The Curious Case of the Mayo Librarian (15 page)

It is easy to overestimate the
Catholic Bulletin's
impact at the time. As one historian puts it, the
Bulletin
‘which appears to have acquired an historical curiosity, perhaps because of its extremism and bombastic pedantry, far in excess of its actual significance at the time of publication, may be viewed as representing merely the most hysterical and distorted fringe of the tradition from which it came.'
19

As evidence of the independence of the bishops, His Grace Archbishop Harty was also reported to have said, ‘Stick to the Local Appointments Commissioners', and gave instances of bribery in respect of appointments of doctors in South Tipperary during his father's life as a ‘public man'.
20

As for the specific Miss Dunbar Harrison issue, the hierarchy did not want to get involved, letting it be known that they considered it a local matter for the local bishops to deal with. After a number of meetings with intermediaries, President Cosgrave, accompanied by his Minister for Education, Professor O'Sullivan, finally got to meet with His Grace, the archbishop of Tuam, on 14 April 1932. Archbishop Gilmartin was somewhat defensive. He emphasised that he had not instigated the crisis, rather it was his troops on the ground and he was not going to undermine them. In a signed memorandum written prior to the meeting he made the following points:

1. I may state at the outset that the action of the library committee was taken independently of me.

2. That action has my approval because I consider that there was a Catholic principle involved and that the library committee was justified in acting as they did in defence of that principle.

3. I could not therefore ask those concerned to go back on the position they have taken up.
21

While he did not say it outright the impression was given that the archbishop was in a more conciliatory frame of mind than many of his priests. However, he stressed that there was no way that the crisis could be resolved while Miss Dunbar Harrison remained in the post. As he put it, ‘To acquiesce in her appointment would be a surrender of the principle involved in the protest.'
22
On this point the archbishop was adamant. If the government could not concede this, they would have to look elsewhere for a solution and the church-state conflict would continue.

Notes

1.
Catholic Bulletin
, January 1931, vol. xxi, no. 1, pp.1-2.

2.
Ibid., February 1931, vol. xxi, no. 1, pp.102-103.

3.
Catholic Standard
, 30 December 1930, p.10.

4.
The Nation
, 30 December 1930, p.1.

5.
Catholic Mind
, January 1931, pp.1-4.

6.
Ibid., February 1931, p.28.

7.
NAI D/Taioseach S2547B.

8.
Ibid.

9.
Ibid.

10.
Ibid.

11.
Ibid.

12.
Anthony J. Jordan,
W. T. Cosgrave 1880-1965
, p.130.

13.
NAI D/Taioseach S2547A.

14.
James Meenan,
George O'Brien
, p.134.

15.
Brian P. Murphy,
The Catholic Bulletin and Republican Ireland
, pp.274-282.

16.
Bryan Fanning,
The Quest for Modern Ireland: The Battle of Ideas 1912-1986,
p.67.

17.
Brian P. Murphy, op. cit., pp.274-282.

18.
NAI D/Taioseach S2547B.

19.
Margaret O'Callaghan, ‘Language, Nationality and Cultural Identity in the Irish Free State, 1922-1927', p.275.

20
NAI D/Taioseach S2547B.

21.
Ibid.

22.
Ibid.

In the meeting between Archbishop Gilmartin and President Cosgrave, the archbishop argued that Mayo should be treated as a special case due to its history. As the written memorandum of the meeting recorded, Archbishop Gilmartin was of the opinion that owing to Mayo's particular experience with regard to proselytism, the issue of a Protestant librarian in Mayo was seen as an exceptionally sensitive case.

The
Catholic Bulletin
yet again gave vivid expression to Mayo's distinctive past. ‘The Catholics of Mayo,' it wrote, ‘know well the uses made of the Irish language as an instrument of perversion by organised souperism in their county ever since the Achill mission was started by Souper Nangle and Souper Dallas and since the apostate Carleton's servile and venal pen was hired by Caesar Otway. They were subsidised and patronised by all the leading academic personages of Trinity College Dublin for many a long year.'
1

At the Mayo County Council meeting on 27 December, John Morahan linked Miss Dunbar Harrison's appointment to souperism. Certainly, proselytism remained a touchy subject in Mayo due mainly to the folk memory of the Famine years. Many of the evangelical organisations had been established pre-Famine but there is little doubt that the failure of the potato crop in the 1840s led to them becoming much more active. There were few more zealous than Rev. Edward Nangle in Achill.

During the Famine, Achill Island had been one of the most deprived districts in Mayo. It was still a living and bitter memory in Mayo. Brigid Redmond, Mayo's first county librarian, related how she had met an old man in Achill in 1928 who spoke to her in Irish and told her ‘about Nangle and his settlement of “jumpers” at Dugort, how he had acquired some acres of moorland and built thereon his church, schools and orphanage to pervert the starving people in the Famine years.'
2

Given Miss Dunbar Harrison's difficulties, it is ironic that there was a pro-Irish language aspect to Rev. Nangle's activities. He had set up a printing press from which he issued a monthly paper known as the
Achill Herald
. He also published copies of the Bible in Irish. As Brigid Redmond put it, ‘Nangle must have spent immense energies and monies on the task, and now the work has withered, and his name is held in bitter execration on the island. An alien culture transplanted to this home of ancient sanctities was fore-doomed to blight.'
3

Private charities provided much-needed relief during the Famine years but some of them availed of the opportunity to try to convert the poorer Catholics. It was felt that zealot missionaries had used the threat of starvation to force some of most destitute Catholics to change their religion in return for food and shelter. Whatever the motivation, it was crudely seen as starving Irish Catholics being pushed into converting to Protestantism in return for bowls of soup. To be called a ‘souper' or a ‘jumper' was a mortal insult to a family in Mayo. Even today such a label will raise hackles in most parts of the west of Ireland. While Catholic missionaries abroad were often admired for their zeal, grave exception was taken to any form of Protestant missionary work in Ireland, particularly if it was directed at people who were starving. To have ‘taken the soup' was considered a dreadful slur on any family's good name. To convert to Protestantism just to survive was to betray one's heritage. The actual number of families who ‘converted' remains uncertain, though it would seem that long-term conversions were quite rare. However, whatever the number involved, there is little doubt that such activity created enormous bitterness. The blatant linking of famine relief and proselytising campaigns added insult and degradation to the threat of starvation. Never the quickest county to forgive and forget, this bitterness was to remain long in the memory of the Mayo people.

To coincide with the political crisis over Miss Dunbar Harrison's appointment, the
Catholic Bulletin
ran a historical feature on ‘A Souper Library in Mayo'. The article was actually about a ‘souper school' in Ballindine rather than a library, but it served the
Bulletin's
purpose, reminding those who may have forgotten, of notorious proselytisers like Rev. Nangle.

Rev. Edward Nangle's Achill mission had actually been established in 1831. The Famine had merely added impetus to his missionary efforts. The local priest claimed that his parishioners ‘were dying of hunger and rather than die they have submitted to his [Nangle's] impious tenets.'

Rev. Alexander Dallas and his Irish Church Missions were active in Connemara, one of the poorest areas in Ireland during the height of the Famine period. As Desmond Bowen put it, ‘there is no doubt about the terrible purity of Dallas's motives. He was out to save souls – not to give temporal relief to the suffering Irish people.'

An account by Mrs Dallas of an incident in Errismore gives some insight into his detachment from the suffering happening all around him.

We walked across to Mannin Bay and on our way we saw about a dozen poor famished creatures attempting to work, but too weak to do anything. It was impossible to lose the opportunity of telling the Gospel to these apparently dying men as they stood or sat around me like living skeletons. They listened with fixed attention, as if they were pausing on the brink of the grave to receive a message from heaven as to their journey beyond it. I never set forth the salvation of Christ under so strong a feeling that my hearers would be soon called to experience the truth of my statement.

With such attitudes it is unsurprising that the activities of Rev. Dallas and his Irish Church Missions were the cause of much bitterness in Connacht.

Harriet Martineau, a not entirely unbiased English traveller, visited Achill in September 1852. She remarked on the tension on the island. ‘For a long course of years there was a quietness which might almost be called peace in Achill.'

She put the blame for the unrest squarely on the shoulders of Archbishop John McHale and the combative clergymen he had sent to the island. She gave a vivid account of a particular incident which had occurred.

The admitted facts are, according to the report of petty sessions, that the two priests collected the people in the village of Keel (Catholic, and the largest place on the island); that they supported each other in instigating the attack by which a Scripture Reader was stoned, knocked down among the turf, and beaten; that one of the priests, foaming at the mouth with passion, called the readers ‘damned devils' , and the Protestants ‘jumper devils' and ‘stirabout jumpers'; that he charged the parents with sending their children to school to lose their souls, to be ‘justified by stirabout and redeemed by porridge'; that he bade the people ‘scald, scald' and ‘persecute to death' the Protestants of Achill; that he pronounced the curse of God on any one who should sell them a pint of milk or a stone of potatoes; that he said he had but one life, and he, ‘would willingly give it to drive out these devils, and see Achill great, glorious and free, as it was before they came.

It was little wonder that Nangle moved from Achill soon after this incident.

Bishop Thomas Plunket became Protestant Bishop of the united dioceses of Tuam, Killala and Achonry in 1839. He was also landlord of an estate in Tourmakeady. He used his power to support both Nangle and Dallas, and in fact gave Nangle a position at the rectory of Skreen in North Mayo.

In the post-Famine years he was heavily influential in the promotion of missionary and evangelical Protestantism in Connacht. The Bishop and his sister, Catherine Plunket, set up a Protestant school in Tourmakeady. He came into conflict with the Catholic priest in the area, Fr Peter Ward, and then with Ward's successor, Fr Patrick Lavelle.

The struggle between them became popularly known as ‘the war in Partry'. It flared up in 1860. Plunket was accused of using his power as a landlord to proselytise, that ‘he preached his gospel at the point of a crowbar', that is, that if his tenants refused to allow their children attend Catherine Plunket's school, they would be evicted.

Plunket's Tourmakeady estate agent defended him, admitting that, while there had been evictions they were not due to religion. The people evicted were guilty of ‘outrage, conspiracy, incendiarism and murder.' The incident had come to the attention of the
London Times
. It was critical of Plunket's estate policy. As they put it, ‘Lord Plunket applies to all alike a punishment which is too severe for the innocent, as it is insufficient for the guilty.'

In the 1920s, some Protestant ministers made the tentative suggestion that use of the word ‘souper' was, at the very least, indelicate if not downright distasteful and that it should perhaps be withdrawn from the vocabulary of the Catholic press. Conservative periodicals such as the
Catholic Bulletin
and the
Catholic Mind
would have none of it.

In 1906 the contentious issue of Bibles in Irish had been the cause of a minor controversy in Dublin corporation libraries, when two members of the municipal council (one of them the MP T.M. Harrington) had ‘denounced the Hibernian Bible Society for having given, and the Libraries Committee for having accepted', a Bible in Irish for each library branch. The Hibernian Bible Society was accused of being a proselytising institution. ‘The discussion in the corporation was seized upon by the Dublin press as an event beyond ordinary importance for sale of copy.' The Books Committee found it necessary to defend itself. It claimed that it had ‘always acted upon the principle that public libraries should be public libraries in fact as well as in name, and consequently that they should not be administered as if by the ignorant in any narrow, bigoted or intolerant spirit: that the libraries are the property of all the citizens.'
4

In October 1906, the full meeting of the corporation backed this policy. ‘The report of the Libraries Committee was adopted without a division and by an overwhelming majority. The opponents … could be counted upon the fingers of one hand.' The controversy quickly fizzled out.

As well as souperism and Bibles in Irish, Seán na Sagart had also been mentioned in the County Council debates. Seán na Sagart's infamy went even further back in time. He had a fearsome reputation as a demon from Mayo's folk memory, a bogeyman rendered all the more scary in that he was based on a real person. Seán na Sagart (John of the Priests) had been a legendary priest hunter during penal times. So infamous was he that in America his nickname, Seán na Sagart, was used as a generic name for all priest hunters. Many tales were attached to this legend.

In a Catholic Truth Society booklet from 1946, R.J. Bennett laid out the accepted facts of Seán na Sagart's life. His real name was John Mullowney. He was a native of Ballintubber Parish, from the townland of Skehanagh, near Ballyheane. As a youth in Mayo he had led a life of dissolution. He had expensive taste that could not be supported by legal means. He was reputed to have two particular vices, drinking and stealing horses. He was only of average height but he carried himself in a fashion that made him seem taller than he really was, while his whole bearing was indicative of strength. Brown-eyed, under shaggy eyebrows, he could be good company. He was free with his ill-gotten gains, always anxious to pour strong liquor down his throat.

John Mullowney was little more than a boy when he was captured and sentenced to death in Castlebar for horse stealing. He was so contemptuous of his fatal sentence that he attracted the attention of the prison authorities. They offered him a free pardon provided he join the ranks of the priest hunters. It was an occupation for which he proved to have an exceptional aptitude.
5
It was reported that on one occasion he lured a priest to him by pretending to his sister that he was mortally ill. His sister, Nancy Louhnan, was a devout Catholic. She had been widowed at the age of twenty-five and had two infant daughters. Her brother asked her to find a priest for him so he could repent his sins and confess. When the priest turned up, he promptly turned him in for the bounty. One particular priest he was hunting, Andrew Higgins, was reputed to have been killed by a pistol shot as he was being pushed off in a currach near Pulnathacken.

John Mullowney eventually met his end while in epic pursuit of Fr David Bourke. He chased the friar from Ballintubber on through Kiltharshahawn, Derreenfaderring, Skeeh and Furnace, on to the high road towards Cloonach and Ballynew, finishing up at Aill Baile Nuaid near Partry.
6
It was there that the tables were turned and the hunter became the hunted. In the ensuing struggle John Mullowney was killed. He was stabbed to death, some say by a relative of Andrew Higgins, the priest he had killed. The place of his death is marked by a tall stone in a wood near Partry. According to Matthew Archdeacon, whose novel based on John Mullowney's story was published in 1844, ‘The deeply blood-stained priest hunter who seemed through life to have neither loved nor feared God or man' was interred in a little dismantled chapel adjacent to Ballintubber Abbey.
7
Even then he achieved no peace. Outraged locals were said to have dug up his grave and scattered his bones, throwing them into the waters of Lough Carra. The ash tree that shadowed John Mullowney's grave was long an article of curiosity to Ballintubber visitors. It was a deformed branchless and leafless trunk, ‘an object of awe as well as of wonder among the peasantry of the district.'
8
Whatever the precise truth of all these stories there is no doubt they were widely circulated in Mayo.

It might seem excessive to lay the guilt for all this history at the feet of Miss Dunbar Harrison, but Archbishop Gilmartin felt that Mayo's past had such a strong influence on its current political reality that the wrath of his priests and their flock was justified.