John Minahane

Continuing my long-running review of the third issue of Dúchas, the Duhallow local history journal, I have some more to say about the poet Máire Bhuí Ní Laoire. She is one of a long line of poets who contributed to a slowly developing land war. 

   For about 70 years after the Battle of the Boyne, the Williamite winners were still developing their conquest. They faced no real challenge. Nothing happened in Ireland in conjunction with the Scottish Jacobite risings in 1715 or 1745. Until about 1760, there was nothing much for the colony to be disturbed by. And then something changed. 

   In a number of southern counties (Tipperary, Kilkenny, Cork and others) rural secret societies were formed, the most famous being the Whiteboys. These societies aimed to lay down a law of their own and enforce it. All the indications are that they had plenty of enthusiastic support among the rural Catholic communities that they came from. 

   For a long time, the Whiteboys’ aims were quite modest. They aimed only at limiting what the landlords and their associated state-church were allowed to do. The Whiteboys wanted to limit how much could be exacted in rents and tithes, and to control the movement of farm labourers from outside into their communities (which might drive the local labourers’ wages down), and to stop the landlords enclosing areas and taking over common tillage land. At night they used to pull down fences, dig up grazing fields, and injure cattle on their opponents’ estates.

   Alongside the actions taken by the secret societies at night, which might involve large numbers of members, there were also some very daring actions in daytime taken by crowds. In Robinstown, County Kilkenny in 1764, a crowd ambushed a group of soldiers who were transporting Whiteboy prisoners and attempted to free the captives, and initially they succeeded. 

   Events like this appalled the colonial ruling class. There were some who said that the idea of wearing white shirts over their clothes (hence Whiteboys) could never have been thought up by Irish Catholics on their own and must have been introduced by French agents, who were making preparations for an invasion.

   Anyhow, some of the most dynamic colonists decided that exemplary action should be taken. Two “improving landlords” and a very wealthy Protestant clergyman targeted Father Nicholas Sheehy, parish priest of Clogheen, County Tipperary. Sheehy was “the very life and soul of these deluded people”, i.e. Whiteboys, according to his accusers. Probably it is true that he was a Whiteboy commander: one poem composed in his honour presents him as reviewing his troops, while another, a lament composed by his sister, refers to his Whiteboy status ambiguously. 

   At any rate, he was actively concerned about the conditions of the poor farmers and cottiers. According to his sister’s lament, 

At feast-days and when rent was claimed, 

he would hold off the want that threatened the house

till a calf was old enough to sell, 

till they got the highest price for butter, 

till they made tweed of the wool of the sheep.

   In 1763-4 Sheehy was twice charged with Whiteboy activities, inconclusively. Then in 1765 he was charged with high treason and tried the following year in Dublin, but the jury acquitted him. This was not the desired result, and so the authorities were forced to do it all again a second time. 

   The acquitted man was immediately re-arrested and charged with murder and sent for trial to Clonmel, where a more cooperative jury could be found. (His bishop, who was actively opposed to the Whiteboys, did not try to help him.) Sheehy was convicted of a murder for which no evidence could be found, and which may never have happened at all. He was hanged, drawn and quartered in March 1766. 

   Sheehy’s execution may have had short-term deterrent impact (but only in the very short term: there was a new wave of Whiteboy activity in the 1770s). But what the authorities mainly achieved was to create a folk hero and an example of utterly despicable injustice. “A Sheehy trial” became a catchword. 

   At least four poems in Irish were composed lamenting him, one by a very skilled artist (Do chuala geoin ag slóite ar thaoibh cnoic). And what comes across from this latter poem is that Sheehy was very close to the poets, who miss him bitterly, in fact he was himself a poet, and specifically he was a fine reciter or singer of the difficult high-class poems. (His sister also refers in passing to how sweet his voice was, “sweeter than a blackbird”). 

Úrghas ard de bhláth na saoithe

Fresh, tall stem from the flower of the master-poets!

the elegist calls him. (Dinneen translates the word saoi as “a master of an art or arts, a worthy, a cultured person, an expert, a savant, a noble; one of the Gaelic litterati of the 18th century”.) This is exactly the kind of praise that was typically given to one of those who were attempting, without official approval or institutional support, to maintain the tradition of the old master-poets, the filidh. 

   Afterwards the elegist calls him

Cantaoir suairc na nduanta bhfírcheart

The poem’s editor translates this line as “a joyous inspiration of truly proper poems”. But I think cantaoir must surely be a form of the word cantaire, which Dinneen translates as “a chanter, a singer”. So I would say that the line means “a delightful performer of the poems of true harmony”, meaning the really well-made poems or songs composed by the top artists. In other words, he was an excellent reciter and singer. 

   Overall, the elegist presents Sheehy as a victim of lies and injustice, a man of religion, social conscience and poetry, and someone who is woven in with the country’s most ancient traditions, so that it is even possible to think of the old goddesses, Clíona, Aoibheall, Úna and Áine, as mourning his death. Two other laments use the aisling form, setting Sheehy’s death in the context of the oppressed condition of the country. 

   We can say that from its beginnings the key social struggle in Ireland, the struggle for power on the land, is accompanied by poetry. Poets are the ones who encourage the Whiteboys, the Rightboys, the Rockites, the anti-tithe capaigners, and give them uncensored expression. And the top poets, who attempt to carry on the old traditions of poetry, are those who give local events a context in Ireland and in history. 

The Ballyragget Lament

There’s at least one book of poems which illustrates this very well. Duanaire Osraíoch, edited by Dáithí Ó hÓgáin, has a fascinating series of poems from County Kilkenny, 1760s to the 1830s, framed by this rural resistance. Several of the poems are about conflicts with soldiers or police or militia, with the rural rebels usually coming off worse.

I mBéal Átha Ragad thá fearb is fíorthann ag fás,

is fuil na bhfearaibh ag screadaigh chun Rí na ngrás!

Bhí an solas á lasadh is na Gallaibh in íochtar á lámhach,

is na buachaillí geala ag seasamh gan díon ná scáth.

In Ballyragget the wheat-grass and buttercups grow,

and men’s blood in showers screams to the King of Grace!

The light was burning and the English below were shooting,

and the bright boys were standing without protection or shade.

The Whiteboys around Ballyragget, County Kilkenny in the 1770s were organising against enclosures of land by the local Butlers. In response, an Anti-Whiteboy League was formed, with its members sworn under oath, and armed. In February 1775 the Whiteboys decided to burn the houses of the principal Leaguers. It appears that hundreds came together at night to do this, but the plan was betrayed and the Leaguers were waiting for them with guns.

   Repeating the place-name Béal Átha Ragad with hypnotic effect, a very skilled poet composed a short lament (13 verses). The first few verses let the fact of the killings sink in. The poet then addresses the main organiser of the ambush (one Hewetson), telling him he will not be saved at the Last Judgment because he has rejected Mary, and describing how he will be tortured on a spit in Hell. But this is not done to excess, and the mood shifts quickly. Two very tender verses follow about a girl, one of those girls who loved the Whiteboys and helped them by keeping watch and bringing warnings. The tension builds up again to the final verse:

Liomsa níorbh ionadh ’á loscfadh an ghrian an t-aer,

ná an ghrian ná an ghealach a dh’fheiscint le saol na saol,

tríos na fearaibh do leagadh gan choir, gan chúis, mo léan;

ach is minic do fealladh ar chlanna bocht’ cráite Gael!

It wouldn’t surprise me if the sun were to burn the air,

or sun and moon be seen no more till the end of the world,

because of those men who were killed without crime or reason, alas;

but the poor oppressed Gaels have often suffered treachery! 

   Vincent Morley thinks this lament is a very simple piece of work (“This song has a distinctly demotic feel and does not read like the work of an educated author.” The Popular Mind in Eighteenth-century Ireland, p. 222). Morley has been deceived by the simplicity of art! Here and there, OK, the metre may be a bit battered, because singers have forgotten a word or a phrase and patched it themselves as they could, and that’s how the song has come down to us. Basically, however, this is an expertly made art song. 

   Morley also observed, no doubt, that the song doesn’t have lots of Irish and Greek mythology. This is simply because the poet thinks it isn’t suitable. His only mythological reference is to Oscar (son of Oisín of the Fianna), but we shouldn’t assume that he couldn’t bring in many more names if he cared to.

   Pádraig Ó Riada, a decade previously, lamenting the massacre at Robinstown (a crowd ambushed soldiers who were transporting Whiteboy prisoners; they freed the prisoners and disarmed the soldiers; the officers then begged the people to at least let them have their guns back, because otherwise they would be severely punished when they returned to barracks; the crowd, in spite of the protests of some dissenters, fell for the ruse; the soldiers, when they had recovered their weapons, fired into the crowd and killed eight people) – Pádraig Ó Riada also keeps things simple, and he doesn’t have any mythological reference at all (Bualadh Bhaile Roibín in Duanaire Osraíoch). Yet he was a schoolmaster who knew Latin and Greek and was thought of as having a rare poetic talent.

   There are many remarkable things about the Ballyragget lament. Not least is the fact that this fluent and moving poem is concealing something, wiping it right out of the record. The truth is, the local Butlers who were enclosing common lands were Catholics. The Anti-Whiteboy League had been organised by the Catholic parish priest. He went into alliance with the local Protestant magistrate Hewetson, who supervised the Leaguers’ taking of oaths (making sure there was nothing unacceptable to the established powers) and supplied the guns that were used to shoot the Whiteboys. From the poem, however, one would think it was Hewetson’s doing exclusively, from beginning to end. 

   This was one of the options for poets when dealing with a hostile Catholic Church: to leave the questions hanging in the air (since, in fact, everyone knew that Hewetson hadn’t organised the ‘treachery’ all on his own). The Catholic Church was the non-state church, the Gaelic church, so one didn’t want fundamental antagonism.

   On the other hand, there were times when its official representatives might behave more like functionaries of the state church. In rare cases clerics like that could be named in poems and take their places in a rogues’ gallery, alongside the relevant Protestant magnates. (A prime example was Bishop Peter Creagh, who had connived at the execution of Father Nicholas Sheehy.) Or they might be pointedly ignored, as in the Ballyragget lament.

Thoughts of Captain Right

But another option was to address the problems discriminately. This is done in a poem that celebrates the Rightboy movement, which was active in the south of Ireland for a few years in the 1780s. The Rightboys were the Whiteboys renamed (instead of wearing white shirts, they now called themselves the followers of ‘Captain Right’, who could be the leader in any district). Perhaps the most interesting thing about them is that besides wanting to reduce tithes, they also wanted a reduction in the dues demanded for their various services by Catholic priests. 

   Vincent Morley, whom I have criticised earlier, must be given his due as an editor of Rightboy literature: he has published a magnificent Rightboy poem, almost certainly composed in 1785-86, which seems to be connected with West Cork (Cé fada dúinn fá dhaoirse gan aoibhneas an tséinghin, in The Popular Mind, pp. 200-6). The exuberance of this poem, its elated spirits, the impish wit that sparkles in it again and again, can hardly be exaggerated. (Not that Morley is likely to exaggerate things like that, or even to mention them.) 

   The poet feels that he’s among heroes like those of ancient Ireland and Greece. And still better will it be when the exiled heroes return

tar taoide i gcéin go treasúil, go h-anfach ar seol

combatively across the sea, stormily under sail 

In the meantime, though, the Rightboy author has serious things to say. His poem is nothing less than a warning to the Catholic Church not to become like the state church. There are times in the poem when the difference between the two becomes less than perfectly clear (which is not unintended), though the poet in the end does distinguish carefully. He is giving a friendly warning, but a warning nonetheless.

   I will give a couple of verses here, to let readers have the flavour. I have chosen to emphasise the sharp change of metre coming in the middle, so the verse has nineteen lines. (Morley has sixteen-line verses.) The first eight lines, anyhow, are the long lines of a type of amhrán. Then there’s a brisk change to a dancing metre, which is interwoven again at the end with the long lines. Each verse concludes with a long line, which is a punchline: this poet never ends a verse without a sting in the tail.

   There are some similarities between this Rightboy verse-form and the verse-form that Máire Bhuí Ní Laoire uses in Cath Chéim an Fhia. The Rightboy poet is more accomplished, one does have to give him that. But Máire Bhuí also capably handles a complex verse-form that could not be successfully deployed by just anyone.) 

   I begin with the opening verse of the Rightboy poem.

Cé fada dúinn fá dhaoirse gan aoibhneas an tséinghin

do chlannaibh maiseach Míle do shíolraigh le treoin,

fé bhrataibh dealbh scíosmhar d’fhúig sinn síos gan faoiseamh

is gan taitneamh ceoil dá spreagadh dóibh ach atuirse gach ló,

ní peaca leo sinn sínte ar thuí smoirt gan éadach

faoi smacht gach acht is dlí ag lucht poímpe agus óil,

dár gcartadh ag srathaibh cíosa d’fhúig síos sinn gan téarnamh,

is gurbh í an tseanmóir do chanaid dúinn an t-airgead d’fháil dóibh.

Till I met by night

brave Captain Right

ag teacht le meidhir faoi ghaisce chugainn:

“Pray will you join

those lads of mine?”

is ea dúirt go deimhin nár dhanaid liom;

agus na mílte laoch calma ar eachra go gléasta

le harm faoibhir

ba mhaith i ngníomh

is leagfaidh siad na deachmhaithe,

is ná tugaidh puinn do shagartaibh, tá beatha acu tar meón.  

Though we’ve long been unfree, the joys of the lucky-born

denied to the Gaelic families whose forebears were strong,

(layer upon layer of troubles and want, forever pushing us down)

without music to inspire us but sorrow every day –

for them, it is no sin that we lie stretched on foul straw, naked,

ruled by each act and law of that pompous crowd of drunks,

harassed by rent demands that crush us without ceasing,

and the sermon they sing us is: to get money for them!

Till I met by night

brave Captain Right

coming merrily and armed: 

“Pray will you join

those lads of mine?”

and I told him, sure, I wouldn’t mind; 

and the thousands of brave heroes equipped on their horses

with weapons sharp

good for a fight,

and they will overthrow the tithes,

and don’t give the priests much, they live more than moderately!

The poet then spends a couple of verses drawing on his Greek mythology: these Rightboy leaders would be more than a match for Hector and Achilles! Captain Fearnot, for example, was swearing he would tear up the tithe leases that Luther and Calvin had bequeathed to Ireland; every tithe proctor in the country would soon be forced to flee. A heavenly light shone down upon the Rightboy assembly, from Luna, and all the Greek gods were confirming their goodwill. Juno was calling to Jupiter,

dá mhaíomh san spéir

don chliar go léir

go stiallfadh plaosc gach ministir…

promising in the sky

to all the clergy

that she’d burst the skull of every minister…

Then comes the most remarkable verse of the poem. (Slasher, whom it refers to in passing, is presumably another Rightboy leader.)

Tá an eaglais go saothrach gan traochadh á insint

ná maithfidh siad ar aon chor dúinn aon chuid den ór;

nuair shuifidh coiste an tsléibhe amach ar an saol mar scríobhtar,

is olc an saoradh an t-airgead do lucht bailithe gach stóir;

an eaglais gan daonnacht, ciodh léanmhar le ríomh daoibh,

gan charthannacht gan féile, is daor docht a nós;

is guidhidh chun an Aon-mhic do céasadh le díoltas

bheith do bhur saoradh ar dheachmhaithe ’s ar chamdhlíthe nódh,

Ag tnúth le Right

’s le cabhair gan mhoill

do réidhfidh leigheas gan eagal dúinn,

is do bhrúfas meidhil

na mbúr seo ag adhaint

’nár ndún ’s ag roinnt ár dtaiscithe.

Beidh Slasher tréan is arrow aige dá dtreascairt is dá dtraochadh,

is a Rí na naomh 

do chíonn gach taobh,

bain dínn-ne an faobhar-so ar eaglais,

is beidh saint an tsaoil ar shagartaibh faid mhairfidh siad go deo. 

The church is actively and tirelessly announcing

they will give us no remission of any of the gold;

when the jury of the Mount sits in judgment, as is written,

money will not rescue those who’ve gathered all the wealth.

The church has no humanity (though it grieves us to say so),

no charity, generosity – a bleak and stingy custom;

and pray to the Only Son who was crucified in vengeance

to save you from tithes and wicked new laws,

hoping for Right

and prompt help

that will bring us a remedy with no fear

and stop the bleats

of boors who light 

fires in our hearths and and who share out our stores.

Mighty Slasher with his arrow will best them and wear them down;

O King of Saints 

who sees all sides,

remove this anger of ours at the church, 

as priests will be worldly and greedy all the days of their lives. 

The poet then turns to another of the Rightboy leaders, comparing him to heroes of Irish legend and history: Éireamhón the Gaelic conqueror of Ireland, Conn of the Hundred Battles, Brian Boru, who drove the fierce invaders back across the sea; or Cormac Mac Airt, who was Conn’s grandson;…

’s ’na réim ná bíodh na deachmhaithe

is ó ghéillimid don eaglais do scaipeadar na treoin.

and when they ruled there were no tithes,

but since we submitted to the church the heroes have all gone!

In his final verse the poet imagines the scene in a free Ireland. There will be harp music and revelry, dancing and social drinking, and he himself will stay ar thaobh an bhairille, “beside the barrel”.  The poets of Munster, he says, will spend their lives in humble service to the champions who have done the freeing.

Bíodh bréithre caoine ag sagartaibh, beatha coirp is éadaigh,

is níor chóir dóibh luí

ar a gcomharsain gaoil

chun a gcófra a líonadh d’airgead,

is tugadh gach n-aon do réir achmhainn dóibh, is má thaithneann leis níos mó.

Let the priests speak gently, and may they have enough to eat and wear,

and they should not grind

their neighbours down

to fill their trunks with money,

so let each one give them what he can, and if he wants to, more! 

The poet provocatively lays claim to a culture that is older than Christianity, but himself professes what he claims is a more genuine Christianity than that of the greedy priests. However, he does want coexistence and understanding with the Catholic priests, while the alternative state Christianity, on the other hand, is linked with all he wants to destroy. The conflict that he describes, between the priests and the secret society, is a special one, involving the priests’ own revenues. But I think the attitudes he expresses could be found in modified forms in secret societies for a long time after (Fenians and IRA). The Rightboy poet is a cultural pioneer. 

   The Whiteboy and Rightboy surges were only temporarily impeded by the terrorist response to the failed 1798 rebellion. By the 1820s there was energy for another surge, and some poet or other (it must have been a poet) discovered that an English-language writer, Pastorini, had a prophecy with excellent potential for boosting. The Whiteboy and Rightboy poetry was also still around. We don’t know how much of it Máire Bhuí was familiar with.

   In a final article in this series I will see what more I can say about the poets and poetry of those few decades before the Famine.

JOHN MINAHANE

(For the lament for Father Sheehy, Do chuala geoin ag slóite ar thaoibh cnoic, see Meidhbhín Ní Úrdail, “An elegy on the death of Father Nicholas Sheehy”, Zeitschrift für celtische Philologie 60 (2013). For his sister Cáit de Búrca’s lament, A Athair Niocláis, mo chás id luí thú, see Bone and Marrow/Cnámh agus Smior, ed. S. K. Fisher and B. Ó Conchubhair, pp. 486ff. For the Kilkenny poems, Duanaire Osraíoch, ed. Dáithí Ó hÓgáin. For the Rightboy poem, Vincent Morley, The Popular Mind in Eighteenth-century Ireland, Text 6.)