When David asked me to recall my memories of travelling to Ireland when I was much younger it appeared to be a straightforward task of recalling and revelling in happy memories of four eight-week long summer holidays I enjoyed in the west of Ireland between 1958 and 1961.
However, in June 2024 my eldest daughter and I completed another quarter of the Wild Atlantic Way from Malin Head to Blacksod Bay, starting with the Giant’s Causeway and the Carrick a Rede Rope Bridge near Portrush in the Six Counties (a shibboleth!)
A consequence of this was that she bought as a birthday present for me Fintan O’Toole’s We Don’t Know Ourselves – a Personal History of Ireland Since 1958. Since 1958 was the year of my first ever visit to Ireland the date had a special resonance for me. Even more so was O’Toole’s detailed and incredibly readable account of the religious, social, political, nationalist, economic and other issues that created tensions around Irish life in those days.
A direct consequence was that I had to go back and revisit my memories but this time paying more attention to what now appears much more significant than simple happy memories.
Although I was born and brought up in Carlisle , whenever I visit relatives in Donegal, Sligo, Roscommon and Dublin the inevitable query comes up – “How long is it since you were home, Gerald?”
I know where I come from!
My parents were ‘economic migrants’, in that current term of abuse used by right wing politicians, many of whom are, ironically, themselves descended from immigrants.
Some four years after a large part of Ireland had gained a measure of freedom from eight hundred years of English (and later British) misrule, my father from Sligo crossed the new border to Enniskillen and ‘took the king’s shilling’, spending the next ten years in the army in India maintaining British power over the so-called ‘Jewel In The Crown.’
He never saw the irony!
My mother, a bright and capable girl from Tuam in Galway, travelled to London to enter domestic service with an aristocratic family.
For myself, I have often recalled my Sligo grandmother, who was born in Easkey on the Atlantic coast of Sligo in 1879. She was originally a native Irish speaker. By the time I came to know her in 1958 she only spoke English.
I frequently wonder if she would appreciate the irony of her grandson spending fifty years teaching the English their own language?
INTO THE WEST
The west of Ireland is not just a different physical place where, the further west you go, the trees bend towards the east – a result of ‘the haystack – and roof – levelling wind’ from the Atlantic.
It’s a place with wide physical horizons stretching to America.
When I ask my youngest daughter to recall a trip we made to Clifden in Galway, her response is the heartfelt exclamation, “Sea and sky!” Clifden, of course, is where the distance across the Atlantic was shortened to one of time not miles when Alcock and Brown crash-landed in a bog there in June 1919.
The west is also a place of the imagination where writers seek (and find) inspiration for their creativity.
Even the most minute of surveys could include J M Synge in the Aran Islands in the 1890s, the influence of Sligo on William Butler Yeats, the Kerry of John B Keane, the Galway of The Lonesome West and The Beauty Queen of Leenane by Martin Mc Donagh (born and brought up in London but whose mother was from Easkey and whose father was from Connemara), Tom Murphy from Tuam, the powerful playwright of The Gigli Concert and The Sanctuary Lamp among many others, the Claddagh in Galway captured in Walter Macken’s Rain on the Wind, the Leitrim of John McGahern’s Amongst Women and Conor McPherson’s The Weir, and, very notably, the Donegal of Brian Friel, especially the imagined Ballybeg (Ballybeg, small town).
(However, Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man did not share this view of the west. He tells of John Alphonsus Mulrennan returning from the west where he had met an old man. Stephen says of the old man, “I fear him. I fear his red rimmed horny eyes. It is with him I must struggle all through this night till day come, till he or I lie dead…”).
CARLISLE TO TUAM 1958
My first visit was when I was not yet 12 in 1958 when I travelled from Carlisle to Tuam in County Galway.
My companion on the initial part of this first trip was our local parish priest, Michael Curley, a kindly and gentle man who came from Ballinasloe and so counted as a neighbour of my mother.
We travelled via Stranraer-Larne and then by train from Belfast to Dublin.
Such was the respect with which priests were regarded in Ireland in those days that the waitress in the dining car actually curtsied on the fast moving train as she asked, “More tea, your reverence?”
(I must record here that Fr. Curley was, in my judgement, everything a priest should have been – devout, caring, devoted to his duties, unlike the monstrous hypocrites of serial abusers of women, girls and boys who destroyed the standing of the Catholic church in Ireland when, eventually, their manifold crimes and betrayals of their vocation came to light).
The train was late so a quick taxi dash from Amiens St (now Connolly) station to Westland Row (now Pearse) station saw me bundled into the guard’s van of the Galway train just as it was moving!
“There’s no train to Tuam by the time we get to Athenry,” said the guard.
Luckily, my mother had prepared me for this.
“If you get to Athenry late just wait for Tom McGrath to come from Tuam to collect the mail off the midnight train.”
Sure enough, when I got out at Athenry the porter said, “Tom McGrath will be here for the mail so just wait.”
When he did arrive and I explained who I was and how I wanted to get to Tuam his response was, “You’re Mamie’s boy?”
My mother was called Mary and hearing, for the first time, his familiar name for her conjured a whole history of hers which I had never guessed at.
Along with another late passenger, the rent collector in Tuam who had been visiting his son interned in the Curragh for IRA membership, (a policy enacted, ironically, under the government of the arch rebel himself Eamon de Valera), I sat amongst the mail bags in the back of the van and was duly dropped off at my aunt and uncle’s house at about 1.30 in the morning.
“Put some rashers on and wet the tay!” were almost the first words I heard in their house – the universal Irish welcome to a traveller who’s just arrived!
My aunt Freda and uncle Jarlath (a man of whom one of his sons said, “He would never use one word where thirteen would do”) made me feel completely at home over the four years in which I visited them.
Looking back now two things dominate my memory. The first is of Pauline Geraghty, a wonderfully pretty thirteen year old who lived two doors down – but that’s another story!
Her father, however, was a stern looking man who drove the pony and cart for the local laundry run by an order of nuns. This brings to my present mind the horror stories of the Magdalene Laundries run by nuns where unmarried mothers, abused women and girls and those often suffering from psychiatric disorders were effectively imprisoned and made to work for nothing other than their meagre keep.
The second is that, while I am not aware that the Tuam laundry was in fact a Magdalene Laundry, much, much more disturbing were the revelations that on Athenry Road, just round the corner from where I was staying, was the Tuam Mother and Baby Home run by the Bon Secours nuns. The remains of almost 800 children under three were discovered there in 2016/17 in a multitude of underground chambers (including, horrifically, in one report that one of the chambers was a sewage tank.)
Bon Secours means Good Help!
And all of this was happening while the people of Tuam went, unknowing(?), about their daily lives.
I WISH I HAD KNOWN HIM
Linked to this are two stories about my mother’s father. One of my aunts became pregnant in 1944. Although the father offered to marry her, my grandfather would not allow it. But, rather than banishing her and her child, as happened to so many unfortunate girls, my cousin was born in the family home and brought up with the family name. He did not however realise who his mother actually was until he was getting married and searched for his birth certificate when it all came out.
In fact, when I asked my own mother about Michael’s parents she told me they were dead, this despite the fact that her sister, now married with two children, was living less than a mile away from us in Carlisle.
My mother hated the Sisters of Mercy whose convent school she attended in Tuam. They were brutal.
She tells of them especially picking on and beating one of her classmates who was very pretty with beautifully long hair. Does one need a degree in psychiatry to read sexual repression into that?
My mother herself was beaten on one occasion whereupon my grandfather went up to the convent and said to the nun in question, “You lay a finger on my daughter again and I’ll break that stick across your back!”
In the Ireland of the late 1920s, dominated as it was by the Catholic Church, that took, I think, some determination.
Granddad, however, had joined the Inniskilling Dragoon Guards in 1900, gaining several Queen’s Medals and clasps and, inter alia, serving against the Boers in South Africa in 1901-02.
I should imagine he was afraid of nothing.
GIVING UP THE DRINK
My favourite story about him is how he became a Pioneer, in Ireland a member of the Total Abstinence Association. In the 1920s pubs in Ireland were shut on Sundays. My grandfather, like many others, liked a pint after Mass and before dinner. His chosen pub was Quinn’s Rustic Vaults on Vicar St which dates back to the early 1800s.
One Sunday, he and several others were there having a quiet drink when the Gardai (Police) raided it – a fairly usual occurrence in those days. The well- worn routine was to run out of the back door, down the garden and over the wall, still holding your pint. When the Gardai had left, empty-handed as it were, back in the drinkers would go. This particular Sunday, the Gardai returned twice further, occasioning the same escape routine. Having gone over the wall for the third time, my grandfather looked at the pint in his hand and said, “If a man can’t have a drink in peace, he might as well not drink at all!”
He flung the glass against the wall and joined the Pioneers.
In 2019 I enjoyed a pint of Smithwicks there in his honour, paying homage to the memory of him, the back door, garden and the wall!
His obituary in The Tuam Herald in November 1949 described him as ‘… a fine active type of man…cheerful and obliging…held in the highest regard by all classes’
CARLISLE TO SLIGO
The train for Stranraer from Carlisle left in the late afternoon with a change at Dumfries.
In those days you could sleep overnight on the boat and I still have a clear memory of the purser making white bread luncheon meat sandwiches for supper for myself and a few other travellers.
The boat to Larne was supposed to leave at 7.00 in the morning but in those days of integrated transport it waited for the arrival of the London–Stranraer boat train, which was late.
It was absolutely essential that I arrived in Enniskillen in time to catch the second and last bus of the day to Sligo at 4 pm.
From Larne the train went to the old York Road station in Belfast. I and several others piled into a taxi for the two mile journey to Great Victoria St station.
I ran into the station and up to the ticket barrier to see the back of the 11.15 train to Londonderry/Derry pulling away. A minute earlier and I would have caught it.
(A shibboleth which still exists – Londonderry/Derry or, more recently, Stroke City)
“There’s a duplicate at 11.20,” said the ticket collector.
Huge sigh of relief.
“But of course that’s gone long ago!”
So, I spent several hours sitting in the station waiting for the next train having sent a telegram to Sligo to say I would be late.
My obsession with arriving early for trains, boats and planes stems from this and my earlier experience of getting to Tuam, now 65 plus years ago, and I’ve never been able to exorcise it.
I eventually got off the train at Omagh, now forever remembered for one the most horrific mass murders of the IRA campaign to ‘free’ Ulster, but a quiet town in those days.
On the bus to Enniskillen from Omagh as we were passing through a very quiet village (Ballintrillick?) I was surprised to see a policeman strolling down the main (only) street cradling a sub-machine gun.
I learned later that he would have been a B Special policeman, one of the (Protestant) paramilitary group formed to protect the Protestant state .
Obviously, when I got to Enniskillen the bus to Sligo was long gone.
However, a friendly regular young RUC constable knowing I was obviously stranded told me that since it was market day there probably would be cattle farmers from Sligo in town who could give me a lift.
In fact he commandeered a car to confirm that there were indeed farmers from Sligo in the cattle market. Interestingly, he wouldn’t actually enter the cafe in the market. An act of kindness I often thought of in later years when the RUC was the target of murderers.
Beyond Enniskillen the border on the UK side is at Belcoo. In those days the customs post was protected by sandbags and barbed wire. A third of a mile down a straight road was Blacklion in the Republic with not a sandbag in sight.
(A few years ago my wife, Marcella, and I drove from Enniskillen to Derry weaving in and out the border; the only indication of which country we were in came from road signs in kph or mph or ‘Yield’ at junctions in the Republic).
So, at about 10.30 that night, having been dropped in Collooney by one of the cattle farmers, and then having caught a late bus to Sligo, I eventually arrived.
My granny, 79 years old, having had her nightly tot of whiskey, had gone to bed at her usual time saying her rosary for my safe arrival and totally confident that I would, in fact, arrive safely.
THE LANDSCAPE OF THE PAST
Sligo, with Knocknarea on one side, topped by the supposed burial cairn of Mebh (Maeve ) of Connacht of The Cattle Raid of Cooley fame, and Ben Bulben on the other, (Yeats is buried ‘Under bare Ben Bulben’s head’), was the scene of great fun with my cousin Gerry who was the same age as me . I saw him in June of this year. He is now sadly limited by vascular dementia but still able to remember events from our summers of long ago.
The very landscape is awesomely rich in ancient (i.e. more than 4000 years old) monuments.
Outside the front door of my aunt and uncle’s house in Garavogue Villas, situated on a small roundabout above the river, is the Abbeyquarter Stone Circle, also known locally as the Garavogue Fairy Fort In fact the circle is the reason why the houses there are actually on a roundabout. Here and in what follows I am indebted to Fr Michael O’Flanagan’s History and Heritage website –http://www.carrowkeel.com/sites/coolrea/abbeyquarter.html.
While I was always aware of the local name for the circle, it is only as I recalled and researched my memories that its full significance became apparent. Garavogue is apparently named after the ‘great hag or cailleach, the primal goddess of the early Neolithic farmers…. Abbeyquarter may be the oldest of all the early passage-graves, the primary burial place of the first group colonists to arrive to Sligo.’ (O’Flanagan). She appears as the Red Woman (who appears in Lady Gregory’s re-telling of Irish legends round Finn MacCool Gods and Fighting Men in 1904) and also as Mebh of Connacht. Her latest incarnation apparently is in Game of Thrones as Melisandre.
A very readable re-telling of legends around Maeve and Cú Chulainn can be found in Patricia Finney’s two novels A Shadow of Gulls (1977 (written before she was 18) andThe Crow Goddess (1978).
Another fact to emerge is that the earliest settlers of Sligo were probably farmers from the Carnac region of Brittany some 6,000 years ago. I remember on a holiday to the Quimper/Beg Meil region of Brittany making a visit to Les Alignements, or Standing Stones, at Carnac.
A small world!
The Garavogue river (the shortest river in Ireland?) flows for two miles from Lough Gill to Sligo town and then to the sea, past the original Coney Island to Rosses Point where my cousins and I would go swimming on what always seemed to be sunny Sunday afternoons.
On the shores of Lough Gill is Tobernalt, a popular place of Catholic pilgrimage from Sligo in late July in the years when I visited. Even today a pilgrimage still takes place because of the well’s association with Penal Times two hundred plus years ago when Catholics would gather there to hear Mass.
In comparison with the time of my visits to Ireland when weekly attendance at Mass was over 90% today the figure is 27%. In the 50’s and 60’s churches had notices in their porches forbidding Catholics from attending dances on Saturday nights (not that there were any) – presumably for fear that they wouldn’t get up for Mass on Sunday mornings. Consequently, Sunday was the night to go to a dance. Like continental Europe, most major specifically Irish sporting fixtures, Gaelic football and hurling, took place on Sundays.
However, the well dates from long before the Christian era (possibly around 4.000 BC) and was associated with cures for eyesight and madness with perhaps connections to queen Mebh. It will probably survive the decline of Christianity in Ireland because of its long associations with the spiritual, even sacred, essence of water surviving from much earlier cultures
It is not at all surprising that W B Yeats – in my (limited?) critical judgement, the greatest poet in English of the century 20th – and, like Seamus Heaney, not an ‘English’ poet – should have found so much inspiration for his creative genius in the Sligo of his childhood holidays. The landscape resonates through the poems from the earliest to the last – Glencar, Dromahair, the Rosses, the Salley Gardens situated in Ballisodare ( the last syllable pronounced as in deer not rare) five miles south of Sligo, Innisfree, Lissadell, Benbulben, and Drumcliffe where he is buried with the simplest and most profound inscription on his headstone:
Cast a cold eye
On life, on death.
Horseman, pass by!
Legends were part of people’s everyday knowledge. My uncle Larry who worked for Foley’s Brewery in Sligo would occasionally take me with him on delivery trips into the surrounding countryside. On one occasion in the Ox Mountains he stopped the lorry and pointed out what appeared to be a footprint in the rock by the side of the road.
“That’s where Oisin (pronounced ‘Uh-sheen’) stepped off his horse and aged three hundred years.”
The legend was that Oisin (son of Finn MacCool) had spent those three hundred years in Tír na nÓg, the land of eternal youth. He was allowed to return but told not to get off his horse. He did, and as soon as his foot touched the ground he instantly aged and soon died.
Just outside my grandmother’s birthplace of Easkey is the Split Rock of Easkey, a huge boulder split in two in an otherwise flat landscape. Legend has it that you can pass through the split twice but on the third time it will close up on you.
My daughter walked through it three times in 2019 but she wasn’t swallowed!
A Lough Gill legend from Fr Flanagan’s website:
Once there was a man building a beautiful boat and when he had it finished he decided to call it The Lady of the Lake.
One day he went up the lake in it and when he was half way up a mermaid appeared to him and she said, “Go back and change the name of that boat. There is only one Lady of the Lake and that is all that there will be”.
So the man went home and changed the name. If he had not obeyed the mermaid he probably would have been drowned.
In the version that I heard the boat sank and the owner did drown!
The more prosaic fact is that a small paddle steamer called The Lady of the Lake operated between Dromahair and Sligo for thirty years in the nineteenth century.
When did facts ever stand in the way of a good story?
As I mentioned earlier, my grandmother was born in 1879 in Easkey, a remote village on the Atlantic coast in county Sligo. It is now a stop on the Wild Atlantic Way tourist trail from Malin Head in the north to Kinsale in the south as well as a popular destination for surfers. I have often wondered if she knew people who had survived The Great Hunger (Cecil Woodham Smith) of the 1840s Irish famine. The memory remained difficult to handle in Ireland for a century and more afterwards – it was only in 1994 the National Famine Museum was established at Strokestown in county Roscommon.
Last year it was a moving experience to visit the abandoned Village of Slievemore near Dugort on Achill Island and to see the ‘lazy beds’ where potatoes were grown simply by laying them on the ground and covering them. When blight struck it was a mortal disaster, leading directly and indirectly to a million or more deaths.
(Even today we can get blight here in North West England after warm and wet weather. Luckily we can recognise it and if you act very quickly and cut off the diseased tops you can, perhaps, save something of the crop).
The poverty of the land in much of the west made it a suitable place of banishment for the defeated Catholic Irish when Oliver Cromwell told them they could “Go to Hell or to Connacht!” – death or exile.
When I first visited Ireland and spoke to people of my own age, my English accent almost immediately made them bring up Cromwell so that it seemed as if he had only left Ireland a few years ago instead of three hundred.
Right up until the (ultimately false) boom of the Celtic Tiger, emigration was the chosen method of seeking a better life for nearly two million Irish people, my own parents, aunts, uncles, cousins included.
The Irish diaspora means that, apart from finding Irish pubs wherever you are in the world (on a recent visit to Bergamo I found three), an Irish passport means a warmer welcome from immigration officials from Singapore to Los Angeles, as we discovered on a round the world trip in 2012.
However, as countless songs and poems convey, the longing for ‘home’ never really dies among the exiles so, as I mentioned at the start of this piece, there has always been for me (a native Carliol) a comforting sense of ‘coming home ‘ whenever I visit Ireland.
By David Selzer