altogether living on the mission grounds, twenty-seven of these families are persons who have been brought out of the Church of Rome; some of these came to the island with us; since we came into the island eighteen or nineteen families have been brought out of the Church of Rome.’
What conditions were applied to the people who were given ground at the colony?
‘The manner of our proceeding is simply this: we give a cottage, and we give an acre of reclaimed ground, and for this they pay us a yearly rent of £2 5s, getting constant employment from us in reclaiming the rest of the land; they are employed as our labourers in reclaiming land.’
Was it a condition of residence at the colony that the people were Protestant?
‘All the persons living on our mission ground are Protestant with the exception of one female; the place is intended as a refuge for persons wishing to be protected from the tyranny which everyone acquainted with the state of Ireland knows is practiced upon those persons who leave the Church of Rome.’
Would the colony house people who converted from Roman Catholic to Protestant?
‘Yes, and are suffering persecution.’
Were the people who became converts and were admitted to the colony in a better position than the most destitute Catholics in Achill?
‘They are in a better condition, certainly. But when we strive to better their temporal condition, it is insinuated that we attempt to induce them to change their religious profession by bribery.’8
The words were unequivocal: Edward Nangle had come to Achill to convert the Catholic people to Protestantism and all else was subsidiary to this objective. The real honey pot was the schools, for the people thirsted for education, but John MacHale and the priests sought to out manoeuvre him by setting up their own schools and the scandal for Edward was that the priests were aided and abetted by the national education system. The prizes on offer to woo the people to the colony were enticing: land and employment for any who could overcome the power of the priests and the taunts of neighbours – tantalisingly seductive if you lived a wretched life.
The explosion of new schools in 1830s Achill was remarkable. By 1837, there were almost 400 pupils, only 20 per cent of whom were female, enrolled in five national schools under the patronage of the Catholic parish priest while the Achill Mission schools, which were outside the national system, struggled to retain their earlier pupil numbers.9 The antagonism between Edward Nangle and John MacHale at least had the merit of triggering the introduction of widespread education in Achill.
***
The contrast was astonishing between the conditions of the women associated with the Achill Mission colony on the one hand, and the common drudgery of the native Achill women on the other.10 Eliza Nangle was a Protestant woman, reared in a comfortable, sheltered middle-class home and imbued with the evangelical values of the period. Like others of her contemporaries, she gave her whole-hearted support to a strong, evangelical figure, in her case her husband. From the early years of their marriage, as a pregnant woman and mother of a young daughter, she had accompanied Edward on the arduous famine relief journey to the west. She set up home with her young family in the most inhospitable conditions imaginable, sublimating the family needs to Edward’s enterprise. For a woman imbued with the virtues of orderliness, cleanliness, temperance and domestic virtue, and attempting to inculcate these qualities in her young daughters, the relocation to Achill would have been traumatic. She could not have envisaged how the family’s first year in Achill would turn out: extreme and inhospitable living conditions, her husband’s poor health, the eruption of violence against the colony and a dead infant son. Most painful of all must have been the ferocity of the opposition to the mission’s work for a woman who desired to do good for those less fortunate than herself.
Eliza had little in common with the island women who eked out an existence in one of the most remote and economically-deprived areas in Ireland. The Achill woman lived in ‘fourth-class’ houses with neither chimney nor window, had no formal schooling, could not read or write and looked after the animals and tillage when the men took on seasonal migrant work in England. The island landscape was her domain: she harvested turf and carried it home on her back; hauled seaweed from the shore to fertilise the soil; planted, weeded and harvested the potato crop; baited and gutted fish; sheaved and stacked oats and drove cattle. It was arduous physical work. The gulf between the lives of the colony women and their counterparts on the island was immense.
There was no administrative or commercial centre on the island and no middle class with the exception of the coastguard families. For over a decade, the coastguard was the most visible government agency charged with preventing smuggling, shipwreck plundering and illegal distilling. Margaret Reynolds, a Catholic woman married to the Protestant Captain Francis Reynolds of the coastguard, arrived in Achill a couple of years before the Nangles and this couple was the closest Edward and Eliza had to island friends.
Margaret’s position was tense and uncomfortable as she became embroiled in a power struggle between Edward and her husband on the one hand, and the Achill Catholic clergy on the other. While rearing her large family, she stoically tried to follow her conscience, attending Catholic services and appearing bewildered by the fractious sectarian tensions around her. She listened at Sunday mass as the parish priest, Father Connolly, harangued the public about the Achill Mission and their attitude to the devotion of Catholics to the Virgin Mary. When she reported back to her husband, he, in turn, challenged the priest to a public debate on the doctrinal issues involved. Margaret was caught in an impossible situation which would, in time, turn out to be tragic.
***
Before leaving Achill, Jane Franklin set out to experience what she could of the island, used as she was to hiking, exploring, observing and note-taking. She took to the mountains, crossing the width of Slievemore behind the Achill Mission settlement on horseback, and also traversing the magnificent Minaun on the island’s other coast. While disappointed not to find any Achill amethyst stone worth taking away, she appreciated the superior quality of Achill mutton grazed on Atlantic-splashed heather. While playing down her knowledge of the island plants, she noted ‘the miniature fern, the abundant thrift and London pride, and the pretty little tormentilla, of which the peasants made a yellow dye for their shoe-skins’. She spied an eagle and some foxes, saw rabbits swarm the Dugort sand dunes, and witnessed the abundance of snipe, woodcock, grouse and plover, a delight for the sportsman’s gun. Most delightful were the seals basking on exposed rocks in Achill Sound until they slid into the water, ‘like the crocodile of the Nile’.
What, then, was her overall assessment of the Achill Mission? On this, she was in two minds. There was so much that was positive about Edward Nangle’s project: ‘If my good wishes are with this experiment, it is in the absence of any more effectual means of rescuing Ireland from her present state of moral and spiritual debasement.’
However, there was a hesitancy that prevented her from fully endorsing the proselytising institution. It was a reluctance that resulted from the manner in which she observed Edward Nangle deploring and castigating sincerely held Catholic doctrines such as that of the Eucharist: ‘I cannot but deplore that Mr Nangle should think it right to speak as he does of a doctrine [the Eucharist] which however erroneous and, to us, incredible, is held in pious awe by many an honest Catholic.’11
While generally approving of the Achill Mission’s programme of conversion, she was apprehensive about some of the tactics used: ‘we may still regret that any weapon sharper than the voice of persuasive reasoning, any language less tender than the daily prayer which Mr Nangle fervently offers up for his deluded and deluding brethren’ should have been used in achieving those conversions. While accepting the viciousness of the Catholic backlash against the mission, she feared that Edward Nangle’s fierce, over zealous approach could prove detrimental
