Wounds: A Memoir of War and Love. Fergal Keane

organisers of hunger relief in Ballybunion, about five miles from the Purtills, described how the ‘surging crowds of deserving and naked poor who throng the streets every day seeking relief show unmistakably that dire distress prevails in the locality and that unless immediate relief be given and held on for some time there can be no alternative but the blackest Famine … the state of our poor is hourly verging on absolute destitution and the condition of the poor children attending our schools deplorable’.34

      Once more a network of secret groups sprang up across the countryside to mete out the people’s justice. Informers were despised. A parallel system of justice with its own courts was set up to adjudicate on land disputes. Ominously, in parts of north Kerry the Royal Irish Constabulary were increasingly identified as the landlord’s enforcers. ‘They have thrown the whole thing on the police,’ a report noted, ‘who for the past six months have acted more in the capacity of herds[men] than policemen and the result is the men are becoming completely worn out, disgusted in their duty and demoralised.’35

      The hour of the night raiders was back.

      The Moonlighters roamed the country in disguise. They raided to exact retribution and to arm themselves with seized guns. The Catholic farmer John Curtin, a senior local figure in the Land League, was murdered in l885 in south Kerry. One of the attackers was shot during the raid and Curtin’s daughters gave evidence that led to the conviction of some of the Moonlighters. As a consequence, the family was damned. They were booed and jeered when they drove on the local roads. All their servants left. An old man who had herded their cattle for thirty years was too afraid to remain. When they went to mass ‘a derisive cheer was raised by six or eight shameless girls … believing that the police won’t interfere with them’.36 The parish priest ‘never uttered a word in condemnation’. They were again assailed outside the church. The priest, Father Patrick O’Connor, explained that on a previous raid Curtin had surrendered a gun and ‘that if he had given up a gun they would not have hurt a hair on his head’.37 The following week the daughters were accompanied by twenty-five policemen and a representative of the Land League. But the presence of the man from the League made no difference. Stones were thrown. When he tried to address the crowd he was shouted down and afterwards said he owed his life to the police. A group of women ripped out the Curtin family pew and destroyed it in the church grounds. Curtin’s widow could neither sell nor leave. The sale was boycotted. Any prospective buyer was threatened with death. ‘I cannot live here in peace but they won’t let me go,’ she wrote. But the mother of one of the convicted men showed no compassion. ‘As long as I am alive and my children and their children live, we will try to root the Curtins out of the land.’38 The words have an obliterative violence, as if she were speaking of the destruction of weeds. The Nationalist MP John O’Connor sounded a note of hopelessness when he remarked that if the Curtin family was to be protected from the annoyances, to which he regretted they had been subjected, ‘it would have to be by other means than public denunciations of outrages’.39 Not for the last time in Irish history, political condemnations would mean nothing. After eighteen months of hostility the Curtins sold their farm for half of its value and left the area. Nobody, not the police, not the gentry, not the government, could change the minds of their neighbours.

      Near to Ballydonoghue, sixty-year-old John Foran was murdered in 1888 for renting the farm of an evicted man. The teenage Bertha Creagh, whose father acted as solicitor for several landlords, saw his killers planning their attack as she went for a walk. ‘I remarked on their evident seriousness to my brother,’ she wrote. Foran was a successful farmer and had gone to Tralee to hire extra help. When on his way home with his labourers and fourteen-year-old son, an assassin appeared out of the woods at a bend in the road and ‘fired from a six-chambered revolver, and lodged bullets in succession in Fohran’s [sic] body … the terrified boy, having waited to lay his dying father on the grass at the roadside, drove on to Listowel’.40 The murdered man was a survivor of the Famine and a contemporary account describes him as ‘being brave even to rashness – that the people of his district had a wholesome dread of himself and his shillelagh’.41 He had also endured four years of harassment – with police protection that had only recently been withdrawn at the time of the murder.

      The investigation followed a familiar pattern. There were arrests and court hearings but nobody was convicted. The witnesses kept to the law of silence. In the time of my grandparents, the IRA would draw on those old traditions of silence and communal solidarity.

      The Land League was denounced and Parnell and Davitt accused of fomenting violence. The League leaders knew how rural Ireland worked. Violence was not a surprise to them. Davitt condemned the murders but stressed the responsibility of history. ‘The condition and treatment of the poorer tenantry of Ireland have not been, and could not be, humanly speaking, free from the crime which injustice begets everywhere,’ he declared. ‘For that violence which has taken the form of retaliatory chastisement for acknowledged merciless wrong, I make no apology on the part of the victims of Irish landlordism. For me to do so would be to indict Nature for having implanted within us the instinct of self-defence.’42

      With tough anti-coercion laws, and a gradual resolution of the land issues, violence abated. The Land War wound down. Parnell led a new campaign for Home Rule before he was destroyed by scandal. Davitt went off to become a journalist and then took a seat in the House of Commons. He dreamed of nationalising the land of Ireland but misunderstood entirely the character of rural Ireland. Only the land a man held for himself offered any security. By 1914, seventy-five per cent of Irish tenants were in a position to buy the land which they rented. They were assisted by British government loans. Labourers were helped by the building of cottages, each on an acre of land. The Purtills bought their own land. In time the sons of the family would move out and buy their own farms. When my cousin Vincent Purtill sold his 400-acre farm and retired he felt agitated. Without the land who was he and where was he? Eventually the stress got the best of him. He went and bought a small farm of twenty-four acres. ‘I need only walk out the door and I am walking on my land. I do it every day,’ he said.

      By the early years of the twentieth century, Listowel seemed at peace. Violence was present but contained. It flared occasionally and just as quickly fell away. Tenant farmers used the law to challenge landlords. One case from the Ballydonoghue area in March 1895 shows how dramatically rural life had changed. George Sandes, a descendant of Cromwellian planters, was one of the most powerful landowners in the area. The town of Newtownsandes, about five miles from the Purtills, was named after his family. During the Land War, Sandes was such an unpopular figure that locals attempted to rename the town after one of the Land League leaders. He was a resident magistrate during those years

      But in the new rural world forged by Parnell and Davitt, Sandes was no longer free to evict at will. When a farmer went to court to challenge his eviction Sandes lost and was ordered to pay damages.

      Constitutional politics were again on the march and Home Rule was promised. My great-grandfather, Edmund Purtill, was listed as donating 1 shilling and sixpence to the cause of the Irish Party at Westminster. Enclosing a cheque for £32 from the parish, the Very Reverend John Molyneaux assured the party treasurer in London that there was not ‘in any parish in the South of Ireland a people more willing and anxious to generously support any movement which has for its object the interests of religion, and the happiness and prosperity of the people’.43 It may have been that Edmund Purtill harboured more radical sympathies and was donating money out of a desire to please the parish priest. But it is more likely that he believed Home Rule within the British Empire was the surest guarantee of stability. The Purtills were still poor but they had a stake in the land. At that point in history, directly on the turn of the century, the majority of Irish Catholics took the same view. The area returned Home Rule MPs at successive elections.