Exiled Gaels and Irish sporting rebels: part 2

GAA: beloved for generations across all ages

Part 1: Exiled Gaels and sporting rebels - Exotic stories of Gaelic and indigenous games

The intensely passionate addiction for Gaelic sports held by Irish ex-pats did not just form after the establishment of the GAA in 1884. There are accounts the world over which narrates the Irish grá for the clash of the ash and the big ball in the years and centuries prior to the clarion call for formal organization of these sports went out from the Dergvale Hotel of Dublin to Hayes’ Hotel in Thurles.

There are accounts on intrepid Gaels such as Chevalier Thomas O’Gorman and the Wild Geese of Paris. O’Gorman from Tullycrine, County Clare was born into a wealthy Catholic family in 1718.

An imposing figure of 6’6”, he immigrated to Paris in the mid eighteenth century to escape the repressive penal laws. He immediately set about organizing hurling matches among the large number of Irishmen in Paris. They played exhibition matches in one of the city’s parks, which attracted huge crowds of curious Parisians.

Word of his prowess on the hurling field reached the court of King Louis XV and O’Gorman became such a celebrity that the king decided to come and see him play. Fascinated by his hurling talent and impressive physique, the king arranged a commission for him in the Irish Brigade where his courage and skill on the battlefield earned him the title of Chevalier. He was afterward to go on to live a storied life, and become a renowned historian, donating many Irish manuscripts to Dublin libraries. He returned to his native Clare after the French Revolution where he was buried in 1813.

Old Wicklow Dark Blues GAA Team 1898

 Part 1: Exiled Gaels and sporting rebels - Exotic stories of Gaelic and indigenous games

It is worth noting that his fellow Clareman, Mr. Blackwell of Ennistymon may not have been held in such high esteem by the French monarch. He happened to have been a revolutionary leader during the storming of the Bastille in Paris, which sparked the new era of the French republic.

Another Irish man on cordial terms with foreign monarchs was Sir Caesar Colclough of Tintern, in south Wexford, a descendant of one of the old Norman settlers of 1169. He was said to have been on friendly terms with King William III (he of Orange fame) and often boasted of the hurling skill of his south Wexford tenants and neighbours. The bold Orange Billy eventually challenged him to bring over 21 Wexford men to play an equal number of Cornish men, whose hurling skill, documented back to the 1500s, and no doubt inherited because of their Celtic origin, made them foremost among the English as wielders of the camán.

Of course the Wexford boys, who had tied yellow kerchiefs around their middles so that they would easily recognize each other on the field, literally hurled their opponents off the field. They exhibited such a degree of skill and craft that William and his queen were heard to shout "Well done, yellow bellies", "Fine fellows, yellow bellies". The name stuck to this very day, and Wexfordians are proud of it.

Meath GAA, unknown date

Where you had Irish stick fights, faction fights and swordsmen, never too far away were hurling matches, because one often masqueraded as the other, which many files like the Crime Branch Special papers held at the National Archives in Dublin confirm. Following in the wake of the ruthless suppression of the United Irishmen, the Act of Union and the agrarian conflicts of the early nineteenth century, the pomp and ceremony of the gentry patronised eighteenth century hurling seemed well distant. During the penal days stick fighting with goose greased blackthorn or holly bataí was encouraged, as many went on to swell the ranks of the Wild Geese European armies as skilled swordsmen. A downtrodden peasantry took to faction fighting with gusto, and fair days were thought incomplete without a good donnybrook to conclude proceedings.

 Part 1: Exiled Gaels and sporting rebels - Exotic stories of Gaelic and indigenous games

Fair day murders were commonplace, and when authorities did intervene, the factions often united and turned against them. In some instances magistrates were even interested parties in the outcome of such riots. Faction fighting was a legacy of a distressed and subject society, and it could be argued that warring gangs such as the Caravats and Shanavests were to early nineteenth century Ireland what rival Afro-American gangs such as the Crips and the Bloods were and are to Los Angeles today. Irish stick fighting is promoted today as a martial art in Canada and America.

Then you have the  American Civil War Hero and the Hurler. The father of the Irish tricolour was the Waterford born Young Irelander, Thomas Francis Meagher, who was later to also win fame as a Union general of the Fighting Irish 69^th Regiment at Gettysburg in the American Civil War. In the late 1840s, he exhorted his fellow Irishmen to bring back the ‘old game of hurling’, and later supported hurling exhibitions in the US. Michael Cusack was later to cite Meagher’s speeches to assert Irish racial superiority. The Citizen Cusack himself claimed that it was the training of the hurling field that ‘made the men and boys of the Irish brigade’ of the eighteenth century.

GAA played in Croke Park 1929

A perfect storm

The Kentucky Guards hurling club was founded in Hoboken, New Jersey in 1853. A concerted Irish American initiative to form an Irish sports body began in 1880, four years before the GAA was founded, in Worcester, New England, the later setting for the Hollywood classic, A Perfect Storm. Thousands participated in these Gaelic days, although the standard of the earlier hurling was savaged in the local press at the time. The Irish Athletic Club in Boston was the first American branch to affiliate to the GAA in 1886.

Elsewhere narrated in this parish in the townland of the Celtic Times, are the seismic happenings at Batman’s Hill, Melbourne, Australia, where the first and last battle for Irish cultural freedom in Australia was won, through the simple playing of Gaelic football and hurling matches, this a half century before the GAA was set up. It is also fitting to note that fifty odd years on from it, at the foundation meeting of the GAA in Thurles, Cusack read out a letter of support from a solicitor, Mr Lynch, on behalf of the Irish of Melbourne for the fledgling new movement.

Irish heritage website of the week - Ireland's National Museum

National Museum of Ireland, Kildare Street

We are staring a new resolution here at the Celtic Times corner, a shout to an honoured Celtic Times Heritage website of the week: www.museum.ie.

Check out the National Museum’s website for an update on what’s up at their venues in Kildare Street and Collins’ Barracks in Dublin (there is a museum link bus to shuttle visitors between the two locations), and at the Museum of Country Life in Castlebar, Mayo.

Make sure not to miss out on the Bog Bodies exhibition. There is a very convenient museumlink public service bus for ease of access across the capital. With world renowned curators and conservators from Ned Kelly of the Tallaght Mountains and Ballyportry’s own Dr Pat Wallace to CSI’s Paul Malarkey, their collections are an intrinsic part of a cultural visit to Ireland.
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Remember too, they are free, and purchases at the museum shop will go towards their programmes. In due course, it is the earnest wish of this parish to see the National Museum of Sport to soon take up residence in Ireland’s Shannon Region, now is the time to be bold, and to not waste the opportunity of a right good recession; watch this space.

Don’t forget also that ancient and beloved museum of a museum, the Natural History Museum in Merrion Street, just a stone’s throw from the Kildare Street venue. It is Ireland’s great Dead Zoo.

The restoration of the ruined heart of the midlands, St Mel's, and the New Ireland of Auckland

St. Mel's Cathedral

On Christmas Day 2009, residents of Longford town woke up to find its landmark St. Mel's Cathedral ablaze, and with it, the county's most prestigious collection covering the full span of the region's history, including priceless artefacts like the magnificent bronze wrapped yew Crozier of St. Mel himself, and the Shrine of St Cailin.

It was the lot of the Celtic Times to return to the sweet auburn country of County Longford over the weekend, having previously spent the tropical downpours of late spring 2006 to the eve of that same year there conducting an audit of that same St. Mel’s Diocesan Museum Collection at the behest of the National Museum of Ireland.

It was one of the most eclectic and prestigious collections in Ireland, with a rich diversity of material from the Neolithic to the modern age, constituting mostly archaeological, folklife, numismatic and ecclesiastical artefacts but also political, military, ethnographic and geological displays. Longford County Council in partnership with the Heritage Council, commissioned my historical management services, Boru Cultural Enterprises to conduct the said audit, which took place on site at the once towering St. Mel’s Cathedral in Longford town.
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The aim of the project was to document the collection of approximately 450 artefacts currently on display in the museum. This entailed the drawing up of a Collection Management Plan, creation of a database methodology, conservation analysis, preparation of a research plan and showcase layout along with recommendations.

The past tense is used above because that same irreplaceable collection has been substantially destroyed. The remnants of the collection that was in church ownership in the diocese of Ardagh and Clonmacnois are currently held at the National Museum in Dublin. In the immediate aftermath of the fire, our inventory, which also had the input one of the Europe's leading conservators Dr Adrian Kennedy, had been used by the diocese of Ardagh and Clonmacnois in the initial stages of rescue and consolidation of the remains of the Cathedral.

Mel Gibson

There have been rumours for some time that Mel Gibson, whose Longford mother named him in honour of the diocese's patron saint and who was actually schooled for a period in Aughnacliffe, Co Longford will help in terms of the reconstruction, and one can only hope that a vital umbilical link between people, place and heritage will not be totally severed. So it was with some poignancy that the Bishop Colm O’Reilly allowed the doors of the gutted cathedral reopen to the people for the first time since the blaze last Sunday.

They saw for themselves first hand the extent of the recovery work that lay ahead. There is good fight in the Longford folk and one hopes that the surviving collection will find a fitting new home in the town be it at the Cathedral itself or in a purpose built museum location. Who knows, the now vacant Connolly Barracks may have a new tourism and heritage use designated to it yet for the Longfordians.

When arriving into Longford county, one journeys not just into the physical but the spiritual heartlands of Ireland. The landscape here, so beloved of Oliver Goldsmith, would have sparked some of the greatest masterpieces written in the tongue of the Sassenach, such as She Stoops to Conquer and The Deserted Village.

Maria Edgeworth, author of the famed novel Castle Rackrent which was written in 1800 in the wake of the defeat of the French general, Humbert, and the United Irishmen at Ballinamuck, hailed from an establishment family based at Edgeworthstown who owned vast tracts of the county. Her works which were inspired by the Longford peasantry won the acclaim of Scott, Turgenev, Byron and Jane Austen. She died in 1849, soon after the calamitous famine which decimated many of her adopted people, and was buried in a vault at Edgeworthstown church. Also of the soil of Longford was Paraic Colum, who authored She Moved through the Fair and was a prolific Irish writer of the early twentieth century. Leo Casey, author of the Ring of the Moon, resided in Ballymahon, the southern gateway into the county.
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The Celtic Times took up a brief repose at Cooney’s renowned hostelry in Ballymahon while taking in both a hale and hearty breakfast and the unfolding Australian annihilation at Auckland by the Irish caid playing boys; its special what four of our provinces can achieve together as a nation. It was also both stirring and heart rendering to see them roared on in the stadium itself not just by Irish rugby fans but the tens of thousands of the first wave of the new lost generation of ex pats who have made new homes abroad.

They have done nowt, save only to be born Irish in their Irish motherland, to deserve the lowest, slyest digs of the sleeveen kleptocracy we call our system of governance, a governance that has failed its people and placed it in the grip of economic receivership. It is not too difficult to envisage any fortnight now, which is the regularity with which the life support checks are being signed, that as Berlin sees the fattened largesse and excessive payouts and lump sums still being issued to civil servants that stood as governors and regulators during this surrender, they may yet say that there is nothing in the coffers this week boys.

The Celtic Times states this fully in the knowledge that there are often paybacks for making such statements. It’s a sharp dose of reality many companies, small businesses and self employed across Ireland are already well acquainted with. The Celtic Times though will never confront a problem without proffering solutions. It remains obvious to us in this parish that one of our most potent resources - heritage tourism - needs the slightest bit of management and innovation, and hopefully local agencies across the country like the Longford Community Resources can get the required buy in, and for a relatively small seed investment, considerable economic and social capital is generated.

All the children of the nation have the democratic right to partake equally in this regeneration, not just well versed practitioners of the darker arts of gombeenism and parochialism, for it is due largely to this unashamed cross section of go forward, cop out clowns that we live in what is currently a de facto failed state. Look at it, we have a better endowed, similar land mass to our nearest and dearest neighbours across the sea, a largely well bred, decently fed and educated people, who generally work hard, party hard and have usually conducted themselves well when gathered in droves abroad be it on old battlefields or modern international matches, with a genius for innovation and getting on. We may have a weakness when it comes to a needy want to be held in good esteem in other countries – a want that manifests itself currently in our insane approach to the financial troika as the teacher’s pet – perhaps this can be attributed to a colonised/coloniser complex.

On the whole, not an inherently bad people really. So how in God’s name, can we justify being unable to marshal our resources as a nation to cater for 5 million when sterling John next door, for all his many failings, accounts for 50 million plus in a multi ethnic state.

With this thought process set aside, for now, along with the hale and hearty breakfast, we put ourselves back on the right track in Longford again…..

Sean MacEoin

Amidst the rolling plains and dense boglands of this county, lies the ancient Iron Age trackway of Corlea which dates to 148B.C. and can be accessed during the tourist season through the Corlea Heritage Centre in Kenagh. In Ballinalee lies the recently restored forge of the town’s most heralded blacksmith, General Sean MacEoin, hero of the Irish War of Independence. He took charge of the Longford brigade at Michael Collins’ request. Among the many incidents during the war involving this leading IRA officer, one is recounted where MacEoin was surrounded in a cottage. He came out of the homestead to make his stand because there were women inside. Once outside he took out the commanding British officer and put the rest to flight.

MacEoin himself recalled another prominent family from the War of Independence, from which hailed the much desired Kiernan sisters of Granard. It was during the watershed 1917 Longford by-election which was won by the Sinn Féin candidate Joseph McGuinness, that Collins first came into contact with them, and according to MacEoin, he fell in love with Helen Kiernan, who chose to marry a solicitor, Paul McGovern. Upon this Collins soon turned his eyes towards another sister, Kitty who had already attracted the affections of Harry Boland, Collins’ close friend. This ill-fated love triangle was to have serious consequences for the future fledgling nation state, and Kitty was to lose her fiancé Collins in the devastating civil war to follow.
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At Dromard, in the most northerly part of the county, lies the unique townland of Fyhora, which marks the meeting of three baronies, three parishes, three counties and three provinces. Just south of here lies Ballinamuck, an area made infamous as the last fatal stand of the United Irishmen and the French invasion of Ireland in 1798. The name of Gunner McGee has always crackled in the background of conversations on Irish independence and it was here, hopelessly outnumbered by the advancing British loyalists, that he won his fame. He had charge of a canon, which he had used to devastating effect.

When he ran out of ammunition, he smashed a number of camp pots and kettles and with these loaded his gun. There was time for just one more discharge at the advancing redcoats. When just ready to fire, one of the stocks of a wheel broke, and the gun could not be fired until two of McGee’s cousins who were manning it, stepped forward and propped it up with their backs while McGee applied the match. The discharge broke their spines and their miserable state was soon put at an end when the British captured the gun and strangled McGee. A British officer wrote of that day:

‘How awful to see that healthy mountain covered with dead bodies, resembling at distance flocks of sheep, for many numbers were naked and swelled with the weather.’

Around five miles to the east lay Aughnacliffe, where there is located here a portal dolmen approximately 5000 years old. This immense stone monument marks a pagan burial site, and is one of the largest of its kind in Western Europe. One of the most famous students said to have attended the local school here is one Mel Colmcille Gibson, the actor and director of works such as Braveheart and The Passion of the Christ. This was in the late sixties when Mel’s father and his Longford born mother Anne Reilly Gibson were relocating their family from New York to Australia, to protect the older of their ten children from the war draft, and also in protest at what they saw was the growing immorality of American society. Mel, their sixth born child, was named in honour of the patron saint of the Diocese of Ardagh and Clonmacnois which incorporates Longford.

St Mel

Mel was an Irish saint who is said to have performed a miracle to counter a slanderous rumour. Accused of living in sin with his aunt, St. Mel managed to convince St. Patrick of his innocence by ploughing up a live fish from the land. Gibson’s middle name, Colmcille is derived from the patron saint of the parish where Anne Reilly, Mel’s mother was born. This was an area renowned for its sheltering of priests and rebels during the penal laws days within its high hills and steep descents towards Lough Gowna. Colmcille, in whose honour the parish is named, was a prophet who once foretold that by the end of days, Ireland would be amongst the greatest of nations – typical!

The county town of Longford itself over which St. Mel’s Cathedral had towered since 1840 is a town of fine, hospitable people. It lays no claim to delusions of grandeur, but it has an Irish soul about it that gives the town a taste of more for visitors. It has a decent soccer team, and St. Mel’s college itself has a rich gaelic football pedigree, and is a nursery for the current buoyant county underage teams. Another Longford McGee, Eugene, was responsible for masterminding Kerry’s five in a row downfall in 1982 when in charge of the Offaly boys. When formerly watching the World cup of 2006 in saloons such as Clarkes and Valentines, I was struck by the amount of Poles who bedecked the town on the nights of their short-lived campaign. Many of these have now returned to their original homeland wit a slight Longford lilt.

This is a town and a county where man has found God, craic, tax havens and all the leisure the lordly Shannon can throw up. A place where the land has given up live fish to saints - let that be an image for the resourcefulness that’s required ahead. A place with soul.

Exiled Gaels and sporting rebels - Exotic stories of Gaelic and indigenous games

Histories and folklore, stories and legend abound about the ancient Gaelic sports of Ireland. These native games have a rich modern history, peopled by famous names and fabled places, from Ring and Mackey, Purcell and Stockwell to Thurles, Croker and Clones on a mid summers day in the Red Hand Province. The four seasons speak of the feats and fame, infamy and lows in the vernacular world of Irish sport. These contests have earned its association a rightful place as a dynamic force in today’s Irish society.

Yet within the quilted patchwork of these indigenous games and memories, seldom is noticed a binding thread, which, when unraveled, takes you to the essence of our sporting traditions. Buried within the modern lore of our national games lay exotic histories which span across the world, from Batman’s Hill in Melbourne and the hallowed walls of Jerusalem to the Bocas Juniors of Diego Maradona in Buenos Aires; from the glittering floodlit nigh time glory of nineteenth century Madison Square Gardens experienced by once starving Irish peasants to the Parisian playing fields of the French Sun King.

One word leaps consistently from these obscured gems of Irish history amidst the tales of valour, struggle and joy – indomitable. Though defeat and victory may define the two sides of a sporting coin, these games, to borrow an iconic quote from an iconic Scouse sporting figure of another code, weren’t about life and death – they were much more than that.

This is the first in a three part series where the Celtic Times explores accounts which mirror

through the ages the common experiences of the Irish people and its diaspora. They reflect the evolution of Irish pastimes, from the time football was referred to in the Statute of Galway in the sixteenth century to the dawn of hurling over two millennia before it. They also indicate a communal solidarity and indeed, in some instances, striking similarities with indigenous sports of the Americas, the Old World and the Orient.

World View:

The international perspectives of stick games, catch and kick games and handball sports, inform and enrich these sometimes intertwining stories. They set a fitting world view context for the role of Gaelic sports. Football sports such as Tsu Chin in ancient china, the Episkyros and Harpostrom of the Classical world, the Kamari of sixth century Japan right up to the playing of La Soule in Brittany, Cornish hurling, Cnappan in Wales and the founding of the modern day AC Milan soccer club, all graphically illustrate the global rooted nature of the big ball game.

 It seems certain that primitive Eskimo and Faroe Islanders caught and kicked about inflated skins long ago in friendly rivalry. So wrote the reliable folklorists and early explorers. The Meso American cultures had strong ball playing cultures. The Mayan kings were referred to as “the ballplayer” as one of their ceremonial titles. In the creation story of the Mayan people, we read of the ball playing heroic twins Xbalanque, (Deer Jaguar) and Hunahpu (Hunter). A 3,600 year old rubber ball is displayed today which originated with the Olmec civilization. Some ancient American cultures had as one of its social cores a ceremonial catch and kick game in which a human skull was used as the core of the rubber ball.   Catch and kick games were played all over the world from Tsu chin in fifth century B.C. China to the episkyros of the Greek world and the Harpostrom game of Rome and to the large inflated Roman ball called Follis, we are on even sounder premises.

The Milanese, the bluebloods of European football, is a case in point. They were founded as Associazione Calcio Milano, as opposed to Internazionale Milano - their contemporary rivals Inter Milan, which was founded by English ex pats. Calcio is the Italian for the old version of Italian football which was a catch and kick game with a surprisingly similar tactical formation to the old Irish game of football - it is vividly described in a 1555 Italian treatise. The city fathers of sixteenth century Florence sought to revive the old Roman football game, and il calcio is still played annually to massed crowds in Florence and these annual derby matches would make the infamous Compromise Rules matches of the 1980s look like mild mannered affairs..                                  

Some respected rugby historians hold that William Webb Ellis, the accredited 'inventor' of modern rugby, brought back to Rugby public school in England, the Irish football game he had learned from the Irish natives during his childhood spent in an Irish military barracks with his officer father; this ‘caid’ tradition, featured in many primary and published sources; it is also intriguing that three Lions rugby internationals have come from the same rural Kerry parish of Currow - Mick Doyle, Mick Galway and Moss Keane - an area which was traditionally part of the Munster heartlands of the game of caid.

The evolution and growth of indigenous stick games also has a strong Irish influence. Ferocious stick games much akin to hurling were recorded in North Africa, which was once an intrinsic part of the ancient Atlantean routes plied by Irish traders. The close kinship between the Scottish game of shinty and hurling has been explored in both popular and academic features.

It is part of Dublin urban legend that it was their beloved hurling playing Vikings who sparked the phenomenon of early ice hockey. They spread the game to their other settlements, adapting it to their harsh environments. The Icelandic Viking Sagas from 1000 years ago mention such a game, which was called Knattleikr.

The Knattleikr ball game was very popular amongst the Vikings. It was one of the roughest games invented, and often deaths were reported from the games; Viking writer Hord Grimkellson reports at the time of a game between Sands and Botn, that "before dusk, six of the Strand players lay dead, though none on the Botn side". Apparently Tord Blig was the worst, as he was barred from playing completely due to his "bad temper, even though he was not so strong as to be excluded for that reason". Apparently the worst berserkers were thrown out of the game even in those days. From west-Iceland it's reported that at Lekskalvollane ("Ballgame Shelters") there were annual tournaments that lasted 14 days. Shelters were erected where people lived during the tournaments. The place still bears this name.

Not that Olaf, Leif and co. had exclusive rights to stick games on ice. Oral tradition has it that Whitegate of Clare and their great Tipperary rivals across the mighty Shannon river, Kilbarron, had once played in the heart of winter on ice-locked Lough Derg in the eighteenth century. The origins of another modern stick game played on ice, Broomball, are steeped in the mystery of time, but it is believed to have been influenced by our own Icelandic Vikings and also by the Indians of Eastern Canada, using a ball and stick and tree stumps for goals.   Other native sports such as the stick game played by the Aracucano Indians of Chile up to the mid nineteenth century have become extinct, a dusty footnote in the passage of sport and time.

The fate of the Aracucano Indians may also have been the lot of the sports and culture of the Gael in the face of colonisation, assimilation and famines. Yet they were clung dearly to both at home and abroad, throughout the centuries. In parts 2 and 3 we will look ahead at climes and places across the world where in some remote or fabled corner there remain fields and memories which remain forever Irish.

Details of forthcoming heritage events and projects can be emailed to Daniel McCarthy, Boru Cultural Enterprises at boruculture@msn.com

In the footsteps of saints, scholars and sinners - A Celtic camino

Confessio Patricus, the written confessions of St Patrick, have a special resonance today, in this the age of damning reports from Raphoe to Cloyne on an infected church in an era of overwhelmingly disinterested, disconnected younger generations and demoralized older ones.

Patrick apparently was an unbecoming upstart figure to his clerical peers in the mid fifth century, and the Confessio was all about setting the record straight from his own perspective. A fifth century tribunal response, if you like, where the once enslaved Briton shepherd boy of part Roman stock (some sources indicate Kilpatrick, near Glasgow was his birthplace) sets down in his own hand the circumstances that led to his mission to Ireland and how he went about answering the call.

Indeed Dáibhí Ó Croinín a superb lecturer who could entice 9am attendances on hazy Friday mornings in Galway, quipped that Patrick, must have been the only citizen of the Roman empire to have been made a slave and live to tell the tale. It is also a strongly held viewpoint by Ó Croinín and prominent scholars of this period that Patrick the man, arrived into an Ireland that already had embryonic Christian communities and that aspects of these early missions are later combined within the persona of Patrick.
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Alleged by his detractors to be poorly educated and misguided in his Irish mission, Patrick was a foreign Christian in a sometimes hostile land, and above else a straight shooter. In the uncalibrated code of internal politicking he was in many ways a sitting duck. Ireland’s patron saint though proved himself a durable sort, much like the faithful masses who revere him every March 17 parading up 5th Avenue (and the enthusiasts, as Malachy McCourt remarked, who stagger down 3rd ) and perpetuate the traditions through unbroken generations.

Once taken a prisoner by pirating Irish, Patrick was inclined to hold hostage to fortune himself and often walked a fine line between pagan natives led by the druids and sceptical church authorities in Britain. Patrick was not afraid to alienate one side or the other but to keep on flowing like old man river in his great mission. If the harsh winters spent herding the flocks of his cruel Irish enslaver were the anvil upon which his spiritual soul was forged, it was with a forgiving, graceful heart that he accepted the Voice of the Irish in a letter from an angel Victoricus calling the holy servant boy to come back and walk amongst the Irish.

The message taken from the altar at the Celtic Times is that Patrick and other apostolic men like him in early Christian Ireland were all but dead to themselves and the world, and animated with humility. This is something that the church today has totally turned its back on.

If our heritage is one of the motors for tourism, recovery and enhanced social capital, our rich ecclesiastical heritage and traditions are a signpost to the best of us that has been lost. For in the ancient wells, monuments and pilgrimages there is not just Christian heritage to be absorbed but ancient cultures where Christ and Caesar and druidic vestiges do battle still.

It is said that the best way to preserve traditional sports is to play them. Well, the best way to connect with ancient paths is to walk them, commune with them, see what made the people tick. This is in the true imraam spirit of St Brendan the Navigator whose life and epic voyages were as much about spiritual inward journeys as outward.  My friend Brian Mooney, the greatest living bard of Thomond, quotes Augustine - “Solvantis Ambulantes” – Solved through Walking.

The message is loud and clear, Take to the streets and hills, and venerated old boreens. With this in mind a fine number of people took on the old Celtic routes of Clare last week, in the path of Senan of Scattery, who Patrick once prophesised about. It is hard to believe that this same man 1500 years ago was also Senan of Plouzanne, in Brittany, twinned with Kilrush. That he made it to Rome, and established foundations throughout Europe and Britain, and is also venerated in Wexford in an era before Ryanair and Newcastle Brown Ale weekenders. Put simply, taking in this pilgrim route was an enriching experience. It was like Clarke’s poem, The Blackbird of Derrycairn brought to life where the landscape and the water and the folklore and the history shouts and whispers of the conflux and the strife between pagan and Christian Ireland. People say spin doctoring came in with modern politics, Murdoch and co. – don’t you believe it! It was invented in the mysterious stones and symbols of Clare, Ireland’s great outdoor museum. Even the unfaithful, or the doubtful, anarchists or monarchists, socialists or right leaning, gamblers or mere hikers could take something good from this. Get on the move. Do the Clare Camino, its where tourism first began!

In a quirk of fate, as the Celtic Times reaches Slane this week, where the courtier Erc, at the peril of shame and death at Laoighaire’s pagan court, paid public homage to Patrick, a living testimony to his cult has been revealed once more in Killerc, Ballyea where the wonderful meitheal spirit of the people have been restoring the cilin and holy well. It is in this tragic and poignant local heritage that the true narrative of Ireland is written, and will reflect well on present day keepers of the faith. Now its thirsty work being a pilgrim also, so the Celtic Times bids adieu for now and will give a shout next week on another version of people taking to the streets. Slán tamall.

Romantic Ireland is far from dead and gone, yet

 Ballroom of Romance, Glenfarne County Leitrim

Having but mere Travolta like social experience of the raucous disco floors of west Clare, this column would not claim to have too much insightful knowledge of the delights of the Ballroom of Romance era. However the bashful secrets of this bygone age are to be revealed in a new museum project spearheaded by the good citizens of Glenfarne in lovely Leitrim.

Amongst the community leaders of this innovative heritage tourism project is Sean McDermott, a namesake and distant blood relation of the 1916 leader who helped mould Michael Collins, Sean MacDiarmada. Sean highlighted to the Celtic Times the visit of the Minister for Tourism onsite last weekend at the world famous venue as a sure step in reliving the innocent heartbeat of a bygone Ireland.

The show-band showpiece is set to revive memories for golden oldies and newer audiences who may or may not have came to be from the seeds first sown at show-band halls like in Glenfarne up and down the country.

The Ballroom of Romance in Glenfarne had already attracted a dedicated international fanbase, inspired by the famed 1970s William Trevor novel of the same name which captured superbly a time when men and women lined up on opposite sides of the dance floor and tea and minerals were the staple.

It was the returned U.S. emigrant John McGivern who first opened the Ballroom in 1934 and his entrepreneurial spirit informs this project yet, as his brainchild is now in the ownership of the Glenfarne parish council who have now revived the live dances here as part of a major tourism draw to the area. The era of the Miami, Joe McCarthy and the Dixies, Joe Dolan and Sonny Knowles lives yet in this imaginative new revival, and more power to Glenfarne for its initiative and skilful harnessing of the fertile past, one of the best remaining resources we have.

Indeed it would be something to capture the history of romance, Irish style throughout the ages in a dedicated museum. History meets Ireland uncovered. From the Blarney stone and the gift of the gab to the warning of sinful ladies conveyed by our own venerable Sheela na Gig, a crudely carved female figure conveyed springing up here and there across the country.

Its stone ugly demeanour, its bulging eyes and its exposed genitalia, make this female exhibitionist figure uneasy on the eye, but one cannot deny that Sheela has a personality. It is just that she is not the type of girl you would bring home to your mother. It has engaged the Irish psyche since its introduction to these shores, which is attributed to Anglo-Norman influences. Such stone-carved figures appeared on European pilgrimage routes as a warning against lust. Pilgrimages, like at Santiago de Compostela in north western Spain, were infamous for prostitutes that plied their trade along the route.

The Celtic Times happened upon one such Sheela lately on the trail to the excellent Burren Centre in Kilfenora from Shannon. Gesticulating to the world, above the south-facing circular doorway of the fourteenth century Kilnaboy church, there she stood. It is the only instance of such a carving appearing above the entrance doorway of a church. This Church at Kilnaboy is also the only example in the whole of north western Europe with a double-armed cross built into its west gable. This type of cross, the Lorraine Cross, perhaps indicates the former presence here of a reliquary of the True Cross. Nearby is a well-preserved forge, where the Curtis family were blacksmiths.

They were reputed to have possessed healing powers with animals which date back to antiquity. It was from this forge that pike heads were made for the ill-fated 1799 United Irishman’s Rebellion in Clare. PJ Curtis, a scion of this family, has penned an internationally acclaimed novel The Music of Ghosts, inspired by the history of the area.

The fact that these Sheela figures appeared on fortified buildings in a later period indicates a shifting in the interpretation of Sheelas by Irish society and perhaps a fusion between Norman and Gaelic influences. During an enjoyable stint sometime back at the National Museum, I spent some time in the company of the Sheelas stored in the crypt, while carrying out a research project for an old friend, Mr Sheela himself, Ned Kelly, keeper of Irish antiquities.

All I can vouch for is that after a number of days spent at this, one emerges onto the streets of Dublin’s fair city with a more enlightened perspective on life, and on its girls who are so pretty.

Such talk of Sheelas would drive one to fidelity. Speaking of romancing the stone, one of the best places in the Celtic world to pledge undying love, or God knows for your sins, to renew your marriage vows is at Holy Island in Lough Derg, County Clare. A centre of pilgrimage for over 1000 years since a papal intervention, East Clare Heritage has reminded this column in timely fashion one can receive marital blessings around Brian Boru’s old stomping ground at Holy Island, the jewel of Lough Derg. With this oath stone came a health and safety warning also.

‘Woe betides the one that breaks the agreement,’ early tourists/pilgrims were told with regard to the power of the oath stone whether it be a marriage settlement, a land transaction or merely a loan. So if one is so inclined to renew vows of old or indeed make new ones on the old sod, outside of the famed spa resort of Lisdoonvarna in the month of September, seal it not just with a kiss but set it in stone at Holy Island.

Of course a Living Museum of Irish Romance would have to feature reference to the patron saint of love actually residing in Dublin, at the Whitefriar Street Church, a little known fact. The saint’s relics have been in situ here for some time. And to the Queens Hotel, Ennis not just where I first stumbled my way into the path of the Celtic Times’ far better half but is also situated just off where Parnell first met Kitty O’Shea.

Of course the omnipresent Leaba Diarmuid agus Gráinne would have to take pride of place in such a tourist attraction. If it is true that each stone monument of this name refers to sites where these most eternal of eloped lovers laid to rest while fleeing the scorned Fionn, well then the bold Diarmuid must have drank from the waters of Cahercommaun in the Burren, Ireland’s largest inland cliff fort, renowned for its fertile properties.

Honourable mention would also have to be given to one of the first practitioners of Gaelic games, Setanta, who, it is chronicled, after one display of skill was greeted by many bare breasted women. The love affair of Tristan and Isolde would also feature prominently in the international section along with Bernardo O’Brien who was the first European to encounter and document the hardy Amazonian women that he encountered almost 400 years ago before moving onto the modern section. I would be far too ignorant to even advance suggestions at this point in time for the modern gallery without due reference to Amy Andrews elsewhere in this parish who would be a far more reliable judge. Over to Fáilte Ireland to commission feasibility study.

The Orange Sash and the clash of the ash - The Munster Boys of Melbourne, 12th July 1843-44

The Orange sash and the clash of the ash

-The Munster Boys of Melbourne, 12th July 1843-44

The Munster Clans from far and near,

All thoughts of danger scorning,

With hands and hearts that knew no fear,

Came mustering fast that morning,

A warning voice had speeded forth,

Which brooked of no delay;

And East and West, and South and North,

Were at their posts that day

-         Edmund Finn

 All lovers of hurling know that the ferocious intensity and at times, naked aggression of the Tipperary and Clare clashes of the mid to late 1990s were born of the antagonism that was sparked between two clashing cultures. One county’s tradition spoke of a prime hurling pedigree, of Hell’s Kitchen and the Doyles, Jimmy and John. And, of course, scintillating stylists like the smiling assassin Nicholas English, a brave and magnificent hurler. The other county’s hurling tradition spoke of God’s musical people, the nearly men of Clare. It was a county which had bequeathed venerated greats to the game such as Jimmy Smyth and Dr Tommy Daly but had always come up short on the big stage since 1932. Even the famed optimism of the Banner folk of Clare, which had once caused the Limerick legend, Mick Mackey to remark that ‘Clare expect to win an All-Ireland every year’, was almost permanently extinguished by 1995. It was only when a Feakle native, one Gerard Loughnane, Clare’s first All-star hurler, a man who witnessed up close the playing out of this valiant losers/chokers tag on the hurling fields of Munster, steeled a team of both manly and gifted hurlers to annex their first All-Ireland in 81 years, that Clare could regain its rightful place as kingpins of hurling. Yet to the Tipperary man, no such bold claim could ever be asserted without having the scalps of the proud blue and gold to hand. When these two houses furiously clashed on the double in 1997, the ‘whipping boys’ of Clare backed up the street cred they had earned in 1995, and there was no more ‘dissing’ to be heard from Slievenamon. Respect had been earned the hard way.

Amidst the rancour of these and later matches, including one particularly bitter u-21 feud at Cusack Park, it was conveniently overlooked by many in each camp that it was the father of Gaelic football, Maurice Davin, the great Tipperary world champion athlete and the true father of Gaelic football who had led the answer to the Clareman Michael Cusack’s clarion call to form the Gaelic Athletic Association.  Yet what was never mentioned was a place called Batman’s Hill, thousands of miles away in the Australian state of Victoria, and how the Premier and the Banner counties through their hurling prowess were in the vanguard of physical and cultural resistance to imperial domination.

 Melbourne, a sophisticated world city in the south-east corner of mainland Australia, is a sports mad town with a particularly fervent passion for Aussie Rules. Originally founded as Port Philip in 1835 by Tasmanian settlers, it is the state capital of Victoria, an area which had in the mid-nineteenth century attracted a large influx of Irish emigrants from Munster, and in particular Clare and Tipperary. It was at Batman’s Hill in Melbourne, named after one of the original Tasmanian settlers, that a great battle for Irish sporting, cultural and religious freedom in Australia was won.

Sectarian tensions had been transported from the old country and when it was announced in the summer of 1843 that a July 12th Orange parade was to be held in Melbourne, many Irish feared that it was to be a continuation of the ritualistic violence which had accompanied such parades at home. The parade had been called by the recently formed Orange Confederation to ‘perpetuate the glorious, pious and immortal memory of William the Third’. Then three days before the planned parade an advertisement in the Herald newspaper appeared, inviting all Irish colonists to attend on July 12th the county hurling match for £50 between Clare and Tipperary. It was an apparent ploy, a call to arms as such, to assemble a large crowd with hurleys. The call was answered. There was a very strong Munster contingent present as indeed a notable constabulary presence also who were all treated to a glorious exhibition of hurling by the Clare and Tipp men. This clever ruse achieved its purpose of a display of strength that would not be cowered, and indeed not alone was the Orange parade cancelled but some of the intended marchers enjoyed the lively day’s hurling. The footballers of Clare and Tipperary thereafter thrilled the gathered masses of exiles and curious Antipodeans as a sequel to the day’s hurling affairs.

A contemporary account continues:

“The old year died, and the New Year was born, and about its period of middle age, rumour, with her hundred tongues, began to babble in loud whispers of the wonderful things to which the next 12th July was to bear witness. This time there was to be a grand Orange procession with flags flying and drums beating. The Orange tune of ‘Croppies Lie Down’ was to be played, and no hurling match or any other power under the sun should prevent it…

The preparations on both sides were quietly prosecuted, and the first startling intimation given was an advertisement in the Herald of the 10th proclaiming that ‘The greatest sport under the sun! – The grandest hurling match ever witnessed (even in old Ireland) will come off on Saturday next (12th) at twelve o’clock noon, on Batman’s Hill’. It was to be between all the Munster men in the province, and the players were to constitute a numerous team, for the ‘boys’ of the six counties were to be in the fielding, viz., Tipperary, Clare and Limerick against Waterford, Cork and Kerry. ‘All strapping young fellows were requested to attend, and to be sure and bring good hurlies, etc., etc., with them.’ What ‘the etceteras’ included was left as guesswork and widely interpreted.

Saturday, the 12th., was a fine winter’s day, and three fourths of the Melbournian population went off to the hurling. The spectators could be reckoned by thousands, and about 500 of as fine specimens of adult population as could be picked out of Ireland, threw off their coats, and set to work with a ringing Hibernian hulloo. Such a gathering of the clans, and such a real Irish turn-out have never been reproduced in Victoria. On the hill prevailed a promiscuous sort of enjoyment, much appreciated; and although there was no refreshment, gambling or music tents there, pocket-pistols, well primed with strong mountain dew, were in much request, and nipped and shared with true Irish hospitality.

And thus did a hurling match achieve for a second time a peculiar and bloodless victory. No third hurling match was ever required, for no Orange procession afterwards was either effected or even menaced.”

The Clare and Tipperary hurlers of 1843-44 showed that this was a new world where croppies would never have to lie down, where the prowess of the Gaelic games Cusack was to codify forty years later could be enjoyed by three quarters of Melbourne’s population.     Today, the city of Melbourne is the home, workplace and leisure centre of one of the world's most harmonious and culturally diverse communities. This owes much to the unique and momentous occasion of the great gathering of Gaels at Batman’s Hill, Melbourne, Australia in 1843. The new sporting association founded by Cusack with Davin, forty years after the events of Batman’s Hill, would in effect represent a sporting reincarnation of the pre-famine Catholic and Repeal mass-movements. Cusack himself admitted that ‘every social movement in Ireland is to a certain extent necessarily political.’So scratch enough beneath the surface of a Clare-Tipp rivalry, and there you will find a brotherly bond, bewitched by an endearing love for an ancient Irish art form, a bond that stretches back through turbulent ages.

One final shout to Loughnane who presented his and Clare’s first all star trophy to this writer some moons ago when setting up the award winning Riches of Clare Museum.  He once invoked the spirit of the Orangemen at halftime of the single most defining match of his tenure, the Munster Final breakthrough of 1995, and is now going toe to toe with a serious illness, and we return that shout to him now – no surrender.

Daniel McCarthy can be contacted at boruculture@msn.com, all heritage project commissions considered, regardless of international boundaries,Tipperary related included.