events excite such passions?
I realise that, beneath the emotive exchanges, large and weighty issues loom. What happens when an outside force with a vigorous agenda descends upon an isolated community, when the forces of religion, imperialism, famine and landlordism coalesce like a whirlpool on a remote Atlantic island? What brought a stream of nineteenth-century commentators to Achill to observe with fascination this island settlement?
Is this, when all is said and done, a narrative about the fusion of good and bad and the seduction of idealism by other forces?
I am hooked by the story. I decide to retrace these events, walk the places where they were played out, search the archives, and listen to the stories handed down by the people.
PART 1
On a winter’s night, 6 January 1839, a woman listens in the darkness of her mountainside home. The wind strengthens by the hour; it is more terrifying than any island gales Eliza Nangle has experienced in five gruelling Achill winters. Her husband is absent, away on important engagements, for he must travel to raise funds for the Achill Mission’s work and for the family’s survival. Perhaps her three small daughters rush to her for comfort as successive squalls roll up the mountain, Slievemore, to a screaming crescendo. It is the ‘Night of the Big Wind’ – the most devastating storm ever recorded in Ireland, which will leave hundreds dead in its wake. What goes through her mind? Perhaps she looks out into the darkness where, less than a hundred paces away, the remains of her three infant sons rest: one for each of her first three years on this island. Slievemore will become her resting place too – her body, blood and bones forever sunk into the island mountain where Atlantic winds furiously pound.
– Patricia Byrne
CHAPTER ONE
Shaking the Dry Bones
At precisely midday on Friday, 26 January 1827, a stern man in his sixties, known for his mild manner in private and his obstinate views in public rose to address a gathering in a packed courthouse in the mid-northern Irish town of Cavan. John Maxwell-Barry, 5th Baron Farnham and head of an expansive 30,000-acre estate, ought to have been wintering in England with his wife, Lady Lucy, to escape the winter dampness that seeped into his bones. But he could not leave, for he was swept up in developments which could well drag pathetic Ireland out of its stupor.
The town crackled with religious commotion, the agitation reported in the Freeman’s Journal with a suggestion – in something of an overstatement – that ‘recent events have directed all eyes towards Cavan’, and that those events could have implications far beyond the town.1 For months, Roman Catholics in Cavan had been renouncing their faith and converting to Protestantism in a wave of evangelical fervour.2 Bulletins on the town’s walls carried daily updates, and hired men walked the streets with placards announcing the latest conversions. Lord Farnham himself claimed that 453 people had defected from Catholicism since October: evidence, surely, that the conversion of thousands of Ireland’s inhabitants to Protestantism was no longer ‘a matter of Utopian speculation’.3 He believed that Cavan was at the nerve centre of nothing less than a new moral order in Ireland. It was the clever coincidence of a system that both improved the moral and practical conditions of the tenants while boosting the efficiency of the landlord’s estate.
Public notices announced the purpose of the Cavan courthouse assembly that winter day. There were plans afoot to establish a new society, one that would promote the progress of the Reformation and Protestantism across the whole of Ireland. Many of those gathering to listen to Lord Farnham believed that the spirit of evangelical revival would sweep out from Cavan like wildfire, delivering Ireland from the forces of the antichrist in the shape of Roman Catholicism and its priests. Cavan had to seize the moment. This was the point in time when a number of factors coalesced to germinate a remarkable narrative: the historical phenomenon of the second reformation as the evangelical movement swept across the midlands region and the southern belt of Ulster; the fusion of this movement with economics and landlordism as exemplified in the figure of Lord Farnham and the innovative management of his estate; and a young, volatile clergyman who became caught up in the Cavan turbulence with life-changing repercussions. Out of this maelstrom emerged an astonishing series of events that reached across Ireland into an isolated island community.
On a winter’s morning, the sun splashes light on the high grey walls of Farnham House, flinging thick shadows across the green pastures. Nowadays, the demesne – a modern golf and spa hotel resort – boasts several nature trails across what the hotel promotion literature describes as ‘the three-hundred-year-old footprints of landed gentry’. Grazing cattle move out of the shadows into the warmth of the morning sunshine while hotel guests stroll nearby. The only embellishment on the plain building façade is the Farnham coat of arms incorporating the family motto: Je suis prêt (I am ready).
It is a brisk twenty-minute walk along the old estate road pathway to the secluded Farnham Lough where decaying leaves of beech, oak and sycamore are soft underfoot. Perhaps Lord Farnham strolled here before heading out through the arch of the stone perimeter estate wall on the short journey into Cavan town. He was a landlord on whom the wellbeing of many tenants rested; he was also a man imbued with the sureties of his faith and a conviction that the religious reformation of the people was good not just for his estate and tenants, but for the progress of the whole of Ireland.
Sectarian tension seethed through 1820s Ireland as agitation for full Catholic emancipation grew. Among the landed classes across the southern stretch of the province of Ulster, including Cavan, a counter force was at work: it was the Protestant evangelical movement known as the ‘second reformation’.4 Evangelicalism and landlordism combined in reacting to the growing assertiveness of Irish Roman Catholicism as evangelical Protestantism and economic progress became inextricably linked. The evangelical crusade aimed at nothing less than the moral reformation of the minds and hearts of the Irish peasantry and Cavan was leading the campaign. The movement was underlined by a belief that the Protestant Irish had the moral character and enterprise essential to economic progress, while Catholicism and its priests were held responsible for the wretched state of the country and its peasantry.
It was five years since John Maxwell-Barry had inherited the Farnham estate on his uncle’s death and he had wasted no time. Believing that there was nothing more injurious to good estate management than idle, slothful tenants and the influence of the Catholic Church and its priests, he immediately set about the transformation of his estate with a neat formula: break the hold of Catholicism on the tenants, promote evangelical education with good moral living, and improved estate efficiency would follow. It was a win-win for landlord and tenant and the landlord quickly circulated his plans in a pamphlet to over 100 of his tenants.5 He told them that he wanted them to prosper, to be virtuous and happy, and to live good moral lives. If they did so, they would receive his praise, his support and his practical help; but all evildoers would be punished, without favour or leniency. They, his tenants, must use their own industry and exertions to improve their lot, remove all evil from their lives and grow in prosperity.
Education and religion were at the heart of Lord Farnham’s system. He encouraged parents to send their children to the estate schools, to train them in virtue and sobriety, and withdraw them from ‘dances, ball-alleys, cock-fights and all other scenes of dissipation’.6 The schools were strictly scriptural: classes opened and closed with the singing of a hymn, a reading from the Bible and a prayer.
Soon, change was visible across the Farnham estate. In place of run-down shebeens there were neat slated dwellings, whitewashed inside and out, with perimeter fences, painted gates and a kitchen garden for fruit and vegetables – an attractive vista, like in a contemporary glossy property brochure. Tenants could purchase building materials, shrubs and implements from the estate depot at reduced prices. On no account were pigs or cattle permitted indoors, and an area of six feet in width had to be kept clear and clean around each dwelling. As to the moral improvement of his tenants, Lord Farnham did
