The Rebels of Ireland

  Their land lay in stony terrain. But the fields had been cleared and the stones used in dry-stone walls, several feet thick in places. Like his neighbours, Eamonn Madden planted potatoes for an early crop in August, followed by a later crop in October or November. Their nutritional value was unrivalled. With a little butter and milk, a few vegetables or some fish, the potato could produce a race of healthy giants, so long as you ate enough. And the Irish did. When Eamonn Madden was working hard on the land, he’d consume fourteen or fifteen pounds of potato in a day.

  Could anything be objected against the potato as a crop?

  “It is subject to blight,” Eamonn admitted. There had been numerous potato blights, some quite serious, in recent decades. “But against that, you must consider three things,” he would add. “The first is that the potato produces far more food per acre than anything else. The second, that the blights are usually local, and soon pass. But the third thing, which is sometimes forgotten, is that potato crop failures are less frequent and less severe than the failures of cereals. There is actually less risk, Maureen, in planting a field of potatoes than there is in sowing a field of wheat or oats.”

  Her father worked the potato field with his spade, and all the family helped with the harvest. The pigs they kept were partly fed on potato peelings, and provided manure for the fields in turn. Once a year, the family killed a pig for their own consumption, but the rest of the pigs were fattened and sold to market. “That pays the rent,” her father told her. This regime left him many months in the year when he could go and work for others. He would also earn money by carting, travelling quite large distances sometimes.

  Sometimes, he would take Maureen with him. Once, they went up to the huge, stony wilderness of the Burren. She had been impressed by its bare loveliness, and quite surprised to see sheep grazing there. “You wouldn’t think they could find enough nourishment here, would you?” her father remarked. “Yet they do, and the herbs they find amongst the rocks give their meat a particularly fine flavour.” They had also visited the mighty cliffs of Moher, and she had gasped at the huge, sheer drop, almost a thousand feet, into the roiling waters of the Atlantic far below. Then, as he held her, he said “Lean forward,” and she had leaned out over the cliff and felt the great rush of air as the Atlantic wind struck the cliffs and came racing up, thrillingly supporting her and pushing her back. “There’s nothing between us and America from here,” he called, “except that churning sea.” She didn’t know why she found this thought so exciting.

  “Shall we ever go there?” she called back. It was a natural question. Most of the farming families she knew seemed to have a relation in America. One of Eamonn’s brothers and two of his uncles had gone there with their families. It was the better-off people who went to America. The poor could not afford the fare.

  “Why, would you want to leave Clare?” he shouted.

  “Never,” she cried.

  Another time, they went down to the shores of the Shannon and watched the fishermen going out in their little curraghs made of skins.

  “The lands along the Shannon here are known as the corcasses,” Eamonn said. “The blue corcasses, as we call them, are wonderful soil; but the black carcass is so rich that you can get twenty harvests out of it before you have to manure.” He said it with as much pride as if he owned it.

  But mostly, he went into the local town of Ennis, taking the cart in early morning and returning at dusk. But whenever he asked her to accompany him there, she tried to find an excuse. She dreaded going into Ennis.

  It was not large, but it was a place of some importance. Barges brought goods from the northern inlet of the great Shannon estuary, up the River Fergus to Ennis. It had a cattle market and a courthouse, and you could buy all sorts of things there. Once, she remembered, because it was going cheap, he had bought a load of seaweed there, which had been shipped up from the Shannon estuary. When they got it home, he asked her to help him spread it on the potato field. “It feeds the soil,” he told her. “Down by the coast, they use it instead of manure.”

  But it was the road into Ennis that she hated.

  There had been landless folk in Ireland for centuries. In a way, they were part of a natural process. When the lands of a chief were subdivided amongst his sons, they soon took over the lands of the larger tenants, forcing them onto smaller holdings. The tenants, in turn, subdivided their holdings, and so on down the scale to the cottager, with his acre or two, and below him, the landless labourer. Even Cromwell, by kicking out a layer of Irish landlords in favour of English ones, had only added one more to the endless waves of displacement down the generations.

  It was this process, during the last century, that the nutritious potato had so rapidly accelerated. Since they could afford to remain on the land and subsist on smaller holdings, Eamonn’s father, and his grandfather before that, had married young and produced large families. Eamonn himself had been only twenty when he married, and who knew how many children he might have? Even the poor cottagers with a small patch could survive. As a result, the population of Ireland had hugely grown. It was already over seven million, and still climbing. Ireland was one of the most densely populated countries in Europe. Inevitably, therefore, with so many to feed, the price of food, and of land, was rising. “The landlord can get a higher price for his land, and the richer farmers can pay it. We are fortunate,” Eamonn could tell Maureen, “but some of the poor cottagers can hardly manage their rents.” Those who could not were being forced off the land to subsist, as best they could, as labourers. In the slums of London, or the Liberties of Dublin, the sight of the urban poor was common enough. But now, in the countryside of Ireland, a huge new phenomenon could be seen: the slums of the rural poor.

  They began about a mile outside Ennis. Some were shacks with roofs, others nothing more than hovels built into the banks of earth. Some families there were able to rent potato patches just for one growing season at a time; others had not even that. They got what work they could; sometimes there was none. It was the same on each of the roads leading into Ennis. As she passed and saw the hapless faces of the men, and the women and children in rags, Maureen would shudder.

  “Could that happen to us?” she had once asked her father when she was five.

  “Never,” he answered boldly.

  “Can’t we help them?”

  “There are too many.” He’d smiled sadly. “I am glad that you wish to, however.”

  It had shocked her to hear the tone of quiet defeat in her father’s voice. Until then she had supposed that he could do anything. He knew that, if they went that way together, she would never be quiet unless he gave her some pennies to give to the children as they passed. But, though she never said so, it was the sight of the shantytown that made the little girl shake her head, usually, if he asked her if she wanted to come with him into the town. Last year, however, she had asked a different question. “Can Daniel O’Connell do anything for them?” And at this her father had brightened a little.

  “Perhaps.” He had nodded. “If anyone can, it would be O’Connell.”

  So it saddened her that now, for the first time she could remember in her life, her parents should be at odds with one another, and that the cause should be Daniel O’Connell.

  She had heard him once. Her father had taken her with him; her mother had refused to go. The great man had come from his home in the mountains of Kerry to address a huge audience that had gathered in a field near Limerick. He was standing on a cart. She and her father were well back in the crowd, but they could see him clearly, for he was an even bigger man than Eamonn, with a broad, cheerful face and a mane of wavy brown hair.

  He spoke to them in Irish and English—indeed, like many people in that region, he would go easily from one to the other, sometimes mixing the two together. She did not understand all of what he said, but the crowd did, and they roared approval. What she chiefly remembered, however, was not what he said but the wonderful, musical sound of his voice—someti
mes quiet, sometimes rising to a great crescendo. And when he dropped his voice, the entire crowd went as quiet as a mouse, so that you could hear every word. “He has the voice of an angel,” her father had remarked. “And the cunning of a devil,” he’d added approvingly.

  For thirty years now, O’Connell had been a brilliant lawyer who specialized in defending Catholic clients against the Protestant Ascendancy. But if that was the necessary foundation of his career, his genius was for politics. And it was five years ago that he had begun his great political experiment when, with a group of like-minded followers, he had founded the Catholic Association.

  There had never been anything like it before. There had been committees of Catholic gentlemen; there had been Patriots who favoured the Catholic cause; there had been Volunteers and local insurrections and revolutionaries. But O’Connell’s Catholic Association was none of these. It was a peaceful political movement. But it was a mass movement, open to every Catholic in Ireland who could afford the small minimum subscription of a penny a month. Nothing had ever been seen like this in politics before. Eamonn Madden had joined at once.

  The genius of the thing lay in the way it was organised. For when his friends asked him, “However will you administer such an organisation, and who is to collect all the pennies?” O’Connell had cleverly replied: “I shall ask the local priests.”

  It had worked. In every parish, the priest collected the pennies, kept note of the subscribers, and sent the money on. Why would he not, when the whole purpose of the organisation, in a strictly proper and legal manner, was to get justice for their flock and representation for their faith?

  And O’Connell was always careful to show that his followers were law-abiding. At the meeting Maureen had attended with her father, when a detachment of troops had arrived in case of trouble, O’Connell had immediately asked the crowd to give them a cheer.

  Of course, it was a great departure for the Church, too. “I’m not sure,” Father Casey, their kindly, grey-haired priest, had remarked to Eamonn, “that my predecessor would have done it. He was educated in Rome, you know, and he believed in the old order: ‘Obey your governors and know your place.’” But thirty years ago, the government had allowed the Catholic Church to set up a college for training priests at Maynooth, just west of Dublin; and these Irish-trained priests had more modern and nationalist views. “We’ll collect the money,” they said. And the funds flowing into the Association were huge. The membership was well over a million strong, and the organization taking in an astounding hundred thousand pounds a year.

  When she heard her parents argue about O’Connell, Maureen could understand them both. Her mother was small, dark, and practical. She did things quickly. Her big, blue-eyed father was practical, too, but he liked to ponder things, and he would take his time when he thought it was necessary.

  “All this money he collects,” her mother would object, “what is it for: so that a Catholic may sit in the British House of Parliament?”

  “That is the first objective,” Eamonn answered. “Do you not find it strange that I, a Catholic, forty-shilling freeholder, have the right to vote—but that I may only vote for a Protestant to represent me?”

  The town boroughs were still under the control of rich and powerful gentlemen and their friends; but in the elections to the rural county seats, the ancient forty-shilling property qualification had been eased, so that even a Catholic tenant paying forty shillings a year in rent had the right to vote. For a Protestant, of course. King George III had passed on to his maker now, and his artistic son George IV was on the throne, but he was just as firm as his father had been about having Catholics in Parliament. It was against the coronation oath, he, too, declared.

  “What possible good, Eamonn, can such a business do us anyway?” his wife demanded. “A few Catholics in Parliament changes nothing for you and me.”

  “Not at once, I grant you. But do you not see the principle of the matter? It is the admission that a Catholic is as good as a Protestant.”

  Maureen knew what he meant, she was sure; but her mother only shrugged.

  “And who is to sit in this Parliament now, with all your fine help, if it isn’t Daniel O’Connell himself? It’s for himself that you’re doing this.”

  “And what better man could there be?” Eamonn asked with a smile.

  Maureen knew from the sermons of Father Casey what humiliations were still heaped upon the Catholic Church itself. The British government, for instance, thought it had the right to veto the appointment of any Catholic bishop it did not like. “Think of it,” the priest would say. “The Prime Minister tells the Pope himself that the Church may not have the man His Holiness has chosen. Sends His Holiness back to try again, like a naughty schoolboy.” Even worse was the long-standing grievance over the tithes. For even now, the Catholics of every parish had to pay to support not their own priest but the Protestant clergyman; and having paid for the Protestant heretic, they, the poorest in part of the community, had to pay a second time if they wanted their own priest not to starve. Beyond these specifics lay the whole panoply of Ascendancy bullying which, whatever concessions the government might allow, still remained unchanged. For weren’t almost all the landlords, magistrates, and army officers still Protestant? Just recently, a local landowner called Synge had even compelled his tenants to convert to Protestantism or face eviction. Where were simple Catholics to turn in the face of such power? To the Catholic Association, of course.

  “We have an advocate now,” Eamonn could say. Instead of burning a bad landlord’s barn, the aggrieved could speak to O’Connell, and the great Liberator would speak to the landlord. O’Connell could not right every wrong, but he could make a start.

  None of this seemed to matter to her mother, however, in the light of the latest development. For now an election had brought O’Connell to their own doorstep.

  It was a strange business. The sitting member for County Clare, a Protestant supporter of the Catholic cause, had been chosen for a government post, and by convention he submitted himself to his electors again before taking it. He was surprised that the Catholic Association should suddenly decide to oppose him—and amazed when the candidate turned out to be Daniel O’Connell himself.

  The gauntlet was now thrown down. For the first time, a Catholic was standing for election.

  “The beauty of it is this,” Eamonn explained to his family with a laugh. “British law does not forbid a Catholic to stand for election. But he cannot take his seat in the British House of Commons unless he takes the Protestant oath—which, of course, he has sworn he will not do. He’s using England’s own rules to embarrass them. If elected, he leaves them all in an impossible position.” It was a clever irony which delighted the Irish mind just as much as it appalled the English.

  “And what will you say to Mr. Callan, then, that has been to our door three times looking for you?” she demanded with a look of anger and reproach. “What will you say, Eamonn—that your wife and children are to be put out, to go and beg for bread in Ennis?”

  Maureen could not help being frightened when her mother said such things.

  “It will not come to that,” her father replied.

  “And why not? It did in Waterford.”

  The fact was that, although the forty-shilling men all had the right to vote, it did not mean they could vote as they pleased. Not at all. Not unless they wanted to be evicted. For the landlords expected their tenants to vote as they were told. There could be no doubt about how they voted, either, since the votes were cast in public. Any tenant so rash, so foolish, so disloyal, as to vote against his landlord’s wishes was, in effect, declaring himself the enemy of the man whose land he rented. Naturally, therefore, the landlord or his agent would throw him out and seek another, more decent sort of person as tenant in his place. The message was clear and simple: obey or starve.

  Not long ago, O’Connell and the Association had run a candidate—a Protestant gentleman, of course, but active in the Cat
holic cause—against the scion of one of the largest Ascendancy families in the area, who reasonably assumed that the seat was his by right. To the horror of the local landowners, O’Connell and his men had persuaded the tenants, and even their intimate retainers, to abandon their traditional loyalty and vote for the interloper. There had been rage, stupefaction—and evictions. The danger was real, therefore.

  “This is not Waterford. This is Clare,” said Eamonn.

  It was true that in the region, though perhaps a third of the landowners were absentee, most of the gentry were ancient Irish families like the O’Briens, or Old English like the Fitzgeralds who’d been in Ireland for six hundred years—though they had all, Old English and Irish alike, turned Protestant to keep their estates.

  “And you think that Mr. Callan cares whether this is Clare or Waterford, or a desert in Asia?” his wife cried. “Or that an O’Brien would hesitate to turn out a tenant any more than an Englishman would?” she added for good measure. For it had to be confessed that there was no evidence that the Irish landowners would be any kinder than their English counterparts.

  “And Father Casey: what would you say to him?” asked her father.

  At Sunday Mass, the priest had made his view plain when he stood facing them, in front of the altar, and told them: “A vote for O’Connell is a vote for your religion. Be in no doubt, therefore, about what God requires.”

  “Do you mean, Father,” one of his flock had asked him afterwards, “that if my husband votes as Mr. Callan says he must, it would be a mortal sin? Would he be in danger of hellfire?”

  The kindly priest had hesitated, but nonetheless declared: “It may be so.”

  But her mother was not so easily influenced. Maureen had noticed already that, while her mother went regularly to Mass and confession, and insisted that her children learn their catechism, she seemed to keep some part of her mind separate and under her own control.