I was in the library a tad early last month for Wexford Science Café. Desperate for something to read I snagged Buried Lives - The Protestants of Southern Ireland review
(2017) by Robin Bury [History Press of Ireland ISBN 9781845888800]. As
we went into the meeting, I waved it at the convenor and said "My people . . ." to which he replied "Yeah, mine too." As neither of us are Protestants of Northern Ireland the exchange didn't have much weight. Up North, when strangers meet there can be a bit of a dance around trying to establish each other's antecedents [never anything so obvs as asking "What school did you go to?" where's the fun in that?]-
- mentioning a yorker or cover-point and gauging the amount of recognition of these cricketing terms
- ditto the score at last weekend's local GAA / rugby derby
- using mental calipers to measure the inter-orbital distance of your chatee
Bury's Buried Lives [a harmless pun? I don't think so: we know The English are mad for puns] is agreeably tendentious - because "My people . . ." - but that doesn't make it less shocking. We live in a multi-cultural society now with Paul McGrath + Lee Chin + Leo Varadkar not to mention pizza, pierogi and polenta: all lovey and inclusive . . . until it's not. Obvs, travellers have been excluded from the inclusion. If you are Irish and think You are without prejudice, just check your pulse when a neighbour announces "Joe saw a white Hiace van going up Hungry Hill last night while the Widow Hungry was at Mass". Any sense of national smugness w.r.t inclusion is no longer tenable since the Coolock Riots last Summer.
Ger Murphy was a colleague and friend at The Institute where/when the Blob was born. He researched and wrote a book The Year of Disappearances, Political Killings in Cork 1921-1922
whose thesis was that Protestants were ethnic-cleansed along the Bandon
Valley in Co Cork, during the civil war: under the fiction that they
were informers or imperialists. You can get a flavour of the issues in Ger's review of a subsequent book on the subject: Massacre in West Cork: The Dunmanway and Ballygroman Killings, by Barry Keane.
Not as terminal as being killed, but according to Robin Bury, "My people . . ." were being given the C🔥🔥l🔥ck treatment - back then arson was carried out not on buildings intended for The Other as now, but buildings = homes actually occupied by people who didn't fit a narrow GAA, Catholic, post-colonial description of what it was to be Irish. People were rousted from the beds in the small hours by armed and trench-coated posses of their neighbours and told they had 15 minutes to vacate the premises which were scheduled to be torched. hmmm, for some definitions of "My people . . ." because both The Big House in King's County (where my Grandfather grew up) and The Big House in Wexford (whence his mother hailed) survived the 1920s Wars (Independence and Civil) unscathed. The latter was then demolished by the Office of Public Works in the 1960s and
70s. Actually the structure was filleted, with great care, to remove
everything that had been incorporated since the dissolution of the
Cistercian Monastery in 1540.
Gotta say though, that not all Catholics still say the crassest things to some Protestants - it just slips out like - one of my colleagues invited me to go back where I came from when I claimed to come from King's County.
Another anecdatum about whether Protestants were excluded from the nascent state after independence is that the same Big House grandfather applied for and got the job of Harbormaster at Dunmore East in Co Waterford and held that billet for 25 years until he retired in 1947. In retirement he lived across the estuary in a cottage owned by his cousin near his own mother's home-place. He died in the fullness of his years in the Summer of 1957. By coincidence, a very short hop down the road, that Summer the
Fethard Boycott blew up over the rights and wrongs of the
1907 Ne Temere decree from Catholic Centraal under Pope Pius X. Ne Temere declared that Catholics could marry Others if, and only if, both parties to the contract agreed to raise the kids as Catholics. Sheila Cloney signed the papers when she got married but balked at sending her eldest to Catholic National school when the child was old enough to go. At least partly that decision was triggered by the bullying assumptions of Father Stafford the local curate. A film [poster L] was made about the events 40 years later. And at about the same time the then current Bishop of Ferns Brendan Comiskey issued a formal apology. Four years later Comiskey resigned because of his complicity in the wide-spread sexual abuse of children by members of his team.
Robin Bury devotes a whole chapter to Fethard. If you live in Ireland, or grew up here, you probably have 'views' on some of the actions of some of the members of The Religious. According to Rev Adrian Fisher, the CoI rector at Fethard in the 1950s, Father Stafford found time to carry out a vehicular homicide on one of his parishioners . . . "One day he killed an elderly man. Ran into him and the body landed on the bonnet of his car. I walked to the village after this happened and saw two elderly country women, simple souls, and I mean this is no disparaging way. I said it was a tragedy that poor old man who lived down the road. The immediate reaction of these two women was to put their hands in the air and say 'Glory be to God, killed by a priest.' Extraordinary. I walked on. The Gardai did nothing about it. In England there would be an enquiry straight away." [Buried Lives Ch.5 p.131]. Nobody talks about the boycott in 1957 SE Wexford nowadays. No more than the plain people of Granard speak about Ann Lovett - those who live(d) there all know the story and those who didn't don't need to know; but will certainly judge.
What's with Ne timere in the Title? Just a hint that "My people . . ." fear nothing. I do think that Buried Lives is worth reading by those who aren't members of our MOPE community but rather live alongside us. Or read something like Liam Kennedy's Unhappy the Land; the most oppressed people ever, the Irish? [whc Bloboprev]