That Old Self-Sufficiency Lark, FFF XXII

What with Ger's help, good solid progress is being made on the building front, though God knows we oldies are a tad on the slow side. Then again being on an island certainly complicates getting materials. I fall back on picking blackberries and cutting up apples, not to mention applying some much needed tlc to the old part of the house, when there is a hiccup in their supply. 

Soon it will be time to head for Portugal again, with hopefully some more serious cruising coming up next year. Here is another despatch From the Fractal Frontier, about our early times in Glencolmcille. Sorry there are no photos this week; whatever kind of but has got into my chromebook, it is refusing to display photos.

FFF XXII, To the Hills of Donegal.

The first summer of 1973, we basically camped in our cottage in Braide, the children eventually sleeping in a huge two level bunk bed that I made in the room, with its floor of puddled clay, which indeed was a nice dry and warm floor which raised very little dust. The chickens roosted under the kitchen table with a cover thrown over it, and even Paddy the goat had to be brought into the house at night. She was tied to the bedpost of our bed in the corner of the kitchen. Our Somerset goats were still lodging with a friend in Wales, but wild Irish Paddy came our way to give us a supply of milk. I have a vivid memory of her with her long horns up on the banks above the house and silhouetted against the full moon rising behind her.

The vegetables one could buy locally were mainly carrots, onions and rather tired cabbages, so an early move was to start growing some ourselves. The best bit of land for a garden was over the fence belonging to a neighbour, but he let us use it. I also learnt to save turf, so what with fish, and meat from our neighbours, we were soon beginning to meet many of our basic needs. The support we had from our neighbours was however vital. We were lucky with the weather, those summers of the ‘70s being exceptionally good on the whole. However, we moved into a rented house in Druim on the North side of the Glen when the winter came in.

John Maguire and I built the road across the bog when there was no fishing to be done, so in the Spring we were able to get a small caravan in for the children to sleep in. Rory showed up and we started to build a new kitchen/living room and two small bedrooms, one above the other, onto the West end of the cottage. Fr Clem from Downside came for a while, and made some fine A beams for the roof. It was all done in the traditional style, except for things like putting roofing felt under the thatch; Big John was up on a ladder laying on the thatch, while we forked up the bundles first of rushes and then of straw, which had been bought from a neighbour and thrashed by dashing it against a bicycle wheel on its side over a big sheet to catch the grain. The straw was tied down by a criss-cross of sisal rope, tied to the projecting stone pegs that had been built into the top of the walls. It was a good roof with built-in insulation.

The loo was a bucket with a fine wooden seat over it, made by Clem, in a little block-built closet out the back. I built a small catchment reservoir up the hill and piped the water from it down to the front of the house, where it flowed into a kind of stone sink before rejoining the stream. ‘The best water in Ireland’, Big John called it. Fiona did the washing there for the first summer, and washed the children too in good weather. Otherwise it was a tin bath-tub in front of a big turf fire. Its equipment consisted of a crane for the kettle and the pot-oven that Fiona baked in.

One Sunday we went off to visit Ailne and Charlie Gallagher near Port Noo, the other side of Glen Gesh. Ailne was a sister to my Dad’s friend Jimmy Hamilton; they were the children of a landowner at Rosbeg. Jimmy never went back there; he didn’t want to spoil his idyllic memories of boyhood. ‘Things are all so different now!’ I should think so. His father had had one of the very first cars in West Donegal - they had to go all the way to Derry for petrol. But I have already told the story of how an uncle of Jimmy and Ailne had been shot by the IRA in Ardara. Now Ailne and Charlie had been sweethearts in their youth, but Charlie had been in the IRA. Ailne had gone to London and spent her life working as a nurse there, until finally she had come home and married Charlie when they had turned sixty; and a lovely couple they were!

They lived in Charlie’s fine old two story farmhouse, mostly around the range in its big country kitchen. The land was a good bit kinder there, making me wonder if we were overdoing it among the boulders and rocky screes of Braide; but it was the people of the Glen who held me. Our children were mightily impressed with the Gallaghers’ bathroom, and especially the pull-and-let-go loo with its high tank. The chain got pulled rather a lot!

Our Bella came away looking rather solemn. “Yese are very odd!” she announced. “When I grow up, I’m going to have a proper house with an upstairs and a downstairs and a barfoom.”

“Can we come and stay?” asked Fiona.

“No.”

“Can we camp in the garden?”

“No.”

Oh well! I thought of my Dad’s exasperated question - “What are you trying to prove?” - although it was more of a comment than a question at the time. But was I putting Fiona and the children through undue hardships? It all just happened, one thing leading to another, but I must admit that I did want to prove that one did not necessarily have to follow a career, ‘get one’s foot on the ladder’, engage in the rat-race or even get a job at all in order to live the good life! I also found it therapeutic to get down to the basic physical necessities of life, hard work indeed though it was.

The economic and social conditions in the ‘70s were not so very different to today; one could see that we were headed down the road to where we are in danger of arriving today. The countryside was being emptied, while the already over-crowded and expensive cities were drawing people into a highly problematic future, with little inherent satisfaction for anyone. Automation, unemployment and environmental pollution only looked like making things worse. Now and again someone had to get off the treadmill and look for alternatives! Quite a few hippies and so on were trying, but were they onto anything viable? If one refused to base one’s life on making money and ‘getting on’, how was one going to structure it? Where was the necessary framework?

Both Fiona and I wanted to make our home the focus of our lives, restoring it to its ancient role as the place where as many of life’s necessities as possible were produced. This way there is never any shortage of work for anyone, and the quality of life is likely to be much enriched all round. How feminists had managed to convince women that becoming an employee and a consumer was superior to being mistress of one’s own house was a matter of bemusement to us, which we suspected of being in fact a capitalist plot! However, questions do arise about how one is to relate to each other, to others outside the home, and to gain access to the many resources that one does need to draw on beyond what one can produce in the home.

We could not have managed without the support of friends and neighbours, but then again, what was that Sartre said about Hell being other people? It was difficult to cope with Rory and his alcoholism, and indeed with our next-door neighbour wandering into our house every evening. Old cultures such as that of the Glen had their ways of coping with such inter-dependence, but it has always been problematic and will remain so.  It is difficult to run an ‘open house’, partly because we remain somewhat selfish and lazy, but also because of the legitimate need to have our own space and privacy. Fiona and I rather liked the old adage from the Tristan da Cunha bible:- ‘To every person their skin, and to every family their house!’ It is a bit extreme; it seems we need quite a bit of divine help to get the balance right.

I had not ceased to think of myself as a Catholic, but we had drifted away from the practice of any religion, as young people tend to do in the quest to establish their autonomy. Now we were realising that in fact we could not survive like that. Fiona decided that she too would become a Catholic, and we started going to Mass and the sacraments again. It was fortunate really that Fr McDyer had moved to Carrick, and in the Glen we now had a more spiritually minded man in Fr McCauley, who formally instructed Fiona in the Faith.

As we began to settle into our new life, Fiona was only too happy to give up contraception, and another five gorgeous babies were to come before we made any attempt at natural family planning. As for the question as to whether it was responsible for someone with pretensions of ecological concern, I can only say that the place we were in was anything but overcrowded, and indeed my wider family had been a bit of a disaster in the line of reproduction for the past two generations. Having grown up with just one sister and no first cousins, I reckoned it would be a fine thing to get a bit of a clan going again. If we could manage to support each other rather than depend on banks and the State to keep out of trouble, it would be a very fine thing indeed!

Wind In Europe's Sails.

It’s all very fine for M. Juncker to be saying saying* that the "wind is back in Europe's sails"! Is he a sailor? Well if he is, he knows that the wind is a fickle thing. If he wants something of a trade wind that will last a while, then I will agree with Mr Farage this far: there are some lessons that need to be learned. Actually they are lessons that were present in the minds of the E.U.’s founding fathers, but seem to have got lost along the way; lessons from Catholic Social Teaching, as a matter of fact, of which the ‘warp and weft’ are solidarity and subsidiarity.

‘Subsidiarity’ can sound obscure. It simply means that responsibility should reside where the action is, on as ‘low’ a level as possible. To understand what I mean, it would be helpful to have read last week’s despatch From the Fractal Frontier, recounting my story of herring fishing in Donegal in the 70s. It demonstrates very clearly why the present model of market capitalism is not fit for purpose; but I do not wish to suggest that mere state control is the answer, even less more diktats  from Brussels or anywhere else. Both the national Government and the Common Fisheries Policy have their place, but they need to be focussed by way of particulars.

We have seen how the present set-up is by destroying the resources on which it is based, draining the life out of peripheral communities, and creating on one hand a rather obnoxious breed of super-rich and on the other an under-class of people sucked into cities where there is little prospect of a satisfying way of life. A massive abuse is further being perpetrated in Ireland at present, whereby pelagic super-trawler owners midwater species can buy up tonnage from the poorer whitefish boats, albeit at a proportion of three units to one. This only exacerbates the tendency, tacitly approved by our Government, of centralising the fishing industry in a few big ports and its ownership in the hands of millionaires; all in the good long tradition of clientalistic politics, whereby brown envelopes of cash opened all sorts of doors, and goes to show that our national Government is far from providing a remedy.

I fear it is a luxury to feel one can trust one’s own State, but the French have got one thing right at least. ‘Tonnage’ is not, as in Ireland, a marketable commodity, but remains vested in the State, though allocated to particular vessels. The fisheries are a common resource, and since access to that resource nowadays depends on having tonnage, on one’s being licensed for a particular size and power of boat, this is surely fair; but who is doing the allocating and on what basis? Such standards really need to be thrashed out on a European basis.

I do not wish to deny for a moment the importance of the market. Indeed it is the fact that in Europe we all depend on a Continent-wide market, as well as the other facts that fish and the environmental factors affecting them do not respect national boundaries, which provides a rational basis for having a Common Fisheries Policy. But there is no need to reiterate that it has often failed dismally to follow through with a rational policy, as when it has so often resulted in dead fish being dumped back into the sea. How then should it be followed through?

With the sea under such chronic pressure, and so much technological power at our disposal, a fishery’s management has to become the prime concern of every participant. Upon this concern, authorities must be built that hear their voices: those of the fishermen themselves, and those who sell their fish, consumers, scientists, even bureaucrats, or should I say, lawyers! They must be tailored to be accessible to those participants, and support them all. They need to knit together local communities with the big structures. They require a degree of actual, face-to-face, physical presence, one level leading on to another.

The C.F.P. has attempted to move in this direction through establishing Producer Organisations, but they have not been empowered to tackle the critical issues and have generally failed to engage the men left struggling with the realities. Despite much hand-wringing, a few simple mechanisms are all that are required to manage fisheries, once one really understands what is involved; ‘technical measures’ concerning the fishing gear allowed, control of the size and power of boats that are allowed (which should be as small as practicable), control of time of access (as in for example closing fisheries for weekends or more drastically when necessary, taking into account the welfare of the fishermen and helping to bear the cost of such closures), and where possible modulating supply to fit the market.

Now that would be real democracy and solidarity! What we have does not work because it fails to confront powerful interests and address the deep structural issues.  But we have to build painfully with as much consensus as possible, and the trouble is, time presses! We should not however fall for that spurious kind of democracy that elevates a small majority into ‘the Will of the People’. Even M. Juncker spoke the other day about having to ‘respect the will of the British people.’ This is where we have to be careful what we mean by solidarity.

Mr Clement Atlee was on the ball when he rejected Mr Churchill’s call for a referendum as ‘a device so alien to all our traditions as the referendum, which has only too often been the instrument of Nazism and Fascism.’  All M. Juncker has to deal with is the will of Her Majesty’s Government, while it is the historic right of the British people to throw rotten eggs and generally grumble. If those in power are wise, they will not close their ears to the grumbles, but they will also have the gumption to ignore them as  and when it is appropriate.  The first of the Nazi referenda, by the way, was to withdraw from the League of Nations. A year later, in 1934, there was another one merging the posts of Chancellor and President in the person of the Fuhrer.

The concept of subsidiarity was developed as an antidote to all that. To provide the heft to make such an approach actually work is a challenge for all the peoples of Europe. To really bring it to fruition involves the rediscovery of spiritual realities that have been forever under our noses, but more often than not, ignored. To make some little contribution to the required genuine sense of shared identity, based on mutual recognition and knowledge of each other, particularly for those of us who live along the Atlantic coast, is the object of this blog.

*https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/sep/13/jean-claude-juncker-plays-down-brexit-in-eu-state-of-union-speech

Sorry, no Dispatch From the Fractal Frontier this week. J.A.

A lesson for the times - FFFXXI about the Silver Darlings of Donegal.

Bbq for the RNLI at the Islanders' Rest.

It quite takes one back, all this jolly living on the brink of unthinkable catastrophe. Fears and indeed objections that we sixties types have had to push to the backs of our minds, in order to survive, are bubbling up again. Anyway the lucky ones among us have on the whole had a pretty good time since. ‘But now’, as the Americans have it, with ever more nuclear weapons in the hands of divers crazies and global warming beginning to gallop, anyone with any degree of awareness and responsibility has to address the dreaded question, how can we help our grandchildren to find a liveable future?

Any sailor can tell you that the first essential for getting out of trouble is to learn how to balance keeping one’s head and staying calm, with a keen sense of reality. Anxieties which we refuse to face undermine both these essentials; so let us all acknowledge that we are in deep trouble, even when it is the poor people perhaps thousands of miles away who are taking the worst hits. Whichever way one looks at them, those political narratives that are at present so dominant, especially in the USA, Britain and Israel, which build on our fears, must be rejected.

What is becoming of ‘the greatest democracy on Earth’? The few parts of the Duckie’s election platform that made some kind of sense, like cooperating with Russia, pulling out of Afghanistan or seriously addressing the problems of the national infrastructure, have all been dropped, along with his senior civilian advisors. Real authority seems to have largely passed into the hands of a triumvirate of generals, Generals McMaster (National Security Advisor), Mattis (Secretary of Defence) and Kelly (White House Chief of Staff).

While the Tories faff around in Britain and end up tagging along with that lot, even while they spout rubbish about reclaiming British sovereignty, the alternative is none too convincing.  It’s no good beating the drum of Keynesian socialism along with Mr Corbyn without a few more answers to hard questions, like why did neoliberalism sweep the board in the first place? It’s no good just putting it down to the likes of Mrs Thatcher, for it happened in Ireland and all over the place. Economic, environmental and spiritual or ideological factors all feed into each other, and aspiring  to some kind of genuine socialism without facing up to the real issues promises as little success as the offer of an idyllic Caribbean holiday with a hurricane in the offing.

So what of Europe? Is there any chance of finding an alternative route here? I wrote a letter to the Irish Times back when Ireland joined the E.C. to the effect that the big question was whether Europe would manage to become a real community of nations, or would degenerate into some kind of Fourth Reich. I pointed to the fate of the sea fisheries as a possible indication.

I did not mean to say that it was merely a matter of the management regime. Fisheries pose the whole problem of how the modern world can develop without destroying itself, in a particularly dramatic and archetypal form. To exemplify my meaning, in the following despatch From the Fractal Frontier, I follow this theme through several years, sticking with the story of the pursuit of the silver darlings  of Donegal in the 1970s.

FFF XXI, The Silver Darlings.

It was thanks to Jerry Cross that we were able to extricate ourselves from Somerset in reasonable shape. He brought the work on September Cottage to conclusion and had it sold, so that eventually we paid off our debts and had some left over, which mostly went on buying a fishing boat. This time we decided to put making a living ahead of getting comfortable! John Maguire put me up to buying a half-decker so that we could go herring fishing, after that first summer fishing in his punt out of Port.

The factory at Meananeary retained some of the approach of a cooperative, even if it was being bought out by the Irish Sugar Company. It was now concentrating exclusively on fish, especially herring, for which there was a strong demand on account of the North Sea being closed, so that the stocks there could recover from years of over-fishing. The herring came inshore to spawn in the month of November, and dense shoals of them occurred around the peninsula of SW Donegal.

We bought a 33’ traditional clinker-built double-ended half-decker up in Buncrana on Lough Swilly. She was called An Cnoc Mor and was obviously a direct descendent of the Viking long-ships. Such boats even used to come on the decks of ships from Norway; rather different to the vessels that were to come to Donegal from there a little over a decade later! We started off with no electronics or fancy equipment at all, just a 48hp Lister diesel. The only other bit of machinery was, er, a manual bilge pump. She was steered with a tiller.

The fishing gear consisted of ten clean-mended nylon drift-nets, imported from Scotland by Gundry’s of Killybegs. They were to be anchored overnight in fleets of five, each suspended by 6 buoys or blondies that were scrounged from various byres around the Glen, having been washed ashore and gathered by those keen beach-combers. A coil (120 fathoms) of 1½” polypropylene rope was cut in two in order to anchor a fleet of nets at either end. The anchors were made with old donkey-cart shafts, also scrounged around the Glen, and then all one needed was a trip-line for each of these.

So the great day eventually came when, with the nets boarded, we set off one November afternoon looking for ‘signs’, especially the presence of the black-back gull. This is the true herring gull; the herring gulls that go by the name are mere scavengers, but the black-back really did follow the herring, maybe just roosting in groups on rocky promontories in the daytime, especially lying in rafts on the water at nightfall. When we could shoot the nets where they were lying in the Uig of Malin Beg, off the Silver Strand, round in Malin Mor or off the Finn Shores under the great banks of Slieve League, we were sure of a good catch. The further west we went, the bigger and fatter the herring were inclined to be, with the very best of them on round Malin Mor Head in the Glen Bay itself, but the weather had to be very good indeed to fish there. Some years it just did not happen.

By far the biggest problem was judging when the weather was good enough to chance the precious nets, and to be able to steam home safely in the morning with a heavy-laden boat. Having shot the nets, we would steam back to Teelin and tie up while we went home for a night’s sleep. One needed to arrive back at the nets at the crack of dawn, and high was the excitement as they came into sight. Were they safely anchored the way we had left them? Sea-birds would be wheeling above them if there were fish in them, and a heavy catch would be tugging on the blondies. When the cry went up ‘the blondies are going under’, we knew we were in serious business!

There were four lads generally to haul the nets, while I had to keep the boat up to them as tightly as possible, without however getting the nets or any of the straps (buoy-lines) on the prop. Using the waves to help haul the nets, the lads would pull them across the boat, shaking as many of the fish out of them as possible in the process. Gannets were screeching and wheeling and diving right beside me, so that I could see them going down into the water to retrieve fish that had fallen off the nets, but not for a moment could I leave off concentrating on the work. The thrill of a good catch was indescribable, and likewise of the first cheque, cashed and divided at Biddy’s pub, and celebrated with rum and black!

Once the nets were in the boat, we steamed back to Teelin, if deeply laden with the odd nervous glance astern at the waves rearing up behind us. Safely back at the pier, a sheet of plastic was let down into the boat from above, arranged so that the nets could be pulled up without snagging and loose fish would slide back into the boat as they were shaken once more. Up on the pier, they had to be pulled over a spar set up between two piles of the wooden fish boxes, so that fish that were still stuck in them could be picked out. If we had been a bit slow in the morning, the conger eels would have got to work, leaving us with the remains of fishes twisted up in vile knots. Dogfish too might have got to work, leaving plenty of holes in the nets.

So when the nets were sorted and boarded back into the boat, and the fish in the stacks of four boxes which made a cran, then, if the weather held, we were off again. There were no coastal radio stations in those days, so the only forecasts were those on RTE from Dublin or the Englishman on the BBC. They were not that accurate and so a lot came down to our own judgement. For weeks on end we might get no chance at all; everything depended on being on the ball when one came. It was fine frosty weather of course that was best, even if it meant very cold days for us on Teelin pier, with the north wind cutting through us as it whistled down the bay into our faces. But the prices kept strengthening for those few years in the seventies, and it only took a few good catches to make our season.

For the second season we were more organised, with an echo-sounder and a little radio. We were doing fine, and soon there were about fifty men putting out in half-deckers and yawls around south-west Donegal for a share of the silver darlings. Meanwhile there was serious money being made in Killybegs, where some lads were getting very handy with mid-water trawls, towed between two boats. The first two generations of trawlers were mainly built by B.I.M., the state-owned Irish Sea-fisheries Board, many of them in Killybegs itself. Many good, satisfying jobs resulted all around the coast. The Irish fishing industry had been deliberately repressed in times past, as trawlers came from Fleetwood to harvest the riches of Donegal Bay. There was real pride in the country as it found its feet at last.

Killybegs was a boom town, though things went along sensibly enough for a while. The whitefish boats could make a living fishing just four days a week, using Friday and maybe Saturday morning to maintain their boats and gear, Sunday morning to go to Mass, the afternoon perhaps a football game, then off again early Monday morning. It was rather what the Spaniards call living en paz y en la gracia de Diós! But some people were getting to make serious money, and the way these things go, the fact that fish stocks were coming under serious pressure meant that one had to make more and more effort to keep ahead of this decline. Technology was developing at breakneck speed, its suppliers and the banks were anxious to be in on the action.

By the time eighty-foot trawlers were being built in Killybegs under the management of Don Patterson, the rationale for the state to be directly involved in financing and building boats was much diminished. In fact the powers that be in Dublin had already decided to privatise the yard, but it was a pity that they didn’t tell Don as much, as he slaved away trying to make it work. He was the son of a Moderator of the Presbyterian Church in the North, who had married a Catholic and come, like others whom we knew, as refugees from the pressures there, especially on mixed marriages. But Don felt let down, and eventually returned to Derry disillusioned with the way things were done in the Republic.

Some of the trawlermen were not above deliberately towing through the anchored nets of the half-deckers. More often they would try to scoop close by, which indeed would help us by chasing fish into our nets. These were big, full, spawning fish. How long could the shoals withstand such treatment? When things are going well, intoxicated with Progress and money, it is hard to stand back and give even to oneself the obvious answer to this question!

Decline of course was masked for some years by increasing prices, together with the massive increase in effort and development of technology. Soon bigger and bigger steel trawlers were being financed by the banks and built in Norway or wherever. Whereas we were landing by the cran in wicker baskets that filled a box, the new trawlers were pumping fish ashore by the ton.

I think it was in 1980 that the crash came. For some years we had been getting prices such as £15/16 per box. At the height of the boom, it was £27/28; a lot of money in those days. Now that inflation was taking off, the herring stocks were collapsing and also the market. The fish had got too expensive, the North Sea opened again, Canadians had got into the European market. All of a sudden, the herring, scarce as they were, were only worth £3/4 a box. It was all over for the small boat men of Donegal. If they packed up and went to Killybegs, they might get work on a trawler or a in a fish-factory there.

It has to be recognised that this debacle, while enmeshed in international trends, was a case of mismanagement here in Ireland which could not be attributed to the Common Fisheries Policy, as many like to do. The question is whether nowadays, in 2017, with so much evidence of the catastrophic potential of modern technology combined with unbridled capitalism in the ‘neo-liberal’ mode, we can cooperate with our neighbours in developing a new approach, which will combine the benefits of personal initiative with social responsibility, of development with care and respect for the natural world? We had better hurry up about it!

With thanks to Ger Kavanagh for the photos.

Autumn Sets In and FFFXX, to Glencolmcille.

Arthur up the ladder.

At last I have a bit of time and energy for writing again, with rain tipping down outside and the stove lit. It has been a good summer on the whole, and we have got a lot done in the line of maintaining Horseshoe Cottage and gradually progressing with the new room. It has already proved itself magnificently, seating over 40 with the babies at our Golden Anniversary; a great occasion which however left us very tired. After climbing ladders and carrying things I shouldn't I had a bad week with back pain, but thank God for sending us a lovely young Frenchman out of the blue, who helped with painting the house. Then came Ger again, with his old trade of plastering. Indeed he is the fourth generation of plasterers in his family, but I fear his son disdains the old trade, though what a useful trade it is! I was to head back to the Anna M next week, but since Alec and Anna have things in hand there, I think I have more business being here, and certainly will please she who has to be pleased. Hopefully I shall be able to help getting the old raft back together next month!
And so to FFF XX, as we move to Glencolmcille in County Donegal:-

It was a fraught time, and hard work, establishing ourselves in Glencolmcille. We salvaged what we could fit into a couple of loads in hired vans, while first living in one of the holiday cottages, and then in a little old cottage in Druim, up on the north side near Ann Gavigan and her daughter Tessa, son-in-law Big John, and grandson Mark Columba. Also nearby was the home place of one John Maguire.

These two Johns and another guy were trying to organise themselves to fish the latter’s punt out of Port, a little bay with a tiny breakwater and a slip a couple of miles away, on the other side of the North Hill. It may be very healthy to begin a summer’s day with a beautiful walk at four in the morning, but the joy of it could pall! Then there was the little business of getting gear and fuel there for the outboard engine, and of doing something with the catch. It was a very much longer journey there by road, but my little Renault van bought me a place in the enterprise, especially when it was discovered that I was actually quite useful in a boat.

A ‘punt’ in Donegal was an open, clinker-built boat, about 18ft long, that you could winch up onto one of the many little slips around the coast. We were fishing lobsters and salmon, with a few ‘stake nets’, meaning nets that were anchored in a strategic spot and visited at least first thing in the morning and then again in the evening. Seals were kept well persecuted then, one actually got a bounty at the Garda station if one presented a seal’s snout. They were regularly clubbed to death on the remote strands where they hauled out to breed in the autumn. Around this time, however, we all got jolly humane and things changed. The seals were protected, but life soon became a lot more difficult for the salmon fishermen, and staking nets pretty much became a waste of time.

Not that it was easy then. One had to get the fish at first light, or the odd seal and the sea-birds would have them. It was an unforgettable place to be, under the cliffs and banks about Tor Mor early on a summer morning, with the air full of the cries of nesting sea-birds. The nets could usually been seen by the fish by day, so they only worked by night; the evening visit was mainly to ensure that they were clean and in good order for the coming night.

Each crew member was expected to make maybe a dozen creels, which John Maguire showed me how to do. First we scrounged some old barrel staves around the fish factories, which made the bottom of the creel, then we went off through the country cutting sally rods for the frame. When bent and set in holes in the base, and strengthened with cross pieces, they were covered with net, usually purchased in rolls made for the job down at Bridport-Gundry’s in Killybegs. Then came the most skillful part, which was knitting in a good eye, that would welcome Mr Lobster in, but not let him out.

So it was that my fishing career began. It was very absorbing and actually showed potential for making a livelihood, though it was a good thing that there was no difficulty about ‘signing on’ when we had nothing else to live on. The lads thought I was mad to ‘sign off’ when we had a few quid coming in. The dole was frankly the basis of the local economy, which made for a good way of life at that. With it, once one had ‘a nice country house and a bitteen of land’, not to mention a woman who would stick it, it was in fact just grand. But one did have to be content with few possessions and hard work, and as time went by and everyone got edumicated and brain-washed by television, there were firstly more and more bachelors, and secondly fewer and fewer people at all!

Sadly, Fr McDyer’s co-operatives did not seem to be fitting in particularly well. There was little interest in my idea of making goat’s milk yoghourt and cheese, but what was worse, most people were fairly sceptical about the whole idea of constructing an economically viable way of life. Sure the Government had plenty of money; why bother? Best to keep the head down and make the best of the way things were!

Well, in the 1970s, when we are told Ireland was a God-forsaken place still in the Dark Age economically, and blighted by the troubles in the North, there were a series of great summers and life was pretty good for us in Glencolmkille. When I wasn’t fishing or dealing with the logistics of survival, I was working on our little place in Braide. John again helped me, as well as Mark Columba. Access was on a footpath over a little spur of hill, littered with boulders from the banks above it, so the first job was to get a road in there. ‘Bah, if you could get a road in there, the old people would have done it long ago!’ said Old Johnnie next door. But we did it, and our only mechanical help was a little tractor with a box on the back. At least the material was all about, plenty of stones! Then when we came to a great big boulder, John had the bright idea of buying a few bags of coal and lighting a big fire around it, which split it up.

My parents came to see what was going on, but sadly it was all too much for

Anna the Bog Fairy.

the old man. ‘What are you trying to prove, going to live in that Ypres mud?’ he asked, and stormed off, dragging Mum with him. As he saw it, I was ‘rejecting all he stood for’! Well, what was I trying to prove, if anything? Fiona teases me now ‘just trying to prove yourself a real man!’ But there was more to it than that.

From the atomic bombing of Japan, through the Korean and Vietnam wars and on to its activities in Latin America and Africa, the claim of Western civilisation in general and the U.S.A. in particular to represent all things bright and beautiful had been steadily eroded, as had been our very confidence in capitalism and Western civilisation itself. ‘When will they ever learn?’... The gravelly voice of Bob Dylan set the tone of rebellion. ‘The times they are a’changin’... Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command, Please get out of the new way if you can’t lend a hand!’ etc.

Even more to the point perhaps was Che Guevara, the iconic hero of the Revolution, who had  been summarily shot while fighting in the Bolivian jungle in 1967, his murder unsuccessfully misrepresented as death in combat. Che’s Irish roots had added a little extra immediacy to his status as a martyr to the cause of justice and an icon of youthful rebellion, whose image (produced by an Irish artist) was everywhere.  The juxtaposition of youthful rebellion with the quest for social justice and ecological sanity posed a huge intellectual problem in those years. The 60s ran out of steam, the rebellion part dissolved into drugs and predictably flopped; we were trying to find a sustainable model!

Albert Camus put his finger on the problem with rebellion in his commentary on Dostoyevsky's character Ivan Karamazov, in The Rebel:

‘If evil is essential to divine creation, then creation is unacceptable. Ivan will no longer have recourse to this mysterious God, but to a higher principle – namely, justice. He launches the essential undertaking of rebellion, which is that of replacing the reign of grace by the reign of justice.’

How such a terrible misunderstanding could have arisen is more than I can tackle here, for in Catholic understanding both belong together in God. ‘Man’s vocation to eternal life does not suppress, but actually reinforces, his duty to put into action in this world the energies and means received from the Creator to serve justice and peace.’ says the Catechism of the Catholic Church, para 2820. But such an attitude was making its way painfully in the Church, hampered by the struggle against atheistic communism. How was one to reply to those who complained of the Church’s identification with right-wing dictatorships, from Franco onwards, when for example in the year of 1973 (when Fiona and I went to live in Ireland), the democratically elected socialist government of President Allende was overthrown by General Pinochet’s CIA-backed coup?

I looked to Latin America and its Theology of Liberation with particular interest as that continent struggled to free itself from corrupt dictatorships. I had already seen enough of actual living to realise that we inevitably fail to establish any genuine solidarity and justice if we think we can do so without divine grace. One might say that mercy and justice in fact constitute the face of God in human society. The most promising response of a practical nature seemed to be that of building up ‘base communities’.

On a practical and personal level, it was a great privilege and a wonderful thing to find such support from the locals and a kind of intuitive understanding of what Fiona and I were about. Some had forecast that I would probably get myself shot in Donegal. It was suspected then, as we know for sure now, that the British intelligence services were not above ‘planting assets’ in Ireland, who indeed have been known to ‘carry out extrajudicial killings’. Perhaps this partly explains why we found no attempt to openly grapple with those thorny issues.

Around this time, Fr McDyer had to fire his manager for the coops, a guy by the name of Peter Pringle, on account of his republican paramilitary associations, so we understood, while knowing nothing of the details. Peter visited us at least a couple of times, and was very interested in our goats, and I also ran into him in Killybegs, where he was sometimes working on a trawler. He seemed a decent and intelligent man, with a genuine concern for both social and ecological justice, but he was by now rather turning to drink and his marriage broke up.

However, to run ahead, it was a huge shock to us when in 1980 he was convicted of murdering a guard during an INLA bank robbery in Roscommon, especially as a sister of one of the two guards was a very good friend of Fiona’s mother in Somerset. He was condemned to be hanged, but the sentence was commuted, no doubt for purely political reasons, to 40 years imprisonment with hard labour. Fourteen years later, he managed to mount a successful appeal, his conviction was quashed and he was released.*

Such is the tangled web of suspicion engendered by civil conflict. The Glen was not immune to the tragedy of Ulster. There on the good bits of land down the middle were the Protestant planters, there in rocky perches up the sides were the Catholics, who could still remember how they had had to pay rent for their bits of land, and even walk up to three miles or more morning and evening to the Agent’s house if they needed the simplest of implements. It was not so very long ago. Old Johnnie would say that he could remember the first clocks that came about, apart from the clock on the Protestant church, the first bike, car, van with groceries, radio, tv, phone, electricity, piped water….

At times of special tension, things came to the surface. Our Protestant shop-keeper used to disappear on the 12th of July. When Bobby Sands, the hunger-striker, was being buried, a black car parked outside his shop to  make sure he closed. For a few days the whole of Ireland seemed to take a look into the terrible abyss of renewed civil war. But most of the time, they all got on together. All I can say is that is was indeed a triumph that in our experience in Glencolmkille, ordinary human solidarity trumped the atmosphere of fear and mistrust that prevailed across so much of Ulster.

* To find out what Peter is up to now, see http://www.thesunnycenter.com/