Ireland's Pirate Trail by Des Ekin

Author:Des Ekin [Des Ekin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781788490337
Publisher: The O'Brien Press
Published: 2018-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

Grania Mania

The story of the female pirate Granuaile – Grace O’Malley – has always held a particular fascination. For a start, it has an amazing cast of characters. Not only will we meet ‘Gambling Grace’ herself, but we will also encounter names that even the scriptwriters of Pirates of the Caribbean could never imagine in their wildest dreams. Names like Black Oak O’Malley, Iron Richard Burke, Battling Donal O’Flaherty, and – my personal favourite – ‘Satan’s Slash-hook’ Burke. And, may I point out, these are names that predate World Wrestling by about 400 years.

Grace herself has been dubbed ‘the Pirate Queen’, although she was not literally a royal queen (even under the generous Gaelic system), or a queen among pirates in terms of her buccaneering accomplishments. Really, Grace ‘the Pirate Queen’ O’Malley is much more like Elvis ‘the King’ Presley. Her royal title is more fanciful than literal; she began life as a rebel, but ended up as a compliant figure of the Establishment; and she became far more successful after her death than she had ever been before.

For the benefit of those who aren’t familiar with her story, ‘Granuaile’ was a notorious sixteenth-century Irish pirate, whose plundering exploits off Ireland’s west coast infuriated not only her neighbours, but also the English colonists. ‘The affrighted natives trembled at her name,’ wrote one early historian, and an English viceroy agreed, saying she was ‘a terror to all merchantmen that sailed the Atlantic’.

When she died in the early 1600s, it was the best career move she ever made. Grace, who’s also known as Grania, Gráinne and Granuaile, is now at the centre of a phenomenon you could describe as ‘Grania Mania’. Devoted followers – I like to call them Graniacs – come from all over the world to venerate the shrine of her supposed home on Clare Island. She has become internationally famous. Her name is a franchise worth a small fortune. She has been the subject of books, plays, a full-length movie, a one-woman show, TV documentaries, a Broadway musical, a song-cycle, poems, ballads, rock songs and even ‘Pirate Queen’ T-shirts. There is a festival dedicated to her. In short, since her death, she has become a major money-spinner. Not bad, for someone who ended her days living ‘a farmer’s life, very poor’ in the craggy outcrops of Connacht.

Now here’s the strange thing. Details of Grace’s actual piracy – the basis of her fame – are scant and sketchy. This is no surprise, because, overall, we have only the shakiest notion of the basics of her life story. We don’t know precisely when or where she was born, where she spent her childhood, or when, where and how she died.

We’ve no idea what she looked like. No contemporary descriptions survive. A search of Google Images shows a bewildering variety of appearances, from a Cosmopolitan-style beauty with sculpted eyebrows and coiffed, flame-red hair, to a dark-haired sea-rover in a pirate hat. Some show her in dresses with plunging necklines; others have her in punkish tattoos and nose-rings.

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