Round Ireland in Low Gear (15 page)

Down in a little wooded dell by the bridge over the Monavuaga river, the upper parts of which were still touched by the sunset, there was a painted concrete statue of the Virgin, which had been set up there during 1954, the Marian Year. It was a pretty place, very quiet except for the sounds of rushing water. Kneeling before the statue were half a dozen women and one elderly man. Vases filled with artificial flowers, and admonitions and instructions on how to comport oneself, some of them written in coloured ink which had run a bit, stood amongst the still dripping greenery.

In August 1985 this particular statue had ceased to be just another Marian image and became what some now refer to as the Miraculous Virgin of Mount Melleray. For it was then that she was first seen to smile, and to move her head, now surrounded by a blue halo, and other parts of her body. On one occasion she actually descended from her place on the side of the dell in order to admonish some small boys who were behaving in a rowdy fashion, which gave them a bit of a turn. She is also said to have announced that the world would come to an end on 28 or 29
September, the latter date being the Feast of St Michael and All Angels (Michaelmas). Well, there was no action on this particular afternoon. If ever a statue looked immovable, this one did. Maybe something would have transpired if we had stayed on for a bit, but we had no time.

We went on to spend the night in a very comfortable B and B on what were still the arcadian shores of Lough Mahon except where the local authorities, with that delicacy of taste that characterizes local authorities everywhere but which nowhere reaches its full flower more than in Ireland, had decided to build a sewage plant on them. Mrs Walsh, our hospitable landlady, told us that we could leave our van with her as long as we liked, and thinking we might be short of reading matter she very kindly presented us with Georgina Masson’s
Italian Gardens
, a magnificent coffee-table work which weighed 5 lbs 4 oz, and which we left in the van as ballast after ascertaining that her feelings would not be hurt.

Not far off was Castle Mahon, now a golf club, a fortress house with towers at each of its four corners, built by Anastasia Gould in 1836 as a surprise for her husband while he was away overseas. When it was completed and she balanced the books she found that as the result of an advantageous deal she had struck with the workmen whereby she was their sole supplier of food and clothing, the net cost came to 4d. In spite of this she apparently incurred the displeasure of her husband, who thought she had mismanaged the business.

The nearest place to eat was Douglas, which at nine o’clock on what was now a nasty, cold, wet night was still the scene of frenetic activity, with people tottering out of the shopping precinct, some of them in pairs bent double under the weight of huge cardboard containers that contained washing machines, Toshiba Microwave ovens, Hitachi 26” Teletext TV sets (‘Offer
Price £449.99. Save £30’) and/or Philips Twin Deck Midi System Hi-Fis with Graphic Equalizers (‘Offer Price £189.99. Save £20’). After a nice dinner of grilled sole Wanda bought a pair of Taiwanese gloves from a shop in the precinct in which entire outfits of clothes lovingly crafted in South Korea and Taiwan came out at only £14 a set; then we went back and had lovely hot baths at Mrs Walsh’s B and B.

The next day started with everything except my sinuses being frozen solid. Then it began to pour with rain, and by the time we got going it was so dark that flocks of birds were going to roost, under the impression that night was falling. I felt we had been a bit dotty to abandon the van.

We left for Kinsale, having asked the way from the kindly driver of a juggernaut container lorry loaded with bananas. The somewhat erratic route he proposed took us through an industrial estate full of banana warehouses and suchlike, and it was in this unsuitable area for such a purpose that we both developed the urge to pee, which is not all that easy when one is wearing Gore-Tex trousers over other trousers over thermal underwear, not to speak of Bike Brite Retro-Reflective Sam Browne belts. When Wanda finally found a spot that seemed to be to her liking she discovered, too late, that it was infested with stinging nettles. In spite of these difficulties we presented a brave face to the world and actually succeeded in raising a cheer from a little band of heroes who were clearing dense, rain-sodden scrub from the roadside, as we plugged up an interminable hill past Cork airport.

We reached Kinsale, having crossed two parallel ranges that were for us the equivalent of the Karakoram, via a beautiful, wooded estuary where brown swans floated in the puddles that the tide had left behind and a few oystercatchers were scraping a living on expanses of steely-coloured mud which looked as if they were jumping up and down under the rain that was bombarding
them. In fact there was more water in the atmosphere than there was air.

The lower part of Kinsale, with its tile-hung houses disposed around the main square, had a strange, operatic, foreign feeling about it, even in the rain. (The upper parts of the place, on the other hand, were Georgian English.) The Valmoule Restaurant was even serving Crabs Guadeloupe, although the place next door was reassuringly Anglo-Irish, offering a three-course meal, choice of beef, pork or lamb, at £3 a head, including tea. Perhaps it was the influence of Spain that made it look as it did. In September 1601 a Spanish fleet commanded by Don Juan d’Aguila sailed up the Brandon estuary on which the town stands and disembarked some 3800 foot soldiers, who immediately proceeded to occupy the two castles which commanded the entrance to the harbour.

The Spaniards’ plan was to bring help to Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone and to Red Hugh II O’Donnell, Lord of Tyrconnel (an ancient territory in north-west Ireland now County Donegal). Since 1594, in what was known as the Nine Years War (1594–1603), the pair of them had had a series of spectacular military successes against the forces of the English Governor of Connaught on the borders of Tyrconnel and Tyrone and in Munster, where 210,000 acres of the best land had been confiscated in order that they might be settled by Protestants in what was known as the Plantation.

It was unfortunate that the Spaniards had chosen to make their landings at the furthest possible point from where the forces of O’Neill and O’Donnell were at that time operating. And there, at Kinsale, d’Aguila and his Spaniards waited for the Irish armies to arrive from the north, besieged meanwhile by an English force of twelve thousand men, commanded by Lord Mountjoy, Elizabeth’s Lord Deputy in Ireland, whom she had sent there with the task of crushing the rebels for good and all.

It took the rebel armies ten weeks to reach Kinsale, but when they arrived Mountjoy found himself in a precarious position between the guns of the Spaniards in the town and the encircling Irish forces. On 24 December it was decided that the Irish and Spanish should launch a simultaneous attack on the English. What followed was a disaster. The Irish lost their way to the starting point, and instead of attacking were completely routed by the English. Meanwhile the Spaniards did nothing but watch the outcome of the battle from the town.

Nine days later, on 2 January 1602, the Spaniards surrendered and were subsequently allowed to leave the country. O’Neill succeeded in escaping but was forced to make his submission to the English throne in March 1603, six days after the Queen’s death, and the following month to make a further submission to James I. O’Donnell sailed for Spain where he was given a cool reception by Philip III until the truth emerged about d’Aguila’s cowardly behaviour, at which time his stock began to rise. But it was too late: on 10 September he died, having, it is thought, been poisoned by a Scotsman. He was buried at Valladolid. He was only twenty-eight. Although the last rites were postponed for another five years, these events at Kinsale marked the end of the old Gaelic order, which had survived from the earliest times in Tyrone and Tyrconnel.

For in spite of a pardon from James I for both O’Neill and O’Donnell’s successor, Rory O’Donnell, the former having his earldom of Tyrone restored to him and the latter being created Earl of Tyrconnel, they both lost their power as independent rulers, which must have influenced them in their decision to leave the country. This they did at midnight on 14 September 1607 from Rathmullen in Lough Swilly; a total of ninety-nine persons, including family and retainers. Bound for Spain, after a fearful voyage in what was a small vessel, ‘having little sea-store and being
otherwise miserably accommodated’, they were driven ashore at the mouth of the Seine, and eventually arrived at Rome after much wandering and with a much reduced retinue. There they lived as pensioners of Pope Paul V until their deaths, O’Donnell’s in 1608 and O’Neill’s in 1616, and both Earls were buried in the church of San Pietro di Montorio.

In fact, like Cork, Kinsale continued to be a rather unhealthy place to be mixed up with unless you happened to be English and Protestant. After Mountjoy’s victory no Irishman or Catholic was allowed to live within its walls. James II landed there in 1689 to begin his unsuccessful campaign to recover his throne. After his defeat at the Battle of the Boyne it was from Kinsale that he sailed into exile. John Churchill, later Duke of Marlborough, took the town after reducing Cork, and having a Churchillian eye or nose discovered a thousand barrels of wheat and eighty pipes of claret in one of the forts. It then became an English naval base, which it remained until the latter part of the eighteenth century when ships became so large that they could no longer be easily accommodated there. The base was moved to Cork, and after this Kinsale ceased to be prosperous.

Of course neither of us knew all this when we arrived in Kinsale on our bikes, but then the disadvantage of riding bikes in the rain is that you can’t consult guide books while awheel, and when you’re not awheel you are too busy eating, drinking, squirting oil on your chain, changing your wet socks, sticking plaster on your bum, writing your notes or just slumping or sleeping to do much improving reading. At least we were. So much for Kinsale
in tempi passati
– perhaps too much.

Our first stop at Kinsale was at the premises of a friendly garage proprietor and bike-repairer who operated his business single-handed in a building which resembled an airship hangar with the heating switched off. I asked him to adjust Wanda’s faulty back brake as I had left my pliers back in England and had never acquired what is known as a Third Hand Tool; it took an eternity because we were part of a queue which included the owners of a pre-war Ford tractor that was in need of re-animation and a car that looked as if it might have passed a millennium or two in the Labbacallee wedge-shaped gallery grave, Ireland’s largest and finest. And from time to time the owner had to trot across the road to work his petrol pump which was out on a limb next door to the town’s principal department store, located in the former Community Hall. In it every assistant had her own individual Calor gas heater, and there was a large enough stock of Irish handicrafts to last until the end of time. Here Wanda, less interested than I in machinery on the verge of dissolution, took refuge, moving from heater to heater and chatting up the girls, from one of whom she received a leaflet entitled
Ballinspittle in the Night: Some Facts about the Statue.
Having described the construction of a grotto there and the erection in it of a statue of Our Lady in 1954, it went on as follows:

Among the gas heaters, all the girls were for the phenomena.

‘It was five visits before I saw her move,’ the garage man said, having adjusted the brake and refused payment, which made us feel bad about being impatient. ‘I’d almost given up hope. And when I did see her move, I didn’t want to believe it.’

‘You’ve chosen a terrible day if you’re on your way for the Statue,’ said one of two men sharing a food-free lunch in the Anchor Inn, where we were enjoying a degustation of soup and pie. ‘I don’t believe she’ll be obliging at all.’

‘And why shouldn’t she oblige,’ said his companion, ‘whatever the weather? Would she be getting even a drop of moisture on her, even spiritually?’ And they both went off into a rambling theological discussion, some of which was about why they had never been able to see it move when it had obliged for their wives and daughters, the rest of which was impossible to understand, or disentangle from their heavy accents and inversions of syntax such as ‘It is on my way home I was.’

Until now neither of us had any idea that we were anywhere near Ballinspittle. This was because it was situated on the folds of our half-inch map of the area, which had been folded and unfolded so often in the prevailing damp that its location had become nothing more than pulp. Now we decided to leave at once, and try to see the statue in one of its Peak Social Hours.

And so to Ballinspittle along the shores of the Brandon estuary, past decrepit buildings that looked like barracks, and forts, and decrepit quays with fishing vessels that looked as if they would probably never go to sea again tied up alongside, with the rain still coming down like anything on everything. Then we crossed a bridge and climbed steeply into thick, freezing fog. The surface of the road had an awful lifeless quality, as if it was covered with porridge, and our brakes were permanently on. I was behind Wanda who was battling away, making things impossible for herself in a gear of 51.3”, which was much too high for her in the circumstances, having locked herself on to a 38-tooth chain ring and a 20-tooth sprocket.

‘Change down!’ I shouted, with no effect at all. Anyone wearing a Gore-Tex hood can hear practically nothing, not even a passing juggernaut. ‘
Change down!
’ I shrieked in the direction of her right ear, coming up alongside her, a hazardous business in the prevailing conditions of nil visibility. ‘Push the right lever forward and pull the left one backward!’ I shouted.

‘There’s no need to shout,’ she said huffily, at the same time pushing and pulling the levers so that up front the chain mounted on to the mighty 48-tooth ring and at the back descended on to the 14-tooth sprocket, producing the highest gear of the lot, a colossal 92.6”, at which point the machine stopped moving and Wanda dismounted.

‘This is too much,’ she said. ‘I’m going to walk.’

‘It’s easier riding,’ I said. ‘You’re just in the wrong gear.’

‘I don’t care what gear it’s in,’ she said. ‘I’m not a superwoman. You ride, I’m walking.’

After which, because we were on the pulped section of the map and obeyed a crazy signpost, we made what proved to be a wide detour before descending to Ballinspittle.

Ballinspittle was two streets and a small square, and the reader will be relieved to know that I am not going to run on about the Norsemen, the Anglo-Normans and the Anglo-Saxons, and their influence on Ballinspittle. I don’t even know what the significance of the rather extraordinary name is.

We put up in what had been the schoolhouse, built in 1833, and was now the home of a Mr and Mrs O’Donovan and their eight children: one boy and three girls, big; two boys and two girls, small. We were cold and wet, our climbing boots were like sponges, and kind Mrs O’Donovan gave us a nice pot of tea before we set off for the statue.

‘I saw her hands moving,’ she said. ‘And some of the children, but not all, saw her turn her head sideways, the first time. Besides ourselves there were two ladies there. They said “Hail Marys” but nothing happened until they began the rosary. It was the rosary that clinched it.’

The Grotto was about half a mile uphill from the village and about thirty feet above the road, in the face of what was really more of a steep bank on the hillside than a cliff, although here and there outcrops of rock protruded from it. How much of the Grotto was natural and how much was constructed was difficult to say, but according to the pamphlet issued by the Committee, which also took the opportunity to announce a new cassette on sale, a lot of work had been put into it. Someone irreverently has compared it to a sentry box. The site had been donated by a local man, and was planted with dwarf conifers and shrubs and further
embellished with vases of artificial flowers and rosettes. Below it, down near the roadside, there was a small enclave in which there were benches on which one could either sit or kneel while contemplating the statue. On a night such as this, when there were only three other visitors besides ourselves – a middle-aged nun in a severe pale grey gabardine raincoat which matched her complexion, what looked like her middle-aged brother, in pale grey ditto, and the driver of the taxi in which they had come here, who had nothing on but a suit – there was plenty of room. This little enclosure was separated from the bank and the Grotto by blue and white cement railings with the words ‘Immaculate Conception’ cast in the upper part. On the opposite side of the road rose a steeply sloping field, its surface covered with sand, which was said to be capable of holding between six and seven thousand spectators, rather like one of the terraces behind the goal posts in a football stadium.

The statue itself was what is known as a Five Foot Eight Lourdes. It was made in 1954 from half a ton of concrete, its hands reinforced with wire, by the Barnardi Brothers in Cork, known there locally as Chalkey God’s, and the man who made it, Maurice O’Donnell, is still alive. According to him, the demand for statues to be made that year was so great that they often used to leave the statues unpainted to be finished off on site. The correct colours were white for the robes and blue for the scarf, which was how the Virgin appeared to the fourteen-year-old peasant girl, Bernadette Soubirous, at noon on 11 February 1858 in the Massabielle Grotto at Lourdes. The fingertips of the statue were pressed together across the breast in an attitude of prayer and a rose had been placed between them, a daily offering made by Catherine O’Mahony, one of the seven girls who first saw the statue move. A long rosary made up of large beads hung from her wrists. The face was slightly upturned and the expression it
wore, which was intended to suggest piety, could only be described as vacant, partly due to the treatment of the eyes which were nothing but blobs of bright blue paint. Above the head was a halo of eleven electric light bulbs, which strongly illuminated the face.

Three days after the first manifestations took place, on 25 July 1985, Teresa O’Donnell from a village near Skibbereen in southwest Cork, visiting the shrine with her family, saw the statue appear to grow larger and clearer. The following night she saw ‘a small silver cross shining very brightly’ on a nearby hill. Others present saw it too, but enigmatically said that ‘in reality it was not there at all’. A party of Bavarians who were in the field that night, when questioned by a reporter, said they had seen the statue move but that they thought it was due to the halo of electric lights. ‘We shan’t be coming again,’ they added, a little ungraciously.

On 31 July a 37-year-old housewife and mother of four from Cork city, Mrs Frances O’Riordan, had her hearing restored during a night visit to Ballinspittle, having been completely deaf since contracting measles at the age of four. In 1982 she had visited a Cork hospital where an ear, nose and throat specialist had told her that both eardrums were irreparably damaged. She not only saw the statue move but experienced strange choking sensations and a feeling that her body was about to explode. She then heard the first sounds she had heard for twenty years: the crowd singing ‘Ave Maria’ (it was too dark for her to lip read). The doctor to whom she subsequently went to have a hearing aid fitted said she now had almost 30 per cent hearing. Although not a regular churchgoer she had made three pilgrimages to Knock in County Mayo, where a series of apparitions were seen on the gable of the parish church in August 1879, hoping for a miracle, but without success.

Another cure, this time of arthritis, was apparently effected on a Mrs Kathleen O’Loughlin, the wife of a taxi driver, Gerald
O’Loughlin, who told the journalist June Levine how it happened:

On 15 August, the Feast of the Assumption, three weeks after the events witnessed by girls of the Daly and O’Mahony families, fifteen thousand people from all over Ireland descended on Ballinspittle by car and special bus and coach services, and the tradespeople of Knock, who are deeply into the religious memento business, were said to be beginning to be worried about their future livelihood. In anticipation of this influx a sixty-strong Shrine Committee had been formed and prayer-masters and -mistresses selected to lead the recitals of the rosary and other prayers, punctuating them with edifying commentaries on the dire state of everything. A car park had been opened, for which tickets cost £1 each. The field had been bulldozed free of dangerous protuberances and covered with sand brought from Courtmacsherry Bay. A nearby stream had been piped underground. Lavatories were in position. The road past the shrine had been closed to vehicular traffic and the little enclave immediately below the statue roped off for the use of the aged and infirm between two and four in the afternoon, at other times for those with enough push to get into it, such as newspaper reporters.

The day began with a Mass conducted by the Bishop of Cork at the Diocesan Shrine in Cork, for he would not allow Mass to
be celebrated at the shrine itself. Hymns, however, were sung at the shrine by various choirs, including the Our Lady of Lourdes Choir; sixty people also recited the rosary outside the gates of Our Lady’s Hospital; and at eleven o’clock that night the Riverstock Folk Group performed. Meanwhile proprietors of burger and chip vans did big business, and the Ladies’ Committee made tea. Most of those who came for the night brought baskets of food. This was the night that a policeman from Blarney, Jim O’Herlihy, took a number of pictures with an Olympus camera and zoom lens which, when he got the film processed in Cork, showed the hands and arms in a succession of different positions, in spite of the fact that no movement was visible through the lens.