He looked away again, down at the stream, and recited.
‘On highway side, where oft was seen/the wild dog and the vulture keen/Tug for the limbs and gnaw the face/Of some starved child of our race.’
She said nothing. Just listened.
‘Slow terrible deaths from hunger, coffinless graves on the roadside.’ Davitt spoke with a dreamy voice of memory, as if he saw the faces of the dying reflected back to him by the stream. ‘Everywhere that a hole could be dug for the starving peasantry of Mayo. People buried when and where they fell. Bodies thrown into pits outside the workhouses – no priests called. And the survivors driven out – banished to the four corners of the earth.’
Now he looked back up at her, his brown eyes very dark. ‘Tell me, my dear Bee, what crime did the Irish peasant commit to have deserved such terrible punishments as occurred here thirty years ago?’
‘None Michael,’ she said, quietly, ‘except perhaps to have too much faith in the justice of God and men.’
‘It was not God who starved the Irish people!’ Davitt was suddenly so fierce, she felt a little afraid of him. ‘And anyone who says it was God’s will is a blasphemer.’
He moved away from the stream, getting ready to return. ‘This is a new and terrible Famine, Bee,’ he said, turning back to face her, ‘but this is also a new generation. This time we are not going to let our people lie down on the road and die, having paid their rent and said their prayers.’
‘No Michael, we are not!’
‘This country – this land – is for the people who labour upon it, not for those idle vultures who reap our flesh and harvest our children’s futures.’
She understood that he was speaking not to her, but to the thousands who would come to Straide to hear him speak that day. ‘Michael, you are the bravest man in Ireland.’
She saw him frown a little. He did not really enjoy receiving compliments. She had noticed that he even seemed to fear them. As if he feared being used or manipulated by anyone, of being drawn from his path. ‘So long as I have tongue to speak, or heart to feel,’ he touched his heart with his left hand, ‘Irish landlordism and English misgovernment shall find in me a sleepless and incessant opponent.’
And then he turned fully away from her and the stream, and strode rapidly back to where the men were waiting at the edge of the field. James Daly was waving vigorously at them, shouting out something to them across the cold air. Urging and urgent. He shared Davitt’s sense of urgency. After all, they had a people to rouse from despair. And not just to rouse but to organise.
She had to scramble hard after Davitt and his long legs to catch up. ‘Come on Bee,’ he called back to encourage her, ‘Let’s go and drive the robbers out of the house!’
***
Last year Bee had thought they would surely be engaged. On his regular visits to their farmhouse, she felt Michael Davitt had paid her special attentions, laughing appreciatively at her little sallies, admiring her abundant auburn hair, her slender figure, always ready to look up and smile when she came into a room, no matter how thick the atmosphere was with men and smoke and talk of politics.
That was last summer, the third and the wettest of three cold summers, when the doom of the crops had become clearer, the men’s faces grimmer and the politics tougher.
That was when James Daly’s Tenants Defence Association had become the Mayo Land League, with a clear plan of organisation and action. That was when the Fenians John Devoy and Michael Davitt had finally persuaded The Right Honourable Charles Stewart Parnell, MP, to support the growing land agitation in the West. At Davitt’s urging, the Wicklow landlord, and future leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party at Westminster, had come to Mayo himself in June.
What a victory that had been. To hear those cold calm English-accented tones speak out against the unpayable rents and callous evictions. ‘You must show the landlords,’ Parnell had said, to a monster meeting at Westport, ‘that you intend to hold a firm grip of your homestead and lands. You must not allow yourselves to be dispossessed, as you were dispossessed in 1847.’
As Davitt repeatedly pointed out at meeting after meeting, three hundred individuals owned six million acres of Irish land while five million Irish people didn’t own a single acre. It was time for change. No more the shame of paupery, the mark of the slave. The Land of Ireland was to be for the People of Ireland. Those who sowed must now reap.
In October of 1879, the Irish National Land League had been formed in Dublin with Parnell as President, and Davitt as Secretary. The Irish people were on their way.
But the Church had baulked. The new Land League was not talking of compassionate aid to the poor in times of enormous stress, but of revolutionary changes to land ownership. Two of the four leading prelates spoke up against them. The Archbishops of Tuam in the West and Dublin in the East.
Then the Mayo discussions had raged as to how far to go, how far they could go, without the Church. Daly was not keen on any split. He said that Church and People drew their strength from one another. But Davitt was confident that their movement could take the majority of the clergy with them. After all, most of the priests were sons of farmers. They knew the reality facing their poorer parishioners. And at least Armagh in the North was silent, for the hard old Cardinal there was finally dead – Cullen’s grip on Ireland at last broken.
And then the Archbishop of Munster, the spiritual leader of the South, of Cork and Kerry and Tipperary, Dr Thomas Croke of Cashel had stepped up on the people’s side. ‘It is cruel to punish a person for not paying a debt which is impossible to satisfy,’ he had publicly stated, in a written message sent out to the parishes – to the horror both of England and of Rome. ’It is neither sin nor treason to say that where a man labours, he has a right to be fed, ‘ Croke had continued, ‘There is no sin in striving to live and wishing to die in Ireland.’
The great Archbishop had given the people permission to resist. He had strengthened the Land League’s power immeasurably. Payment of rents was being delayed everywhere, and evictions were being challenged with a new will.
In the depths of winter, in January 1880, the impoverished community of Carraroe in Connemara resisted all attempts at eviction of tenants of the landlord Kirwan. The police had had to retire defeated from the field of battle, a battle of sticks and rocks and curses coming from all sides, from furious and determined men and women.
And some of the landlords were reducing the rents. If the tenants stood together and stood firm. In towns around the country, police were being called in to collect the rents, but found no support from the community. They could not buy milk or meat, as even the shopkeepers refused their custom, as the new idea of boycotting spread. The tactic of social isolation had been so successfully used against the land agent Captain Boycott –the bully-boy for Lord Erne’s estates in Mayo, that his name became forever associated with the method.
It was not just food or labour that was being withheld. Young women were standing up at public meetings and urging their sisters and friends not to walk out with any member of the constabulary. Not at least while they were engaged at destroying their own people.
But for all the new spirit of resistance, which was in itself a kind of nourishment for the body as well as for the soul, Bee knew it had still been a time of great suffering in the West. In the most desperate homes, children were entirely without clothes. A cruel
