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/