Phillip Freeman's "The Gospel of Mary": Book Review

Since I was a teen reading James Michener's "The Source," I've had a weakness for "So-and-so has discovered a missing Gospel" yarns. I liked the prolific Professor Freeman's recent Oxford UP retelling of Celtic mythology, so I gave this a try. Via an e-galley, I did not know until I finished that this is the third in his Sister Deirdre series. That explains some backstory I kept wondering why not more was divulged herein. I had no trouble following along, but it's better I assume to have caught up with the previous books, for the main character evidently has a complicated past and much to tell.

Not be confused with another, recent Irish-oriented story, Colm Tóibín's drama "The Testament of Mary," Freeman's "The Gospel of Mary" features the rapid pace, genial tone, and expository dialogue that fills us in on an Ireland when Christians still number few. Deirdre's grandmother was a druid and she claims the same identity, although when her mother died, her grandmother fulfilled her promise to raise Deirdre in the new faith. With allusions to a failed marriage, other past liaisons, and a child who died young hovering about, it's clear that Freeman's protagonist has had more adventures than most nuns might have, at least in later times. She lives with her friend and sidekick Dari in a monastery founded by Brigid, which to Rome's discomfort hosts celibate men and women together.

Rome's unease deepens as it sends a clever emissary to find out what the truth might be to a manuscript smuggled into the island with haste, secrecy, and danger. It is, naturally, the tale of Jesus told by his mother, and its passages intersperse, as they are translated by Dari from the Aramaic, with the fate of the two women as they get caught up in keeping their treasured text safe from the Church. The Church, after all, fears that its integrity will crumble if Mary's words are proven true, and even if they are not able to be verified, that the heresies and tumult generated by them will bring down Rome

It all moves satisfactorily. I read it in a sitting. Freeman has done his biblical homework, and he blends it with a quest that dashes about Ireland. There's plot complications, but the story line as a whole does not surprise. It's a pleasant narrative, and it likely will educate as well as entertain you.
(Amazon 9/5/17)

Claire Santry's "The Family Tree Irish Genealogical Guide": Book Review

This is the best resource in print on Irish genealogical research that I have found. I had to learn some of this advice the hard way, before the internet eased the process. Claire Santry had the advantage of accessing much online as well as onsite, and she shows how the first stage can be done before one visits Ireland. Key to success is matching the surname back to its townland--the small area that as she informs, was what a cow could graze on. This focuses an investigation on its narrowest set of data.

She intersperses her suggestions with a general history of Irish events and situations that affected the records extant. While for many of Catholic origins, the trail will end around the middle of the 19th century, she shows how landlords, neighbors, witnesses at marriages and baptisms, and other friends of the family, so to say, can orient a seeker who may have a common surname, common first names, and many families of that line in the same region, or different ones. Particularly helpful are patterns of naming children based on their relatives and ancestors: the reason why so few names are often used, and why they keep repeating down the generations in records or lore, complicating the quest.

The records transcribed or microfilmed are gradually archived online, some free, some not. Santry gives detailed directions on how to organize one's notes, and how best to proceed online so as to get as much of a sense of the local area as possible, before ideally a visit. Civil registrations, church records, census, land and property, newspaper, police gazette, military, and probate documents all are mentioned and often illustrated. Deciphering Latin abbreviations in parish registers is challenging; the appendix provides help. From my experience and I assume hers, the state of the online uploads as to legibility does not improve at all on the physical microfilm in many cases, so be forewarned.

From Santry's book, I learned a few new tricks. Findmypast is a site I'd never seen, linked to the 1749 Diocese of Elphin census, valuable for Co. Roscommon information in my own case. Griffiths Valuations are a lot easier to read than when I needed them on microfilm, and the National Archives of Ireland now has some land valuation notebooks I spent hours paging through in person uploaded.

Connaught and Munster databases for landed estates are now online, as are some Irish and British newspapers (some in my search behind paywalls). Finally, headstones by the thousands in photos and transcriptions are now also on the web. Such tidbits collect rich knowledge in one handy guidebook.

Therefore, lists of genealogy centers, local history organizations, libraries and government offices are also appended, as firsthand encounters may have to be done when net-working only takes one so far. Both American and Irish databases are covered, as well as some British ones, which will please the many millions descended from mid-19c emigrants. The book's narrative concludes with a couple of case studies, showing from researchers how they successfully navigated their way through the data.

I'd add that for certain surnames, blogs or discussion groups or websites are often recommended, as you may find that others have preceded or paralleled your path. I found this out years after my own search of primary records seen in Irish record keeping offices, but at least that then verified my own findings--and that the "tree" on Ancestry-com had an error due to that mixing of common first names and surnames that may likely bedevil even the most diligent tracker, due to traditional naming patterns. I'd add a final caution that even at the parish or townland level, you may find repetition among different families, often related of course, sharing surnames that concentrate very locally. (Amazon US 5-18-17)

David M. Emmons' "Beyond the American Pale: The Irish in the West, 1845-1910": Book Review

"Beyond the pale" originated from the limits, the palisades that the Normans erected around their incursions encircling Dublin. Outside of that tamed territory, Hibernian natives lurked, uncivilized according to the conquerors' suppositions. David Emmons, historian at the University of Montana, adapts this title cleverly. For in the American expansion, the immigrant Irish were also seen by Protestant counterparts as inferior, and relegated to the margins socially and spatially. In the growing U.S., contrary to stereotype, some “two-boat” Irish Catholics settled for neither shanty nor tenement. 

Industry demanded cheap, expendable frontier labor. The mines and mills erected, often by Protestant capitalists, attracted desperate Irish. Outnumbered, they formed communities and institutions to secure themselves in hostile territory. Having studied this phenomenon in the Irish-dominated enclave of Butte, Emmons in this follow-up expands his focus to eight different concepts of "the West" in the American imagination and fact. He compares or contrasts Irish Catholic experiences with those of black slaves and Native Americans, broadening this 2011 book's relevance today. 

It rewards careful reading. It's accessible, with folk stories and testimonies drawn from archival research. Its hundred-page list of documentation attests to Emmons' scope and discipline. Attention to detail regarding his claims, therefore, is expected.

The local insistence on camaraderie given dangerous jobs and social prejudice meant many Irish newcomers rallied together in their camps and towns. Emmons suggests that in a land where the future meant to go West, the Irish for their own survival might have cut themselves off from joining this enormous juggernaut. Faced with anti-Catholic discrimination and anti-Irish sentiment, they found themselves beyond the pale again, gathered in their clans, defensive against an all-too-familiar aggressor. (Spectrum Culture for "Our Favorite Books Read in 2016" staff list 12/18/16; Amazon US 11/16/16)

Fate of my fathers

Last year, I remarked to a FB thread that the Irish might have suffered trauma in surviving An Gorta Mór. A recent study verified this epigenetic transfer to children born to parents who had endured the Holocaust, after all. I was mocked immediately as if I was trying to support white privilege, and as if I was discounting somehow the experience of the Middle Passage and black slavery and abuse.

Not sure how all this equates in the victimhood sweepstakes, but it wasn't my intent to enter that contest. I merely wondered, as Séan de Fréine did half a century ago in his little book The Great Silence, how the impact of the sudden and dramatic loss of one's identity rooted in language, culture, and family might be shattered so its effects were transferred by mores and habits from those effected.

In de Fréine's account, he focused on the nationalist legacy, but I recall hearing Garrett O'Connor speak of this in nature as well as nurture terms twenty-odd years ago. His chapter on this topic in Tom Hayden's The Great Famine collection of essays suggested from O'Connor's treatment of we Irish how this might have come down 150 years later, and left imprints on dynamics and complexes.

My ancestral region has lost 80% of its population since that mass death and emigration crippled its economy, its coping mechanisms, and its people's prospects. How might that have emanated in my forebears? How, huddled in a farmhouse rebuilt around 1851, might they have dealt with this--or not?

Psychoanalyst Michael O'Loughlin explores this, and he lists some of the research advanced. It's no longer apparently a fringe idea, despite my FB deniers. As genetics progresses, so do explanations.

Now, I write this short entry far from my expertise, but I raise it anew as I happened to see one pundit fear how this upsetting behavior undergone by millions now might echo down the DNA so to speak. The shakeup among half the nation in terms of their expectations for the election leaves many around me self-medicating with more pot, more booze, and more indulgences. I lack this reaction, but it may be indeed my inherited detachment from emotion from my own clan, who knows? An useful article in Discover Magazine in March 2013 elaborates discoveries of Michael Meaney and Moshe Szyf.

Apparently I am vindicated. While my own family history is left for discretion off this day's reflections, I can see evidence for supporting patterns I have inherited from stress and separation very early on. While this does not ease my challenges directly, it does offer me explanations for why I am at least in part--is it nature and nurture?-- the way I perplexingly am, facing a topsy-turvy New Year.

"Her Exiled Children": The Irish in Montana

A month ago, I attended this gathering of scholars and supporters in Missoula. The American Conference of Irish Studies-West regional meeting coincided with the exhibit "Her Exiled Children". In turn, to my surprise, these events dovetailed with a visit to Big Sky Country from the Irish Ambassador to the U.S., and the Governor of the state. The locals were out to welcome us delegates.

Professor David M. Emmons, Irish West expert and retired historian at the U. of Montana, guided our bus tour. We rode past the Clark Fork named after the explorer, and then the back way on Highway 1 to skirt more riparian valleys. The weather forecast was for rain, so I dressed the part, but I did not need to, as the climate was brisk but clear. Recent snowfalls speckled peaks. Far away from 90· L.A.

We stopped after an hour and a half in Anaconda, a copper mining town that stood out not only for its stack (my seatmate compared it to Sauron's tower) but its hardscrabble endurance as an Irish-managed production hub for that mineral much of the past century. It was a bustling region where the bosses were Catholic, as well as the workingmen and women. Little cabins attested to the life of the miners and their families, who walked out to the mines and back, by the railroad, self-contained.

The steadfast Corkonian, Dr. Traolach Ó Riordáin, told me that the children of Seámus Moriarty only spoke Irish at home back then, but that such fidelity to Gaeilge was the exception. But I never heard such an amount of an teanga beo in America before, for he and others chatted away in it, naturally. My two halting attempts failed to rouse responses. When I complimented his young son on his tweed hat, or when I warned him to be careful as he lugged a concrete block in the cemetery, both attempts at conversation were ignored by him. Will nobody ever understand my bleats, as exiled Gaeilgeoir?

You can see me in this snapshot at the AOH breakfast hosted for us at the Anaconda branch, one of the few west of the Mississippi, and one still, I am happy to report, thriving today after decades on. I never expected such a reception and it testified to unapologetic pride I felt during my too-brief visit. This mortás cine is perpetuated by the Friends of Irish Studies in the West, which I've happily joined.

Butte dramatically perches on the side of a massive pit. So much so that neighborhoods of Italians and Eastern Europeans were dug into, for the resources beneath outweighed the value of those on the top. The memorial to hundreds who died in one of many accidents is moving, with flags of many nations around to commemorate the losses of those from around the world driven to that far corner.

I heard the daughter of the famed poet Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill exclaim "there's Turkey!": land of her father, as we all entered the marker area. Sure enough, the lists of the dead were diverse, although mainly Irish. Back then, almost 100,000 lived there. Now as in Anaconda, far fewer: a third of that.

Montana boasts even today at 27% the highest percentage of Irish-identified U.S. residents. That cheered me. I knew historically there'd been many miners, but I did not realize how many stayed.

Vowing to return, to the Mining Museum, the town excited me. The downtown again struggles, but its buildings preserved from that boom era could entice the bold and brave today, to restore and care for them a mile high. Up by Walkerville, dwellings stretched out in precarious, attenuated, thinning lines, presumably to avoid the subsidence that would swallow them up from those voracious excavations.

The archives there attracted me. I wanted to scrabble in them, especially for Fr. Michael Hannan's diary where he lamented his stay among the squabbling clergy and all those non-recalcitrants from Hibernia not sharing his belief in a particular brand of Fenian payback. Professor Emmons showed me the scrawl of photocopies of the priest's diary: not easy to decipher. But he published his findings in The American Journal of Irish Studies (2012 issue; abstract only, alas, online for we the curious).

The cemetery walk in Butte also alerted me to the many graves from the Spanish American War, next to a Mass Rock memorial. I wondered why the amount. The number seemed disproportionate for the city. I suppose to me, any death toll is more than it should be, going to fight in such dubious battles. A lesson for all who labor to resurrect the names and deeds of those rallied to a cause, and with arms.

Péig Sayers' "Péig": Book Review

While this well-known account has sat on my shelf for decades, I read this only after staying in the author's native village of Dun Chaoin (Dunquin) in the West Kerry/Corca Dhuibhne Gaeltacht. Its prescribed reading for generations of schoolchildren subjected to compulsory Irish has weakened its reputation. I noted when travelling around the Dingle area and her 1873 birthplace that nothing I could see revealed Péig Sayers' presence, although my stay there was too brief, and half at night, to allow me to investigate further. Her book and that of her son are still in print and in local shops, and surely the study of the Blaskets accounts for the bulk of local commemoration, or the scholarship given to her memoir and those of her fellow islanders.

What surprised me was how much of her autobiography took place in her youth, not only in Dun Chaoin but in her Irish-speaking schooldays in the family's new residence An Ceann Trá (Ventry) nearer to Dingle, where she went to work for a household while in her teens. Most of this book are stories, naturally, told by her, with frequent invocations to the holy presences that once filled many an Irish person's mind and mouth, whether they knew the Irish or had given over to the English tongue.

After marriage takes her across the strait to the Blasket Island home where she raises a family, the years compress. The last third or so of the narrative, as with many a teller's life, is more weighted down by sorrow and lament. The frequency of these woes has led to Flann O'Brian's parody translated as The Poor Mouth by Myles na gCopaleen, to the detriment of this original inspiration. 

These tales, a century later, are frankly not that arresting. Bryan MacMahon's translation came too late for many a cribbing child's lessons, but it conveys the air of the Irish for we English-speaking readers. This may or may not be a strength for today's audiences, but the value of this historical record remains. It's not the most gripping account, but visitors to these shores today may give it a go.
(Amazon US 11-4-15)

Peter Somerville-Large's "Irish Voices": Book Review

This prolific chronicler's Anglo-Irish background offers a welcome vantage point from which to look back on the half-century (and more!) from the 1916 Rising. Although its subtitle makes this seem as if it ends in 1966, it looks at the cultural changes weakening the Catholic church and the social mores that for long kept many Irish men and women within the sectarian and political divisions that the Free State, Republic of Ireland, and the Northern Ireland province as bywords and manifestations for division, strife, and bitter memories lived out for millions who remained, or left, the fraught island.

Peter Somerville-Large integrates engagingly many first-person accounts into his own prose. As a veteran journalist and historian, he can blend the varied and contending testimonies of hundreds of his fellow countrymen and women (as well as visitors with their romantic or barbed reflections) into a thematic sequence of chapters. These are loosely chronological, taking you from the failure of De Valera and his rebels to their qualified, partial, and ambiguous "success" in leading the 26 Counties.

Somerville-Large, however, looks to Loyalists, dissenters, and Republicans alike, and he mixes his own aloof (by his own estimation) approach towards this small place whose allegiances loom large. He sympathizes with those who have suffered under clerical and political and economic power; while from a place of privilege himself, as somewhat of an outsider despite that advantage, in at least the post-1922 state, he offers a comprehensive panorama by a social history for the general public that is far more readable and enjoyable than a casual reader may expect. Inevitably, one may differ with some of his tone or leanings, but that too may be predictable when investigating this locale, so full of contention, controversy, and best of all despite all the ups and downs, conversation, as constant craic.
(Amazon US 11-4-15)

Clan Committment: Armenia + Ireland, 100 years on

 

This photo, "Remnants of an Armenian Family," reminds me of photos taken from An Gorta Mór, the Great Hunger, known popularly if not exactly correctly, according to many, as the Irish Famine. Change the costumes or headgear, and these five could be an evicted family from a stone cottage far northwest.

Nothing to Celebrate in ANZAC in Solidarity Net criticizes those who from colonies and dominions were encouraged to fight in useless battles for capitalism, imperialism, warlords, and false ideals. It questions the tributes to troops at Gallipoli. About 88,000 for the Ottoman and 44,000 for the British Empire died there. This slaughter and that in Armenia echo, as death returns in a region today. Small nations hunted and hated by armed fanatics, hunted for their allegiance, their clan, their religion.

James Connolly, when asked "What Should Irish People Do During the War?", after denouncing cooperation with the Crown to defend its Empire and admitting if Germany could free Ireland from Britain, that would not be rejected, finally rallied against Kaiser or King. "Should the working class of Europe rather than slaughter each other for the benefit of kings and financiers, proceed tomorrow to erect barricades all over Europe, to break up bridges and destroy the transport service that war might be abolished, we should be perfectly justified in following such a glorious example and contributing our aid to the final dethronement of the vulture classes that rule and rob the world."

Reflecting this May Day on an Irish history full of invective against its nearest and oldest enemy, I wonder about the psychic cost of raising generations a century later on what riled and inspired our families' desperation: to rage against rulers, to take up arms, to revenge eras culminating in ravaged decades filled with famine, rape, emigration, rack-rent, landlords, conscription, death fast or slow. 

While for years much of my reading and writing focused on The Cause, I find the past few years, and after all nearing two decades since truces were called and arms decommissioned and dumped in Ireland, I'm a bit weary of a sustained diet of study of these events. How, I mulled over as I studied Judaism, can people craft careers in analyzing the records of the Shoah, or literature of the Armenian genocide? It reminds me off hand somehow of the professor of Hitler Studies in White Noise, but no parody is intended by me. Primo Levi's books are being retranslated this autumn and reissued, and the publisher has to remind the press and audience he's not only a survivor-testifier from the deathcamps. 

Watching the shows that John Walsh produces as his son was killed years ago and led him to produce America's Most Wanted as the first of many successful get-tough programs on t.v., my wife and I muse over what that career must do to one's spirit. How far do you capitalize, however well-intended, on death or harm caused to you or your family? Does that market or brand you always? Levi wrote fables like his fellow storyteller Italo Calvino; he dramatized the life of workers, he crafted stories, and he told some of his best tales set before the war, in The Periodic Table, as when he hiked with his little dog. Those moments tend to get subsumed into the great drama. Some veterans never get over the most vivid and harrowing moments of their service, and I suppose for prisoners, hostages, those freed from slavery or torment, kidnapping or disaster, the life after can never create the same energy. 

Meline Toumani, an Armenian-American writer originally from Iran, warns in the New York Times: "Armenians Shouldn't Let Genocide Define Us." She speaks of how Jews are accused of self-hatred if they take issue with the prevailing notion that one must conform to the narrative of what I borrow from the saga of the Irish as "Most Oppressed People Ever." (MOPE: I don't agree with much of that last link's writer, but it's for ease of cyber-reference for this acronym.) Historian Alvin Jackson, a more reliable source, cites colleague Paul Bew who reminds us of the dubious claim "that the most oppressed people in Europe in the 1940s were to be found in Ireland." (671; Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish History.) It's almost, but not quite given the fatal lack some carry now, superfluous to say that this was a decade which few countrymen and fellow sufferers who were interned with Primo Levi survived. So, that takes us back to Toumani. Noting Kim Kardashian's support of the centennial, Toumani submits her thesis: "Watching the dubious intersection of celebrity worship and genocide commemoration, I couldn’t help but reflect on some of the less obvious things Armenians have lost since 1915: not just people and property, but a kind of existential confidence. The genocide recognition campaign itself, in the name of restoring Armenia’s losses, has been so all-consuming as to stand in the way of other kinds of development--in Armenia and in the diaspora." It should not be all Armenians, admittedly a long time away from this event, should focus on for their identity.

She argues that it's too limiting to expect members of small ethnicities and their diasporas should or must conform to a narrow range of banal exhortations to carry on or insistent dehumanization of the enemy nation or empire which committed the violence. She went to Turkey to try to learn from the other side's intransigence and denial. Therefore, in her estimation, she has been accused of "self-hatred." She defines this: "The idea is that you are embarrassed by your true nature — your ethnic nature — and so you mock it or speak out against it. The label is used not to engage in meaningful criticism, but to dismiss such criticism by chalking it up to shame. And yet the behavior labeled self-hating often reflects the opposite of shame; it reflects confidence." Comparing the plight of Armenians to that of the Jews, she continues: "The common phrase, 'Is it good for the Jews?' is implicitly present, too, for Armenians: but what does it mean to be 'good' for the Armenians, if survival means blocking out uncomfortable ideas and clinging to simplistic symbols?"

No, neither she nor I are denying horrors perpetuated. Turkey's refusal to take responsibility, Britain's collusion to worsen the potato blight's devastating impacts by pushing millions off the land and on the emigration boats if not the sides of the road to starve, or the black whirlwind of the Shoah all stand as blots on the record of what we do to each other. But how long do we stand in as "survivors"? 

Back to Ireland, similar questions can be raised. I am no great fan of the revisionists who try, as one wag put it, to tidy it all over, as if the English had a small misunderstanding with their subjects. Yet,  as the commemoration of the Easter Rising's centennial looms and politicians and pundits bicker over whether to invite the British, this drawn-out fracas, to some apart from the scrum, appears very petty.

Toumani concludes, for her small ancestral nation (one that like Ireland has clung long to an ideal of an embattled faith, a bastion of learning amid idiocy, an outpost of beauty and tradition and language apart from its brutish neighbors far greater in power, greed, and cunning): "But the question of what healing looks like beyond the use of a single word; of how children can be taught about their histories in a way that does not leave them hating the descendants of their ancestors’ killers. Of how a country can grow in meaningful ways so that there won’t be a Kardashian-size gap in its national confidence. Taking positions that don’t track with your ethnic group’s orthodoxies, or indeed living your life in a way that is not defined by clan commitment, are not signs of self-hatred but rather an indication of learning to value oneself. And this is at the heart of what it means to be not erased but fully alive."

My friends in Ireland are learning slowly how to learn a more inclusive history, as that nation itself becomes more diverse than any other time, rapidly, ever before. Some like me one generation apart from the homeland grapple with that old language, not easy to learn at home, but far more difficult pverseas, at least from my struggle. Many at home and abroad begin to drift from from clerical orthodoxies, and those who do not feel emboldened to speak out against ecclesiastical abuse. Those of us in the diaspora, passing on our heritage to our children, grapple with how much to pass on about past wrongs, and whether so much of our identity consists of commemorating ancestral pain. Clan commitment remains. But our pride does not overshadow an awareness of nuance or honesty.

"The Otherworld: Music & Song from Irish Tradition": Review

Twenty years in the making and drawing from the National Folklore Collection’s musical and narrative archives stretching back nine decades, this inviting book presents the words and sounds of those who relate tales from the otherworld. Editors Ríonach uí Ógáin and Tom Sherlock define this expanse as ‘a domain relating to the preternatural, an alternative realm parallel to or sometimes beyond human earthly existence’.  Having visited it, glimpsed it, or heard music from it, people tell tales and play songs.

What they offer confronts the mystery of the world beyond, and it provides for many puzzled by loss or wearied by drudgery a chance to enter the imaginative sphere. The fantastic leaps out to pull in the wanderer, but it often repels or threatens those humans tempted or foolish enough to cross its border.

The results, compiled here with two CDs of forty stories and songs in both Irish and English, represent but a smidgen of the material at UCD, but they allow researchers and students to listen in on recordings, as well as to follow along with transcriptions and photographs which enrich this well-designed (by Red Dog) text.  Voices from all but Offaly, Derry, and Longford contribute individual and communal memories. The value of this edition rests in its thematic range and bilingual accessibility into this lore.

For instance, the juxtaposition of Irish and English, urban and rural, widens the perhaps expected territory investigated here. Told by Meg Doyle in Dublin’s Ringsend or Edward Kendellan in Stonybatter, the tale of the banshee (a popular choice for many interviewed) from 1980 balances out the preponderance of rural material collected as Gaeilge in earlier years. Following Doyle’s report, the famous fiddler Micho Russell from Doolin in Clare plays ‘The Banshee Reel’ as the text includes a photograph of a local holy well and a placename report (originally in Irish, translated) on a local hill associated with keening cats ‘wailing and shrieking’.

Séan Ó Catháin tells a legend of Petticoat Loose, who ‘among other crimes’ in Munster, ‘drowned a school master in Coilleagán and killed infants’. The action damning her was being drunk ‘and about to have a child’ while Sunday Mass was being said. It’s a bit confusing, but the haunting nature of such tales, perpetuated widely and doggedly, supports the popular warning of the fate of a ‘fallen woman’.

On the other hand, ‘Amhrán an Frag’ comically contrasts a frog’s entry across the domestic threshold (as told to the Conamara teller as if real) with an invented song by Peadar Ó Ceannabháin likening that intrusion to ‘the fight in the gap of the fort/ an troid a bhí I mBearna an Dúin’.  The mock-heroic, complete with the amphibian converted into a ‘mermaid’s husband dressed in women’s clothing’ conveys the manner in which the everyday inflates into the epic.

Fear, humor, and respect mingle in such reactions to the uncanny. Meeting the devil at the crossroads and learning a rousing tune, for example, can conjure up the clever retort of the human player confronted by the revelation from the next world.  Jigs stolen or learned from devious faeries repeat the prevalent notion that pipers suddenly appear among humans to play before vanishing as quickly. Máire Ní Bheirne of Teelin passes on such an account to Donegal collector Mícheál Ó Domhnaill in 1974, and from here, the reel ‘Tiúin an Phíobaire Sí’ passes (and takes on two more titles in English) into the repertoire of the group Altan, widening its audience and broadening the scope of the living tradition.

Also common and continuing today is the tacit admonition to those walking about not to enter the realm of those who often are given, for fear of summoning them or a curse, no name but ‘them’.  The widespread notion that metal and water protect the man or woman from the fate dangled by the fairy hosts or the sí attest to the enduring (and quietly persisting, or at least not denied) awareness of a mysterious presence hovering near farms and villages, in circles, forts, bushes, trees, or cairns.

Associations of venerable places with the otherworld fill many pages here, such as Fionnbhearra (Cnoc Meá near Athenry in Galway) and Áine (Cnoc Áine near Teelin in Donegal).  Most of Ireland is covered, and much of the past century. Collectors for the Folklore Commission, such as Tom Munnelly, Seán Ó hEochaidh, and Caoimhín Ó Danachair (who looks quite the indefatigable itinerant in his leather vest and pipe) garner credit as the predecessors to the current editors and their colleagues, who wrote down and taped such material. The compact discs show the results, originally on acetate disc, cassette, reel-to-reel tape, digital audio, minidisc, and memory sticks. While the technological progression proves the passing of time for its archivists, the variety of places the fieldwork was conducted reveals the way such material was gathered: in the fields, in a car, or at home.

Labeling this as tradition does not detract from its ongoing relevance. As the editors remind us, Tom Munnelly titled a paper ‘They’re there all the same’ when it came to the question of belief. Elusive or vague as Irish responses may continue to be when asked about the truth of ‘the good people’ or the banshee, the popularity of Samhain, bonfires, vampires, lotteries, and prophecy persists despite a purportedly secularised mindset today. One wonders after perusing these attractive pages and hearing the creaky fiddles or bold voices from the recent past what folklorists a century hence will say about us. (In pdf and online at: Estudios Irlandeses 9 (2014): 195-196)

J. P. Mallory's "The Origins of the Irish": Book Review

Combining archeology with linguistics, adding genetics to explain the connections between these two fields, this expert in Indo-European Studies turns to his homeland to wonder how its earliest inhabitants wound up on this North Atlantic island. With attention to demystification but with an affection for the myths, J. P. Mallory builds on nearly a half-century of his research to present an academic study that anybody curious about his title will welcome. Learned but lively, Mallory's contribution remains throughout cautious in its surmises but diligent in his analyses.

He begins about as far back as the Big Bang, if in passing. Much of the first hundred pages explain how recently Ireland (and Britain, always its fractious or friendly neighbor) split off from the Continent--itself long in the making as the tectonic plates shifted slowly. Two parts of Ireland at one time faced each other, if from a distance as far apart as Australia from the island today.

After the last Ice Age, the land bridge between northwest France and Ireland cannot be firmly dated, but it broke apart over 12,000-10,000 years ago. That means whomever settled as what Mallory calls the "Irelanders"--prior to the relatively recent national formation of the "Irish" under Niall of the Nine Hostages, the first figure straddling legendary and historical times and allegedly the kidnapper of Calpurnius' Romano-Briton son to be known as Patrick--had to migrate into that thawed-out expanse after the melting glaciers filled the Irish Sea.

For only 1/43,000th of its existence as a land mass has Ireland occupied its present site and shape. Poorer in flora and fauna than Britain or the Continent, it could not have supported many prehistoric families. As few as 3,000 people may have lived in Ireland for the first 40% of its existence as we know it. Recently settled in Eurasian terms, colonists may have voyaged from the nearby Isle of Man as global warming wiped out part of that territory. Generally, Mallory favors looking closest--to the western Scottish and Welsh shores for those who would populate Ireland first.

As for farming, around 3800 BCE marks a revolution in agriculture. It may have spread rapidly, within two hundred years, and again probably westward from a British base. Brittany at the tip of today's France may have contributed, as the longer sea passages navigated back and forth in turn may have stimulated Irish-British trade all the more.

Any archeological treatment of Northern Europe debates the origins and provenance of the Beakers, the pottery goblets with a bell-like shape. Suffice to say Mallory delves into this with gusto and wit, no small feat for what can be deadly dull material for those of us outside the trenches. He loves citing his more imaginative predecessors to telling effect about the romantic interpretations of sherds and grooves. "Drink, fighting and the Irish Sweepstakes would certainly tally with Irish stereotypes," he comments as he surveys the eagerness of his gullible colleagues to imagine (ca. 2500 BCE) brutal invaders, tipsy warriors, and horse-drawn shock and awe descending upon cowering scrabblers.

Metallurgy ushers in the Bronze and Iron Ages, and the siting of dramatic hillforts may show cultural shifts for population changes and ritual behaviors at this time.  While Mallory downplays the exotic or martial, he notes how, given hoards found, Continental foreigners could have visited or stayed.  He consistently edges away from a scenario of invasion (despite the Irish legends and their "nine waves" of conquerors) to one of gradual diffusion of goods and contacts. Ironically, Niall's own inheritance centuries later would signal the end of this mythical time, as a cult from Southwest Asia and the customs and language of a dying empire would transform Ireland into the "Irish," whose legacy would be distorted by Christian interpretations of what has come to be known as a "Celtic" past.

Earlier than often assumed, by those celebrating Patrick's freedom from Niall's enslavement and his return to Ireland to convert its "pagan" natives, Roman influence entered Ireland as it had Patrick's homeland, wherever it was across the Irish Sea. In fact, perhaps by way of earlier slaves than that fabled missionary to the Hibernians in 432, Christians lived on the island; a bishop was sent there the year before Patrick to minister to that flock. Niall and his ilk engaged in an active sea-slave trade.

Mallory shows that while a pre-Christian Roman presence left a fraction of what imperial centuries of occupation over Britain had, nonetheless Irish evidence for Roman trade and settlement can be marshaled. From the classical reports of Ptolemy and the Romanized variations on the savage British and Irish tribes and places, we get the first glimpse into what "civilization" regarded as Hibernia, a damp backward dump on the world's edge. "Why the Romans or indeed anyone else should have wanted to come to Ireland is a mystery if the early classical descriptions of the island had provided copy for Roman travel brochures", Mallory remarks with typical flair. 

We also owe the classical historians another label, if an elusive one. They named the diverse peoples across Europe speaking similar languages as Celts. Mallory follows Kim McCone in matching this to a root meaning of "hidden" and therefore "offspring of the hidden one," identifying this allusion with the lord of the dead, Donn, the "dark brown one."

Speaking of enduring identifiers, generations looked south to Spain (anywhere but east!) for Irish origins, but this Latin confusion does not fool Mallory. He dismisses origin myths as modeled by monks on the biblical wanderings of the Jews. He also blames the Wikipedia equivalent of the 7th century, Isidore's Etymologies, with this persistent but false derivation of supposedly adjacent Hibernians from venerable Iberians.

Deepening his application of language, the latter third of Mallory's study finds him tackling the spread of the Celtic tongue into Ireland. These final hundred pages pack a tremendous amount of data--DNA as well as glottochronology--into a few chapters. Microliths give way to haplotypes.

He leaves us with two possibilities about the spread of Proto-Irish during the first millennium BCE. Mallory posits social prestige and identification with trend setters as likely explanations for a native adoption of a Celtic language. He suggests that an initial impact around 1000 BCE is one of two "most likely" windows of opportunity, in tandem with the emergence of hillforts. The second may be around the 3rd century BCE as Tara and other highly visible "ritual enclosures" dominated the landscape and consolidated a mental perspective that would endure as the "Irish" looked around in Niall's pivotal era to adapt the four provinces circling around a fifth center as their nation's model.

This valuable book does not leap from a petri dish or a soggy excavation to any bold conclusion. This Belfast-based professor knows his subject all too well to trust in what genetic findings from next year's lab or carbon dating from this season's dig may override. Mallory relies on commonsense and judicial balancing of the more fervid proposals of his colleagues. The Origins of the Irish serves as a trustworthy. eminently scholarly but accessible guide past tricky diversions and evasive directions. (PopMatters 4-1-13 + 4-2-13 Amazon US)

Colin Broderick's "That's That: A Memoir": Review

While the phrase popularized by Seamus Heaney "whatever you say, say nothing" endures as a code for Northern Irish character toughened by the Troubles, Colin Broderick's telling of his childhood reveals the language unspoken. He gives us a glimpse at those in the IRA who were never by necessity singled out by their supporters, but who carried themselves with an air of entitlement, entrusted as they were by the Catholic community with their protection and their idealism in a time when those with whom they shared a village's main road or shops or those in a market town kept a distance, Protestant petrol stations and pubs for some, Catholic ones for others, and outside of a terse greeting, no acknowledgment or admission that could betray confidences to the occupying enemy and the long-settled watchful neighbor both.

Broderick, born in 1968, raised when virginity still was expected and when the Church still dominated, tells in many instances a familiar tale. He details cutting turf and picking potatoes memorably; he comes of age into sex and brawling the way many have in his rural circumstances in County Tyrone; he emigrates only to return to the hard choices that push him off the island for good.

While some of this for all his cautious balance of intimacy and tact moves his story along as expected in respectable but not astonishing form, he intersperses the device of having his family react to the BBC news reports of atrocities to convey the span of time and the intransigence of the war in his native land. This efficiently tells the reader when the chapters are occurring in a roundabout manner, freeing the narrative from chronology. However, a spirited first ten pages of Irish history in revisionist fashion surprises--Patrick comes full of "retribution" for the humiliation endured as a slave, and overthrows the comparatively preferable Celtic way of life for what soon is suffered as "a good dose of Christian shame, humiliation, and fear." (3) The collusion of the papacy with the English Crown weakens the native resistance long before the Reformation forces the natives to remain loyal to Catholicism as a badge of defiance against those who plunder, inflict, and subdue. Their own form of terror, by Broderick's infancy, sparks a violent and determined reaction from his fellow friends and cousins.

The tension grows as the war surrounds him, and while he never overplays this, or pumps up his own attitude, he demonstrates convincingly his resentment of the British and the local people--often part-time paramilitaries--who collude to control the IRA in its burrowed-in, subversive rural heartland. He lets us witness how year by year, those who become victims in the attacks and reprisals circle closer to his hamlet. Finally, the Loughgall ambush (or SAS set-up?) kills among the eight IRA operatives the two youngest, whom he knew well. This will lead him to make a deeply moral choice.

Earlier, after a harrowing incident not unfamiliar to any farm lad, he reflects on the costs of death. "We lose our childhoods by degrees. Inch by inch, time and circumstance steal the last of our innocence. Some of it will fall away unnoticed; some will be ripped forcefully from our fingers, other morsels of it we will bury in shallow graves, until only the shadow of youth exists, drifting in our wake like an abandoned ghost." (114-115)

"Perhaps that was the real mark of maturity, I thought, finally deciding which mask suits you best, and wearing it." (165) The beat between "best" and the final phrase shows Broderick's timing and pacing, He prefers to reflect, pause, and continue, sifting his memories to study and analyze them after he narrates a passage from his past.

"You just acted and spoke accordingly, never betraying an iota of your interior dialogue, even in a whisper to your closest friend, and then you had nothing at all to worry about." (348) His sangfroid after a harrowing examination by British army at a border checkpoint, in the company of an IRA higher-up who takes into his own wary confidence the trusted local youth Broderick, remains his studied pose. After a well-described chapter detailing his selling hash, working as an apprentice electrician on construction sites in London, and squatting there along with the "Tyrone clan," one prepares for his prequel-as-sequel, Orangutan, which details his stint indulging himself and working the similar trade in Manhattan, after he emigrates.

The reason he does ends his follow-up memoir, which he had to tell. "I was living in a society that demanded my silence, but I needed to talk this childhood through. I needed to scream it at the top of my lungs if I was ever going to get to the bottom of this noise. And if I survived long enough to get to the bottom of it all, to understand myself more clearly, perhaps I would not have to raise my voice at all." At nineteen, already drinking, already made the hard man by necessity in Tyrone among his McClean clan and on the sites and in the pubs of North London, Broderick leaves for America. I will certainly seek out the second half of his life, previously published, and I welcome this writer's voice.
(Amazon US 6-4-13; Slugger O'Toole 8-6-13)

Tim Robinson's "Connemara: A Little Gaelic Kingdom": Book Review

While the last published of this trilogy, Robinson tells us first off it's meant to be the second installment. It nestles into the southern Connemara coastline. Concluding this exhaustive investigation of this Irish-speaking (if increasingly threatened) enclave thirty-odd miles west of Galway city, this Cambridge-trained mathematician turned Connacht cartographer tracks down its traditional place names and wanders in the lore and the landscapes of these locales near his Roundstone residence the past thirty years. The Atlantic pounds these shores with only slightly less fury than on the Aran Islands, the chief of which marked his earlier map and two books in the 1970s and 1980s.

Now, nearing eighty, Robinson circles the last lap of his adopted home turf. He begins at Ros Muc, the "little Gaelic kingdom" envisioned by Patrick Pearse a century before, and looks at other writers, natives influenced by uneasy terrain, such as Pádraig Ó Conaire and Cáitlín Maude. Robinson deftly shows the tension in the former author's novels and the latter poet's terse, "tired" verse.

In "An Piarsach"'s adopted realm, Robinson finds "a glint of comedy" during Pearse's arrival. It's "not the last of the mutual misunderstandings between ruler and subjects of the little Gaelic kingdom-to-be, for the former came with an ideal of the latter that no one east of Tír na nÓg could ever have lived up to." (30) Robinson circles from where Pearse yearned to revive both a language and a nation.

The Irish language, despite Pearse's rural and urban ambitions, recedes a century later. Efforts by "An Ghluaiseacht," the civil rights movement of its speakers, led to TnG broadcasts from the Connacht heartland, but a better economy, massive tourism, and holiday homes endanger its "health" among an anglicized, globalized younger generation. One notable advantage Robinson possesses is not only his intellect and network of contacts, but his own (however English-accented) command of the local variant of Gaeilge. He reveals its rich store of placename lore by his access to overhearing or engaging in the local craic which would elude many visitors to this region, where Irish holds much behind closed doors that outsiders cannot eavesdrop upon or tease out from a signpost.

The twilit, sunset-oriented tone of this final volume, elegiac, suits the now-venerable author himself. Previous books on Aran and Connemara tended to become weighed down by eccentric tales of a Big House owner, eccentric blow-ins and misfits, and the flora and fauna often rendered in arguably necessary but at times typically overwhelming detail, given Robinson's Cambridge training and his combination of art and science. Mandelbrot's fractals, tectonics, kelp, middens: these fit into marine expanses and geological inheritances neatly. Still, he confesses after on such effort to figure out a derivation: "I have spent too much time trying to make these fragments cohere into significance." (155) Instead, he revels if soberly by "my walking of the tide-line between place and story." (169)

He intersperses bilingual renderings of songs and stories throughout, enriching the experience of the mentality and attitude of those who've come of age and endured, or emigrated from, these rugged contours. While fewer Big House or blow-ins (including one with a tragic tie to the Titanic who merits your own discovery) managed to endure its wastes and winds among islands and peninsulas of the jagged and blustering south coast, this narrative flows smoother than the preceding two studies.

His deft portrayals of Pádraic Ó Máille and Colm Ó Gaora during the Black and Tan War, or the sean-nós singers Joe Heaney and Sorcha Ní Ghuairim, resonate. Robinson finds common cause for a preservation of freedom and heritage among these eloquent natives raised around Mám's streams or on Iorras Aintheach, who found in now treeless plains, peat-stripped slopes, or barren shores a heap of lore akin to the seaweed dragged up and left to enrich the stony soil.

Around An Cheathrú Rua, at the studio home of painter Charles Lamb, Robinson observes the disjunction between what Lamb's student Walter Verling selects to paint and what's now evident. Neither telephone wires nor bungalow blight appears. "West of Ireland naturalism is reaching the end of a narrowing outlook. It will be driven into ever-greater selectivity, and so fall into undertruth by omission, unless it takes on modernity in all its ungainly contradictions." (297) Yet, he qualifies this as an exaggeration immediately.

Robinson, not given to hyperbole or even belief in what cannot be charted, remains sensitive to the damage done by developers, as South Connemara divides between locals courting industry and visitors wishing naturalism--but who also demand accommodations, diversions, and excursions. Still, he inveighs against a Tír an Fhía "ranting demagogue" who portrayed Robinson as wanting "Connemara emptied of its human inhabitants in favour of the landscape." (335) His depictions of Carna's desolate industrial estates and defunct Sisters of Mercy school or the massive new harbor at Ros a' Mhíl which funnels 300,000 ferry passengers to Aran each year will comfort none eager to find in Robinson confirmation of an artist's careful avoidance of contemporary impacts. He ties a phrase from T.S. Eliot to a rape-murder of a girl on a waste shore; he learns where holy wells and famine graves endure next to concrete estates and gabled sprawl: he sums up much in little. (Shorter, by a couple hundred words 3-23-13 to Slugger O'Toole. As above to Amazon US 3-27-13)

Tim Robinson's "Connemara: The Last Pool of Darkness": Book Review

Taking its subtitle from Wittgenstein, who stayed here in 1948, this second installment of a trilogy surveys the tip of Western Ireland as elegantly as Robinson's previous explorations of Aran. While the little map cannot display his cartographic expertise (some places are not included and you'll have to consult his Folded Landscapes fold-out chart or an Irish road atlas), his nimble prose and learned eye combine for a rewarding companion along these byways.

I've driven many of them, but stopped on too few. So, a resident of Roundstone since 1984 such as Yorkshire-transplant Tim Robinson, with his Irish-language expertise and his mathematically trained gaze, is ideal as a guide. This time, he takes you from Killary Harbour near Leenane under the Mayo border with Co. Galway to Slyne Head in the south-west of the Connemara coast. He keeps mainly along the coast. Whereas the first book, "Connemara: Listening to the Wind," felt sometimes despairing in its evocation of ecological frailty, this one despite its subtitle feels lighter.

Even if Robinson by now is of "gammy leg and bleary eye," this volume testifies to his perspective and endurance on so many lonely lanes and along the empty shores. The concrete fills some of this, and it's sad to read of the tourist industry's scars on the landscape, too often spoiled by ugly construction. Noting the stopping of the Clifden airport on the Marconi radio station's ruins on the bog, but admitting it goes in somewhere else inevitably, he laments the "death by a thousand cuts of the natural world, and a thinning of the human spirit" that we suffer by letting one more plot of land give way to concrete and asphalt. (176)

He sees the same "mental command" in the dominating spirit to acquire and diminish even in the Neolithic sacred stones erected in 1200 BCE. This "will to power," to lock down the landscape with monumental sightlines, resembles the Ordnance Survey of the British in the imperialist age. The soil began to be depleted by these ancient Bronze Age arrivals, and it began the bog that then swallowed up the stones, "not to be revealed again until our own exploitative, turf-cutting times." (130)

He writes well of what still dominates most of the Irish west. Whether the Rev. Alexander Dallas and the Famine-era attempts to convert the Catholic peasants to Protestantism, the impact of Marconi's radio transmitter in the light of quantum physics, coral and saint's legends, or the end of Kylemore Abbey, he gets you interested. Combining scholarship with energy, he teaches you in an enjoyable and thoughtful manner at what he himself has learned and marveled.

Like his other writings on Ireland, Robinson immerses you. Sometimes in the Connemara books it feels as if the goings on of the gentry and those who have moved here take precedence over the nameless families who have endured, and perhaps then emigrated, without acclaim or notoriety. I found the sections most engaging that dealt with nature or the Irish language place names, rather than chronicles or Big Houses, but this reflects my own bias. Robinson, to his credit, tries to stay more even-handed, a mediator between those like him who have come to settle here, but who by his Irish-language acquisition understands the hidden layers. Parts may slacken only by my own comparative lack of equal engagement with a chapter's topic, but not for long--the sights keep changing as does the weather, and it's no sign of any loss of control over his considerable erudition.

He reflects on juxtapositions of ourselves with the past, hidden as the Irish language names hint at a shallow legacy under the English-language culture that has swept the old tongue nearly away and with it most of its hard-pressed natives. (I note how many living here now do not live off the land, and how many of them as himself come to this place to enjoy its views, newcomers from another land.) He ponders the lesson of the ancient markers of white quartz torn open by a bulldozer today. "Ghosts and fairies are moods of one's feeling for the Earth; they wax and wane with our desires and delusions. The glimmer of white quartz, dim afterlife of its daytime brilliance, may persist throughout a long summer evening, but will succumb to the black rainy nights after Hallowe'en." (135)

Such metaphors show Robinson's power on the page. He adds a naturalist's knowledge and a folklorist's ear to his travel account, and he mingles history, song, politics, religious rivalries, and a steady focus on the human and ecological balance in this niche off the Atlantic. Recommended and if you have not read his visits to Aran as well, add those to your list as well. (Amazon US 2-9-13)

Tim Robinson's "Connemara: Listening to the Wind": Book Review

Reading this a few years after his pair of Aran books, the density of detail and erudition applied to what appears a far larger realm than an island is not diminished by the widened perspective. This Cambridge-trained mathematician, cartographer, and artist applies his Irish-language acquisition to his adapted terrain, where's he lived in Roundstone since 1984. Around his new home, he explores its shores, the Twelve Pins, and the Maamturk mountains inland in the western portion.

He walks without textbooks, so as not to get too bogged down in detail, but surely he consults them, as this learned first installment of his trilogy--well-indexed and over four-hundred pages-- documents. He tries to "see things as they are when he's not there," as a naturalist. (26) He visits a Dead Man's Grave and finds in its name a fitting reminder of our shared fate. He enters a bog to revel in its monoculture, where biodiversity may be lacking, but where it holds intact its own simple treasure.

As in all his writings and maps, the attention to the Irish enlivens this in terrain from which the spoken language has faded along this patch of its western enclave. "Irish placenames dry out when anglicized, like twigs snapped off a tree." (81) In a "gargoyle-logic of creation," Robinson inserts our own small span, as we add years, distort, and then fall rigid ourselves in odd postures. Mortality infuses these eloquent pages, where Beckett's "skull in Connemara" (and I think since this of Martin McDonagh's plays) lingers in the fate of a Famine village of Rosroe. Graves speckle some boreens so much that in his map-making he gave up marking them. Such poetry and philosophy combined with archives and science deepens the fatal impacts of the abandoned.

This narrative is best read slowly and sparingly, for sometimes the amount of local history (he seems to enjoy telling the comings and goings of the titled and the eccentric, as often the incomers get the attention given their printed records of power or orally transmitted anecdotes of oddity that the anonymous dweller or nameless emigrant will never reclaim) or botanical precision can weary. I would have welcomed more follow-through on colonist Sir Richard Bingham's 1641 coverage of the land, the 1660s Survey & Distribution books, or Richard Martin's holdings, for instance; Robinson has published on the Martins separately, but sometimes he alludes in this volume too briefly to matters that only whet the curious appetite. And the map here, the same in the sequel (see my Feb. 2013 review of "Connemara: The Last Pool of Darkness") is far too small and sketchy. You will need Robinson's own maps of Connemara (and Aran) to fully enjoy his books.

Still, that gap shows a book that generates interest. Derryclare Wood's five thousand years in the making, the felled conifer plantation's disaster zone adjacent make for a telling symbol of Irish stewardship for a fragile ecosystem. But, a great joke about King Edward VII's visit to Recess in 1903, and a spirited encouragement on the Barony Bridge at Ballynahinch, restored after the War of Independence, sum up promise well. Young John Barlow hesitated to cross it; an army officer at the other end cheered him on. "Come on, little boy! This bridge was built for you!" (398) (Amazon US 2-14-13)

M. D. Healy's "Irish Genealogy": Kindle E-Book Review

M. D. Healy parcels out advice in helpful bits. For instance, disparity between where an infant is born and where the census records the baby's residence may be attributed to the mother's tendency to return to her own ancestral home to give birth. Naming orders for sons and daughters delineate the maddening tendency (my pedigree attests to this!) of repetition every two or three generations. In the past, the range by horse or bicycle might explain the relative proximity of a courting couple's homes. 

Looking into the Constabulary data, as well as parish baptismal records, can replace the lack of census information for many decades in the nineteenth century. Abbreviations of first names (or in parish documents, the Latin forms of them) common in data, it's good to expand searches in archives to account for these--as well as surname variants. The author also reminds us of transcription errors. (I have one clan in my family tree I've found spelled in the records three ways over two generations.)

Healy intersperses, more willy-nilly into the short sections of a few paragraphs, his own north Mayo connections and culture, place-name or local Irish lore, and application for "Citizenship by descent" guidance. (He errs when citing as "1830" the Republic of Ireland's legalization of this status; I also think that it merits mention that such a status cannot be passed on to one's own foreign-born descendants.)  You even get a distant cousin's shaggy-dog tale about the Irish genetic descent from the Basques. 

All in all, this replicates a genial long chat in a pub with a professional genealogist. However, it's a very, very brief e-book. My Kindle had no table of contents, and while a short reading list is appended, more was needed in the text about "finding your Irish ancestor's birthplace" as to the learning where the locations of "the full compliment" of records might be consulted. Some records are now coming online, but many have or will not. Knowing the difference for those who may have hit that "brick wall" in an initial online search would assist the American audience for this book.

Healy's approach rambles even within these small parameters, but the tips he shares will encourage those who now have the benefit of the Net to do what some of us--not long ago--had to do with waits for the big tomes at Dublin's Public Record Office, the tax records from the Land Valuation archive, or the microfiche lists at Irish county libraries. These, still, may be consulted with benefit, by professional or amateur genealogists. His comments here are parsed out as but a few in total, but they may point you in the right direction. (Amazon US 12-17-12)

Robert Kanigel's "On an Irish Island": Book Review

 

A rowboat away, southwest of the westernmost tip of Ireland, the Blasket Islands seemed five hundred years ago in time to those who visited them starting nearly a century ago, and who read the memoirs and accounts written by its natives. These authors, in turn, did not all know even how to read and write in their Irish-language dialect. Yet, they found an international audience through a motley set of mediators, mostly in their twenties, who traveled to the islands after learning Irish themselves. 

Robert Kanigel, a science writer retired from M.I.T., in 2005 visited the interpretative center set up to explain the legacy of the islanders. On his honeymoon, he got into his first “tiff” with his wife, after he could not tear himself away from the bookstore stocked with works by the Great Blasket Island’s writers there. Unsurprisingly, he winds up explaining to us the meeting of European scholars and unschooled fisher-folk, recorded by sophisticated archivists and shrewd islanders, in a rare convergence of intellects.

George Thomson, a Cambridge classicist (and later leader in the British Communist Party), began the popularization of the Blaskets. He wanted to learn modern Irish, and his friendship with Tomás Ó Criomhthain leads to the publication of Island Cross-Talk and The Islandman. These accounts, the latter a Book-of-the-Month Club selection in 1933, generated mixed reviews. Some then, as with certain critics today, reacted negatively to the manipulation of romantic themes which minimized the repetitive storms and drownings of real island life. Others lauded the “simple, lilting pages” and enjoyed such exuberant pastoralism.

Mr. Kanigel sides with the editors and translators who crafted the storytelling talents of Ó Criomhthain as acceptable compromises to heighten the power of his tales. Robin Flower from the British Museum and Carl Marstrander from Norway join those attracted to what appeared a last bastion of spoken Irish and primitive ways on Europe’s last frontier. Brian Kelly, another mediator, gains a less documented and more shadowy presence as he works with Ó Criomhthain; Marie-Louise Sjoestedt, a brilliant Parisian linguist, brings deft skills to her own work with a raconteur, “Seán a Chóta,” in what may, as Mr. Kanigel suggests, have been an infatuation hatched out of opportunism, or a series of miscues about compatibility. Similarly, Thomson’s own attempt to woo a local girl, he twenty-three and an atheist academic set on doctoral studies in Greek at Cambridge, she fifteen with a big smile, appears fated for failure. Mary Kearney left the island, first for domestic service in the shadow of Ireland’s premier seminary, and then in Springfield, Massachusetts, where she soon entered the convent. 

The mismatch between trained scholars and blunt fishing families challenges both sides. The language barriers, as Mr. Kanigel sums up well, daunt even skilled linguists. Add the shock of leaving Oxford or Paris to land on a barren, treeless rock, so difficult to get to that a priest was rowed over but once a year, and the culture clash intensifies. Mr. Kanigel interweaves the perspectives of Thomson or Sjoestedt intricately into how they approached the islanders. Alternatively, via Maurice O’Sullivan--who while a policeman stationed unhappily among Irish-speakers in Connemara wrote what in English Thomson translated as Twenty Years a-Growing--Mr. Kanigel shifts to allow us to see 1920s Dublin through the eyes of the newly arrived O’Sullivan. 

Emigration by the 1930s accelerated, even as eager readers found more books to read by islanders documenting their now-vanishing folkways and dialect. After the success of The Islandman and Twenty Years in 1933, the reminiscences of Peig Sayers appeared, from a woman who had married into the island but who could neither read nor write in Irish. In the pages of Peig, generations on the Irish mainland labored to learn an “official” national tongue foreign to nearly all schoolchildren. Three works had found success, produced from a community of about 150. More studies and accounts followed, and fame came to Great Blasket.

Yet, a blip of tourism ended with the privations of WWII, and the economy dwindled along with the numbers able to survive in a harsh if sometimes enchanting place. Marriage partners dwindled, and the school taught fewer children. By 1953, the last islanders were evacuated by the Irish government. 

Mr. Kanigel draws upon the research of nearly a hundred years. Assisted in relevant Irish-language materials by his own mediators, he admits collaboration of his own. The results for a wider audience rest on a command of the sources and an understanding of the complexity in translating and rendering one worldview into another aimed at mass consumption. As a professor of science writing, Mr. Kanigel is to be commended for working outside of his natural expertise. He knits together a handsome pattern as he traces the inherent drama within the destinies on the page--and in recollection by themselves and others--of the Blasket Islanders. In their encounters with European intellectuals, this narrative provides an unexpected combination of characters, all treated with dignity and sensitivity.

Concluding with the aftermath of the Blasket encounter upon its interpreters, both schooled and untutored, this history shows how the impact of the island, whether savored in summer by visitors or endured all year by natives, effected the rest of their lives, after nobody was left to hunt rabbits or catch mackerel. Mr. Kanigel compares the setting to the legendary Land of Youth, where writers and mediators combined to capture the essence of their transformed vision of a place. He knows both its allure and the dangers of distortion, but after all, this is the making of a legend as much as it is the chronicling of fact. The mundane makes magic. Mr. Kanigel reminds us of our own longings for a respite from the pressures of civilization and mechanization; all involved in this Blasket saga appear, later in life off the island, to regret to a small or great degree their exile. 

This book efficiently conveys the feel of living in such a place, and the excitement of the intellectuals who lay claim to having found what Thomson marveled over. Of the fifteen or so books from those who grew up or conducted research on the Blaskets, the results were unequalled in any language, “a collective portrait of a pre-capitalist village society, made by the villagers themselves, at the very moment of transition from speech to print.” This Cambridge scholar’s praise for what when he voyaged there was still largely cut off from the early twentieth century today turns poignant, as the Co. Kerry interpretative center faces the depopulated Blaskets, across three miles of rough, choppy sea. (New York Journal of Books 3-6-12)

Tim Pat Coogan's "The Famine Plot": Book Review

The subtitle plays into conspiracy theory, a melodramatic touch calculated to attract readers to what's a familiar saga for many who know Irish history. So, how justified is "England's Role in Ireland's Greatest Tragedy" by "Ireland's best-known historian" according to his byline? I read this soon after John Kelly's "The Graves Are Walking" which places the "Great Hunger" of the late 1840s in contexts of Europe, North America, as well as Britain regarding its similarities and differences to other famines. Kelly expands the story to show how emigration, privation, and policy combined to bring a near-worst-case scenario to millions of Irish.

Tim Pat Coogan takes the side of the native against the imperialist. His preface compares the Famine with today's austerity imposed upon the Irish Republic, and notes the personal afflictions endured by his fellow citizens--at least where the Irish again have to depend on charity from abroad. Coogan advances the genocidal definition of what happened in the mid-19th century, and he shows in the first chapter about the conditions of his ancestors how his paternal townlands in Co Kilkenny reveal in the archived "Great Book" the appeals of the tenants to their absentee landlord. Throughout, I was impressed by how Coogan navigates between the big explanation and the local detail garnered from such records and scholarship. He has an eye for the detail, such as a Mayo priest's reticent acknowledgement of "a very interesting woman" given that sexual matters were not discussed.

The second main chapter looks at the background, full of "multilayered demonology" as faction fighting, sectarian rivalry, and the repression after the 1798 rebellion struck fear deeper in the minds of the natives. Poor law relief and the Victorian ameliorative attempts to fix what was wrong with the Irish according to the English show in chapter three the responses habitual and experimented by the British Crown to handle what it feared in Malthusian terms as overpopulation and as mass emigration (to England). Relief was seen as helping the poor to survive and so as to procreate even more peasants.

Coogan turns from the masterminds to the "chief actors in the drama. There were, of course, millions of bit players but their lines were not listened to and echoed only in graveyards." Daniel O'Connell, Sir Robert Peel, Sir Charles Trevelyan, Lord John Russell, Disraeli: well-known names who sought to solve the predicament as the potato crop failed. Tory and Whig debated, the Corn Law ironically passed even as another Coercion Bill was implemented for Ireland. Most MPs did not want to spend money on the ungrateful Irish peasants, the subterfuge of party politics aside.

How much money would be spent depended on grain sent over. Indian corn (hominy grits) was notoriously hard to digest. Crops kept failing, workhouses and public works projects meant to keep the poor fed by having them build roads to nowhere met with predictable despair by the natives. As chapters five with evictions and six with work schemes demonstrate, such conditions exacerbated the deteriorating state of millions in the latter part of the '40s. Peel and Trevelyan among others under Queen Victoria's direction attempted to assist the Irish while keeping down costs, and the corrupt and mismanaged whole as Coogan sums up "was a microcosm" of how the island was governed under the colonial power of the 19th century.

When these schemes ran aground, the workhouses (chapter eight) left an awful legacy in the Irish psyche and its landscape. As Coogan relates, in one of his typical asides bringing in current affairs, even in the past decade the reluctance or refusal of some political entities to commemorate the Famine shows the "{s}ensitivity regarding Anglo-Irish relationships." He pays attention to the plight of the young as well as old housed in appalling conditions, and reminds us of the inhumanity that marked many who survived to emigrate or return to poverty, perhaps shunned by neighbors now as unclean after their release from "the last places of resort" intended "for the destitute only."

The Quakers to their credit helped relieve with food and care, but sectarian rivalries poisoned Protestant efforts derided by Catholics as proselytizing. Chapter Nine documents the battle as Vincentian priests countered with parish missions the attempts of other Christians to establish rival denominations to overturn "Romanism" under the guise of a hidden agenda. This intricate feuding, of course, helped connect Catholicism with nationalism even more deeply, as converts from the rosary to the Bible, so to speak, were ostracized in the small towns and communities where most Irish Catholics survived.

Who paid for Irish poverty? The peasants, via the taxes due to landlords who had to fund by property the relief efforts? Or, the workhouses, where no "outdoor relief" outside their walls was permitted? This contention in chapter ten sets up a Poor Law Extension Act. Landlords understandably if not always fairly (some did help and tried to do what they could) were targeted by the natives as blameworthy for the awful conditions of the past few years. Coogan tips more blame to the Crown.

Divine Providence, some leaders argued, coupled with a disdain for the improvident, papist, and brutal Irish peasantry, meted a just punishment on behalf of Protestant Britain. Laissez-faire policies met another rebellion, attempted in 1848 by the Young Ireland movement, and in this year of change and threat over much of the Western world, it failed. "English benevolence" was at a low point.

By 1848, after hundreds of thousands of deaths, millions sought to escape. The landlords under the Poor Law had been charged with increased rates to care for their destitute tenants. So, landlords, emboldened by the Crown's own advice via the Whigs, encouraged emigration. Unrest grew, desperation deepened. Soon, Liverpool, Canada and the U.S. found their ports overloaded with the starving, the sick, the dying, and the dead. Chapter Eleven dips into the highlights of this dramatic event. It's sketchier than other sections as it's such a large topic, but it provides an overview for those new to this.

As a journalist, Coogan's well placed to judge publicity. Chapter Twelve takes on "The PR of Famine." Akin to the stage Irishmen always willing to be hired to grace a play in the West End, Coogan notes how the Irish contributed to their own stereotyping as yahoos and gorillas in the pages of "Punch." How the Whigs managed to control the spin on the Famine relief and keeping the Irish in their role as designated simians and as grateful servants of the Queen (depending on the article) reminds readers of the ease with which the press has manipulated public opinion on Irish affairs for a long time. Coogan in a rambling but justifiable aside looks at how historical revisionists, wishing to accommodate in the 1990s a Britain in the wake of the peace process not to be offended, also colluded in this enterprise as "a certain colonial cringe."

Finally, too brief an epilogue directs the reader to the aftermath. Land reform and more revolt followed, and emigration accelerated. Psychologically, "learned helplessness" may have worsened the prevalence of not only delayed marriages but mental illness and schizophrenia attributed to rural Ireland with its high rates of bachelors and spinsters. (I note that this topic is contested in academia and needs more context than the penultimate paragraph in the advance copy reviewed.) This study, while favoring a top-down approach as it looks at policy from the London perspective, balances it when the record exists by listening to the bit players. It's a helpful short overview of a complicated and still debated theme.

Appendices show some documents from the Crown. The photos in the final version to come were not present, although an index would be advisable. Endnotes show the sources drawn upon but no separate works cited. It remains, as often with Coogan's works, a slightly idiosyncratic approach as he likes to step into the proceedings and as this moves them now and then forward 170 or so years, this can be quirky. However, this also shows the relevance of the strands and threads he pursues, if more loosely than a conventional historical survey. All in all, to nearly cite a cliche, those not killed off by the potato blight and its impacts turned out stronger as a nation, in Coogan's conclusion. (Amazon US 8-28-12 and The Pensive Quill 3-8-13.)

John Kelly's "The Graves Are Walking": Book Review

Telling the tale of how over a million Irish starved and withered to their deaths while another two million emigrated from an already hard-pressed rural population of eight million demands steady control of facts amid so much emotion. Earlier generations relied on Cecil Woodham-Smith’s The Great Hunger (1964) for this, full of data as well as narrative; I recommend a less-known popular history, Thomas Gallagher’s Paddy’s Lament (1982) as a more compact presentation. The 150^th commemoration of the Famine, or An Gorta Mór as Woodham-Smith’s title is rendered from the Irish language, generated new scholarship, some of it revisionist arguing against the nationalist propaganda which since John Mitchel’s The Last Conquest of Ireland (Perhaps) in 1861 had tilted Irish and their descendants across the post-Famine diaspora to curse a genocidal Crown and a heartless Britain when that kingdom was mentioned. 

Science historian John Kelly comes to this daunting task of conveying in four-hundred pages of text a complicated explanation of the origins of the Famine; its impacts as it spread along two major periods from 1845 to around 1850 in worsening patterns; its entanglement within British principles of charity, Divine Providence, public works, poorhouses, workhouses, legal wrangling, and bungled relief; its effects as the native Irish fled to Liverpool, Canada, and New York City; and if too briefly its resonance for the Land War movements later in the century. He conveys an impressive study of the firsthand accounts, the government reports, and the secondary scholarship within a well-paced, judicious presentation of what too often has been distorted by Irish propaganda—itself marshaled to fend off enduring and cruel British stereotypes of a feckless people.

Mr. Kelly intersperses sharply etched vignettes throughout his text; these play off the volume’s period illustrations of wretched squalor and pompous comfort well. (It lacks, all the same, an index and timeline.) He stresses a European context for widespread crop failure. Contrast this with what in many Irish-authored Famine accounts has remained a parochial blight rather than a continental disaster. Rain pummeled Europe and spread the deadly fungus westward to the islands in the North Atlantic. Comfortable with paraphrasing economic theory and climatic studies, Mr. Kelly early links the humble potato, relied upon far too heavily for its easy cultivation and cheap nutrients, to “the violent odor of decay” that became rapidly its telling smell, for years near the middle of the nineteenth century.

This Victorian era also promoted thrift, diligence, and the notion of a Divine Providence angry at indolent and “papist” Irish who, like their Scots highland predecessors, might better be used as workers elsewhere, their Celtic homeland put to large-scale farming or cleared for grazing to feed the needs of the British Empire. Potatoes were so affordable, so filling, and so simple to cultivate that this left the native Irish with all too abundant an amount of free time to drink, saunter, and procreate. This angered their perceived betters, who governed them from the Big House overseeing the farms, or from the estates in England whose rents were extracted by absentee landlords from such cartoonish, lumpish, simian throwbacks. To their credit, as Mr. Kelly shows, some overseers intervened to try to save their tenants. Many gentry despaired of the decline in rent payers, while others looked forward to a cleansing of the land of its less dedicated inhabitants. 

This practical insistence -- coupled with a relentless exegesis that as a “Visitation of Providence,” the Famine was not a natural disaster but a God’s punishment “for violating His laws on food tariffs” -- shows how the British contentions over the Corn Law and relief of the poor by tax reforms delayed sufficient assistance. This lack doomed many Irish, by the end of 1846, to an early grave or exile’s boat.

Scenes of devastation caught the attention of the London press early; Camus, Conrad, Beckett, Boccaccio, Joyce, and especially Melville’s Liverpool docks shown in his novel Redburn (1849) all gain appropriate context placed by Mr. Kelly alongside the eerie desolation and physical annihilation that appeared to clear life and leave only corpses from many sodden, stinking, howling landscapes. Shallow graves filled and emptied, as packs prowled and feverish bodies, dead or dying, sprawled in dark cabins. Mr. Kelly sums this all up in one of many finely penned passages: “In areas devastated by the blight, the familiar scenes of deep scarcity reappeared: men standing in early-morning fields, sucking the blood from the neck of a living cow, seaweed on the boil; grass-stained mouths and hands; women running an anxious hand over a sleeping child to see if she still breathed.” 

These images found verbal and visual illustration for many readers abroad. This is where Mr. Kelly’s analysis sharpens: he provides necessary context for how the British responded and why. Their “relief policy was never deliberately genocidal, but its effects often were.” This careful distinction applies to the chronology he sets out. What in 1845 began that summer as a tragic harvest worsened after the fumbled and hesitant relief given far too few among far too many afflicted failed. Eighteen months on, the stubborn British moral that God’s hand dealt the improvident Irish natives a blow they deserved for their poverty and superstition contended with those imperial ministers who reckoned that “salutary” change might improve the plight of a people deficient in “initiative, industriousness, and self-reliance.” Meanwhile, who merited handouts as bodies filled mass graves or were dismembered by rats and dogs was far too long debated in Westminster. 

The London Times editorialized: “There are times when something like harshness is the greatest humanity.” Tough love, it appeared for many British lords and landlord, would teach their Irish rent payers timely lessons. Social engineering meant that relief policies could be implemented, and religious principles might align with economic reform. So reasoned, if after long bickering, a few in London.

Queen Victoria in January 1847 spoke of “the dearth of provisions” in her nation’s oldest colony. This spurred “the first celebrity-heavy international charity event” sponsored quasi-officially by a Crown suspicious of public funding when the private sector could raise, by today’s equivalents, about $250 million in relief. 

The Irish, however, could not wait for modernization schemes. Mr. Kelly reminds us how Ireland then compared to Haiti, Somalia, or the Congo now. While Mao and Stalin perpetrated deadlier famines and heavier casualties, the impact of the Famine hit the small island harder, for it lacked enough people or enough alternative resources to sustain the force of mass deaths and social collapse. A battered Ireland lost three million of her people in a few years, even as grain continued, for a while, to be exported while more was imported. The trouble was, as Mr. Kelly shows perhaps too subtly, that the two exchanges of foodstuffs did not synchronize. This followed a second summer, in 1846, with rotting crops, leading to the disastrous year of “Black ‘47” when deaths soared still higher.

That spring, public works—roads to nowhere, hills decapitated, holes filled in—stopped so the Poor Law could start and Alexis Soyer’s Soup #1 (splendidly described in its preparation) could be doled out at kitchens. This shift cut off aid to any small farmer eking out a living on more than a quarter acre. This cut off many already on the edge of starvation. This caused pestilence, scurvy, and disease to exponentially accelerate. This pushed many millions to flee to the ports. The landlords and Crown often hastened their exit, envisioning the success of their social model. Too much charity meant that the victims would rely on it.

Yet, as Liverpool found its conniving, greedy, portside con artists overwhelmed by the often illiterate and often Irish-monoglot emigrants who filled its docks and flophouses, and as London faced a thousand new immigrants a day to sleep in its parks, the Crown’s strategy backfired. Many newcomers were too poor to afford Canadian or American passage. Those who did may have regretted it. 

Grosse Isle lingers ominously in Irish Canada for its precipitous mortality rate; this embarkation station found itself the terminus for what would be 20,000 dead Irishmen, women and children in the dismal summer of 1847. That humid season felled many unused to the drastic weather and weakened further by infested environs after a horrid sea crossing. Down the Atlantic seaboard, nearly half of those arriving in New York City in 1848 were Irish; a few years later, over a fifth of all Gothamites were Hibernian-born. Tammany Hall, “Dagger John” Hughes, and the scams perpetrated on the hapless immigrants, throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth chapters here, gain splendid summary and elegant elaboration. It’s a familiar storyline to those immersed in Irish American study, but Mr. Kelly’s deft control of when to pause and gawk and where to glide by makes for a streamlined, moving, and smoothly conducted tour.

Similarly, his conclusion taking us back to a changed homeland telescopes the failure of the brief 1848 Young Ireland rebellion, the decline of the “Liberator” Daniel O’Connell, Fenians, and Land League reform attempts of the later century understandable for a general readership. The Famine’s legacy led to landlords evicting more tenants. The “poor rate” rose by 1000% between 1847 and 1851.

That latter year, my family’s ancestral farmhouse was rebuilt. I learned from The Graves Are Walking that the Catholic diocese in which it crumbles (as a ruin today) declined in population by 10-17% in a few months of the Famine. I know that the county today has about a fifth of the people who lived there pre-Famine. I also recall how my great-grandfather left that county to agitate in London in 1898 for land reform as part of a local delegation. My family lore has it he was “found drowned in the Thames, in mysterious circumstances”—another reason why I closed Mr. Kelly’s impressive narrative history reminded of why so many Irish, abroad or back home, possess such long memories after such hard times. (New York Journal of Books: Review 8-21-12; see also my take on Tim Pat Coogan's new "The Famine Plot")