Setting Foot on the Shores of Connemara (9 page)

In the early years of the nineteenth century the idea that Connemara could be civilized and made profitable persuaded others of the old Galway families to come and live on their estates. In about 1814 John D’Arcy projected a market-town and harbour at a spot called An Clochán, the stepping-stones, by the principal rivermouth of the western shore, and began by building himself a Gothic castle and a grotto. Between 1822, when the government engineer Alexander Nimmo undertook both the harbour and the road from Galway to the new town, and D’Arcy’s death in 1839, a Protestant and a Catholic church, 185 dwellings, most of them
three-storeyed, two hotels, three schools, a police barracks,
court-house
, gaol, distillery and twenty-three public houses had accrued to its basic triangle of wide, unpaved streets. The population had grown to 1100, and An Clochán had been ‘fashionably anglicized’ as Clifden. Merchant vessels were bringing in a wide range of necessities never felt as such before; corn, fish, kelp and marble were being shipped out, and this place formerly ‘only remarkable for smuggling and illicit distillation’ was now yielding considerable excise duties. Daniel O’Connell’s ‘Monster Meeting’ at Clifden in 1843, when he spoke on Repeal of the Act of Union to a crowd said to number 100,000, may be taken as marking the coming-
of-age
of the capital Connemara had so long lacked.

While D’Arcy was beginning this transformation of his estate, the Blakes similarly were interesting themselves in something more than the rents of Renvyle, of which they had been absentee
landlords
since 1680. The O’Flahertys, former lords of the land, having hung on as middlemen there for generations, found
themselves
dismissed into still deeper obscurity when Henry Blake was inspired by the potentialities of a newly discovered slate bed nearby to take over their long thatched cabin, give it a slate roof, and install his family in residence. Like most formerly Catholic landowners the Blakes had by then adopted Protestantism and the ideology of progress. The family’s
Letters
from
the
Irish
Highlands,
published anonymously in 1825, are full of concern for the welfare of their periodically starving tenantry and evince some interest in their culture; nevertheless the little Catholic chapel the O’Flahertys had built near the house was self-evidently
objectionable
and had to be removed. (In one of the letters describing the ensuing rumpus, Henry Blake states that it was within a hundred yards of the house, whereas in fact it was four hundred yards away; the uncharacteristic inaccuracy perhaps betrays an uneasy conscience about the matter.) Another branch of the Blakes of Galway had moved out onto their estates in south-east Connemara by this period and became the Blakes of Tully. Enlightened
travellers
on the coast road from Galway would notice a change in the landscape as they approached ‘the seat of Mr Blake, whose improvements and clearances give an agreeable repose to the eye, wearied with the interminable succession of rock, boulder-stones, cabins and loose stone enclosures’. The obverse of such
commendations
is the ogreish role these Blakes play in local folklore, as the best-hated of all evictors and rackrenters.

Alexander Nimmo, having provided Connemara with a rational road-network and planned the piers that were started at Leenaun, Cleggan, Roundstone and other points as relief-work during the ‘distress’ of 1822, was himself nursing a private project during this optimistic period. At Roundstone, he states in his Coast Survey of 1836,

The street Nimmo created there passes above the little cliff that forms the inner wall of his characteristically boldly conceived harbour, and then climbs a hill to admire the much-painted prospect of the Twelve Bens across Roundstone Bay; we owe to him the handsomest of Connemara’s villages, the decisiveness of its layout only superficially obscured by modern developments.

These crowded years of progress were tragically terminated by the Great Hunger of 1845-8, a natural disaster which a grossly malformed society could not mitigate. The peasant population of Connemara, much reduced by the want and pestilence of the 1650s, had been augmented by the Cromwellian resettlements, and by refugees from Antrim in 1796 and Mayo in 1798. The
biological
rate of multiplication, upon this expanding base, was
phenomenal
. Population was rising generally in Europe throughout these two centuries, but in few places was the rise so steep as in the poorest parts of western Ireland. Even the periodic famines caused by dependence on one crop, the potato, liable to fail for various reasons, did not check the giddy compilation of short generations. The Connemara gentry, having long conformed to the Protestant church under the pressure of the penal laws that made it
impossible
for Catholics to pass on their estates undivided, were now almost as distinct in culture from their tenantry as were the
Anglo-Irish elsewhere. The master of the Big House, being at once landlord, employer, Justice of the Peace and fount of charity, was unchallengeable. His worthy upkeep was provided for by rents that absorbed all the output of his tenants’ farming, fishing,
kelp-burning
and cottage industry, for happily the lower orders could live off their amazingly productive potato-beds alone; their teeming marriage-beds, on the other hand, threatened to overwhelm all estate-improvement schemes, and had to be countered by eviction and assisted emigration. The shading and colouring lent by
individual
cases to this schematic figure of class-relationships faded into insignificance when the potato blight struck. At that time most Connemara people owned nothing (literally nothing, many of them; no cart or donkey, no boat or net, no chair, lamp or bed); when their sole foodstuff turned to black slime, they became paupers overnight. The limited capacities of the British
government
, civil service and public to respond to, or even conceive of, the cumulative horrors of the next few years in Ireland were soon exhausted. By the autumn of 1847, in Connemara, the public
road-works
upon which the stonebreaker could earn the price of a bowl of Indian meal had been closed down, overwhelmed by the crush of desperate applicants; the Clifden workhouse was bankrupt and had voided its hundreds of feverous skeletons to live or die in the open; ragged hordes were creeping into Galway to face the long nightmare of the Atlantic; what happened in the mountain valleys and the islands is recorded only by small boulders marking
nameless
graves.

At this juncture it was revealed to the rector of Wonston in England that the Lord had chastised the Irish with a view to making them ‘come out from Rome’, and that in Connemara in particular there was a potential winning of broken and contrite hearts not to be despised. The Reverend Alexander Dallas set up his Irish Church Mission wherever he had the backing of the Protestant gentry; soup was provided for children attending his schools; some hungry souls ‘converted’, and were damned for it by their parish priests; little colonies of outcasts grew up in the shadow of the rectories, and for three decades, until the venture lost conviction and faded away, the spiritual education of Connemara was the mutual abuse of bigots. One area in the
north-west
, Letterfrack, was for a time spared this and other
post-Famine
plagues through the work of a Quaker couple, James and Mary Ellis, who in 1848 were moved to settle there, to
demonstrate
by personal example how resident landowners could and should stand between their tenantry and the gales of misfortune. Neighbouring gentry grumbled at their paying labourers
eight-pence
rather than sixpence a day, but the Ellis’s farm and its
well-serviced
estate village prospered while all Connemara was in decline. Sadly, after nine years of struggle, James’s ill-health and the death of his wife led him to sell out to a supporter of the Reverend Dallas, and return to England.

In secular matters too, Connemara’s agony appeared as
opportunity
to some English eyes. The Poor Law Extension Act of 1847 had thriftily transferred the whole burden of famine relief onto the local rates, and such top-heavy estates as those of the Martins, the D’Arcys and the O’Neills (as the Geoghegans had renamed
themselves
) had capsized as a result; the Encumbered Estates Act of 1848 having removed certain legal obstacles, the creditors could now force on sales. The entail of the Martin estate had been broken by Thomas Martin in favour of his daughter, and when he was carried off (by a fever contracted in visiting his former tenants in Clifden workhouse), Mary and her newly wedded husband had fled the avalanche of debt, first to Belgium, and then to America, where she died in a New York hotel after a premature
confinement
on ship-board. The 192,000 acres of the Martins’ former kingdom were put up for auction in 1849. The Bill of Sale stated that, since the drawing-up of the list of tenants, ‘many changes advantageous to a Purchaser have taken place, and the same Tenants, by name and in number, will not now be found on the Lands’; but not even this sinister assurance was enough to attract bidders. The mortgagees, the Law Life Assurance Society of London, then bought in the estate very cheaply, and by
rackrenting
and evictions carried on the Famine’s work until 1872, when they sold the lands, with a few small Mayo estates thrown in, for
£
230,000 to Richard Berridge, a London brewer.

The D’Arcy lands too had been mortgaged to English
financiers
, the Eyres of Bath, one of whom took over Clifden Castle as his summer residence when the estate fell into their hands. In 1862 the Blakes of Renvyle had to sell off the eastern half of their lands to the heir to a Manchester fortune, Mitchell Henry, who set
about taming the wet mountain slopes and housing himself on a princely scale, employing hundreds on his model farm, extensive drainage schemes and the elegant Gothic mansion of Kylemore Castle. Other new proprietors in the relatively encouraging
north-western
quarter were residents and improvers too, and indeed it is as if an afterglow of the Ellis’s Quaker sense of social responsibility has lingered there to this day.

But at the other extreme, in south Connemara, the granite itself was being stripped bare by the ever more desperate ‘winning’ of turf for sale to Galway city and the turfless limestone areas south of Galway Bay. Here the poorest of Connemara’s poor were still mercilessly harried by the Blakes of Tully and the agents of absentee landlords, including the Berridges themselves, whom the increasingly menacing words and deeds of a no-longer acquiescent tenantry kept away from their new home at Ballynahinch. The Land League, originating in the equally miserable oppression of County Mayo, was beginning to organize resistance to evictions, and in the first days of 1881 a great hosting of tenants on the Kirwans’ estate at An Cheathrú Rua drove off a server of eviction notices and his police escort. Although the Kirwans were still evicting there a decade later, such events as this ‘Battle of
Carraroe
’ cumulatively extorted reductions in rent and improvements in security of tenure, and forced upon the government a sense that the moral and economic resources of landlordism were inadequate to the needs of these shameful western backyards of the kingdom. In 1891 the Congested Districts Board was set up to further the development of regions that could not in their present state support their populations, and in Connemara it found everything to be done. Over the next thirty years harbours were improved, small fishing fleets subsidized into precarious existence,
herring-curing
stations built, lace-making schools opened, and, slowly but inexorably, the landlords bought out, the jumbled small-holdings on their estates rationalized, and the labourer given his own field to labour at last.

This history, for so much of its course a river of sorrows, has flowed through and at times almost swept away a singular culture – not that of the provincial gentry, but of the humble farm- and fisherfolk – a culture which conserved ancient words and ways, and had its matted and tenacious roots in a sense, deeper than any
economic or legal realities, of being in its own place. As the Irish language withdrew, throughout the century of famines and
modernization
, to its present lairs, principally in the south of the region, only a proportion of its oral lore was appropriated by English. But where Irish lives, that tradition is still so voluble in story, song and placename, that one wonders if Connemara’s days and nights were longer formerly, to hear all that was said and sung in them of Connemara. Around the end of the last century that peasant culture came to represent the true Ireland to one wing of the nationalist movement; through Patrick Pearse, who regularly returned to Ros Muc as to a well of inspiration, its values entered into the veins of the republic he declared and died for in 1916, and works in them obscurely still. Since Independence the
Gaeltacht
(the areas officially designated as Irish-speaking) has been treated with varying small degrees of positive discrimination by the governments of the day, and successive generations of the
dedicated
, through Raidió na Gaeltachta, local co-operatives and other organizations, have insisted on Irish as a language of modern society and its arts. Despite compromises, defeats and
disappointments
, despite even the numbing effect of continued emigration, the stony south is now socially more vigorous than any other part of Connemara, apart from the historically and geographically
favoured
exception of Ballynakill in the north-west; the little turf-
harbour
of Ros a’ Mhíl has become the county’s major fishing port, and An Cheathrú Rua, with its industrial estates run by Údaras na Gaeltachta, the Gaeltacht Authority, is pulling itself together into a recognizable town.