Setting Foot on the Shores of Connemara by Tim Robinson

Author:Tim Robinson [Tim Robinson]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781843512820
Publisher: The Lilliput Press
Published: 2012-08-17T04:00:00+00:00

THE PERSON

The Synges came to Ireland in the seventeenth century from England, produced a succession of bishops for the Protestant Church of Ireland, and married land. J.M. Synge’s father, John Hatch Synge, was a younger brother of the owner of Glanmore Castle in County Wicklow; he inherited a small estate in County Galway, became a barrister in Dublin, and married the daughter of an Ulster-born rector of intemperate evangelical zeal. As landowners and clerics of the Established Church, standing on the apparently natural and divinely sanctioned economic and cultural rights of the Anglo-Irish community in Ireland, families like the Synges were loftily remote from such aboriginals as the Catholic, Irish-speaking and illiterate peasantry of the Aran Islands. At the same time the tiès between the two classes were close and necessary (at least to the well-being of the former). The Synges’ income derived in part from the rents paid by the small tenants of their Galway estates (as J.M. Synge’s mother sharply reminded him once, when his social conscience was troublesome), while for his proselytizing forebears the rural Irish were a field of souls for the harvesting; in fact Synge’s uncle had been the Church of Ireland minister in the Aran Islands in the 1850s.

But by J.M. Synge’s generation the attitudes of the Anglo-Irish to the peasantry had become more complex and problematic, as the Protestant hegemony cracked before the rise of the Catholic middle classes. Among the Synges’ peers were some of the intellectual leaders of the new version of Irish nationalism which found its inspiration in the hitherto despised folk of the countryside – but the Synge family itself had no truck with such an abdication of the duties of civilization.

John Millington Synge9 was born in 1871 in Rathfarnham, then a village, now absorbed into the suburbs of south Dublin. His father died in the following year, and Mrs Synge, left with five children and a reduced income, moved to a house next door to her mother in nearby Rathgar. John was a sickly, asthmatic child, and laboured under the burden of his mother’s vivid belief in hell-fire. An early love of the countryside and wildlife afforded some relief from the fond oppressions of home, but his reading of Darwin (when he was fourteen) introduced the new pain of religious doubt. Within a few years he no longer regarded himself as a Christian but as a worshipper of a new goddess, Ireland. His disbeliefs and beliefs formed rift-valleys of incomprehension between himself and his relatives, though he always preserved his status as a member of the family household. He gulped the patriotic balladry published in a nationalist newspaper, The Nation, and scoured the countryside in search of the Irish antiquities he read about in the writings of George Petrie. And in Petrie he would have read:

The Araners are remarkable for fine intellect and deep sensibility … If the inhabitants of the Aran Islands could be considered as a fair specimen of the ancient and present wild Irish …

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