The Fethard-on-Sea Boycott E-Book

Tim Fanning

• Herausgeber: The Collins Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2010

Beschreibung

In 1957, Sheila Cloney, Protestant wife of a Catholic farmer, fled from her home near the Wexford village of Fethard-on-Sea with her young daughters after refusing to bow to the demands of the local Catholic clergy to educate them as Catholics. In response, the priests launched a boycott of Fethard's Protestant shopkeepers and farmers. Tim Fanning tells the story of one of the ugliest sectarian episodes to occur in the Republic and examines how the Catholic Church's Ne Temere decree on mixed marriages resulted in one small rural community tearing itself apart.

Leseprobe

Introduction

The Hook Peninsula in County Wexford is one of the most attractive, if less well-known, parts of the country. It is not a rugged beauty like that of Connemara or Donegal. Nor is it that spectacular beauty to be found in Kerry or Clare. Instead, it has a remote, otherworldly mystery all of its own. There are few places where the past seems to hang so heavily in the air, from the haunted Victorian grandeur of Loftus Hall to the Cistercian splendour of Tintern Abbey. Fethard-on-Sea lies on the eastern side of the Hook at the entrance to Bannow Bay. Its quaint appendix, redolent of the somnolent English seaside, distinguishes the Wexford village from the landlocked town of Fethard in County Tipperary. Fethard is a quiet spot, only becoming busy during the summer months when the tourists arrive.

I first visited Fethard as an eight-year-old in 1984. My uncle and aunt, over from London, had rented Dungulph Castle, a Norman-era fortified dwelling about a mile and a half outside Fethard, and had invited my parents and me to join them and my cousins for a family holiday. The castle is an impressive building, especially for eight-year-olds with active imaginations. Built by the Whitty family in the fifteenth century, it still has many of its original defensive features, including a tower with arrow slits, a turret and a machicolation from which stones or burning hot pitch could be dropped on the enemy. It has a venerable history, withstanding siege and arson over the years. In 1642, a party of English soldiers from nearby Duncannon Fort attacked rebels who were holed up in the castle. The defenders managed to beat them back. The bodies of sixteen of the soldiers are believed to be buried in the vicinity. The Devereux family, one of the foremost rebel families on the Hook, were tenants during the 1798 Rebellion. The castle was burnt in reprisal. The Cloney family moved in shortly afterwards.

The castle was divided in two in the 1980s. One side was given over to paying guests. Seán and Sheila Cloney lived in the other side. The Cloneys were farmers. Being from Dublin and with little experience of the country, I was fascinated by the farm and thrilled to be allowed help bring the cows in for milking or gather the hay. In this way, I got to know the Cloney family – Seán and Sheila, their daughters, Eileen, Mary and Hazel, and their grandchildren. Seán and Sheila were then in their late fifties. Seán was a rather unusual character, not at all the archetype of the Irish farmer. He wore a beret, de rigueur perhaps for his brethren in Provence or the Basque country, but a rare enough sight in rural Ireland. He had a slight stoop owing to a problem with his spine, and piercing blue eyes which gave him an owlish demeanour that went hand in hand with his talent for storytelling and his love of learning. He was a great conversationalist, someone with a natural curiosity about other people. Sheila, on the other hand, was less visible. Whereas Seán was often to be found pottering about the farmyard, eager for a chat, Sheila was more shy and rarely emerged from the other side of the castle.

During that summer and on return visits to Fethard, Seán shared his considerable knowledge of the Hook with our family. He was a keen local historian, particularly interested in the Colclough family, who had lived in the nearby Tintern Abbey from the suppression of the monasteries in the sixteenth century right up until the middle of the twentieth century when the last resident handed the abbey over to the care of the State. Such was his enthusiasm for history that, after the day’s work, he would retreat to his study on the top floor of the castle and spend hours poring over his research. Often he would work into the early hours of the morning. When correspondents from all over the world would get in touch with him looking for information about some distant forebear who lived on the Hook, he would respond graciously, even though it meant he had less time for his own researches.

One evening, as the sun was going down on a glorious summer’s day, I was standing in the farmyard with Seán and my father. They were leaning on a gate in the farmyard, chatting. My father mentioned that we had made a pit stop earlier that day at Loftus Hall, the hulking Victorian mansion close to Hook Head. The Marquis of Ely, the principal landowner on the Hook, had built Loftus Hall on the site of a previous building towards the end of the nineteenth century. It was an unpropitious time to embark on such an ambitious project. Building work began in 1870, the year of Gladstone’s first Land Act. During the next decade, the worsening economic situation on the land, caused by a slump in agricultural prices, led to increased agrarian agitation. The Land War, which was particularly violent on the Hook, eventually ended in defeat for the old ascendancy landlords. In 1913, the Ely estate put Loftus Hall up for sale. It became a Benedictine and, later, a Rosminian convent. In the early 1980s, it was privately owned and was run as a hotel. I had found the place intriguing. As my mother and father had a drink – we were the only customers in the deserted bar – I had wandered off on my own to explore the long, empty hallways. By the time we arrived back at Dungulph, I was well acquainted with its nooks and crannies.

After chatting with my father about the history of The Hall, as it was known locally, Seán turned to me and asked did I know that it was haunted. I said I did not. With a mischievous grin, he began telling me about a foul, stormy night many years before when a stranger on horseback knocked on the door of Loftus Hall – then owned by the Tottenham family – looking for shelter. After giving him something to eat and drink, the head of the family, Charles Tottenham, invited his guest to a game of cards. Also present was Tottenham’s daughter, Anne, who immediately took a fancy to the handsome young stranger. However, during the game, when Anne dropped one of her cards and bent down to pick it up, she discovered that where the handsome stranger’s foot should have been, there was instead a cloven hoof. She let out a most dreadful scream. Whereupon the Devil revealed himself and shot through the ceiling, leaving a crack which could never be repaired. Poor Anne went instantly mad and was locked in her room, never to emerge again. She was buried in one of the closets. Seán looked me in the eye. ‘And her ghost still haunts Loftus Hall,’ he said. A cold shiver ran through me as I recalled my wanderings alone around the deserted mansion earlier that day.

On the last night of our holiday, my uncle invited Seán to join us in the sitting room on ‘our’ side of the castle for a farewell drink. The room was full, the adults chatting among themselves, the children switching in and out of their conversation. Then, my father, also a historian, asked Seán did he know anything about the infamous boycott which had taken place in Fethard in the 1950s. A grin came across Seán’s face; he paused and replied, ‘I should. I was the man involved.’ There was a moment’s silence. The rest of us non-historians wondered why my father looked so sheepish.

That was the first time I had heard about the boycott. I was only eight years old and didn’t think much more of it for many years – the story of Loftus Hall had a greater impact on me. My summers in Fethard were taken up with exploring the farm or being taught the rudiments of hurling by Seán’s grandson David. But bit by bit, over the years, I learnt more about the story and became fascinated. Seán was a Catholic. His wife, Sheila, was a Protestant. They had initially agreed that their children would be raised in both traditions. But Sheila had signed a piece of paper promising to raise the children as Catholics when she got married, as was prescribed by Catholic teaching. Eight years later, when it was time for the Cloneys’ eldest daughter, Eileen, to begin her schooling, Sheila decided that it was up to herself and Seán to make the decision about which school she would attend. The local Catholic clergy disagreed and told her, in no uncertain terms, that Eileen was to be sent to the Catholic school. Refusing to be told what to do by the priests, Sheila left home with her two daughters, whereupon the Catholics of the village, at the bidding of the two local priests, began a boycott of the Protestant-owned shops and farms in Fethard.

Fifteen years later I returned to Fethard. Seán was no longer the sprightly man I remembered as a young boy. He was now paralysed from the neck down after a procedure to fix a halo brace following a road accident had gone horribly wrong in a Dublin hospital. His body was broken but his eyes retained their warmth and sense of humour. In my hand, I had a letter that I had found in the archives from a local man, John Joe Ryan, to the Taoiseach of the day, éamon de Valera, which contained an intriguing line suggesting that the roots of the boycott went back eighty years. I quizzed Seán about the reference, and the conversation which followed led me to investigate the deep historical resentments and grievances which had surfaced during the boycott.

I discovered that the boycott resulted as much from economic motives as from sectarian ones. The local Catholic clergy were anxious to prevent a situation where substantial-sized Catholic-owned farms fell into the hands of children who might be reluctant to contribute to parochial revenues. Once the boycott began, some Catholic traders saw an opportunity to get rid of unwelcome competition in the form of Protestant shops. The remainder of the Catholics in the village, who had hitherto enjoyed friendly if somewhat distant relations with their Protestant neighbours, were bullied into acquiescing to the boycott out of simple fear.

Some writers and historians contend that the Protestant minority enjoyed remarkable toleration after Independence, and that the boycott was a blip. In fact, Fethard is a blip, but only because Sheila Cloney, unlike so many others among her co-religionists, stood up to the bullies. The Protestant minority were tolerated because they kept their heads down and, for the most part, accepted that the Catholic Church would have an uncommon amount of influence in matters more properly the business of the State or individual conscience. Any deviation, such as Sheila Cloney’s challenge to the Catholic Church’s Ne Temere decree, which prescribed that Protestants had no choice in educating their children as they saw fit, was met with a choleric response.

Neither was Fethard-on-Sea an isolated outbreak of sectarianism. Local intimidation and boycotts of Protestants and the destruction of Protestant-owned property was common in many parts of the country during the War of Independence and Civil War in the early 1920s. In June 1921, a band of over thirty armed men shot dead two young Protestant men in Coolacrease in County Offaly. Fourteen Protestant men, aged between sixteen and eighty-two, were massacred in the Bandon valley in west Cork in April 1922 in revenge for the death of an IRA man. In the Mayo librarian case of 1931, the county library service was boycotted because the Local Appointments Commission appointed a Protestant as county librarian. A further brief, if exceedingly unpleasant, burst of anti-Protestant feeling took place in various parts of the country in response to pogroms against Catholics in Northern Ireland in 1935. In the worst of the incidents, an anti-Protestant mob ran amok in Limerick, smashing the windows of Protestant businesses and churches. In other parts of the country, shots were fired outside Protestant churches, sectarian slogans were painted across walls in villages and threatening letters were sent to Protestant homes. In later years, a sense of denial overtook the communities in which these sectarian incidents occurred – similar to that which continues to this day in Fethard. Many still refuse to acknowledge the existence of a boycott in 1957. This is despite the fact that in 1998 the Catholic Bishop of Ferns, Brendan Comiskey, asked forgiveness for ‘the offence and hurt caused to the Church of Ireland community and others by members of my own church, particularly by some of its leaders, in what has become known as the Fethard-on-Sea boycott’.

The Fethard boycott was shaped by the violent and bitter history of the Hook region but also by the hard, sullen 1950s. In many respects Ireland in 1957 was closer to the Ireland of the late nineteenth century than the optimistic country that tentatively emerged in the latter half of the 1960s. At the end of the 1950s, the country was beginning to pull itself slowly out of a long period of economic stagnation, but in 1957 it was still stuck in first gear. The bungalow and motor car had yet to replace the broken-down cottage and the horse and cart. Poverty was endemic. The economy was in tatters. The last time the emigration figures had been so bad was in the late nineteenth century. Those who were not leaving the country were leaving the land, heading to the towns and cities in search of work. The romantic de Valeran dreams of self-sufficiency had failed to come true. The politicians were suitably chastened by the electorate: after sixteen uninterrupted years of Fianna Fáil, there had been four changes of government between 1948 and 1957. Despite the hollow old nationalist rhetoric, no democratic party looked any closer to solving the problem of partition. Instead, it was back to the bullet and the bomb as the IRA launched the Border Campaign against police barracks, customs posts and electricity substations in Northern Ireland in December 1956. The huge attendance at the Limerick funeral of Seán South, the IRA volunteer killed during a raid on an RUC barracks in Fermanagh on New Year’s Day 1957, showed that there was still an appetite for old-fashioned ‘republican’ martyrdom.

It also seemed to be business as usual for the Catholic Church. Priests submitted their parishioners to endless apoplectic homilies about the threat of atheistic Communism. Frequent topics included the imprisonment of Cardinal Mindszenty, the Primate of Hungary; the Soviet Union’s ruthless suppression of the uprising in that country in October 1956; and the fate of Irish Catholic missionaries in Chinese jails. A proposed soccer match between Ireland and Yugoslavia was abandoned in 1952 as a protest at the Communist regime. The lead story of the weekly Catholic newspaper The Standard (later the Catholic Standard) of 10 May 1957 was indicative of the Church-inspired hysteria:

IRISH REDS STILL ACTIVE – LEADERS TRAINED IN SOVIET RUSSIA

There are about 700 Communist Party members in Dublin, led by 20 men trained in Leningrad and Moscow. The Reds are ‘very interested’ in Ireland, and to meet the threat of their insidious methods now being used, the Bishop of Derry this week called for ‘a militant Catholicism from every individual’.

‘Impure’ books, newspapers, magazines and movies and the dangers they presented to Irish chastity were perceived as another threat to the moral safety of the faithful. The clergy appointed good Catholics to parish vigilance committees to protect the morals of the local citizenry. Committee members would search the public libraries for ‘dirty’ books and prowl the dance halls and country lanes searching for courting couples. This was an Ireland where intellectual pursuits were actively discouraged, where too much education was frowned upon as being a waste of time. John McGahern, that most perceptive observer of Irish internal and external lives in the 1950s and 1960s, remembers a country where reading for pleasure was thought to be dangerous.

Time was filled by necessary work, always exaggerated: sleep, Gaelic football, prayer, gossip, religious observance, the giving of advice – ponderously delivered, and received in stupor – civil war politics, and the eternal business that Proust describes as ‘Moral Idleness’. This was confined mostly to the new emerging classes – civil servants, policemen, teachers, tillage inspectors. The ordinary farming people went about their sensible pagan lives as they had done for centuries, seeing all this as one of the many veneers they had to pretend to wear, like all the others they had worn since the time of the druids.1

The self-appointed moral guardians were not confined to the countryside. They were active in the cities’ cinemas and theatres too. In May 1957, Alan Simpson, the co-director of the small Pike Theatre in Dublin, was arrested and jailed overnight on the grounds of indecency. What caused offence? One of the actors in a production of Tennessee Williams’ The Rose Tattoo had pretended to drop a condom on stage.

Catholic devotion took place in public in 1950s’ Ireland. Being a good Irishman was inextricably linked to being a good Catholic. The people erected grottoes to the Virgin Mary on urban housing estates, in rural villages and at holy sites in the middle of the countryside throughout the Marian year of 1954. The priest had exclusive moral authority. To go ‘agin’ him took courage; the priest went to the front of the queue in the shop. The priest was given the best chair in the house. You did not say ‘no’ to the priest. In this intellectually arid climate, it was easier to conform. To say no had all sorts of implications, metaphysically and socially. Condemnation from the pulpit was dreaded.

Again, McGahern cannot be bettered: ‘People did not live in Ireland then. They lived in small, intense communities, and the communities could vary greatly in spirit and character, even over a distance of a few miles.’2 If there is one incident that sums up the claustrophobic, deeply conservative nature of small-town life in 1950s’ rural Ireland, it is the Fethard-on-Sea boycott. The boycott did not cause a seismic shift in Irish society, though the writer Hubert Butler believed passionately that Fethard was a seminal moment for both Catholics and Protestants. But the country did begin to change after 1957.

In 1958, the Secretary of the Department of Finance, T. K. Whitaker, published Economic Development, a groundbreaking study which re-imagined Ireland’s economic future as moving away from the protectionist dogma of her adolescence to a more self-confident adulthood willing to take its place in the world – the country had joined the United Nations in 1955 – and adopting free trade and greater liberalisation. In 1959, éamon de Valera, struggling with blindness, passed the baton to his heir apparent, Seán Lemass. Lemass did not represent the next generation, but was rather a transitional figure, a reassuring figure to allay the fears of the Old Guard – the men who had stuck with the Chief through thick and thin and could rest easy in the knowledge that the revolutionary generation was still in place. But he inaugurated a period of great change in the country. During his brief tenure as Taoiseach, he created the conditions for Irish economic growth and a more mature relationship between the Republic and Northern Ireland. But this was in the future. During that long hot summer of 1957, the country was in paralysis, trying to look forward but being pulled back into the past. The old certainties had yet to be forsaken, and those who had the most to lose were hanging on grimly to the comforts of history.

1 Cromwell’s Legacy

A despondent James II stood on Irish soil for the last time at Duncannon Fort on the west coast of the Hook Peninsula on a summer’s day in 1690 before he sailed into exile in France. A few days previously the deposed Catholic monarch’s last hopes of restoration to the thrones of England, Scotland and Ireland had been crushed at the Battle of the Boyne by his Protestant rival, William of Orange, now William III of England, Scotland and Ireland. A nineteenth-century representation of the scene portrays James as a lonely figure being helped down the steps of the pier at Duncannon. A rowing boat is waiting to take him to his ship anchored in the distance. He is clad from head to foot in black.

The Irish Catholic gentry was in mourning at the end of the seventeenth century. James’ defeat meant their hopes of being restored to their former positions of power and influence were dead. Protestants would now govern Ireland for themselves. The body of legislation that became known as the Penal Laws placed harsh restrictions on Catholics’ political and religious freedom. It marked the final humiliation of the native Catholic landowning class who, over the course of 150 years, had seen their economic and political power wiped out by the confiscation and transferral of their estates – firstly under the Tudors and then under the Stuarts and Cromwell – to a new breed of English and Scottish, and more importantly Protestant, landowner who were rewarded for their military service, their own shrewd financial speculations and their loyalty to the English Crown.

It was fitting that James embarked on the first stage of his final voyage into exile from the Hook. From the air, the Hook resembles an elongated forearm punching its way into the sea. As Catholic schoolchildren throughout the country were once taught, it was here, at Bannow Bay, that Ireland’s 600 years of suffering at the hands of perfidious Albion had begun. In fact, there were no English aboard the three ships that landed at Bannow Island in 1169. They were a mixture of Normans, Flemings and Welsh under the command of the Norman lord Robert FitzStephen. But history in the hands of nation-builders has to be simple. It needs heroes and villains. And one of the greatest villains of Irish history was the Gaelic chieftain Dermot MacMurrough who, after being ousted as King of Leinster by Tiernan O’Rourke, invited the restless Norman barons from Wales to assist him regain his throne and challenge Rory O’Connor, the High King of Ireland, and in doing so, helped to begin the Norman colonisation of Ireland.

The Normans’ first colony was in south Wexford. The evidence of their strong presence in this part of the country are the castles, towns and churches dotted across the landscape and the preponderance of Norman surnames: names such as Stafford, Devereux, Butler and Colfer. The south Wexford colony became a bulwark of their power in Ireland. It was strategically vital to control the Hook because the peninsula guarded the approach to Waterford Harbour and the confluence of the rivers Nore, Barrow and Suir, also known as the Three Sisters, one of the most important river systems in the country. From here, ships could penetrate deep into the rich agricultural hinterland of Leinster and Munster. The Vikings had recognised the harbour’s importance by founding their first Irish city at Waterford. The Normans likewise founded New Ross at the confluence of the Barrow and the Nore, just north of the Hook Peninsula, at the beginning of the thirteenth century. The Normans divided the Hook into three monastic estates in order to ensure control. The Cistercians founded the abbeys of Dunbrody and Tintern on lands granted to them in the northeast and northwest of the peninsula. The Norman monarch King Henry II – who arrived in Ireland in 1171 to keep an eye on the growing power of his subjects and claim the Lordship of Ireland – granted the southern part of the Hook, the manor of Kilcloggan, to the Knights Templar, the military monastic order, an indication of the importance he attached to the security of the region. Despite their military superiority, the Normans did not succeed in subjugating the whole of Ireland; coloniser and native settled into a pattern of sporadic skirmishing. The Normans protected themselves from the depredations of the Irish by building great fortified castles made of stone and erecting walls around their towns. New Ross, which soon became one of the most important seaports on the island, lay astride the border of the old Gaelic Ireland and the new Norman colony. The Norman inhabitants of New Ross built an ambitious programme of defensive fortifications to protect themselves from the attacks of Gaelic clans such as the Kennedys and the MacMurroughs.

After centuries of wrestling with the native Irish, the descendants of the great Norman barons gradually settled into a form of cohabitation with their erstwhile enemies. By the beginning of the sixteenth century, the cultural and political demarcation between Norman coloniser and Gaelic native had ceased to exist. The descendants of the original Norman families, or Old English as they were known, famously became more Irish than the Irish themselves, intermarrying and adopting many aspects of Gaelic culture, including language and dress.

The Old English elite nominally governed Ireland at the behest of the Crown. In fact, its authority did not extend beyond the Pale. Outside the Pale, power rested with Gaelic or Old English magnates. Thus royal influence was minimal. This state of affairs changed at the beginning of the sixteenth century. The discovery of the American continent by Columbus in 1492 meant the deep-water ports of Ireland, including Waterford Harbour, became critical staging posts, as the great powers of England, France and Spain vied for control of the Atlantic routes to the rich pickings of the New World. The English Crown, fearful of the threat of invasion from foreign powers, moved to strengthen its hold on Ireland. The Gaelic and Old English lords, jealous of their own power, rose in rebellion, only to be brutally crushed by the Tudor monarch Henry VIII.

Then a fatal new element was added to the political situation: religion. Henry’s break with Rome and the establishment of the Church of England resulted in a choice in Ireland of adopting the new reformed religion or staying loyal to the old faith. The majority of both the Gaelic and Old English lords chose the latter and, in doing so, laid the foundations for their ultimate political and economic demise. The shift in power on the Hook from the Old English elite to a new class of loyal English Protestant began in 1536 with the dissolution of the monasteries. In that year, the Cistercian estates of Dunbrody and Tintern were suppressed and subsequently granted to two of Henry’s trustworthy Protestant soldiers. Sir Osborne Etchingham, a cousin of Anne Boleyn and marshal of the English army in Ireland, successfully petitioned for the grant of the lands at Dunbrody in exchange for lands he held in England. Anthony Colclough, who was later knighted by Elizabeth I, was granted the lands at Tintern.

Some of the Old English, such as the former abbot of Dunbrody, Alexander Devereux, had no apparent difficulty in changing religious allegiance depending on which way the political wind was blowing. Upon the suppression of the monasteries, Devereux became the first Bishop of Ferns in the new Reformed Church. But once the Catholic Mary I ascended the throne of England, he abjured the heresy of the new religion and reverted to Catholicism. When the Protestant Elizabeth I succeeded Mary, he speedily switched sides once again. It is believed that Devereux is buried in St Mogue’s Church in Fethard, and that he brought from Dunbrody the baptismal font still used by the Church of Ireland parishioners today.

For the majority of the Old English and Gaelic landowning families, though, the religious and political upheavals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were catastrophic. A new centralised English administration replaced the power of the Old English gentry. The Old English tried to negotiate with the English Crown to retain their ancient rights and privileges but their loyalty to the old religion was beginning to preclude them from influence. A more radical Protestantism was on the rise across the Irish Sea and, indeed, in Ireland. New settlers from England and Scotland arrived in the country – mostly in the northeast – throughout the early part of the early seventeenth century as part of an ambitious project of plantation designed to strengthen the Protestant interest – and by extension loyalty to the English crown. By the early 1600s, most of the Hook was in the hands of Protestant landlords.

In 1641, a small group of Gaelic Irish landowners, fearful of an impending invasion of Ireland by anti-Catholic forces in Scotland and England, rose in rebellion in Ulster. There were widespread massacres of new English and Scottish Protestant settlers. After years of trying to negotiate with an English Crown, which had continually disenfranchised them, robbed them of their lands and treated them with contempt, the Old English gentry, initially suspicious of the rising, threw in their lot with the Gaelic Irish. This loose alliance, with its headquarters in Kilkenny, was christened the Catholic Confederation. The Confederates took advantage of the Civil War raging in England between Roundhead and Royalist to gain control of the country. The rebellion had become a war.

In southwest Wexford, New Ross declared for the Confederation. The Old English families who had seen their political and economic power wane were eager to restore their fortunes. Religion was now becoming a defining feature of political allegiance. Protestants and Catholics sought shelter from the violence on the Hook where they could. Protestant refugees banged on the doors of the garrison at Duncannon Fort. Catholics sought protection behind the sturdy stone walls of the Norman-built castles of their kinsmen. Reprisals were common. Soldiers from Duncannon hanged eighteen Confederates after a raid on Ramsgrange Castle. Under the command of Colonel John Devereux, the Confederates took Tintern Abbey, which was sheltering about 200 Protestants under the protection of 30 soldiers from Duncannon Fort. Fethard also became a Confederate base. In 1645, the Confederate general Thomas Preston gained control of Duncannon Fort. The fort, commanding the narrow approach to Waterford Harbour and the ports of Waterford and New Ross, was again of vital strategic significance because of the renewed threat of foreign invasion by the Catholic powers in Europe.

The expectations raised among the Catholics of south Wexford by the capture of Duncannon Fort were extinguished within five years. In 1649, upon the end of the English Civil War, the Parliamentary general Oliver Cromwell turned his attention to Ireland. After landing in Dublin, Cromwell swept north towards Drogheda, where his massacre of the town’s defenders and civilians gave warning to other Confederate garrisons of what was to come if they did not yield. Cromwell then turned south and swept along the eastern seaboard towards Wexford town, where he wreaked bloody retribution on the inhabitants for their perceived treason. The town was burned, the harbour destroyed and hundreds of townspeople were killed during the sack. The inhabitants of New Ross, fearful of what might happen to them should they stand and fight, quickly submitted to the Cromwellian army. After fierce resistance, Waterford and Duncannon also succumbed. Cromwell had achieved his aim. By 1653, through brutal conquest, he had cowed the country into submission. Ireland was shattered by more than a decade of violent warfare. Traumatised Catholic landowners were penalised. Their lands were confiscated, leaving them with little but deep resentment towards the new class of English Protestant soldier and adventurer who had dispossessed them.

Their hopes were briefly reignited by the restoration of Charles II and the Stuart dynasty to the throne in 1660. But by 1688 the aggressively pro-Catholic policies of Charles’ successor, James II, had disturbed the Protestant establishment in England to such an extent that James was deposed and the Dutch Prince of Orange, William, was invited to ascend the throne. Two years later, the final Catholic monarch of England failed in his last-ditch effort to regain his crown, and the Battle of Aughrim a year afterwards, in 1691, marked the end of the Jacobite cause in Ireland. But while James resigned himself to his fate, living out his days in luxury in France at the court of the Sun King, Louis XIV, the Catholic gentry continued to dream of the day when the great tragedy that had befallen them during the previous century would be undone.

2 Forgetting Scullabogue

The men being held in the farmhouse at Scullabogue were the first to be killed. They were taken out in groups of four, made to kneel down on the grass and then shot. Women picking at the clothes of the dead for valuables were told to move out of the line of fire as the next batch of men were dispatched. The rest of the prisoners, who were being held in a barn close by, must have quaked in fear as they listened to the shots. There were women and children among their number. Their anxiety turned to terror when burning pieces of straw were thrown into the barn. Then the roof of the barn started to flame. Their desperate attempts to escape were repelled by their captors, who used pikes to keep the prisoners trapped inside. Only four prisoners managed to escape. Scores more died, suffocated by the thick smoke that filled the barn.

Most of those who died during that June morning in 1798 were Protestants. They were being held by a small guarding party at the main rebel camp under Carrigbyrne Hill while the bulk of the rebel army was attempting to capture New Ross, about eight miles away. Historians have debated the motives of the killers. Were they purely sectarian, or were the victims killed because of their political sympathies? Had the guarding party at Scullabogue heard of the rebels’ defeat at New Ross and been instructed to kill the prisoners? Or had they acted on their own initiative, driven by bloodlust and a thirst for vengeance? Sir Richard Musgrave, the author of the classic loyalist account of the rebellion published shortly after 1798, was in no doubt.

Some persons have contended that the persecutions in the country of Wexford were not exclusively levelled against Protestants, because a few Romanists were put to death in the barn and at Wexford; but the sanguinary spirit against them was so uniform at Vinegar-hill, on the bridge of Wexford, and Scullabogue, and indeed in every part of the county, as to remove any doubt on that head.1

The later nineteenth-century representation of the massacre, complete with typical stock simian caricatures of the rebels by Dickens’ illustrator George Cruikshank, no doubt reinforced the anti-Irish prejudices of many English.

History is written by the victors, however, and in the newly independent Irish State, Scullabogue was quietly ignored. The nationalist version of 1798 was a glorious, if ultimately failed, attempt to cast off the yoke of British rule through the coming together of Catholic, Protestant and Dissenter led by heroic Catholic priests. The writer Colm Tóibín grew up in 1960s’ Enniscorthy. He remembers how proud his community was of its links to 1798 but also its peculiar cultural amnesia:

The names of the towns and villages around us were in all the songs about 1798 – the places where battles had been fought, or atrocities committed. But there was one place that I did not know had a connection with 1798 until I was in my twenties. It was Scullabogue. Even now, as I write the name, it has a strange resonance. In 1798 it was where ‘our side’ took a large number of Protestant men, women and children, put them in a barn and burned them to death.2

During the bicentennial commemorations of 1798, Scullabogue reared its ugly head once again in a debate carried out in the columns of the national newspapers about the nature of the Rising in Wexford. None of the ever-present questions was decisively answered. Official Ireland quietly drew a veil over the more contentious aspects of the Rising. The government was keen to promote a nonsectarian narrative of 1798 at a particularly sensitive stage in the Northern Ireland peace process.

Whatever about modern cultural sensitivities, it is true to say that intense sectarian tensions existed in Wexford during the latter part of the eighteenth century, exacerbated by the rabid pro-Protestant ascendancy and anti-Catholic politics of the Loftus family, the predominant political force in the county, whose power derived from the land it owned on the Hook. Adam Loftus was the first of the family to arrive in Ireland from Yorkshire during the reign of Elizabeth I. He was typical of his breed, an Elizabethan opportunist in Ireland hungry for wealth and influence, and with few moral qualms about how to achieve them. Loftus had been raised a Catholic but had switched to Protestantism at an early age. He became Archbishop of Dublin and then the first provost of the newly founded Trinity College. Dudley Loftus, Adam’s son, established the family on the Hook, acquiring the former monastic estate at Kilcloggan at the end of the sixteenth century. During the latter part of the seventeenth century they lived in the Norman castle in Fethard. But about 1700, they moved a few miles south to the remote Redmond Hall (later Loftus Hall) close to Hook Head, as if to ready themselves for their spectacular political advancement over the course of the next 100 years.

In 1751, Nicholas Loftus was created Baron Loftus of Loftus Hall and five years later Viscount Loftus of Ely. His elder son, also named Nicholas, was raised to the Earldom of Ely in 1766, a few days before his death. His brother Henry was even more successful, elevating the Loftuses into a separate party in the House of Commons. The basis for this political success was control of eight pocket or ‘rotten’ boroughs in the county. Bannow, which both Henry and his brother Nicholas represented in the Commons, was little more than ‘a mountain of sand, without a single inhabited house’.3 Unfortunately for the Loftuses, they were incapable of producing male heirs and their estates passed through marriage to the Tottenham family. The Tottenhams, who along with the Leigh family controlled New Ross, were zealous defenders of the Protestant ascendancy in the Irish parliament. Their ultra-loyalist politics sprang from their deep-rooted fear of the barbarians at the gate, the Catholic rabble seeking to usurp them both from within and from without the city walls. In 1730, Charles Tottenham, the sovereign of the town – a position dating from medieval times, the incumbent being elected by members of the New Ross corporation – on behalf of the Protestant inhabitants of the town, petitioned the Lords Justices in Dublin for the repair of the barracks and the retention of the garrison. His reason was that ‘the inhabitants of the said towne and the country adjoining being for the greater part most violent Papists, part of the Army’s being quartered therein is a great security of the Protestant Interest of that part of the Kingdom’.4