Forgetting Ireland by Bridget Connelly

Author:Bridget Connelly
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Minnesota Historical Society Press
Published: 2017-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Part Three

RECOVERY

• 8 •

Return to Connemara

“Muise, a réiteach sin ar Dhia,” a deir sí, “an t-athair,” a deir sí, “a bheith ag scaradh leis an mac an fhad is bheas uisce ag rith ná féar ag fás!”

“Well, God settle that,” says she, “the father,” says she, “ever parting with the son as long as water runs or grass grows.”

Éamon a Búrc, Eochar, a King’s Son in Ireland

At the great literary gathering, the Oireáchtas, he had taken the All-Ireland Award. He had been the most exact in song and story, the wittiest in ditty, the most authoritative in lore, in all the four quarters of Ireland…. After the Oireáchtas he had been detained in Dublin for a fortnight, to be lionised, to have an anthology gathered from him, to have his songs and stories put in writing so that they might be there for the Irish people to read as long as grass grows and water runs.

Máirtín Ó Cadhain, “The Gnarled and Stony Clods of Townland’s Tip”

CONNEMARA! It explained everything, and more. I had to go back. My motives for returning—several times, it would turn out—were partly scholarly and partly personal. The professional folklorist in me realized that my family had very recently been part of a rich oral culture and that many of the aspersions cast upon the Graceville Conamaras pointed directly to evidence of their traditional world, its values, its oral-noetic mode of preserving and transmitting culturally important information—a world much at odds with the linear logic, the habits of mind and heart of those raised on literate discourse. As an oral traditionist, I knew that much of the conflict on the Moonshine prairie in 1880 had at its roots a clash of cultures: the literate versus the oral.

My camera-shy great-grandfather Flaherty remained very much a mystery, even though his shade accompanied me wherever my research quest led. In Minnesota, the only trace of him that surfaced was his X on citizenship papers and land transactions and, of course, the tale of the Thousand Dollar Bride. Illiterate people leave few records.

Lured by the memory of my own seanachie relative and the discovery that one of Graceville’s despised Conamaras had returned to Ireland to be feted as not just Ireland’s, but Europe’s, greatest bearer of oral narrative in the twentieth century, I had to return. I needed to visit again our own family bard. Would Connemara recollections of “Larry Saile” flesh out my phantom grandfather more fully? And Éamon a Búrc? The genuine genius seanachie who had lived so briefly near my hometown—what could I find of him on the coast to which he had returned? On my migration back to Connemara to recover our past, I also wanted to know more about Ireland in 1879 and 1880, more about the years the Conamaras were children and young adults during the Great Famine and the ensuing decades when they bore their own families.

The folklore researcher in me took over, and I was off to my new fieldwork site: Connemara and various Irish archives.

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