Last year I reviewed the first issue of Dúchas, the new Duhallow local history journal, for Irish Political Review. I mentioned that it was a promising publication, with many interesting things, and it showed signs of being influenced by the work of the Aubane Historical Society. However, some of the writers did not engage with the relevant Aubane publications, and their articles would have been better if they had done so.

The second issue of Dúchas has now appeared. On the whole, it is lively and stimulating, with substantial material, and avoids the trap of over-academicism. But it has some of the first volume’s faults, which we’ll come to in due course. First, though, I will mention a few of the points of interest.

“Latin scholars, wattle stick fighters, lice and stormy weather: some of the experiences of an English government official, James Weale, on his first visit to Sliabh Luachra in April 1828,” by John O’Regan, tells a fascinating story mainly based on Weale’s letters to his wife. Weale was an open-minded Londoner with plenty of intellectual curiosity; O’Regan thinks he may have been “a ‘closet’ Catholic and Stuart supporter”. He was, however, a top bureaucrat, Chief Secretary of the Crown Commissioners of Woods, Forests, Land Revenues, Works and Buildings. The Crown lands in Ireland were mainly bad lands, not parcelled out in the various confiscations, and one such Crown portion was the mountainy Pobal Uí Chaoimh in North-west Cork. Weale had to decide whether Pobal Uí Chaoimh should be re-leased to the middleman, one Cronin, whose forebears had held the lease for a century, or whether the government should take a different approach and try to develop the area more.

Weale, having gone up the mountains, decided to spend the night there and took a bed in the best-looking cabin. During the night a violent storm blew off half the roof. Worse still, he found he was infested with lice. However, the family deloused him as best they could, and the experience did not turn him against the local people. He was amazed that “such a numerous and intelligent population (submitted) to the slavery they endure from the owners of the soil and the middleman” — though he did also remember that the Pobal Uí Chaoimh region had been at the centre of the Rockite rebellion just six years previously! The people were sincerely and prodigally generous. Once they realised that he didn’t want to raise their rents or evict them, they could not do enough for him and took him to places he would otherwise never have found.

Perhaps the most amazing thing “was their linguistic prowess. He was impressed that not only did the people speak and understand English but that all their men, young and old, had been taught to read Irish, some English and some Latin. To his astonishment, some of the Latinists could converse in it faster than he could follow them. To convince himself that ‘this bog Latin’ was not ‘mere quizzery’, he asked two or three people some rules of syntax which they answered correctly. He learned that the custom was for these lads to assemble at night at different houses to which the schoolmaster would come.” Unlike some others who came across this phenomenon in the early 19th century (the famous ‘Martin Doyle’ springs to mind), Weale did not deplore this impractical cultivation of the mind. He admired it.

Buildings and Games

The Cork architect Richard Rolt Brash (1817-76), among other things, designed the Sisters of Mercy Convent in Mallow and “embellished” some buildings on Cork’s South Mall. To my mind, the most interesting thing about him is his theory about the round towers. They are definitely not Christian buildings, he said. What remains of the old Irish Christian churches proves that the pre-Norman Gaelic population was not capable of building anything like that. The round towers are in a different league! They must have been erected by some earlier, pre-Christian, pagan civilisation that had far better building skills.

As someone who has walked countless times past the splendid round tower of Clondalkin, I can follow his line of thinking. Logical, OK, but…Ireland can come up with illogical surprises; Mr Architect Brash didn’t take sufficient account of that. 

The unavoidable Elizabeth Bowen appears in an article by Ian d’Alton, who seems to think most people believe that the Big Houses in their great majority were destroyed in 1920-23. “The myth of mass destruction looks to a comfortable confirmation of the Irish gentry as decayed, Dostoyevskyan, despairing, and driven out.” On the contrary, d’Alton indicates that the Irish gentry were extraordinarily snobbish, bored, boring, Goncharovian rather than Dostoyevskyan, and petering out as opposed to being driven out.  But when he says that “the fact is that 80% of these houses survived,” there’s a necessarily corresponding fact: 20% of these houses were burned. 20%… about 300 houses! That’s a good deal of detestation and loathing. And it set the scene for the dull and tedious decline of the others. (Malcolm MacArthur, the most Dostoyevskyan Big House product of recent times, was a son of newcomers, blow-ins, not even pre-1922.) 

“Taxation turned out to be a much greater threat than terrorism. Of those which were burned, some were rebuilt, but not many. Function changed. In the post-independence world, many of the great houses purged their apostasy and guilt, seeking salvation by ‘submitting to Rome’ in the shape of the Catholic religious orders who bought them up for use as convents of nuns or houses for priests and brothers. Others simply died of old age and neglect. Some few have had near-miraculous resurrections as new money moved in, such as Castle Hyde and Ballynatray House, both on the Blackwater in Bowen’s County Cork. Bowen’s Court died a prosaic death in 1959, demolished for its stone by a farmer who had bought it from Bowen when she could no longer afford to keep it.”

Did Bowen’s Court miss the chance to become a centre of hospitality, as some others managed to, d’Alton wonders? But he can scarcely even pretend to be interested.

Never bored, and never boring, was Fr. William Ferris (1881-1971), who was active in various Catholic parishes of Cork and Kerry for over half a century. Among other things, he was a Sinn Fein activist, a political theorist and a local historian — his political theory (The Gaelic Commonwealth) didn’t take, but his topographical survey of Millstreet has information one might not easily find elsewhere.

“In a unique sporting initiative, Fr. Ferris re-introduced the ancient Irish ball-carrying game of caid in a series of parish matches played during the 1926-27 Christmas/New Year holidays. It was the first time that caid had been played in the parish for over 400 years. In a three-way tournament, teams from Rathmore, Knocknagree and Gneeveguilla contested for possession of an oval ball (Fr. Ferris supplied rugby balls for the purpose) and victory was achieved by the team who succeeded in bringing the ball to the gate of their own church. As regards rules, there seemed to be few…”

Brendan McCarthy explains that during some of these matches the ball ended up more than once in the River Blackwater, and a few of the players jumped into the icy river to recover it. There were fears of drownings, and these cross-country caid matches were stopped. However, their organiser maintained all his life that caid was the genuine Gaelic football: what Michael Cusack had devised was only a glorified form of soccer, and “rugby was the authentic successor of caid!”

Otherwise, “for proper health (Fr. Ferris) maintained that a person should remain in bed for a continuous period of thirty-six hours per month and during that time should put all cares and worries aside.” Though sympathetic to this, I think maybe the resting period proposed might be slightly too long.

The Battle of Knockanoss

A look at the Battle of Knockanoss in folklore (Cath Chnoc na nOs sa bhéaloideas) by Feena Tóibín, is one of two articles in Irish. Knockanoss was an important battle fought in 1647 near Mallow, where the Munster army of the Irish Confederation was crushingly defeated by an army allied with the English Parliament, i.e. the Cromwellians. The leader of the Parliamentarian force was Murrough O’Brien, Lord Inchiquin, facing General Taaffe on the other side. However, definitely the most colourful character on the Confederate side was the Scottish adventurer Alasdair MacDonnell, commander of a body of Highlanders, and already a very famous warrior.

Drawing on the Schools Folklore Collection of the 1930s, Feena Tóibín shows that there were vivid accounts of the battle still current at that time. (Indeed, “the people speak of the battle of Knockanuss even at present with bated breath,” one local teacher remarked.) Or to be more precise, one of the two main Confederate accounts of the battle, which were current in the 1650s, was still current in the 1930s. This is the account which we get in An Aphorismical Discovery of Treasonable Faction, where it is said that General Taaffe acted as a traitor, causing the loss of the battle. And specifically, when he saw that Alasdair MacDonnell was in difficulties in the fighting, he refused to go to his aid (despite appeals from other commanders), and he therefore had responsibility for MacDonnell’s death.

A totally different account is given by a political ally of Taaffe’s, Richard Belings. He says that Taaffe did his very best to halt a panic flight of soldiers from the battle and regroup them, but unsuccessfully. But Belings also mentions a report that Alasdair MacDonnell was killed treacherously, although not by Taaffe’s doing.

Feena Tóibín does not have any of this, because she has not consulted the Aubane publication The Poems of Geoffrey O’Donoghue / Dánta Shéafraidh Uí Dhonnchadha an Ghleanna. Instead she quotes a pretentious but absurd statement from the article on Alasdair MacDonnell (called Mac Colla in Irish) in the Dictionary of Irish Biography:

“A persistent tradition, perhaps no more than a tribute to his supposed invincibility in battle, held that Mac Colla had been treacherously killed after yielding no quarter.”

The DIB writer, Aidan Clarke, has written his article as a hatchet job. Plainly he feels that Alasdair MacDonnell was one of the most detestable human beings of the mid-17th century, and he would like to deny credibility to any suggestion that those who eventually killed such a monster may have done so illegitimately. But Clarke doesn’t actually know what he’s writing about. What does it mean to say that MacDonnell was “treacherously killed after yielding no quarter”? Who yielded no quarter to whom?

When a soldier or group of soldiers in battle felt they were facing impossible odds, they had the option of asking the enemy for quarter. That is to say, they would stop fighting, and therefore cause no more casualties to their attackers, in return for a promise that their own lives would be spared. The attackers could either give quarter or deny quarter. Or indeed, the attackers themselves could offer quarter, and the defenders could either accept or refuse. But if quarter was either denied or refused, then according to the laws of war the weaker party could all be killed. To do so might be cruel, but it would not be treacherous.

What Clarke has made confused and absurd, the contemporary historian Richard Belings makes perfectly clear: “That gallant gentleman (i.e. MacDonnell) is said to have fallen in cold blood by the hand of an officer, after quarter was given him” (History of the Confederation and the War in Ireland, ed. John T. Gilbert, Vol. 7, p. 35). So then, allegedly he was promised his life would be spared, he surrendered, and then he was treacherously killed. Notions of invincibility had nothing to do with it — quite the contrary! You could not accept quarter without admitting defeat.

Feena Tóibín quotes a reference to the treacherous killing of MacDonnell by a poet writing in the 1650s, Dáibhí Cúndún. This is one of several indications that the story was believed widely. In the extraordinary poem that Seán Ó Criagáin addressed to the victor of Knockanoss, Lord Inchiquin, just a few months after the battle, calling on him not to be a traitor, to be loyal to his king (Charles 1) and to abandon those rebelling against him (Inchiquin’s current allies, the Cromwellians), there is a kind of exasperated, mocking caithréim or ‘celebration’ of Inchiquin’s many victories in battle. In one of these bitter verses the killing of MacDonnell is mentioned, with the final phrase, nár mhór an scéal sin, “wasn’t that a great story?” (cf. Bone and Marrow anthology, p. 364). I can’t prove it, but I think that the double meaning of the word nár (shame, disgrace — “that story is a great disgrace!”) was meant to be picked up here.

What is certain is that when Inchiquin died in 1673 and a poet called Brian Ó Briain was writing a calmer kind of poem in his honour, genuinely praising him, he mentioned Knockanoss as one of Inchiquin’s victories but felt obliged to say also, Marbhadh Alasdruim measuim nár bhinn leat, “Alasdair’s killing, I think, did not please you” (Maynooth Ms M 107 p. 180). In other words, the chivalrous Inchiquin must have deplored the killing of his enemy by a breach of trust. This story as such is not evidenced in the 1930s accounts cited by Feena Tóibín, though the Aphorismical Discovery version comes across loud and clear.

A Ghost in the Throat

An article by Finn Longman, “Lament: a one-day celebration of the tradition of Irish keen”, raises issues too broad to be properly dealt with here. Certainly, though, it’s a sign of the times. The one-day celebration was in Cambridge University in May of this year and focused on Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire. A professor of poetry at the other English university once said that this lament was “the greatest poem written in these islands during the whole of the eighteenth century”. That could seem like it might be a back-handed compliment, but it wasn’t meant as such. The lament for Art O’Leary, Hungarian officer and very defiant Irish Catholic, murdered near Carriganima (or Carriganimmy, Carrig an Ime) in 1773, is definitely in a class above elegies written in English country churchyards and things like that.

The Caoineadh has often been translated. Two new translations, by people who grew up in that Macroom region, have appeared during the last three years: by Doireann Ní Ghríofa in A Ghost in the Throat (the best English version by far, I would think) and this year by John FitzGerald. Ní Ghríofa weaves the poem through an autobiography, which becomes something of a bone in the throat for Finn Longman. “This is a female text,” she begins, and launches into what becomes a story of a woman bringing up young children, daily making lists of basic tasks that have to be done, and methodically doing them… and not being bored in the least, in fact loving it! None of those Betty Friedan complexes…

But Ní Ghríofa does take on board the aspect of feminism which says that women’s voices have been suppressed. She has the problem of how to speak without suppression. (In the background there’s the powerful unsuppressed voice of that elusive eighteenth century woman, lamenting her murdered husband.) Ní Ghríofa tells a life story and gives the full intensity of it. She doesn’t seem to have energy to spare for fashionable posing. Finn Longman, who demands that culture must always have at least a pose of acknowledgement of LGBTQ-ness, finds this a problem.

“A Ghost in the Throat is, admirably enough, trying to centre erased female voices in a male-dominated literary tradition but, in doing so, enacts erasure of its own. Naturally for a work about motherhood, it is extremely focused on an experience of womanhood that is located within a child-bearing body, and it even extends that female identity as far as Art O’Leary’s unnamed mare: ‘She was a female being’. The namelessness of this horse is of some concern to Ní Ghríofa, who sees it as another act of female erasure. But as somebody with a background in queer and gender theory, I find this a simplistic view of gender and sex, and I am uncomfortable with a view of womanhood that implies a human woman might have more in common with a mare than with a (cis) man, simply because the mare has a uterus and the man does not. Moreover, I am very aware that there are people with a womb who are not women, and people without who are. (And, indeed, many women who, regardless of their theoretical reproductive capacities, have no intention of ever bearing a child.) A Ghost in the Throat is a book about and for a certain kind of cis woman, which is fine, even admirable; it is a book where cis men are present, but only as not-the-audience, which is also fine; and it is a book where trans and genderqueer people do not and cannot exist within its paradigms, which is… uncomfortable. I do not expect to be the audience of every book and I do not mind being aware when I am not, but there is a peculiar sting to reading about a world that has no space in it for your existence.”    

Let’s ignore the mare and keep to the main issue. Ní Ghríofa disdained to hang out ideological flags. She did not drag into her story anything that did not belong there. She gave an account of motherhood and heterosexual life, and a femininity that is never reductively labelled “cis-feminine”. And part of the reason for her book’s popularity was surely that it never even occurred to the author to be apologetic. Many readers must have felt, “it’s about time!”

Trans activists may not expect to be the audience of every book, but they seem to expect to be part of the content of every book. Finn Longman, though more reasonable in tone than most, definitely suggests that no book can be quite  legitimate otherwise. So then, the issue is whether all authors are required to indicate that they believe “that there are people with a womb who are not women, and people without who are”.

The reality and possibility of such things would be firmly denied in most of the world’s cultures now. Even in western cultures, these assertions would have been firmly denied until the present millennium. But of course cultures can change, cultural revolutions can happen. After all, the mainstream conception of marriage was fundamentally changed by the legalisation of gay marriage in many countries from the year 2000 on. Building on this astonishing campaign success, the LGBTQ+ movement now proposes to establish it as orthodoxy that sexual identity has no necessary stability and that anyone can be boy, girl, both, neither, 70/30, one today and another next week….

Could it happen? Could it work? Could there still be a functioning society? Could there be a coherent experience of youth, without a great plague of psychosis?

Without doubt, strange things are happening to western mankind. Everyone must feel it in the air. Society is more and more high-interference. Many aspects of life seem over-ideologised, over-politicised and over-medicalised. That a person could have planes of life and thinking which were let alone, not really noticed, which society with its necessarily crass conventions often “saw but didn’t see” — to the modern ideologists this seems anathema. Everything must be dragged out in the open and spotlighted, labelled, messed with this way and that, and either given some mainstream recognition or condemned.

Among other things, I would say there’s a long-term threat to the survival of any kind of sense of humour. (Longman, above, on Ní Ghríofa and Art O’Leary’s mare — prior to our third millennium, could anyone have written like that with a straight face?)

Women and Caoineadh

Elsewhere, Longman complains that the idea that “caoineadh was a female tradition” tends to erase the grieving of men and the literary examples that Irish can show of male mourning. It seems to me there’s a basic misunderstanding here. Academic life is very compartmentalised these days, so perhaps there are scholars of Irish who do not know that there are surviving laments attributed to men from the sixth or seventh century on, and great numbers of them from 1200 or so: elegies in formal metres, composed by male professional poets. Incidentally, Cú Chulainn’s lament in Táin Bó Cuailnge for Fer Diad whom he has just killed, referred to by Finn Longman, is in one of those formal metres. It’s quite literary.

But there was a more rhapsodic, less formally polished kind of mourning poetry which was always associated with women and their public lamentation (“harsh shouts and woeful plaintive wails, bitter screams, faint cries, mournful keening, great shrieks, heavy tears, red palms, scratched cheeks, unbound hair, crushed hearts, copious lamentation, dejected raising of hands, bare breasts, grasping of knees, stricken bosoms, great gloomy grievous groans,” according to the Leabhar Breac). This connection is made not just by modern academics, but by ancient writers too. In the Leabhar Breac there are laments attributed to women whose sons have been killed by Herod in the Massacre of the Innocents. They are formally like what Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill does in her lament for Art Ó Laoghaire.

What Eibhlín Dubh does is feminine. Males grieved in a different expressive zone. There will never be a reasonable argument which gets around that, whatever the third millennium may do with its identities.

However, arguments there will be. The old Irish literature is one of the wonders of the world, and anyone who is looking for different ways of seeing things will never fail to find inspiration there. It is a fact that this literature contains things that might appear very woke, and they are now being written about in that spirit. For example, take the story of the abbot of Drimnagh.

The abbot of Drimnagh, after celebrating Easter, incautiously falls asleep on a hill and wakes up to find he has turned into a woman. Distraught and desperate, she wanders off and meets the erenagh of Crumlin, who immediately falls madly in love with her and seduces her, and then (despite her firm refusal to provide any information whatever about herself) marries her. She lives with him for seven years and bears him seven children. But then she goes with her husband the erenagh to a feast at Drimnagh, and by one means or another finds herself back on the same enchanted hill, and … turns back into the abbot of Drimnagh! The abbot goes back to his wife, but makes a civilised agreement with the erenagh about the upbringing of the seven children they had while he/she was a woman: three stay in Crumlin, three come to Drimnagh, and the seventh is given up for fosterage.

As far back as 1995 a solemn article appeared in the Harvard Celtic Colloquium on “Gender-bending in Gaelic tradition”. But now Tadhg Ó Síocháin has picked up the gauntlet:      “The story of the abbot challenges not only the distinction between male and female, heterosexuality and homosexuality: all binaries are challenged – Christianity and paganism; female attire and male attire; the world and the Otherworld; identity and form” (The Story of the Abbot of Drimnagh: A Medieval Story of Sex-change. Cork 2017, p. 50).

Very well, the comic genius who composed this story eight or nine hundred years ago may have challenged all those binaries! But we would be rather limiting him if we don’t point out that he did so with a smile. The man had a sense of humour; Tadhg Ó Síocháin’s book, I think, would have amused him greatly. Ó Síocháin is so wired to the binaries that he can’t really notice anything else (nor can the Harvard scholars, indeed). If he wasn’t quite so frantic to serve the millennial orthodoxy, he might have asked an idle question or two. For example, the sex-changed abbot stays seven years with the erenagh and bears seven children. Would it make any difference if the number was eight or six?…

Well, so much by way of response to Volume 2 of Dúchas.

JOHN MINAHANE

(Irish Political Review, December 2023)