Priests on the Margins
Bill Toner SJ : : In the early 1950s, I spent a family holiday in Middletown, in Gweedore, Co. Donegal. One memory I have is walking to Sunday Mass. On the way, we were joined by a straggling group of fifty men, women, and children. Many of them were walking barefoot, carrying their shoes in their hands. As they reached the church, they put on their shoes and joined the congregation, and after Mass they took them off again. We learned that these were the people from Gola Island, about a mile offshore. For the islanders, eking out a precarious subsistence, shoes must have been a very expensive and inaccessible item.
Obviously, Gola did not have its own resident priest, but some islands did, and it must have been a difficult posting. In 1841 there were 34,000 people living on 211 offshore islands1, as against about 8,000 living on much fewer islands today. There were resident priests on Cape Clear, Valentia, Aran, Inishbofin, Clare Island, Tory, Inishkea, Achill and Rathlin. Nowadays many of these islands only receive occasional visits from priests.
As described by historian Diarmaid Ferriter, in his book On the Edge2 » the role of the priest on the islands was not straightforward. Most of the islands had retained a very ancient culture, often with elements of paganism and superstition, going back to the Celtic era.
On Inishkea there was a lot of controversy about a “wooden statuary clothed in flannel”. One visitor wrote: “They have an idol they regularly worship and propitiate before their boats put out to sea”. The priests were unable to persuade the islanders to get rid of it. In some respects priests had less influence than on the mainland. They could not persuade islanders to improve their Sunday Mass attendance, or to end Saturday night ceilis, which sometimes lasted until dawn. Nor could they do much to counter the widespread distillation of poitin, which was not only a common pastime, but was also an important source of income.
The priest was often revered as much for his learning as for his priestly role. Priests played a major role in pressing for better services and support from the authorities. They were to the fore in lobbying successfully for bridges to Achill and Valentia. They sought state assistance for the building of better piers and harbours, and for the fishing industry.
At the end of the 19th century, the resident priest on Aran, Fr. Michael O’Donoghue, sent his famous telegram to the chief secretary in Dublin: “Send boats or coffins”. It seemed to have done the trick, as shortly afterwards a grant of £20,000 was made to the three islands to improve the harbours. The priests generally supported islanders in their refusal to pay rates. In the view of the islanders, the authorities did not provide sufficient services to justify rates.
Of course, many islanders had too little income to afford rates. Apart from fishing from small boats, the main economic activity was kelp (seaweed) burning. This released various chemicals such as soda, iodine, and alginates (used in cosmetics). There was considerable demand for kelp products until the 1880s when they were replaced by cheaper imports.
Potatoes were widely grown, but few vegetables. Women spun and knitted with home-grown wool; the larger islands supported a small number of sheep and cattle. In the autumn many of the islanders went to Scotland to work at potato harvesting. Emigrants’ remittances provided income for others. The making of poitin, tobacco smuggling, and miscellaneous activities such as construction of piers and lighthouses provided occasional supplementary income. But for many, at least up to the 1960s, it was a grim life, with no electricity or proper water or sewerage supply, no proper retail outlets, no medical services, no secondary schools (or even primary on the smaller islands), and dreadful gales and isolation in winter.
The journeys to the mainland often had to be made in currachs. Islanders in Insihbofin took turns to row the priest to Inishark to say Mass. It was a hazardous journey: on Easter Sunday 1949 three young men from Inishark were drowned while rowing to Inishbofin for Mass. In 1967, Fr. Anthony McFeely wrote to his bishop, “seasickness makes the journey to and from Tory a bit of an ordeal. As a result I have been on the mainland once between October and April.”
On the islands, the priest was often expected to act as resident lawyer, judge, or arbitrator, since solicitors were reluctant to make the sea trips, and in any case most islanders could not afford to pay them. Priests often became involved in issues such as Wills, as well as disputes about land, land sales, division of farms, and alleged trespass. Some of them were divisive figures, sometimes due to their personalities, and more often because of their involvement in controversial matters. It was very difficult for the priest to remain aloof from contentious issues, nor was he was respected for doing so.
One of the most controversial priests was Fr Murty Farragher, stationed on Aran between 1887 and 1920. The Digby Estate on the islands was sold to the Congested Districts board in 1914, and from the beginning Fr Farragher had clear ideas about how the land should be divided. This brought him into conflict with Roger Dirrane who was a bailiff of the Digby estate agent. In 1908 Fr Farragher’s house was badly damaged by a bomb. Dirrane and his brother-in-law were arrested, and Dirrane served a few years in prison.
Fr Farragher was also involved in a bitter dispute with a local teacher. This had its roots in the priest’s tortured relationship with the local Gaelic League. Fr Farragher forbade the school teachers of the three islands from attending a Gaelic League Feis in Galway. He was revered by many of the islanders for his efforts to improve the lot of the people. But he was a rather obsessive person and was regarded as a tyrant by others; he often encouraging boycotts of individuals or their businesses. Priests also became the focal points of rows and divisions on other islands, such as Tory.
A different but common source of tension arose from the activities of the protestant Island and Coast Society which was founded ‘for the education of children and promotion of scriptural truth in remote parts of the coast and adjacent islands’. Their proselytising activities came to be known as ‘Souperism’, since they provided food, and other assistance, to those who came to their church services. They were particularly active in Achill, Sherkin, and Cape Clear.
Archbishop McHale of Tuam told the Achill priest to instruct his parishioners to “have nothing to do with these heretics – curse them, hoot at them, spit in their faces”. These words seemed to have some effect. On Clare Island, a Bible Society set up a school along with a boiler for porridge and soup. The school lasted five days. As one informant put it, “young men smashed everything up, including them and their boiler”. In general, the faith of most islanders remained robust. In 1860, seventy two children were confirmed on Cape Clear island, out of a population of just under 1,000.
The priests were an important lobby group regarding the desire of many islanders to leave the islands and be settled elsewhere. Fr. Charles O’Malley wrote from Inishbofin to a local TD, referring also to Clare island and Inishturk: “if they got a decent holding they would leave in the morning”. But other priests were very committed to the continued habitation of the islands, particularly those which were repositories of the Irish language, such as the Aran Islands, Tory, the Blaskets, and Cape Clear.
Yet the same enthusiasm for the language was not always found among the islanders. Writing in 1925, the priest on Arranmore expressed scepticism about the extent to which the islanders were concerned about their rights as Irish speakers. He noted their view that “Scotland and America are better for them” and observed that they wrote in English in their letters home.
Nor did all islanders share the ‘romantic’ view of island living, that priests like Fr Thomas Killleen imbibed in Aran in the 1930s: “I was an Oileanach when I left it… I found it hard to get used to the mainland again”. In 1950, when there was a lot of talk about evacuating the population of Gola in Donegal, commentators noted that the islanders were muted: “To the outsider the situation appears highly dramatic, to the islanders it lacks all drama”.
With the sharp decline in the number of vocations, it is likely that the resident island priest is a vanishing species. In a milieu where a fresh pair of eyes can by a catalyst for change, he will be missed by many.
[1] There is remarkable data about all these islands in Wikipedia, – ‘Islands of Ireland’.
[2] Profile Books 2018, Especially Chapter 4, ‘The Island Priest’.
