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CHAPTER TWO

The Most Destitute Spot

in Ireland

‘The state of society is now completely unhinged.’ These were the stark words of a young Catholic bishop in a letter to the British Prime Minister, Earl Grey, on west-of-Ireland conditions in 1831. John MacHale raged about the plight of the peasantry: the weather had wreaked havoc on the potato crop – what were the people to do? If the evangelical view in Cavan blamed Catholicism, popery and the clergy for the country’s ills, the Catholic prelate had a different take on the root cause of Ireland’s distress: there was something rotten, he asserted, at the heart of the land system in the country.

Famine and cholera were sweeping across the western counties, the public roads were crowded with thousands toiling for a wretched pittance of six or seven pence worth of meal for an entire family, while women and children thronged into depots seeking provisions. How could hundreds in Ballina cry out for food while, at the same time, the town was busy with the bustle of corn traders, and the public road crowded with vehicles bearing away food for export? It was a scandal, fumed the cleric, ‘a famine in the midst of plenty’.1

In the three decades since the formation of the Union, Britain had flourished: it was a time of growth, industrialisation, capitalism, free trade and urbanisation, and Irish agriculture fed this economic expansion with a remarkable increase in Irish food exports. But Ireland itself was becoming progressively more chaotic: the population swelled, potato cultivation intensified, and farm holdings fragmented into a patchwork of plots with the chronic subdivision of small holdings. In the west, the decline in living standards for many ‘was both dangerous and rapid’, with a large subsistence underclass virtually dependent on a single crop: the potato.2

The Mayo Constitution newspaper reported that there was a ‘mass of human misery to be found throughout a vast district of the west of Ireland’. For whole communities around Clew Bay there were ‘no potatoes, no oatmeal, a failure of fisheries, no price to be got for kelp, no public or private markets for goods, no means of earning daily wages, no resident gentry landlords, no food but seaweed, and the small fishes that can be picked up along the strand’.3

In the midst of this chaos, Edward Nangle headed west on a relief mission.

***

The Atlantic waves tossed the boat dangerously close to the cliffs.

The clergyman crept from his berth on the Nottingham steamer, his stomach churning, as the sea frothed all around in a sheet of white foam.4 It was near sunset, on a Wednesday evening in July 1831, and the sky glowed red like a hot furnace. He struggled to keep his footing on deck as the storm winds gusted furiously and the gigantic cliffs on Achill Island’s western coast loomed overhead on the boat’s lee side – Croaghaun, where the power of the Atlantic waves had chiselled away the rock face. This was Edward Nangle’s first sighting of Achill Island in its wild and terrifying magnificence.

His pregnant wife, Eliza, was sheltered below deck, perhaps regretting her decision to travel as her body convulsed with sea sickness. Her thoughts must often have turned to their one-year-old daughter, Frances, left behind in Dublin in the care of her family. She had shown a steely determination in accompanying and supporting her husband, a single-mindedness and selflessness that would be a feature of their married life. The boat carried a cargo of Indian meal to provide some relief for the communities of the west in their dire need.

The Nottingham creaked and groaned at every seam as she plunged into successive gullies between the waves and Croaghaun cliffs. As one fearful surge of Atlantic waters succeeded the next, it must have seemed as if the steamer would never again rise from the depths. Edward watched Captain Biddy stalking the deck, knowing he had a calculation to make: should he protect the vessel by throwing some of the cargo of meal overboard or hold tight in the hope of reaching the calmer waters of Clew Bay? The captain waited, never once leaving the steamer’s deck as the red sky faded on the western horizon.

When Edward and Eliza married three years earlier, he was still in recovery after the earlier disintegration of his health in County Cavan. In hindsight, their early married years at Elm Cottage, Monkstown, must have appeared idyllic, with pleasant musical evenings and violin renditions of Haydn and Mozart by Edward at their Dublin cottage. It would be a short-lived period of tranquillity in their married life.

There is a sense that an artist’s soul struggled beneath the surface of Edward’s personality, with glimmers of an enthusiastic musician, an eager watercolourist, a writer of soaring lyrical prose and a man awestruck by nature’s beauty. This aesthetic would reveal a deficit on his part in later years with little evident appreciation of the native culture of the people he ministered to in contrast, for instance, to Christopher Anderson’s regard for the native Celtic culture.

A watercolour, possibly by Edward, of Eliza with two of their daughters a few years into their marriage shows her looking downwards in a diffident, reserved way, the image reflecting the norms for the virtuous woman of the times. Her husband described her as a woman of ‘few words’, a trait that contrasted with his own tendency towards extravagant verbal propensity as words poured in torrents from his mouth and pen.5 These differing temperaments would become a factor in their diverging responses to future adverse circumstances. It was as if his verbal fluency acted as a type of therapy for Edward in times of stress, while Eliza’s taciturn disposition caused her to bury accumulating suffering deep within.

Mercifully, at about ten o’clock, the tension on the Nottingham broke as the steamer rounded Achill’s southern tip into Clew Bay with the wind at its stern and the waters finally smooth. The vessel anchored within a couple of miles of Westport where the passengers got some welcome rest. They awoke to calm waters amidst the scenic surroundings of Clew Bay with its multitude of islands. Leaning over the gunwale, Edward gazed out at the sharp-summited Croagh Patrick on the southern coast of the bay: the holy mountain, imposing and resplendent as it jutted towards the heavens. Edward reflected on his Catholic countrymen who, year after year, lacerated their limbs on the mountain in pilgrimages of self-inflicted torture. He felt only sorrow for their moral condition, reflecting the thoughts of one Christopher Anderson, ‘without a vernacular literature, without books, without schools, and without the ministration of the divine work in their native language’.6 He would bend every fibre of his being towards changing their lot.

William Baker Stoney, the rector of the nearby Newport parish, boarded the Nottingham in Westport and claimed some Indian meal for his parishioners. The famine distress in the area was acute, he told the visitors, and nowhere was more afflicted than Achill Island. He invited Edward and Eliza to his home as guests. Already, Edward was setting his sights on the remote place where he would implement his evangelical vision. He would travel to Achill without delay.

***

What was wrong with Ireland? Why was the country collapsing? Why was the condition of the people so appalling and disorderly in contrast to that of the English? A thoughtful, dark-haired, delicate-looking French nobleman was determined to find the answer and his conclusions would differ from those of Edward Nangle. What he found in Ireland and the west was deep-seated and intractable.

One August day in the 1830s, the young aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville arrived at Newport, about twenty miles from Achill, where Edward and Eliza Nangle were William Stoney’s guests. The Frenchman was on a six-week visit to Ireland with his friend, Gustave de Beaumont, to examine the worrying conditions in the country about which he had read much. He was already an experienced traveller with a scholarly reputation, the first parts of his voluminous study into the American political system having been published. A central concern of his intellectual life was the manner in which societies made the transition from an aristocratic to a democratic society, and he was well placed to offer a dispassionate view on the Irish situation.

He was depressed by the state of Ireland: ‘a collection of misery such as I did not imagine existed in the world’, a nation ‘divided in the most violent way between two parties which are altogether religious and political’. The language of the Dublin aristocracy alarmed him with their description of the common people as savages, reducing them to something less than human. As for the ordinary people, he was likewise shocked at their pervasive contempt for their aristocracy and landlords. It was a divided society at war with itself.

In Newport, Alexis and Gustave reached a one-storey house at the side of a meadow facing the town’s quay. It was the home of Father James Hughes, the Catholic parish priest who would become a thorn in Edward Nangle’s side. Alexis had read the cleric’s powerful letters to the newspapers about the state of his parishioners, and when he decided to see the conditions of the west first-hand he made it his business to meet the priest.

De Tocqueville now stood before the stout James Hughes, aged about fifty, dressed in black, wearing riding boots and speaking with a pronounced accent. ‘A little common,’ was De Tocqueville’s comment in his journal. The priest took the visitors into a small room where the walls were covered with garish religious engravings interspersed with political caricatures. In a short time, a crowd gathered outside the priest’s front door, anticipating that the visitors might have brought some relief as few had eaten that day. ‘Most of them have been forced to dig up the new harvest and feed themselves on potatoes as large as nuts, which make them ill,’ said the priest.

The two local landlords were the Marquis of Sligo, based at Westport, and Sir Richard O’Donnell who lived not far from the priest at Newport House. These great landlords, complained the priest, gave nothing and did nothing to prevent the unfortunate population from dying of hunger. They let the farmers die before their eyes, or evicted them from their miserable dwellings on the slightest pretext. They had drained the energy from the people.

Three hundred paces from the priest’s house, the river divided into two branches and a promontory jutted between the two streams to form a hill. There, in the middle of a meadow, was the house of the Protestant rector, William Stoney. The visitors heard that there was open warfare between priest and rector, who attacked each other bitterly in the newspapers and in the pulpit, each believing passionately in his version of the truth. Rector and priest fought for souls.

Back in Dublin, de Tocqueville took soundings from influential people in an effort to understand the relationship between the Irish landlords and their tenants. What he heard was troubling: ‘There is no moral tie between the poor and the rich. The Irish landlords extract from their estates all that they can yield.’

Why was the agricultural population poor if the farm yields were so good?

Yes, the yields were immense, but none of the wealth remained in the hands of the people. The Irish were raising productive crops, carrying their harvest to the nearest port, putting it on board an English vessel, and returning home to subsist on potatoes.

By the end of his visit, Alexis de Tocqueville was convinced that the profound chasm between the aristocracy-cum-landlords and the Irish people was widening by the day and he set out his thoughts in a letter to his father before his departure: ‘England and Ireland have the same language, the same laws, the same social structure, they are subject to the same government, and there are no [two] countries that present a more different appearance. Both have been for a long time, and are still in many respects, subject to a powerful aristocracy. This aristocracy had produced great wealth in England, and frightful poverty in Ireland.’7

It was, he concluded, as if two entirely distinct nations occupied the same Irish soil: one rich, civilised and happy, the other poor, half savage, and overwhelmed by misery. ‘If you wish to know what the spirit of conquest and religious hatred, combined with all the abuses of aristocracy without any of its advantages, can produce, come to Ireland’.8

The aristocracy and landlords were to blame for the plight of Ireland, concluded the Frenchman. The land system was rotten, said John MacHale. Popery and the Catholic clergy were at the root of the country’s misery, said Edward Nangle, and he was determined to do something about it.

***

Edward Nangle crossed the strand in Achill Sound at low tide and stood for the first time on Achill soil, having travelled with a scripture reader by horseback from Newport the previous day. Afterwards, he would describe the desolate sight: ‘The deep silence of desolation was unbroken, except by the monotonous rippling of the tide as it ebbed or flowed, or the wild scream of the curlew disturbed by some casual intruder on its privacy.’9

A couple of years earlier, a young Anglo-Irish gentleman on a leisure trip to the west had noted: ‘To look at the map of County Mayo, one could imagine that nature had designed that county for a sportsman.’10 The gentleman had chronicled his successful hunting exploits in Achill, returning from the mountain at the end of the day to the coastguard station with bulging bags of game, having shot seven hares and thirteen brace of grouse.

Achill Island presents a landscape of contrasts: an island with the shape of an upside-down boot, the hardness of its coastline countered by the black softness of the bog land that makes up most of its centre. The incessant coastal sounds of breaking waves and screaming birds are in contrast to the melancholy loneliness of large tracts of the island’s interior.

Today, the main approach route from Westport to Achill hugs the eastern and northern shores of Clew Bay via Newport and Mulranny, then swings in an arc around Corraun Hill along the edges of Blacksod Bay. It follows the route of what was once the Midland Great Western Railway line, extended to Achill at the close of the nineteenth century. Nowadays, the disused railway line forms The Great Western Greenway, a 43km stretch of cycling and walking pathways, while the adjacent roadway carries motorists who follow the ingeniously branded Wild Atlantic Way along the entire stretch of Ireland’s Atlantic coast.

Measuring fifteen miles from east to west, eleven from north to south and the population distributed through several villages, it appeared to Edward that much of the Achill land had not been broken for cultivation since the deluge. He took in the crude houses with the roofs resting like domes on massive walls, giving the appearance of beehives. The worst aspect of the island to his view was the moral condition of the islanders: it was a place of ‘ignorance and barbarism, of intellectual and moral degradation’.11 This was not entirely surprising to him since, he observed, it was then a widely held view that Achill was a byword for barbarism and paganism.

The pair headed north along rugged, zigzagging pathways for, had they taken a direct route, their horses would have sunk to their knees in the marshy swamp. It took an entire day to reach the coastguard station perched on Bullsmouth channel in the north-east corner of the island, an innocuous stretch of water between Achill and the small beast-shaped Inishbiggle, where the tidal swell could make a boat passage treacherous. Clergyman, scripture reader and horses welcomed the coastguard’s hospitality.

The next day, they pressed on in the direction of the purple-black mountain of Slievemore at Dugort on Achill’s north coast. Edward Nangle looked upon the slopes covered with peat and overgrown with heath and hard-stunted grass, the sheltered eastern flank sliced by chasms bringing water in its torrents into the sodden swamp below – a place so inhospitable that, according to the locals, a hare could hardly walk over it.

This was the mountain area on which Edward Nangle set his sights. He needed land and decided to return to Newport and seek a meeting with the head of the Burrishoole estate that comprised most of Achill Island. Sir Richard O’Donnell was favourably disposed to the evangelicals, having closely followed events at Lord Farnham’s Cavan estate, and quickly agreed a thirty-one-year lease on a tract of land at Slievemore.

Over thirty years later, Edward reflected on the difficulties he encountered in securing occupancy on even this poor-quality land from Sir Richard O’Donnell on a lease of thirty-one years: ‘This was not easily to be had, as the land was all leased to tenants, who were very tenacious of their rights. With much difficulty, they were induced to surrender 130 acres of wild mountain, without any building or a rood of cultivated ground upon it’.12 He was certain that the Roman Catholic priest, had he known what was intended for the land, would have prevented him from getting it. Goodwill money of £90 was paid to the occupying tenants.13 The tales of the island people would afterwards speak of the pain of those they believed were dispossessed of their Slievemore fields at that time.14

A few weeks after his first visit to Achill, Edward sat down in Dublin to write to Christopher Anderson whose book had fired his soul five years earlier. Not only did he have a vision for his west-of-Ireland project, but he also had the organisational skills and the financial flair to drive forward his concept. He fleshed out a plan which he presented to some supporters: five directors would oversee expenditure on erecting the Achill Mission buildings, two Irish-speaking missionaries would be recruited and an agriculturist would oversee the land reclamation. If the Achill scheme was successful, he told Christopher Anderson, ‘your Historical Sketches will have been the instrument, or the first link in the chain of secondary causes which were used to promote it.’15

But some of Edward’s associates were unconvinced, warning him that it was a risky and foolhardy venture, a wild speculation originating in a romantic imagination, a project that would be abandoned as soon as it ran into opposition. Moreover, was it wise to sacrifice the interests of his family and career for such an undertaking? ‘What wild goose chase is this that you are going upon to that Island of Achill?’ asked one evangelical-minister colleague.16

Edward was unwavering. He would move to Achill with his wife and children and bring about the moral regeneration of the minds and hearts of the Achill peasantry. His undertaking would face the classic missionary dilemma: to bring the Bible and a ministry of service in education, literacy, medical services and economic development to a wretched people, without trampling on the rituals and way of life which bonded a people together. Despite the obstacles, Edward Nangle was convinced that his island colony could become a model Christian development and a template to demonstrate to the world how to lift a people out of poverty, ignorance and idolatry through an evangelising crusade.