File:
<wirish.htm> <Bronze Age Index> Archeology Index <American Archeology> <Home>
HISTORY OF WEST &
SOUTHWESTERN IRELAND 1
[Contacts]
Please Select underlined
categories to view:
|
Southwestern Ireland is an area with a varied landscape, scenic
panoramas, natural amenities, a rich archaeological and historical heritage. The region figured
prominently in a prehistoric trade in reindeer hides with peoples of Mediterranean lands. Wide varieties of geological formations have created a
diversity of topographical features throughout the area. The landscape varies
from the relatively flat terrain in the east, through large island-studded
lakes, like Lough Conn, Lough Carra, Lough Mask, renowned for their game
fishing and beauty, to the naked quartzite peaks along the indented Atlantic
coast, with their rugged cliffs interspersed with flat clean sandy beaches.
The extensive tracts of blanket bog in North Mayo County contrast with the
mountains further south, and illustrate the diversity of scenic panoramas of
the county, which vary from valley to valley.
Mweelrea (819m.), the highest mountain in Connacht situated just north
of Killary Harbour, is the start of a mountain range: Ben Gorm, Ben Creggan,
the Sheeffry Hills, Maumtrasna and the Partry mountains. This area has
beautiful scenery, which includes Doo Lough, Delphi Lodge, the Aasleagh
Falls, Lough Mask, Lough Corrib, and Cong. Further north, the landscape is
dominated by Ireland's holy mountain, Croagh Patrick, (765m., 2,510 feet),
where thousands of pilgrims annually have worn a path to the summit (where
you have the church on the highest altitude in Ireland). The view from the
summit is enchanting on a clear day; the islands of Inishturk and Inishbofin
rise out of the pounding Atlantic waves on the southwest, with Clare Island
on the northwest, and the drumlin studded Clew Bay to the north with Achill Island in the background.
The Nephin Beg range of mountains lies north of Clew Bay, which give
way to the blanket bog in North Mayo County, and the spectacular sea-cliffs
to the coastline between Benwee Head and Downpatrick Head, and several sandy
beaches all the way from the Mullet peninsula to Inishcrone in Co. Sligo.
Achill Island, the largest island off the coast of Ireland with scenic
cliffs and several picturesque villages like Keel, Dooega, and Keem. The
island is dominated by the spectacular peaks of Croaghaun (668m) and
Slievemore (627m.)
The chief rivers are the Moy, Deel, Palmerstown, Ballinglin, Glenamoy,
Owenmore, Owening, Owenduff, Newport, Bunowen, and the Erriff. HISTORY
Southwestern Ireland has a rich archaeological heritage dating from
prehistoric times to the present.
According to the present state of archaeological knowledge, the first
people arrived in Ireland sometime before 7000 BC during what is called the
Mesolithic period. They were nomadic tribes of hunters and fishing people who
built no permanent structures such as houses or tombs. The first colonization
probably took place during that period.
Further details on the early influx of peoples into Ireland may be found
at <Migrate>, <Shardana>
and <Celts>.
In the fourth millennium BC, during the Neolithic period, another
group of settlers arrived in Ireland, the first farmers, who introduced agriculture
and animal husbandry to the country as well as the skills of pottery making
and weaving. They started a custom of burying their dead collectively
(usually cremated) in large stone-built chambered tombs known as megalithic
tombs, the earliest surviving architectural structures in the country. There
are over 1,500 such tombs identified in Ireland with over 160 in the
Southwest. This fact indicates the importance of the region during the
Neolithic period and into the Bronze Age (ca. 2000- 400 BC) when this phase
of tomb building came to an end.
In the literature on archaeology, Irish megalithic tombs are divided
in four classes: court-tombs, portal tombs, passage-tomb and wedge-tombs,
each style named after its chief diagnostic feature. Each class of tomb
probably represents a new major colonization of the country by different
groups of tomb-builders. The remains of some megalithic tombs are so badly
damaged that they cannot be accurately identified by type and are
consequently recorded as unclassified megalithic tombs. Examples of all types
decorate the landscape. County Mayo in the southwest includes most of the
archeologically significant sites.
Eighty-five of the 400 plus court-tombs known in Ireland are located
in County Mayo alone. About 30 of these tombs are situated in the hinterland
of Bunatrahir and Killala Bays in north Mayo. Others are scattered throughout
the county in the hinterland of Ballina and in places like Killasser in east
Mayo, Ballycroy and Belmullet in the north-west, Claremorris,
Cong, Achill, Newport and Louisburgh. There are
seven known portal-tombs in the county (two in Ballyknock near Ballycastle;
one in Claggan, near Ballycroy; one at Gortbrack North and another at
Knocknalower, near Belmullet, one in Achill and another in Killasser); one
identified passage-tomb at Carrowreagh near Bonniconlon (alias
Bunnyconnellan) , with other possible ones in the Cong/Ballinrobe region. There are over 30 wedge-tombs and a
similar number of unclassified megalithic tombs in the county.
The blanket bog, which covers parts of Ireland, developed from the
late 3rd millennium BC onwards and in places covered the field systems,
habitation-sites and tombs of the early farmers. Extensive pre-bog field-systems
with stone walls have been discovered embedded in the bog in many parts of
Ireland, notably at Behy, Glenulra and Belderrig
, west of Ballycastle in County Mayo. The Behy/Glenulra region, known as the
'Céide Fields', contains a 1,500 hectare archaeological site, the most extensive
Stone Age monument in the world.
There are many known monuments from the Bronze Age: 34 wedge-tombs; 12
stone alignments/rows; 24 stone circles; close to 300 ancient cooking-sites
known as fulachta fiadh. The area has also several
monuments from the Early Iron Age (c. 400BC-AD 400): over 250 crannógs
(lake-dwellings); over 100 promontory forts, and numerous ring forts and
souterrains. Early
Christian Period
The early history of the area is obscure and frequently confusing with
various tribes seeking control. Christianity came to Ireland at the start of
the fifth century, if not earlier, and brought about many changes, including
the introduction of writing and reading. St. Patrick, Ireland's national
apostle, whose floruit was the fifth century, is chiefly credited with the
conversion of the pagan Gaels. Recent research indicates that St. Patrick
spent considerable time in the Southwest, where according to tradition and
some written sources he spent forty days and nights on the summit of Croagh
Patrick fasting and praying for the people of Ireland. He had associations with places like
Aghagower near Westport, Ballintubber (well-known
nowadays for its medieval abbey which has remained in continuous use through
all vicissitudes from its foundation in 1216); and Foghill near Killala,
which has been identified by some writers with the Silva
Vocluti , 'the wood of Fochluth beside the western sea' mentioned by
St. Patrick himself in his Confessio.
When the
Judeo-Christian Benedictine monks reached Ireland in 750 AD they found there
a vibrant civilization, which in some ways was far superior to that which
they were familiar with on the European Continent. They learned that this civilization had many characteristics in
common with Egypt and Libya, which was anathema to them. The monks believed that all wisdom had to
derive from South Central Europe.
Thus, they invented the myth that the Celts had reached Ireland about
400 bce. and had brought the civilization with them (see Celts). This was a fabrication and it is described
in the Benedictines own operations manual the "Auraicept na n'Ecese". Julius Caesar in his book "The
Conquest of Gaul" described many Celts, and every one of their names can
be translated with the Basque dictionary, the "Celtic Language" not
having yet existed.
From the middle of the sixth century onwards, hundreds of small
monastic settlements were established around the country, many of which became
very important. Some examples of well-known early monastic sites include
Balla, Aughagower, Inishmaine, Ballintubber, Errew, Kilmore Erris, Balla, Cong, Killala, Turlough, Moyne near Cross, and
island settlements off the Mullet Peninsula such as Inishkea North, Inishkea
South and Duvillaun More.
About the middle of the 7th Century AD there began a huge
migration of Gnostic Christians from North Africa. These were descendents of the Shardana who had spread widely in
the eastern Mediterranean and had given rise to civilizations in Turkey and
the Baltic Region (see Shardana).
This Christian group also settled in other places such as Scotland and
points east.
One of the most interesting monastic sites was that from which County
Mayo derives its name Maigh Eo. Colmán of Lindisfarne, having been defeated
by the 'Romanist' party at the synod of Whitby (in Northumbria, in the
northeast of England) in 663, withdrew with his followers, via Iona, to Inishbofin
off the west coast of Galway. As a result of disagreement between the Irish
and the English monks in the little community, the latter moved to the 'plain
of yews', about sixteen kilometers south-east of the present town of
Castlebar. The monastery they established there, known as Mag nÉo na Sachsan
('of the Saxons'), became renowned as a center of learning, and continued to
attract monks of English birth for a century and more after its foundation. It
is an indication of Southwestern region’s importance in the middle ages that,
when, in 1152 AD, the synod of Kells introduced a system of diocesan
organization to the Irish church, one of the dioceses established west of the
Shannon was that of Mayo. In the aftermath of the Reformation, the Established
Church united the see to Tuam. Tuam,
finally absorbed the Catholic diocese by papal decree, some time after 1631.
The monastery at Mayo became a collegiate church sometime early in the 13th
century, and about 1370 it became an abbey (St. Michael's) of Augustinian
Canons. It survived until the dissolution of the monasteries after the
Reformation. It will be clear from the foregoing that 'Mayo' as the name of
the abbey and, more importantly, of the diocese, was very much in circulation
around 1570, when it came to naming the new county established by Sir Henry
Sidney. The
Vikings or Norsemen first attacked Ireland in 795 AD. and reached
Southwestern Ireland around the start of the ninth century. On arrival, they
started to plunder and loot places of wealth especially monasteries. It was
partly in response to those attacks that round towers were later erected in
monastic enclosures (most were erected in the 12 century). There are about 65
of these fine structures surviving in Ireland, with five located in County
Mayo: Aughagower, Balla, Killala, Turlough and Meelock. The Viking invasion
also led to the establishment of settlements in a number of locations like
Dublin, Cork, Wexford and Waterford which later developed into towns and
cities. The
Anglo-Norman colonization of Ireland from1169 AD. onwards was one of the most
significant events in the development of Ireland. The Southwest came under
Norman control in 1235. The Norman conquest meant the eclipse of many Gaelic
lords and chieftains, chiefly the O'Connors of Connacht, but the invaders
soon adopted Gaelic customs and began to marry with the native Irish and
became: 'more Irish than the Irish themselves'. This process of Gaelicisation
is best exemplified in the adoption by various Norman families and branches
of families of new surnames based on Gaelic-style patronymics. Examples of
surnames today with Norman origins include Barrett, Burke and Bourke,
Costello, Culkin, Davitt, Fitzmaurice, Gibbons, Jennings, Joyce, McEvilly,
Nally, Padden, Staunton and Walsh. The Normans started numerous towns and
developed some existing settlements into towns, as well as organizing fairs
and markets. They developed roads, bridges, seaports and promoted the growth
of trade both domestic and foreign as well as improving the agricultural
methods then in vogue.
A noteworthy feature of the period with which we have been dealing was
the buildings of abbeys or friaries for the new mendicant orders - Augustinians,
Carmelites, Dominicans and Franciscans - principally by the Hiberno-Norman
families. A number of early monastic sites - such as Cong, Inishmaine,
Ballintubber, Errew, and Mayo - had been chosen as locations for abbeys of
the Augustinian Canons Regular, built under the patronage of Gaelic families
(particularly the O'Connors) in the 12th and 13th centuries.
The first friary founded under Norman auspices in Mayo was that of
Straide (alias Strade) established for the
Franciscans by Jordan de Exeter, probably between 1240 and 1250. It was very
soon (in 1252) transferred to the Dominicans. Another Dominican house, also
thought to have been founded by a de Exeter, was Rathfran, dating from 1274.
The Prendergasts founded Ballinasmalla, near Claremorris, for the Carmelites
around 1288. Another Carmelite foundation, dating from 1298, was Burriscarra,
which was built by the Stauntons. Abandoned after about eighty years by the
Carmelites it was later occupied by the Augustinian friars. The Augustinians
were given a house in Ballinrobe around 1313, by
one of the de Burgos. No other notable foundation is recorded for over a
century, until about 1430, when the Mac Costellos established the Dominicans
in Urlaur and the Augustinians in Ballyhaunis. A
decade later Rosserk Friary was founded for the Franciscan Third Order by one
Joye (or Joyce). Nearby Moyne Friary was built for the Franciscan friars by
Mac Uilliam ochtarach (de Burgo)around 1455, while, a couple of years later,
the only Gaelic foundation of the period, Murrisk, in the shadow of Croagh
Patrick, was established for the Augustinians by Tadhg Máille, the local
chieftain. The latest foundation of any significance was the Dominican Friary
of Burrishoole, built around 1469 by Mac Uilliam ochtarach, Richard de Burgo
of Turlough.
Almost all the foundations mentioned above were suppressed in the wake
of the Reformation in the 16th century. One or two have been rebuilt and
restored, but in most cases, only the ruins survive, pleasing, if poignant,
late Gothic relics of what must have been among the most striking buildings
in the countryside of pre-Tudor Ireland. The Lordship of MacWilliam Eighter
The 15th century was marked by frequent quarrels between the Burkes
(as the people of Mac Uilliam ochtair may be called for convenience) and the
Clanrickard Burkes of what is now County Galway, as well as by internecine
fighting among the minor Norman lords.. From mid-century onwards, the
O'Donnells, the great Gaelic lords of Tír Chonaill (in present-day Co.
Donegal), interfered frequently in the affairs of north Connacht, as they
sought to extend their way southwards. They met with opposition from the
Burkes, who were also quite often embroiled in the affairs of their eastern
neighbors, the O'Connors of Roscommon and Sligo. Another Gaelic family, the
O'Kellys of east Galway and south Roscommon were usually to be found in
alliance with the Burkes..
The turn of the century saw the Lord Deputy, Garrett Mór Fitzgerald,
the great Earl of Kidare, ruling as virtual king of Ireland. In August 1504
he demonstrated his power by inflicting a crushing defeat on his son-in-law,
Ulick Burke, Earl of Clanrickard, in a battle at Cnoc Tuagh (Knockdoe) near
Galway. Among those who joined the great alliance against Clanrickard an his
Munster allies were his cousins and rivals, the Burkes.
A mere thirty years after Cnoc Tuagh the great House of Kildare
succumbed to the growing might of the Tudor monarchy, and by mid-century English
power was making itself felt in Connacht, where the rivalry between the Mayo
and Clanrickard Burkes had flared up again into war. By the late 1560s the
Lord Deputy, Sir Henry Sidney, had procured the submission of both de Burgo
lords, and was making provision for the future government of the province in
the interests of the Crown. In July 1569 Sir Edward Fitton was appointed
President, or Governor, of Connacht. One of the first tasks facing him and
his council was to lay down the boundaries of the new counties of Connacht
and Thomond. Almost immediately, he was faced with what was to become a
commonplace over the next thirty years - a rebellion by the Burkes in County
Mayo. Fitton, with various allies, including Clanrickard, met them in battle
at Shrule in June 1570. The outcome of the battle was somewhat indecisive,
but Mac Uilliam ochtair submitted and made peace shortly afterwards. 1572 saw
another short-lived revolt, this time in alliance with two sons of
Clanrickard. When Clanrickard's sons rebelled again in 1576, however, the
Burkes remained loyal, holding Castlebar for the Queen.
It was in this last campaign, in 1576, that the remarkable 'sea-queen'
came from the shores of Clew Bay, Gráinne Ní Mháille (variously anglicised Granie
ny Maille, Grace O'Malley, Granuaile, etc.) first makes her appearance in
history, offering the services of her galleys and two hundred fighting men to
Lord Deputy Sidney. But within two years Gráinne's second husband, Risteard
an Iarainn - a Burke, and claimant to the MacWilliamship - was in revolt; his
rebellion simmered on until 1582, when the new Lord Deputy, Sir Nicholas
Malbie, recognized him as MacWilliam, and later knighted him.
The new Governor of Connacht, Sir Richard Bingham, suppressed a
rebellion in 1585 by various branches of the Burkes with great severity. A
month later, a force of 2,000 Scots mercenaries came to Connacht to assist
the Burkes, but they were routed with a great slaughter near Ardnaree.
In the summer of 1588 AD., the galleons of the Spanish Armada were
wrecked by a storm along the west coast of Ireland. Some of the hapless
Spaniards came ashore in southwestern Ireland, only to be robbed and
imprisoned, and in many cases slaughtered. The
pattern of land ownership in the Southwest underwent a continuous if slow
metamorphosis in succeeding generations as clans evolved and grew stronger or
were eclipsed by their neighbors and London administrations began to play a
more significant and direct role in the affairs of Ireland. The traumatic
Cromwellian settlement, which commenced in 1641, ended a decade later with a
stern regime in absolute control of the country and grimly determined to
reward its friends and punish its enemies. The most significant feature of
the "Cromwellian settlement" as it is known, was the plan to repay
Commonwealth soldiers and adventurers for their services with grants of land
in ten Irish counties. The landowners displaced as a consequence of implementing
this scheme were, if found to be innocent of participation in "the late
rebellion", to be given lands, in proportion to their original estates,
in four counties west of the Shannon - Mayo, Galway, Roscommon and Clare. The
"transplantation to Connacht" also involved transplantation within
Connacht, as existing landowners west of the Shannon, displaced to make way
for the new arrivals, had to be found estates elsewhere in the Province.
For the vast majority of people in southwestern Ireland the eighteenth
century was a period of unrelieved misery, with some minor famines. Because
of the operation of what were called 'the penal laws', Catholics had no hope
of social advancement while they remained in their native land. However,
emigration could and did lead to new opportunities and challenges for many
like William Brown (1777-1857), who left Foxford at the age of nine and
thirty years later was an admiral in the fledgling Argentine Navy. Today he
is revered as 'the father of the Argentine Navy', and as a national hero in
that country.
Culturally, 16th century southwestern Ireland made some contribution
to the "hidden Ireland" of the time, and two poets from the period
have retained considerable popularity: Riocard Bairéad (d. 1819) from the
Mullet, whose songs included 'Eoghan Cóir', 'Preab san l', and 'Tarraingt na
Móna' and blind Anthony Raftery (d.1835) from Killedan, near Kiltamagh (alias Kiltimagh) , who spent most of his life in south and
east Galway, and whose numerous compositions included the ever-pupular 'Máire
Ní Eidhin', 'Aithrí Reaftaraí' and, of course, 'Cill Liadáin'.
There were some stirrings in the west in the 1790s, with reports of
agrarian disturbances in Tirawley, and an influx into County Mayo of Catholic
refugees from Ulster following the sectarian clashes in north Armagh in 1795,
which led to the formation of the Orange Society. Nevertheless, when the
United Irishmen were forced by government repression to move from working
openly for reform to secretly plotting revolution, and when Leinster and east
Ulster blazed into rebellion in June of 1798, no one expected Mayo to play a
memorable role in the bloody drama about to commence. The man who brought the
region onto the stage of Irish history in 1798 was a French general from
Lorraine, a former dealer in goat and rabbit skins named Joseph Amable
Humbert. The Year of the French
Ten weeks after the United Irishmen had been crushed at Ballynahinch,
Co. Down, and two months after the fall of the rebel camp at Vinegar Hill,
near Enniscorthy in Co. Wexford, Humbert landed at Kilcummin strand, on
Killala bay, with about 1,100 officers and men of the army of the French
Republic. Four days later, on Sunday,
26 August, having taken Killala and Ballina,
Humbert led about 700 of his men, and about the same number of untrained
Irish recruits, in an amazing all-night march down the almost trackless west
shore of Lough Conn, arriving next morning in front of the startled British
garrison of Castlebar. The force opposing Humbert
numbered about 1,700, under the command of General Lake, and consisted mainly
of Irish militia. After a short, sharp engagement, the militia broke and
fled, and were quickly joined by the remainder of the garrison in a headlong
flight which, for some of them, did not end till they reached the safety of
Tuam, Co. Galway. The episode, still remembered as 'the races of Castlebar',
was an ignominious defeat for the government forces and a corresponding
morale-booster for the small force opposing them, but it was in no way
decisive. Humbert realised that without additional aid from France his
expedition was doomed to failure. He remained in Castlebar for eight days
awaiting further orders from his superiors, and while he waited he
established a 'Republic of Connacht', with a young Catholic gentleman, John
Moore from Moorehall on the shores of Lough
Carra, as its president. When neither orders nor help were forthcoming,
Humbert marched his little army towards Sligo, winning a skirmish at
Collooney. Then hearing reports of a rising in the midlands, he swung
southeastward through Leitrim into Longford where, on September 8 the force
of 850 French troops and about a thousand Irish allies faced a force over
five times as strong under Lord Cornwallis and General Lake.
The token battle at Ballinmuck ended with Humbert's surrender after
barely half an hour. The French soldiers were treated honourably, but for the
Irish the surrender meant slaughter. There was more slaughter a fortnight
later when Killala finally fell to General Trench's forces. The little
garrison (including its commander, Ferdy O'Donnell) was massacred. The
government forces were turned loose on the countryside. The insurgents, or
anyone suspected of having been involved in the rising, were hunted down and
butchered without mercy. It is estimated that some 4-6 hundred were killed in
the battle for Killala and in the course of the 'mopping-up operations' which
continued for some weeks, while others died on the scaffold in towns like
Castlebar and Claremorris, where the high sheriff
for County Mayo, the Honourable Denis Browne, M.P., brother of Lord Altamont,
wreaked a terrible vengeance - thus earning for himself the nickname which
has survived in folk-memory to the present day, 'Donnchadh an Rópa' (Denis of
the Rope). The awful aftermath of those few stirring weeks, in what was long
remembered with a mixture of pride and horror, as Bliain na
bhFrancach ('The year of the French') ensured that it was a long time
before the people of the region felt free to celebrate in song the exploits
of "The men of the West' and to remind their countrymen that 'When Éire lay broken at Wexford she looked for revenge to the
West.' The Time
before the Great Famine
The early decades of the 19th century saw a new outbreak of agrarian
agitation with the rise of the 'Ribbon Societies' in Connacht. These sought
to protect tenants against eviction by landlords who wished to clear their
lands for grazing - to avail of the high prices for cattle prevailing in the
years immediately after the Napoleonic Wars. Ribbonism had a strong sectarian
tinge, being influenced by inflammatory pamphlets which were widely
circulated at the time and which predicted the imminent overthrow of 'the Reformation'.
Sectarian tensions were further increased in this period by the
activities of evangelical Protestant missionaries seeking to 'redeem the
Irish poor from the errors of Popery. One of the best-known missions of this
kind was that founded at Dugort, in Achill, in 1831 by a Meathman, the Rev.
Edward Nangle. The activities of the missionaries and bible societies were
strongly disapproved of by many, perhaps most, of the clergy of the
Established Church, but they received important encouragement from two
successive Protestant bishops of Tuam. Their staunchest opponent was the
Catholic archbishop of Tuam, John MacHale, a supporter of Daniel O'Connell, a
promoter of the Irish language, and a sturdy polemicist, who died at the age
of ninety in 1881.
These too were the years of the campaign for Catholic Emancipation
and, later, for the abolition of the tithes which a predominately Catholic
population was forced to pay for the upkeep of the clergy of the Established
Church. The Great Famine
Early in the nineteenth century, there were a number of famines in
Ireland, culminating in the Great Famine of 1845 - 1849, when about a million
people died and a further million went into exile. The population increased
from an estimated figure of four and a half million in 1800 to over eight
million by 1841. The pressure of this vast increase exacerbated the fragile
subsistence economy of the period, as land became subdivided into smaller and
smaller plots. Destitution was already a fact of life for many and evictions
became regular occurrences in the Irish countryside. Most of the impoverished
population depended on the potato as their staple food product. Disaster
struck in August 1845, when a killer fungus (later diagnosed as Phytophthora infestans ) started to destroy the potato
crop. The green stalks of potato ridges became blighted and within a short
time the rotting crop was producing a terrible stench. About a third of the
national potato crop was destroyed that year, and an almost complete failure
the following year led to a catastrophe for the remainder of the decade. By
'black forty-seven', people were dying in their thousands from
starvation-related diseases. The workhouses, built in the early 1840s to
relieve appalling poverty, were unable to cope with the numbers seeking
admission. Various parsimonious relief measures were inadequate to deal with
the scale of the crisis. The number of evictions increased. This process of
'clearance' (as it was called) was aided by the 'quarter-acre clause' (the
infamous Gregory clause, called after its proposer, Sir William Gregory MP of
Coole Park, Co. Galway) in the Poor Law Extension Act 1847 which excluded
from relief anyone who had more than a quarter acre of land. Any such
unfortunate person who was starving had to abandon his holding and go to the
workhouse if he and his family wanted a chance to survive. Conditions became
worse in 1848 and 1849, with various reports at the time recording dead
bodies everywhere.
The catastrophe was particularly bad in County Mayo, where nearly
ninety per cent of the population were dependent on the potato. By 1848, Mayo
was a county of total misery and despair, with any attempts at alleviating
measures in complete disarray. People were dying and emigrating in their
thousands. We will never know how many died in the county during those
terrible years. The 'official' statistics for the county show that the
population dropped from 388,887 in 1841 to 274,499 in 1851, but it is
accepted that the actual figure in 1841 was far higher than the official
census return. It can safely be said that over 100,000 died in County Mayo
alone from the famine epidemic and emigration began on a big scale (there was
some emigration before the Great Famine). Most emigrants from the county went
to the USA, Canada, England and Scotland, to become part of the big Irish
Diaspora scattered throughout the world.
There are numerous reminders of the Great Famine to be seen in
southwestern Ireland: workhouse sites, famine graves, sites of soup-kitchens,
deserted homes and villages and even traces of undug 'lazy-beds' in fields on
the sides of hills. Many roads and lanes were built as famine relief
measures. There were nine workhouses in the county: Ballina, Ballinrobe, Belmullet, Castlebar,
Claremorris, Killala, Newport, Swinford and Westport.
Ironically, the great reduction in the population, and especially the
virtual annihilation of the formerly numerous class of landless cottiers who
had been hardest hit by the Great Famine, enabled those who remained to considerably
improve their standard of living in the following decades. The new National
Schools - despite the opposition of those, such as Archbishop MacHale, who
regarded them, with some justification, as agents of Anglicization -
succeeded in reducing the rate of illiteracy by almost half in the forty
years between 1841 and 1881. The result was a population with rising
expectations, and with growing confidence in their own strength and in their
ability to bring about a change in conditions, and so, when bad harvests in
1877 and '78 and a disastrous one in 1879 brought the threat of another
serious famine, particularly in the west, the people were far better prepared
to protect themselves than they had been thirty years before.
A small poverty-stricken place called Knock, County Mayo, made
headlines when it was announced that an apparition of the Blessed Virgin
Mary, St. Joseph and St. John had taken place there on 21 August 1879,
witnessed by fifteen local people.
The people who remained in southwestern Ireland in the wake of the
Great Famine soon showed that they were resilient in the face of adversity. A
national movement was initiated in County Mayo during 1879 by Michael Davitt,
James Daly, and others, which brought about the greatest social change ever
witnessed in Ireland. Michael Davitt (1846 -1906), who was born at Straide,
saw his family evicted at the age of four, emigration to England, and
experienced many hard knocks and disappointments in his voyage through life.
He became Mayo's most famous son on the pages of Irish history and one of the
great patriots of his country. James Daly (1835-1910), who played a crucial
role in the early land agitation in the area, came from Boghadoon, near
Lahardaun, and was editor of The Connacht Telegraph
newspaper. The land agitation started at a meeting held in Irishtown, near
Ballindine, County Mayo, on Sunday 20 April 1879. The meeting, which was
attended by a crowd variously estimated at from four to fifteen thousand,
arose out of a threat to evict a number of tenants for arrears of rent from
the estate of a local absentee landlord. The meeting led not only to the
cancellation of the proposed evictions but to a general reduction of rents.
Of far greater consequence, however, were the wider political effects of the
meeting, whose reverberations were to be felt throughout the whole of Ireland
over the next quarter of a century.
On 1 June 1879, the Fenian leader, John Devoy, Michael Davitt and the
county Wicklow landlord and MP for Meath, Charles Stewart Parnell, met in
Dublin, and apparently agreed on 'the new departure', whereby the Fenians and
the constitutional nationalists agreed to combine in a struggle to reform the
Irish land-system. One week later Parnell urged a meeting of tenants in
Westport 'to hold a firm grip on your homesteads and lands'. His call came as
potato blight was spreading once more through the west, and the number of
evictions for non-payment of rent was rising steadily. On 16 August, under
Davitt's leadership, the National Land League of Mayo was founded in
Castlebar, and two months later the campaign moved well beyond the borders of
the county with the inauguration in Dublin of the Irish National Land League,
with Parnell as its President, and Michael Davitt, its acknowledged father,
as one of its secretaries. The
story of the 'Land War' over the next two decades is part of Irish
history. However, southwestern
Ireland played a prominent, and sometimes violent, role in the struggle.
Almost half of what were termed 'agrarian outrages' (maiming of cattle,
destruction of property, wounding and even killing of land agents, landlords,
and those who were considered 'land grabbers') in the early 1880s occurred in
counties Mayo, Kerry and west Galway. At the same time, Mayo attracted
international attention, and in the process gave a new word to the English
language, by initiating a rather novel form of non-violent protest. This
involved a campaign of ostracisation against Lord Erne's Mayo agent, a
Norfolk man named Captain Charles Cunningham Boycott, whose efforts to secure
the harvest from the estate on the eastern shore of Lough Mask necessitated
the importation of some fifty Orangemen, mostly from Cavan, and a force of
about a thousand soldiers and police to protect them. The campaign against
the 'Boycott Relief Expedition' was orchestrated by Father John O'Malley,
parish priest of Kilmolara (resident in the Neale), and it was he who
suggested the term 'boycotting' as being easier for his parishioners to
pronounce that 'ostracisation'. The unfortunate Boycott realized by late
November 1880 that all his efforts had been in vain (the harvest had cost
over 10,000 - 'a shilling for every turnip dug' said Parnell), and so, taking
his family with him, he returned to England until the agitation had subsided.
The land agitation was gradually resolved by a scheme of a state-aided land
purchase, under which the tenants became full owners of the land. A series of
land purchase acts provided the finance which enabled the tenants to purchase
the land from landlords and repay the loans with interest over a number of
years. Tenant farmers became owner-occupiers within a generation and in the
process created the foundations for the politically stable society we enjoy
today.
Thanks to the vision of Mother Agnes Morrogh-Bernard (1842 - 1932),
the Foxford Woollen Mill was established in 1892. She made Foxford synonymous
throughout the world with high quality tweeds, rugs and blankets. The
Land agitation destroyed servility and paved the way for the emergence of a
modern democracy. Under the provisions of the Local Government (Ireland) Act
1898, Grand Juries (which consisted of the chief landowners in each county)
were abolished and replaced by county councils with a significant extension
of local democracy. The change saw some readjustments to county boundaries..
These developments were aided by the Gaelic Revival of the late 19th and
early 20th centuries. After the defeat of 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin,
fourteen of its leaders, including a Westport man, Major John MacBride, were
executed. McBride had led a small Irish Brigade in the Boer War in South
Africa against the British, and was married for a time to the beautiful Maud
Gonne, the love of the poet W.B. Yeats. (Their son, Seán, became an
international lawyer of renown, the founder of a political party - Clann na
Poblachta, Minister for External Affairs in the first inter-party government
in Ireland 1948 - '51, and winner of the Nobel and Lenin Peace Prizes). The
historic general election of 1918, in which Sinn Féin candidates won a
landslide victory, led to the establishment of 'the first Dáil', or native
parliament, in January 1919, which was not recognised by Britain. The first
public session in Ireland of the new Republican law courts was held in Ballinrobe on 17 May 1919. These developments were
followed by the war of independence, with a number of incidents in County
Mayo, notably at Foxford, Islandeady, Toormakeady, Kilmeena and Carrowkennedy
near Westport. A truce was declared in July 1921, followed by the Anglo Irish
Treaty of 6 December. The subsequent split in Republican ranks led to a
tragic civil war (1922 - '23), again with a number of so called 'incidents'
in County Mayo, but nothing compared to the atrocities which took place
elsewhere in Ireland.
The rights and wrongs of the 'civil war' dominated Irish political
life for a generation and relegated economic, social and cultural development
to second place. Since 1922 the history of the Southwest is little different
from the national one but, with a high birth rate and few opportunities for
employment at home, numerous sons and daughters of the county became part of
the great-extended Irish family scattered throughout the globe. The
population fell from 172,690 in 1926 to 161,349 in 1936 and 133,052 by 1956.
The chief source of livelihood for families during this period was farming,
where incomes were low and in many cases had to be supplemented by emigrants'
remittances or savings from seasonal migratory work in England. In the latter
case, many emigrants had not completed their national school education when
they were forced by economic necessity to supplement the family income. The
prevailing economic situation was aggravated by 'the economic war' (1933 -
'38), and later by the Second World War.
Following the publication of the First Programme for Economic
Expansion in 1958, industrial policy in Ireland was changed from
protectionism to free trade with the objective of establishing an
export-orientated manufacturing sector in the country by attracting foreign
investment and promoting private enterprise. Many multinational corporations
began operations in Ireland and new employment opportunities were created in
industry and services, while the agricultural labour force continued to
decline. Some multinationals were established in the Southwest: Travenol,
later Baxter Healthcare (1972), Hollister (1976), Asahi (1977), and some
indigenous firms like Rowear (Ballina), Killala Precision Components (the
1996 'small business of the year'), and Berry's Printing Works in Westport
established national and international reputations for excellence.
In the sphere of national politics, it could be argued that the
Southwest Region has made a more than proportionate contribution in the
decades since independence. In addition to several government ministers,
three leaders of Irish political parties in this century were born in County
Mayo: Thomas J. O'Connell, who became leader of the Labour Party in 1927, was
born in Bekan; Joseph Blowick, who was leader of the Clann na Talmhan party
in the first inter-party Government from 1948 - 1951, was born near Balla,
and Charles J. Haughey, who became leader of the Fianna Fáil party in 1979,
was born in Castlebar. Castlebar-born Padraig Flynn, who earned a lot of
deserved credit for the excellent road system around Castlebar, became
Ireland's European Commissioner in 1993, with responsibility for Social
Affairs and Employment. There was another honor for Mayo when Ballina-born Mary Robinson
(née Bourke), an eminent barrister and former law professor and senator,
became the seventh President of Ireland on 3 December 1990, the first woman
to hold that office (and the second woman in the world to be democratically
elected a Head of State). ------------------------------------------------------------------ Appreciation is extended to Edo Nyland, Bernard O'Hara & Nollaig Omuraile
for their assistance in the preparation of this history.
========================================== For
further detail, please refer to: Nyland, Edo. 2001. Linguistic Archaeology: AnIntroduction. Trafford Publ., Victoria, B.C., Canada. ISBN
1-55212-668-4. 541 p. [ see abstract
& summary] Nyland,
Edo. 2002. Odysseus and the Sea Peoples: A Bronze Age
History of Scotland Trafford Publ., Victoria, B.C., Canada. 307 p. [see abstract & summary]. |
