The Momentum of Paganism

Review of “Fr Ferris’s History of the Parishes of Rathmore, Gneeveguilla and Knocknagree”  edited by Brendan McCarthy  (www.rathmorehistory.com)

“In every townland there are names for sub-divisions, fields, hills, rivers, roads etc. which should all be recorded lest they be lost.  Every field almost had a name, many a history.”

The quotation is from a letter written by Patrick Dinneen in 1927.  One can find plenty of field names in the book reviewed here (Dinneen’s letter is on page 222), and not a few field histories.  Field history can go from cheerful legend, through simple topography, to real disasters and recent politics, often in a single paragraph about a single townland:

“In Denis Sheehan’s Páirc an Óir, a man crossing the field one day saw a little tree never there before. When returning, the tree was gone.  Had he dug under it, he would have got the gold.  In another field is a lake which never runs dry.  In Pat Daly’s mountain are graves of people buried during the Famine.  Large stone in Mrs. Twomey’s field.  Circular remains of police hut built during Land League in Andrew Sheahan’s field” (p. 171).

Fr. Ferris’s Parish Histories: Rathmore, Gneeveguilla and Knocknagree (Tralee 2023) is an edition of a manuscript history left by William Ferris, who was parish priest of Rathmore in Kerry from 1924 to 1928.  Rathmore, it seems, had by then incorporated the other two places in a single parish. The united parish was still a tiny place on the map.  If we draw a line from Tralee to Mallow, Rathmore will be almost directly under the mid-point of that line (i.e. on the southern side).  It straddles the Cork/Kerry border.

          Ferris set out to show that the smallest details are necessary starting-points and interesting to know, while at the same time this tiny place was connected with everything big:  pre-Christianity (which was still in some sense living) and Christianity;  early Christian times and present times;  legend, literature and poetry;  landlords and tenants, Whiteboys and Land Leaguers;  the English and the Irish, their recent war, and their contending languages—and apart from that, the parish had current connections with Spain, Australia, India, Cuba, USA, Canada, China and Ceylon.   

           Study your immediate surroundings, Ferris said:  unless children start by doing this, they will never get a grasp of national or world geography.  His first topic is therefore boundaries. The opening chapter of his book, listing the different groups of townlands on various sides of the parish, cannot really be read by anyone who isn’t familiar with the area.  But this is followed by a series of chapters focusing on culture, religion, literature and political history, which may be interesting for anyone at all.  There are many stories about landlords and middlemen, not all of whom were villains, though the villains get the most colourful descriptions.

          One family of Duggans, Catholic landlords, used to drive in their carriage every Sunday to Mass at Gneeveguilla Church.  They had a special doorway at the side of the Church, through which none but they could enter, leading to their private family pew—

“a high-backed structure which screened its occupants from the vulgar gaze of their impoverished tenants…  The tenants living along the roadside leading from Duggans’ house to the church often heard their fathers tell how on each Saturday evening each tenant brushed the roadway outside his dwelling, lest the landlord’s carriage should be bespattered the following morning.  One warning was sufficient, and a clean-brushed road saw their glittering carriage and prancing horses bear this hated individual past the lifted hats of the downtrodden peasantry” (pp. 161-2).  

                   Ferris copies long passages or whole chapters from writers such as Eugene O’Curry, John O’Hanlon and Patrick Dinneen, and he chooses his grafts well.  Dinneen, for example, had written informatively about Aodhagán Ó Rathaile and Eoghan Ruadh Ó Súilleabháin—and both of these poets had associations with the parish.  A third outstanding poet, Gofraidh Fionn Ó Dálaigh, had lived at Ballydaly, but Ferris apparently did not know that.

Ferris the Army Chaplain

There are other significant matters which he knew a great deal about, but tactfully ignored.  In particular, the conflict over the Anglo-Irish Treaty.  He himself had been a Sinn Fein supporter since 1906, the year of his ordination;  in 1915 he urged young men to join the Irish Volunteers in his sermons, and he blessed the colours at a major parade of the organisation in Killarney;  in 1917-18 he was active in Sinn Féin election campaigns and in the Anti-Conscription movement;  in 1919-21 he was an active supporter of Sinn Féin and the IRA.

           And then came the Treaty, with the subsequent armed conflict between Treatyites and Republicans.  Ferris took the Treatyite side uncompromisingly, and he was appointed Chaplain of the Kerry Command of the Free State Army.  He was not prepared to try to check the brutality then practised, according to an interview recorded by Ernie O’Malley years later.  A revealing moment came in April 1923 when John Cronin, a well-known IRA Commander in Kerry, surrendered to the Free State Army by agreement, so as to save the lives of two of his captured men.

“The following day Colonel David Neligan, Chief Intelligence Officer Kerry Command, proposed to do away with this diehard Republican by throwing grenades into his cell.  A friend of Bill Bailey was one of the soldiers approached to do this but was reluctant to do do.  With a troubled conscience, he approached Fr. Ferris as Command Chaplain and asked for his advice as to what he should do.  According to Bill Bailey’s interview, Fr. Ferris allegedly responded by asking ‘What is your rank and what is the rank of the man giving you your orders? Don’t you know you should obey your superior officers?’  When the men selected for the assignment reported later to Colonel Neligan, he indicated that he couldn’t take part himself as he was standing by for a message from HQ.  Seeing that Colonel Neligan was not now prepared to participate, the men abandoned the plan” (Brendan McCarthy’s Introduction, p. 24).

Which means that Ferris was urging the soldier to commit what, by anyone’s reckoning, must be considered a war crime.  This, of course, in accordance with the ideology of ‘Do what you’re told!’  That same ideology was central to his idea of political, economic and social reform, as set out in his book The Gaelic Commonwealth (1923), published while he was still a military chaplain.

“The idea that the Irish people might be persuaded to embrace such proposals as authoritarian rule (however locally-based and benign the dictator might be), law-making by university professors, widespread celibacy, newspapers banned, alcohol, tea and coffee rationed, communications and reading material restricted etc. (what Angela Clifford described in her book The Constitutional History of Ireland as “a kind of Soviet system”) was pure utopianism” (Introduction, pp. 37-8).

Ferris should have known that, if a strict ‘Do what you’re told!’ system were possible in Ireland, the British would long ago have found the formula for establishing it!  His book was sub-titled as the programme of a political party, The Irish Progressive Party.  ‘This party had some sort of real existence, apparently as a middle-of-the-road ‘Castle Catholic’ party founded in 1918 by a railway engineer and a barrister.  But the Progressive Party, with its utopian or dystopian programme, made no progress.  It soon became extinct.

The Festival At Caher Crobh Dearg

We can therefore say that Ferris was a dangerous army chaplain and a hopeless political theorist and constitution-drafter (though The Democratic Constitution, a book he produced in 1937 reformulating his Gaelic Commonwealth ideas, so impressed two Dáil deputies that they nominated him for the 1938 Nobel Peace Prize)!  But in other areas he had better talents.  He was a gifted local historian.  And it is interesting that, despite the authoritarian cast of his thinking about modern politics, he took an anti-authoritarian attitude when it came to clerical interference with established popular traditions.

           At the foot of the Paps Mountains in Kerry (in Irish Dá Chích Danann, the Two Breasts of the goddess Dana), there is an old caher or “city” called Cathair Crobh Dearg.  This has a circular wall, enclosing a space where there was said to be an ancient royal dwelling.  Ferris quotes Eugene O’Curry’s translation of a poem describing this dwelling, taken from “The Dialogues of the Ancient Men” (Acallamh na Senórach), one of the great books about the blending of Christianity with what preceded it.  In May each year there was a popular festival, still alive in Ferris’s time, at Cathair Crobh Dearg.

“The City Festival goes back to pagan times in Ireland.  It is held on May Day, which was one of the greatest of the Irish pagan feasts.  The prayers said there are mostly but not entirely for temporal prosperity—for food, crops and herds.  Down to quite recent times it was customary to bring the cattle here to be cured or benefited.  Such was precisely the old pagan festival on May 1st, which was held in honour of the agricultural and pastoral deities. One of the principal rites at the old pagan feast was dancing.  Praying and dancing has been the age-long tradition from time immemorial. The City shrine was sacred to Dana the Mother of the Gods, to whom the mountain at the back of the City was dedicated” (p. 66).

Ferris speculated that the 13 centuries of consolidated Irish Christianity, through which period the Festival had held its own, might represent no more than a quarter or a fifth of the time it had been in existence. In any case, it had “ancient momentum”. The zealous priests who had tried to confront this pagan phenomenon and tidy it out of existence, had not succeeded.

“For 13 centuries, long after the active opposition on the part of Christianity has ceased, there has been a subtle opposition to the May Day festival.  Thirty years ago Canon Walsh denounced it from the altar because of abuses as regards drink.  More recently still an over-zealous curate condemned it as it kept children away from school!   …But in spite of all the hard knocks it has got, it is still a very flourishing institution.

   An institution that has not been nullified by the opposition of 13 centuries must have had behind it the momentum of a mighty antiquity of encouragement probably 5 or six times as long as the period of unsuccessful opposition.  When a train cannot pull up in 13 yards it is safe to surmise that its momentum has not been got up in less than 70.  To continue the train metaphor, the more momentum a train has, the more ground will it cover before a jolt is readjusted.  The City feast got a jolt when the Gregorian calendar was introduced in 1751, making May 1st May 12th.  Such was the momentum of the City institution derived from its remote antiquity that even now, after a century and three quarters, the feast has not readjusted to this jolt, many celebrating the festival on May 12th instead of May 1st.

   We are convinced that it was at the City the last stand of Irish paganism was made against the advancing forces of Christendom” (p. 67).

Ferris’s idea was, rather than try to bury this pagan feast, to give it a new lease of life as a somewhat more Christian occasion. Indeed, May 1st could be made a national holiday, with the central celebration at Cathair Crobh Dearg.  Think of the City as “the oldest religious shrine in the world still functioning” (p. 72)!  He foresaw that this would bring commercialism, visiting academics, swarms of tourists, etc., all of which he would take in his stride.

“The pagan danger is now past. Paganism is dead, or rather all the best elements of it have been absorbed into Christianity. It would therefore be criminal negligence on our part to let this storied stream of age-long religious enthusiasm perish” (p. 71).

However, elsewhere he seems to think in terms of two ancient streams of culture still contending, still engaged in struggle—a fruitful struggle or negotiation, whose outcome should not be forced. He does not conceal the limits of clerical power in rural Ireland:  when his predecessor Canon Walsh proposed to abandon the dilapidated church at Knocknagree and build a central church elsewhere, “the Knocknagree people violently opposed this proposal and, after violent scenes, Canon Walsh was forced to abandon the project” (p161).  And he cites the revealing story about the death of Eoghan Ruadh Ó Súilleabháin:

“A man named Tom Cremin of Lissyconnor, on returning from the funeral, met the parish priest, Father Ned Fitzgerald, and told him of the poet’s death, adding that the priests would no longer have any complaints to make against Eoghan.  Fr. Fitzgerald’s grief was deep and sincere, and he replied that Eoghan’s death was a greater loss than dozens of priests. “Because”, he explained, “priests may be produced any day by the expenditure of money, but all the money in Ireland would not produce another poet like Eoghan Ruadh” (p97).

                                                                                      John Minahane