Letter from Connaught
Richard West
County Galway The Reverend Ian Paisley and his Protestant supporters must have smiled when they heard that the Pope is to go on pilgrimage to Knock in the province of Connaught. This, the Westernmost of the four old provinces, has been the poorest throughout Ireland's the — hence Cromwell's cruel threat to toe Catholic peasants of Ulster and Leinster, `Go to Hell or Connaught' —a taunt that ‘;14'.' repeated into the late 18th and early 19th centuries by Protestant bullies, the they o'Day Boys and Orangemen, when tney chased the papishes from their land at .the point of a sword. Tens of hundreds of thousands of Cathol ics, mostly from Ulster, chose Connaught rather than Hell and moved with their families and pigs into the bog-land or rock !Frrain of Mayo and Galway and Sligo. In the early part of the 19th century, the Population of Connaught multiplied with the rise in the price of grain, and villages ,cpread to the peaks of the hills where even today You can see the traces of 'potato Land was let and sub-let down to the level of serfs, who toiled free for the master just for the right to grow • the IP)°tatoes they needed for their families. This _ arren countryside became a 'congested to borrow the bureaucrats' jargon of e day. When the potato crop failed for the Worst, though by no means the first, time rom 1845-48, more than half a million ,P„e'3131e in Connaught died or emigrated. i.../1011 or Connaught' had become a mean,o_gless alternative. The once 'congested ffrea' is now short of people; the fields of v•n°i_rn and tiny potato patches are wild or tbi_v!n over to grazing; two or three genera on people grew ,,"ms of Cnaught lw up in rmneriea. 0,.Th's part of Connaught is rich in its store (?Id but no doubt righteous grievances: qainst the Bodkins, the • Protestant land lords who took the peasant girls hv dron de seigneur from those who could not pay the rent; of young men sent to Botany Bay for poaching the foreigners' salmon (a favourite theme in the works of the local novelist, Walter Macken); even some of the songs you hear in the pubs recall that Australian exile — 'Oh Johnny Turk, he shelled us at Gallipoli'.
But, although this land has a sombre past, it has a thriving present. Thanks to the European Common Agriculture Policy, combined with speculation in land, even the poorest acre in Connaught is likely to sell at up to /3,000, and most of the wealth has gone to the great grandsons of those small holders who once nearly died of starvation. The tiniest cottage in Connemara now has its car, perhaps even a second car; only the tourists walk. The landlord of the boarding house has purchased a fishing boat as well as a second car out of his several businesses which include a 17-robm lodging house in Hampstead. In a Clegeein pub, I heard these snatches of conversation `There was a man the other day who sold a farm of 300 acres and with it he bought a 500-acre farm in Wiltshire, England, and still had enough money left over to buy five tractors. He employs five men there • 1 know a doctor who gave his wife 118,000 to spend. For tax purposes. He just said "enjoy yourself". She was putting 1200 or /300 on horses whose names she couldn't even pronounce.' But unemployment, I have been told, is serious; and you can see men waiting to get the dole at the local post office, which doubles conveniently as a public house. Oddly enough, it is hard to buy the fruits of the land and the sea from which west Gal way people once struggled to earn a living. Meat costs half as much again as in London. You can seldom buy fresh vegetables in the shops, although this district used to be famous for greens as well as potatoes. At Clifden on a Friday morning—note the.day of the week — I was told that the nearest place to buy fish was in Galway, 50 miles away; yet the coast has many fishing ports. The absence of hens and turkeys is blamed on a plague of foxes, which in turn is blamed on the disappearance of fox hunting; this went out with the Protestants. One local entrepreneur thought that even hay might go out of production; 'It's been awful wet this year for the hay. It's very hard to make hay when it's like this. I had to shout and curse at the kids to make them go out to work. Really it's not a part of the world for hay and I think in the future we will have to start buying it' — although west Galway has not yet followed the lead of Dublin in buying a large number of potatoes from abroad.
This suspension of agricultural work has nothing to do with lack of incentive. You can buy fresh vegetables in the market place from an English family, just as two years • ago you could buy fish from the West German students who made a big profit during their holiday here. Last week I met a party of French tourists who had caught I 5 kilogrammes of shrimps in the afternoon and were taking them down the coast to sell. A fine new restaurant selling locally-caught fish and shellfish is run by a Scots woman. 0 I do not mean to suggest that Connaught people have passed up opportunities to get rich. In every.village shop you can here the characteristic peep-peep-poip-poip of the Japanese cash register that 1 found all over Ireland; people are very glad to take English pounds instead of Irish punt because 'We just don't understand about exchange rates'. (They understand it well enough in Northern Ireland where one Irish punt is worth 90p sterling). But agriculture is out of fashion; it smacks too much of the sad past Better a job on a building site in England, a garage, a pub, a bit of property dealing and farming 'on the intervention'— which means that Europe pays you just for owning a cow or a sheep.
Perhaps some of the character is disappearing from Connaught; a sing-song is likely to feature `Galway Bay' or Cockles and Mussels' rather than genuine Irish songs, and in the Gaehaelit (Irish language) regions here, you cannot receive Guelmeht service from Radio Telefis Eireann,. although you can get the pop programme RTE 2., However, Connaught is thriving at last and doing better than Northern Ireland of which Mr Paisley is self-appointed leader. Many Protestants from the North come down on their holidays and are welcomed and even entertained with some of their strident Orange songs; but privately many Connaught people wish these visitors back to 'Hell or Ulster'.
P.S. Just after writing this I learned of the murder off County Sligo of Lord Mountbatten, his grandson, another fifteen-year-old boy, the Dowager Lady Brabourne four more innocent victims of this accursed country. The Pope would do well to stay away.
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