garment of wool, worn by the children of both sexes all the
year round, without undergarment of any kind, without shoes or
stockings. The flannel the garments are made of is practically
indestructible, and I fancy they are taken off only when outgrown and
passed on to the next youngest member of the family. When a boy outgrows
it and is privileged to put on trousers, it is a proud day for him, for
he ceases to be a mere petticoated "malrach" and becomes a "gossure."
Mary Agnes, the oldest member of this particular family, was a girl of
sixteen, who was soon to leave for America to try her fortune; I don't
know by what miracles of self-denial the money for her passage had been
scraped together! She was an ugly girl, with bad teeth and stupid
expression, and I am afraid she will find life no bed of roses, even
here in America. The rest of the children went to school; and the
nearest schoolhouse was five Irish miles away!
We went on at last, down past the other cabins, which are occupied by
the men employed in the quarry. They were all faithful replicas of the
one I have described, and they were all swarming with children. I never
ceased to be astonished at these children, for though they were dirty
and half-naked, they all seemed plump and healthy. Potatoes, I suppose,
is the main article of their diet, for every cabin had its deep-trenched
patch, won by back-breaking toil from the rocks of the hillside. That
leisurely walk down into the green valley is unforgettable, the day was
so bright, the air so fresh and sweet, the view so lovely.
[Illustration: THE CONNEMARA MARBLE QUARRY]
[Illustration: A CONNEMARA HOME]
We spent the remainder of the afternoon playing clock golf, and
exploring the beautiful garden attached to the hotel; and that night we
sat in front of a great open fire-place where a wood fire crackled, and
luxuriated in the pleasant fatigue of a well-spent day. If I had known
as much then as I do now, we would have spent other evenings there, for
Recess is as good a point as any from which to explore Connaught, and
the hotel there is immeasurably superior to any other in that section of
Ireland--clean and bright and comfortable and well-managed, with food
that was a pleasant variant from the unimaginative dishes we had grown
so weary of. It has been built by the railroad company to encourage
tourist traffic, and I don't see how it can pay; but, for the sake of
travellers in that part of Ireland, I hope it will never be closed.
I said something of this, that evening, to the manager and to Sheila;
and added to the latter that if she would tell me the secret of her
complexion, I would make a fortune for both of us.
"'Tis just the air," she laughed. "Send your lady friends out here to
us, and we'll soon have them blooming like roses."
So there is another reason for a stay at Recess.
* * * * *
I clambered back up to the quarry, next morning, for I wanted some
pictures of it, and of the quaint cabins along the way. I found Mr.
Rafferty there, and a gang of men busy loading some blocks of marble
upon a cart, preparatory to taking them down the mountain. Just back of
the quarry, two red-skirted women were digging in a potato patch, and
they looked so picturesque and Millet-like that I asked them if I might
take their picture. They held a quick consultation, and then said I
might provided I paid them two shillings first!
But I _did_ want a picture of one of those poor little mountain cabins,
and on my way back, I saw a woman standing at the door of one of them,
and she passed the time of day so amiably that I stopped to talk. The
year had been very hard, she said--as what year is not, in such a
place!--and her husband was even then at Oughterard, trying to find
work. Meanwhile, she was left with the children, to do the best she
could, and what they found to live on I don't know; but she was glad for
me to take a picture of her little place, with herself and the children
and the dog standing in front of it, and I am sure the coin I slipped
into the baby's fist was very welcome. That picture is opposite page
322, and it gives a better idea than any mere description could of these
damp, dark, comfortless mountain homes, with their low walls, and tiny
windows, and leaky, grass-grown thatch, tied on with ropes. Both the
boys in the picture wear the red flannel garment common to all Connemara
children. The girl has just outgrown it.
Farther on, I came upon a woman and her daughter, a girl of about
sixteen, working in a potato patch; and the girl was really pretty,
although at the moment she was engaged in spreading manure with her
hands about the roots of the plants. Her skirt was kilted high,
revealing her graceful and rounded legs, and when she smiled her teeth
were very white. That was the finishing touch, for teeth are bad in
Ireland, and most pretty girls need only smile to disillusion one. So,
after some talk about the weather, and about America, I asked the mother
if I might not take the girl's picture; and the girl was willing enough,
for she hastily let down her skirt, blushing with pleasure; but her
mother shook her head.
"You are not the first one to be askin' that," she said; "but I have
said no to all of them, for I would not have her growing vain."
"She has a right to be vain," I pointed out, "for she is very pretty;
and it wouldn't hurt her to have her picture taken."
"Handsome is as handsome does," said her mother; "and she is not as good
as she looks."
No doubt with a little more blarney I could have won her consent; but in
my heart of hearts I knew she was right, and I didn't try to persuade
her. It was not the first time I realised I was not cut out for a
photographer! She said the girl would be going to America before long,
and I advised her to take care of her teeth, and bade them good-bye and
went on my way. I have regretted since that I didn't try the blarney,
for that picture would certainly have embellished the pages of this
book!
I had thought that the fine weather would bring out the turf cutters in
force, and I had hoped to get a picture of them at work; but the
cuttings were all empty, for some reason, and at last, after a final
long look at the beautiful valley, I made my way back to the hotel, and
an hour later we were faring westward toward Clifden.
The road ran for many miles with the granite masses of the Twelve Pins
towering on the right, springing sheer two thousand feet from the bogs
around them--great cones rising one behind the other, their summits
gleaming so white in the sun that they seemed crowned with snow. We ran
away from them, at last, across a dreary moor, down to the sea, and so
to Clifden.
Clifden is a little modern town with a single wide street overlooking
the bay; but we had time for only a glance at it, for the motor-bus was
waiting which was to take us to Leenane,--which is pronounced to rhyme
with "fan," as though it had no final "e"--and we were soon climbing out
of the town, with a beautiful view of the bay to the left, and on a
cliff close to the shore the great masts of the Marconi station, which
is in touch with the coast of Newfoundland. No contrast could have been
more complete--this latest and greatest of the achievements of science,
set down in a country where nothing has altered for five centuries; a
country to which the description penned by Rory O'Flaherty, more than a
century before our Revolution, applies as closely and completely as it
did when it was written. Another contrast, just as great, is that
between the handsome young Italian who set those masts here and the men
who live in the little cottages along the sea under them. And yet
Marconi himself is half Irish--for his mother was Irish, and he has
married an Irish girl; and I fancy he is glad that one of the greatest
of his stations should be here on the Irish coast.
We mounted steadily along a winding road, and at every turn the scenery
grew more superb--great sweeps of rugged landscape, of bog and rocky
field and granite mountain, rousing the soul like a blare of martial
music. Beyond Letterfrank, the road dips into the lovely Pass of
Kylemore; and again, as back at Glengarriff, it was bordered with
fuchsia hedges, gay with scarlet flowers. And presently we were running
close beside Kylemore Lake, with the white towers of the castle gleaming
above the trees on the other side--a magnificent structure, now owned by
the Duke of Manchester--financed by his Cincinnati father-in-law!
And then we came out upon a wide moor, and the road climbed up and
up--and all at once, we came to the top of the pass, and there, far
below us lay Killary Bay, a narrow arm of the Atlantic running back into
the very heart of the Connemara mountains, which press upon it so
closely that there is barely room for the road between rock and water.
We dropped down toward it, passed a tiny mountain village, came out upon
the shore, and sped along at the very edge of the water, until, far
ahead, we saw the cluster of houses which is Leenane; and in another
moment we had stopped before the rambling building which is McKeown's
Hotel.
McKeown himself is a bearded giant of a man, with bronzed face and the
sunniest of smiles, and his hotel is a sort of paradise for fishermen.
To others it is not so attractive; but in surroundings it could hardly
be surpassed. Right at its door stretches Killary Bay; back of it tower
the steep hills, and across the inlet grey and purple giants spring two
thousand feet into the air, right up from the water's edge.
A few looms have been set up by Mr. McKeown in a building adjoining the
hotel, and tweeds are woven there from yarn spun in the neighbourhood,
forming a small industry which gives employment to a number of persons;
and a few yards farther down the road is a station of the constabulary,
and it looked so bright and inviting that I stopped in for a chat with
the men.
I have already spoken of the Royal Irish Constabulary--the force which
polices the country; slim, soldierly men, governed from Dublin Castle,
and really constituting an army, eleven thousand strong, armed with
carbines, sword bayonets and revolvers, and ready to be concentrated
instantly wherever there is trouble. They are nearly all Irishmen, so it
is not a foreign army, but they are seldom assigned to the districts
where they were born and reared; and the men who command them from
Dublin Castle are English army officers, who are in no way responsible
to the public. All, in fact, that Ireland has to do with the Royal Irish
Constabulary is to foot the bills.
Because of this fact, because in the old days they were called out to
assist at every eviction and at every political or religious arrest,
because their services are still required at every trial and
mass-meeting and fair and market, and finally because their demeanour is
sometimes rather top-lofty, the Irish generally regard them with a
suspicion and dislike which seem to me undeserved. So far as I came into
contact with them, I found them courteous and kindly men, and apparently
as good Irishmen as any one could desire. But there is one cause for
complaint which has a real basis, and that is that, in a country which
is as free of crime as Ireland now is, a police force should be
maintained which averages one to every 394 of the population, and which
costs annually about $7,500,000. In the old days of evictions and
coercion acts and political and religious strife, some such force may
have been necessary; but that need has passed. Crime is to-day much less
frequent and serious in Ireland than in England, yet in Ireland the per
capita cost of the police is $1.64, while in England it is only
fifty-six cents.
But the members of the constabulary are not to blame for this, and one
grows accustomed to seeing them everywhere--at the Dublin crossings, at
the street corners of every little village, walking briskly in pairs
along the loneliest of mountain roads, stationed in the wilds of the
hills or amid the desolation of the bogs, often with no house in sight
except the barrack in which they live.
I certainly got a warm welcome, that day, from the sergeant in charge of
the Leenane barrack, and from the one constable who happened to be on
duty there. They showed me all through the place, clean and bare and
Spartan-like, with their kits along the wall, ready to be caught up at a
moment's notice, for a call to duty may come at any time, and there must
be no delay. It was a real barrack, too, with heavy bars across the
windows, and a door that would resist any mob.
And then they showed me their equipment. To the belt which they all wear
a leather case is suspended for the baton, and a square leather pouch
which contains a pair of handcuffs. At the back is the ammunition pouch,
and on the side opposite the baton hangs the sword-bayonet, which can
also be used as a knife or dagger. The small carbine they carry weighs
only six and a half pounds, but is wonderfully compact and efficient,
with a six-shot magazine, and a graduated sight up to two thousand
yards. No man in this station had ever had occasion to use his rifle,
and they all said earnestly that they hoped they never would.
They have a beat of twelve miles along the mountain roads, and they
cover it twice every day and once every night. I asked them the reason
for so much vigilance, for I could not imagine any serious crime back in
these hills among this simple and kindly people; and they said that
there was really very little crime; but a sheep would be missing now and
then, or a bit of poaching would be done, or perhaps a quarrel would
arise between some farmer and his labourers and a horse would be
lamed--it was such things as those they had to be on the lookout for.
The position of constable is a good one--for Ireland; and I imagine that
most of those who enter the service stay in it till retired, for it
carries an increase of pay every five years, with a pension after
twenty-five years' service, or in case of disability.
We sat and talked for a long time about America and Ireland, and
intelligent fellows I found them, though perhaps with a little of the
soldier's contempt for the shiftless civilian. And then I walked on to
the village which nestles at the head of the bay, a single street of
slated houses. Everybody wanted to talk, and I remember one old granny,
with face incredibly wrinkled, who sat in front of her door knitting a
stocking without once glancing at it, and who told me she was
eighty-five and had nine children in America. And I met the girl who,
with her brother, teaches the village school, and she asked me if I
wouldn't come in, before I left, and see the school, and I promised her
I would.
Then I noticed that one of the little shops had the name "Gaynor" over
the door, and I stopped in to ask the proprietor if he knew that was
also the name of the mayor of New York. He did--indeed, he knew as much
about Mayor Gaynor as I did. There were two other men sitting there, and
they asked me to sit down. One of them was a mail carrier, and he told
me something of his trips back up into the hills, and how almost all the
letters he delivered were from America, each with a bit of money in it.
"When there is bad times in America," he went on, "and when men are out
of work there, it pinches us here just as hard as it pinches them
there--harder, maybe, for if the money don't come, there is nothing for
it but the work-house. A man can't make a living on these poor hill
farms, no matter how hard he tries, and there is no work to be had about
here, save a little car driving and such like in the summer for visitors
like yourself."
"Why do they stay here?" I asked. "Why don't they go away?"
"Where would they go? There's no place for them to go in
Ireland--America is the only place, and every one that can raise the
money does go there, you may be sure. Them that's left behind are too
poor or too old to cross the sea; and then, however bad it is, there is
some that will not leave the little home they was born in, so long as
they can stay there and keep the soul in their body. There be some so
wrongheaded that they won't even move down into the valley farms which
they might be getting from the Congested Districts Board."
* * * * *
I have been fighting shy of the Congested Districts Board ever since I
left Cork; but here, in the very heart of the worst of the congested
districts, I may as well explain what the words mean.
No one, travelling from Galway to Clifden and then on to Leenane, as we
had done, would have thought of the district as "congested," for, while
the little huddles of thatched roofs which mark a village are fairly
frequent, they are scarcely noticeable in the great stretches of hill
and bog and rocky meadow among which they nestle. And, indeed,
"congested," in this sense, does not mean crowded with people; it means
exceptionally poor; and there is no district of Ireland poorer than
Connaught, that land of bog and granite, where every inch of ground must
be either elaborately drained or wrested from the rock, and where, even
after years of labour, the fields are still either so wet that a little
extra rain ruins them, or so full of stones that the reaping must be
done with the hook. In Connaught, even the poorest man has a right to be
proud of his home, because, however small and mean it may be, it
represents infinite toil.
But how does it come that any one lives in these hills, where life is
such a constant and heartrending struggle? The answer is that Connaught
is the Irish pale. After Cromwell had subdued Ireland, the Puritan
Parliament announced that it was "Not their intention to extirpate the
whole nation," as many people had been led, not unreasonably, to
believe; and a year later, they proved their humanitarian intentions by
enacting that such Irish as survived should be permitted to live
thereafter between the Atlantic and the Shannon, certain portions of
which were set aside, as the Parliament said in unintentional rhyme,
"For the habitation
of the Irish nation."
It was stipulated, however, that they should not settle within four
miles of the sea, within four miles of a town, nor within two miles of
the Shannon; they were given until the first of May, 1654, to get into
their new homes, after which date, any found outside of Connaught were
to be treated as outlaws and killed out of hand. The misery and
sufferings of the little bands of terror-stricken people, wandering in
the depth of winter westward along unknown roads to an unknown,
inhospitable country, will not bear thinking of--or, thinking of it, one
can understand something of Irish hate for Cromwell's memory. As a
matter of fact, the edict sounds worse than it was, as such edicts
usually do, for it was impossible for it to be literally carried out.
All the Irish were not banished to Connaught, for many of them preferred
to face death where they had always lived rather than among the
Connemara hills; and they were not murdered out of hand, but given work,
for the new landlords were glad to employ them at menial labour, since
no other labourers were to be had. But from that time on, it was usually
the Protestant Englishman who lived in the mansion house, and the Irish
Catholic whose home was roofed with thatch and floored with dirt.
Let us be careful not to grow sentimental over the wrongs of Ireland,
nor to magnify them. They are not unique, for they have been paralleled
many times in history. We should be careful, too, not to judge a
seventeenth-century Parliament by twentieth-century ideals. There is
this to be said for it: that its only hope of existence lay in stamping
out rebellion, and the only way, apparently, to stamp out rebellion in
Ireland was to kill the rebels. That the Parliament chose to banish them
rather than kill them is so much to its credit, and I doubt not that,
after the vote had been taken, many of those old Puritans went home with
the feeling that they had done a merciful and Christian deed. Nor should
we forget that the wars of religion were as bitter on one side as on the
other: St. Bartholomew was far more bloody than Drogheda, and the
removal of the Irish to Connaught was matched by the banishment of the
Huguenots from France, thirty years later. It did not seem possible, in
that day, that Protestant and Catholic could ever live side by side in
peace and friendship, and that narrow bigotry alone would strive to keep
alive the memory of those mistaken, centuries-old feuds and
persecutions.
The best portions of Connaught were already fully settled, as the
fugitive Irish found when they got there; furthermore, although the
broad Shannon formed a natural moat which would hold safely the Irish
who had crossed it, it was further strengthened by giving to Cromwell's
soldiers all the broad belt of fertile land along the river, as well as
the rich valleys running back into the hills. All that was left for the
newcomers were the bleak moors and rocky mountain-sides, where no one
else would live; and since these, for the most part, were quite unfit to
be cultivated, there was every reason to believe that the people
condemned to live among them would soon cease from troubling.
But they didn't--at least, all of them didn't. They built rude shelters
of rock for their families, and the cabins one sees to-day throughout
Connemara are the direct descendants of those early ones, with scarcely
an altered feature. They set to work to reclaim the hillsides, and
though, every year, the spade turned up a new crop of stones, the fields
slowly grew capable of producing a little food. Before that time, of
course, many of the people had starved, but those that were left were
all the better off, and it looked, for a while, as though they might
some day be able to open the door without seeing the wolf there.
But the end was not yet. It should be remembered that these mountain
farms did not belong to the people who had created them, and who
laboured constantly to improve them, but were part of the "plantation"
of some court favourite or adventurer, so that rent must be paid for
them; and as the farm improved the rent was raised, although the
improvement resulted from the labour of the man who paid the rent, so
that, in the end, it was not the tenant who was richer, but the
landlord. If the rent was raised to a point where the tenant couldn't
pay it, or if the landlord wanted the land, the tenant was evicted with
absolutely no compensation for the improvements he had made. Then it was
a question either of going to America, or, if there wasn't money enough
for that, as was usually the case, of taking up some other stretch of
rocky hillside, and beginning the weary struggle all over again. The
craze for grazing, which started some forty or fifty years ago, resulted
in the eviction of many thousands from farms their own industry had
made, and to-day, as one drives through Connaught, one sees great
stretches of land given over to sheep which were once part of such
farms, and one can tell it is so by the faint ridges which mark the old
tillage.
So evolution proceeded, but for the Irish peasantry it was devolution,
for every step was a step downward; and millions of them left the land
in despair, and millions of those that remained were unable to make
enough to live on; and the workhouses kept getting bigger and bigger,
and the people poorer and poorer; until finally, a few English
statesmen, with a somewhat broader outlook than the average, saw that
something had to be done, and set about doing it. There is no need for
me to enumerate the steps that were taken--some of them wise, many of
them foolish; but the greatest of all was the enactment of legislation
permitting and assisting tenants to become the owners of the land on
which they lived.
This was in 1891, when the Congested Districts Board was established,
with wide powers, which have since been made wider still; but the kernel
of it all is this: in the west of Ireland, where the need is greatest,
the board has power to condemn and purchase at a fair valuation the
fertile land of the great land-owners, except the demesne, which is the
park about the mansion house, and can then re-sell this land to small
farmers, giving them about sixty years to pay for it, the payments being
figured on the basis of the cost price, plus interest at the rate of
four per cent. Such condemnation and re-selling is necessarily slow, but
it is going steadily forward, and must in the end, change the whole face
of western Ireland. Indeed, there are some who think it has already done
so.
The Congested Districts Board has done much more than buy and re-sell
land; it has aided and developed agriculture, improved the breeding of
stock, encouraged the establishment of industries, developed the
fisheries along the western coast, established technical schools--in
short, it has assumed a sort of paternal oversight of the districts
committed to its care.
All of the "congested districts" aren't in the west of Ireland--there
are districts in the east and south where the holdings are
"uneconomic"--that is, where the income possible to be derived from them
is not enough to support a family--sometimes not enough even to pay the
rent. But conditions are worst in Connaught, and remain worst, in spite
of the work of the board. It is here that life has sunk to its lowest
terms, where the usual home is a hovel unfit for habitation, sheltering
not only the family, but the chickens and the pigs and the donkey; it is
here that manure is piled habitually just outside the door, and where
fearful epidemics sweep the countryside. At the time we were at Leenane,
there was an outbreak of typhus a few miles back in the mountains. It
had been announced with hysterical scare-heads by the Dublin papers, but
the people of the neighbourhood thought little of it--they had seen
typhus so often!
Which brings me back to Gaynor's general store, and the mail-carrier who
was telling me about the letters from America.
"Yes," Gaynor put in, "and about the only letters that go out from here
are for America--and well I know what is inside them! There was a time
when I sold stamps to the poor people, or gave credit to them when they
couldn't pay, and the only stamps I ever thought of buying was the
tuppence-ha'penny ones, which we used to have to put on American
letters. And many is the letter I have written for poor starving people
praying for a little help from the son or daughter who had gone to the
States, and who was maybe forgetting how hard life is back here in
Connaught."
"Not many of them do be forgetting," said the mail-carrier, puffing his
pipe slowly; "I will say that for them. There be many away from here
now," he went on, "just for the summer--gone to England or Scotland to
help with the harvest. It is a hard life, but they make eighteen
shillings a week there, and the money they bring back with them will
help many a family through the winter. There be thousands and thousands
here in Connaught who could not live but for the money they make every
year in this way."
He stopped to watch Gaynor weigh out a shilling's worth of
flour--American flour!--for a girl who had come in with a dingy basket,
into which the flour was dumped; and then he went on to tell me
something about his trips up over the hills--for no house in Ireland is
too poor or too remote for the mail-carrier to reach. Talk about rural
delivery! With us, a man must have his mail-box down by the highroad,
where the carrier can reach it easily; in Ireland, the carrier climbs
to every man's very door, and puts the letter into his hand--and I can
imagine the joy that it brings. Irish mail-carriers play Santa Claus all
the year round!
I tore myself away, at last, from this absorbing conversation, and
started back to the hotel. The sun had not yet set; but suddenly the
thought came to me that it must be very late, and I snatched out my
watch and looked at it. It was half-past eight--an hour after the
hotel's dinner time! However, in a fishing hotel, they are accustomed to
the vagaries of their guests; and I found that dinner had been kept hot
for me.
* * * * *
An hour later, as we sat on the balcony in front of our room, gazing out
across the moonlit water, we heard the tread of quick feet along the
road, and, looking down, saw pass two constables, starting out upon
their night patrol. And whenever I think of Leenane, I see those two
slim, erect figures marching vigorously away into the darkness along the
lonely road.