about ten o’clock, the tension on the Nottingham broke as the steamer rounded Achill’s southern tip into Clew Bay with the wind at its stern and the waters finally smooth. The vessel anchored within a couple of miles of Westport where the passengers got some welcome rest. They awoke to calm waters amidst the scenic surroundings of Clew Bay with its multitude of islands. Leaning over the gunwale, Edward gazed out at the sharp-summited Croagh Patrick on the southern coast of the bay: the holy mountain, imposing and resplendent as it jutted towards the heavens. Edward reflected on his Catholic countrymen who, year after year, lacerated their limbs on the mountain in pilgrimages of self-inflicted torture. He felt only sorrow for their moral condition, reflecting the thoughts of one Christopher Anderson, ‘without a vernacular literature, without books, without schools, and without the ministration of the divine work in their native language’.6 He would bend every fibre of his being towards changing their lot.
William Baker Stoney, the rector of the nearby Newport parish, boarded the Nottingham in Westport and claimed some Indian meal for his parishioners. The famine distress in the area was acute, he told the visitors, and nowhere was more afflicted than Achill Island. He invited Edward and Eliza to his home as guests. Already, Edward was setting his sights on the remote place where he would implement his evangelical vision. He would travel to Achill without delay.
***
What was wrong with Ireland? Why was the country collapsing? Why was the condition of the people so appalling and disorderly in contrast to that of the English? A thoughtful, dark-haired, delicate-looking French nobleman was determined to find the answer and his conclusions would differ from those of Edward Nangle. What he found in Ireland and the west was deep-seated and intractable.
One August day in the 1830s, the young aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville arrived at Newport, about twenty miles from Achill, where Edward and Eliza Nangle were William Stoney’s guests. The Frenchman was on a six-week visit to Ireland with his friend, Gustave de Beaumont, to examine the worrying conditions in the country about which he had read much. He was already an experienced traveller with a scholarly reputation, the first parts of his voluminous study into the American political system having been published. A central concern of his intellectual life was the manner in which societies made the transition from an aristocratic to a democratic society, and he was well placed to offer a dispassionate view on the Irish situation.
He was depressed by the state of Ireland: ‘a collection of misery such as I did not imagine existed in the world’, a nation ‘divided in the most violent way between two parties which are altogether religious and political’. The language of the Dublin aristocracy alarmed him with their description of the common people as savages, reducing them to something less than human. As for the ordinary people, he was likewise shocked at their pervasive contempt for their aristocracy and landlords. It was a divided society at war with itself.
In Newport, Alexis and Gustave reached a one-storey house at the side of a meadow facing the town’s quay. It was the home of Father James Hughes, the Catholic parish priest who would become a thorn in Edward Nangle’s side. Alexis had read the cleric’s powerful letters to the newspapers about the state of his parishioners, and when he decided to see the conditions of the west first-hand he made it his business to meet the priest.
De Tocqueville now stood before the stout James Hughes, aged about fifty, dressed in black, wearing riding boots and speaking with a pronounced accent. ‘A little common,’ was De Tocqueville’s comment in his journal. The priest took the visitors into a small room where the walls were covered with garish religious engravings interspersed with political caricatures. In a short time, a crowd gathered outside the priest’s front door, anticipating that the visitors might have brought some relief as few had eaten that day. ‘Most of them have been forced to dig up the new harvest and feed themselves on potatoes as large as nuts, which make them ill,’ said the priest.
The two local landlords were the Marquis of Sligo, based at Westport, and Sir Richard O’Donnell who lived not far from the priest at Newport House. These great landlords, complained the priest, gave nothing and did nothing to prevent the unfortunate population from dying of hunger. They let the farmers die before their eyes, or evicted them from their miserable dwellings on the slightest pretext. They had drained the energy from the people.
Three hundred paces from the priest’s house, the river divided into two branches and a promontory jutted between the two streams to form a hill. There, in the middle of a meadow, was the house of the Protestant rector, William Stoney. The visitors heard that there was open warfare between priest and rector, who attacked each other bitterly in the newspapers and in the pulpit, each believing passionately in his version of the truth. Rector and priest fought for souls.
Back in Dublin, de Tocqueville took soundings from influential people in an effort to understand the relationship between the Irish landlords and their tenants. What he heard was troubling: ‘There is no moral tie between the poor and the rich. The Irish landlords extract from their estates all that they can yield.’
Why was the agricultural population poor if the farm yields were so good?
Yes, the yields were immense, but none of the wealth remained in the hands of the people. The Irish were raising productive crops, carrying their harvest to the nearest port, putting it on board an English vessel, and returning home to subsist on potatoes.
By the end of his visit, Alexis de Tocqueville was convinced that the profound chasm between the aristocracy-cum-landlords and the Irish people was widening by the day and he set out his thoughts in a letter to his father before his departure: ‘England and Ireland have the same language, the same laws, the same social structure, they are subject to the same government, and there are no [two] countries that present a more different appearance. Both have been for a long time, and are still in many respects, subject to a powerful aristocracy. This aristocracy had produced great wealth in England, and frightful poverty in Ireland.’7
It was, he concluded, as if two entirely distinct nations occupied the same Irish soil: one rich, civilised and happy, the other poor, half savage, and overwhelmed by misery. ‘If you wish to know what the spirit of conquest and religious hatred, combined with all the abuses of aristocracy without any of its advantages, can produce, come to Ireland’.8
The aristocracy and landlords were to blame for the plight of Ireland, concluded the Frenchman. The land system was rotten, said John MacHale. Popery and the Catholic clergy were at the root of the country’s misery, said Edward Nangle, and he was determined to do something about it.
***
Edward Nangle crossed the strand in Achill Sound at low tide and stood for the first time on Achill soil, having travelled with a scripture reader by horseback from Newport the previous day. Afterwards, he would describe the desolate sight: ‘The deep silence of desolation was unbroken, except by the monotonous rippling of the tide as it ebbed or flowed, or the wild scream of the curlew disturbed by some casual intruder on its privacy.’9
A couple of years earlier, a young Anglo-Irish gentleman on a leisure trip to the west had noted: ‘To look at the map of County Mayo, one could imagine that nature had designed that county for a sportsman.’10 The gentleman had chronicled his successful hunting exploits in Achill, returning from the mountain at the end of the day to the coastguard station with bulging bags of game, having shot seven hares and thirteen brace of grouse.
Achill Island presents a landscape of contrasts: an island with the shape of an upside-down boot, the hardness of its coastline countered by the black softness of the bog land that makes up most of its centre. The incessant coastal sounds of breaking waves and screaming birds are in contrast to the melancholy loneliness of large tracts of the island’s interior.
Today, the main approach route from Westport to Achill hugs the eastern and northern shores of Clew Bay via Newport
