Читать книгу The Country of Our Dreams - Mary O'Connell - Страница 17

Last year Bee had thought they would surely be engaged. On his regular visits to their farmhouse, she felt Michael Davitt had paid her special attentions, laughing appreciatively at her little sallies, admiring her abundant auburn hair, her slender figure, always ready to look up and smile when she came into a room, no matter how thick the atmosphere was with men and smoke and talk of politics.

That was last summer, the third and the wettest of three cold summers, when the doom of the crops had become clearer, the men’s faces grimmer and the politics tougher.

That was when James Daly’s Tenants Defence Association had become the Mayo Land League, with a clear plan of organisation and action. That was when the Fenians John Devoy and Michael Davitt had finally persuaded The Right Honourable Charles Stewart Parnell, MP, to support the growing land agitation in the West. At Davitt’s urging, the Wicklow landlord, and future leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party at Westminster, had come to Mayo himself in June.

What a victory that had been. To hear those cold calm English-accented tones speak out against the unpayable rents and callous evictions. ‘You must show the landlords,’ Parnell had said, to a monster meeting at Westport, ‘that you intend to hold a firm grip of your homestead and lands. You must not allow yourselves to be dispossessed, as you were dispossessed in 1847.’

As Davitt repeatedly pointed out at meeting after meeting, three hundred individuals owned six million acres of Irish land while five million Irish people didn’t own a single acre. It was time for change. No more the shame of paupery, the mark of the slave. The Land of Ireland was to be for the People of Ireland. Those who sowed must now reap.

In October of 1879, the Irish National Land League had been formed in Dublin with Parnell as President, and Davitt as Secretary. The Irish people were on their way.

But the Church had baulked. The new Land League was not talking of compassionate aid to the poor in times of enormous stress, but of revolutionary changes to land ownership. Two of the four leading prelates spoke up against them. The Archbishops of Tuam in the West and Dublin in the East.

Then the Mayo discussions had raged as to how far to go, how far they could go, without the Church. Daly was not keen on any split. He said that Church and People drew their strength from one another. But Davitt was confident that their movement could take the majority of the clergy with them. After all, most of the priests were sons of farmers. They knew the reality facing their poorer parishioners. And at least Armagh in the North was silent, for the hard old Cardinal there was finally dead – Cullen’s grip on Ireland at last broken.

And then the Archbishop of Munster, the spiritual leader of the South, of Cork and Kerry and Tipperary, Dr Thomas Croke of Cashel had stepped up on the people’s side. ‘It is cruel to punish a person for not paying a debt which is impossible to satisfy,’ he had publicly stated, in a written message sent out to the parishes – to the horror both of England and of Rome. ’It is neither sin nor treason to say that where a man labours, he has a right to be fed, ‘ Croke had continued, ‘There is no sin in striving to live and wishing to die in Ireland.’

The great Archbishop had given the people permission to resist. He had strengthened the Land League’s power immeasurably. Payment of rents was being delayed everywhere, and evictions were being challenged with a new will.

In the depths of winter, in January 1880, the impoverished community of Carraroe in Connemara resisted all attempts at eviction of tenants of the landlord Kirwan. The police had had to retire defeated from the field of battle, a battle of sticks and rocks and curses coming from all sides, from furious and determined men and women.

And some of the landlords were reducing the rents. If the tenants stood together and stood firm. In towns around the country, police were being called in to collect the rents, but found no support from the community. They could not buy milk or meat, as even the shopkeepers refused their custom, as the new idea of boycotting spread. The tactic of social isolation had been so successfully used against the land agent Captain Boycott –the bully-boy for Lord Erne’s estates in Mayo, that his name became forever associated with the method.

It was not just food or labour that was being withheld. Young women were standing up at public meetings and urging their sisters and friends not to walk out with any member of the constabulary. Not at least while they were engaged at destroying their own people.

But for all the new spirit of resistance, which was in itself a kind of nourishment for the body as well as for the soul, Bee knew it had still been a time of great suffering in the West. In the most desperate homes, children were entirely without clothes. A cruel winter for them.

Bee and her sister Margaret and their cousin May Nally had gone through their district distributing food and some old clothes the best they could, begging from the wealthier citizens on behalf of the poor. The women had warmed themselves that winter with their long walks through the countryside, and a slow burning rage. Their own home was insecure, with a landlord hostile to their family involvement in the League. Even if you paid your rent, your tenancy was not secure. The women shared the League’s determination that things must change in Ireland.

Yet at times Bee had felt full, not of rage, but of light, warmed and raised above the ordinary, on the dreams of Michael Davitt. Who looked everything at her but said nothing. The only thing she had really feared that winter was that the English would come and take him back to prison.

Everyone knew that Dartmoor Prison had been a cruel experience. Seven years of it. No quarter given, especially not to one of the hated Fenians. As a twenty one year old Davitt had joined the Lancashire branch of the Irish Republican Brotherhood. Three years later, he had attempted to buy arms in England for an Irish uprising, one that never happened. Unsuccessful though it had all been, an informant still told the police.

At the beginning of his fifteen-year prison sentence he had been strip searched daily, sometimes up to four times a day. They had put him to stone breaking, and when his one hand was too blistered to continue, he was moved to the prison gang hauling carts around the prison, yoked as animals. When the cart harness injured the stump of his right shoulder, they simply moved him back to stone breaking. Cockroaches were served up in the food, the men kept so hungry that some of them ate their cell candles.

Davitt preferred light. After all, hunger had stalked him and his kind since his earliest years. He had used his precious candlelight to write to the international press about conditions in the jail. He had written for all of them, political and criminal prisoners. A warder who had no sympathy for the Irish cause, but some for Davitt himself, smuggled the letters out. Liberal newspapers in Ireland and England published them. There was a stir, a controversy, and the slow ripples of his freedom had begun. Although it had taken the Irish Parliamentary Party five more years to get him and other Irish political prisoners out of English jails.

By the time he was released on parole on December 19, 1877, into the welcoming arms of first London Irish then Dublin crowds, Davitt’s father Martin had died, and his mother and sisters, on his urgings, had left Lancashire for the safety of America.

When he came out of Dartmoor, Michael Davitt was thirty-one years old, penniless, jobless, without the comforts of family or wife and children. When you have taken everything from a man - his country, his family, his language, his freedom - you have done either one of two things. You have broken him and made him your slave, or you have forged a mighty and bright-shining weapon, to be raised up against you.