How the small Anglican church went into decline on the Aran Islands

Saint Thomas’ Church served the Anglican community on Inishmore in the Aran Islands for decades (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2019)

Patrick Comerford

As I travelled around Inishmore (Inis Mór), the largest of the Aran Islands in Galway Bay, earlier this week, I visited a number of churches, including Saint Benan’s Church in Killeany, said to be the smallest church in Europe if not in the world, and the two churches, Saint Breacan’s Church and the ‘Church of the Hollow,’ at the monastic site known as the ‘Seven Churches.’

Other churches were pointed out along the way, including Teampaill Chiarán (Saint Ciaran’s Church), dating from sixth century and now used for Father Dara Molloy’s ‘Celtic Weddings.’

I was told how Teampaill Asurnaí is the only church on the island named after a female saint – Saint Surnaí who is buried nearby. Teampaill an Cheathrair Álainn (the Church of the Four Beauties) is named after Saint Fursa, Saint Breandán, Saint Conall and Saint Bearchán – although all four beauties were men.

Signs beside the ascent to Dún Aoghasa point to two churches, Teampaill na Naomh (the Church of the Saints) and Teampaill Mhic Duach, an 11th century church dedicated to Saint Colmán Mac Duach.

Signs pointing to church ruins on the ascent to Dún Aoghasa (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2019)

Today, the island is one parish served by three Roman Catholic churches at Kilronan (1905), Eochaill (1833) and Eoghanacht (1958).

But the popular tourist maps and the signposts do not point to the ruins of Saint Thomas’ Church, the church that served the small Church of Ireland or Anglican community in Kilronan from the 1840s to the mid-20th century.

The Aran Islands appear to have had a sizeable Protestant population since the 1650s or 1660s. Seventy troops were continually based on the island for many years to quell any rebellion and over time some of the soldiers settled there.

Simon Digby, Bishop of Elphin (1691-1720) and a former Bishop of Limerick (1679-1691), bought the Aran Islands in the early 18th century for £8,200 from the representatives of John and Richard Fitzpatrick and Sir Stephen Fox. The Digby family and their descendants in the St Lawrence family continued to hold vast tracts of island land for 200 years. However, it took more than a century after Bishop Digby bought the Aran Islands to provide the islands with a Church of Ireland parish church.

At the time of Griffith’s Valuation of the Aran Islands in 1837, there was a Church of Ireland church in Kilronan and at least one school.

Saint Thomas’ Church at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries … a photograph by Robert French in the Lawrence Collection

Saint Thomas’ is a small church that was completed in 1846, during the Great Famine. Until then, the Aran Islands had been part of the Clifden union of parishes in the Diocese of Tuam.

The first permanent Church of Ireland priest on the island, the Revd Alexander Synge (1820-1871), from Glanmore Castle in Ashford, Co Wicklow. He arrived at a time when the three islands in the Aran Islands had a population of 3,333.

Synge’s battles with the fishermen of the Claddagh in Galway remain part of local lore and legend on the Aran Islands. Synge operated a small fishing boat, the Georgiana, but the Claddagh fishermen claimed all fishing rights in Galway Bay and challenged his trawling methods.

The Claddagh men attacked Synge and his crew at the fishing grounds, and during a visit to Galway he was attacked on the streets by the Claddagh women, although he escaped without serious injury. An uneasy peace was reached when he helped organise assistance to get better fishing gear for the Claddagh men.

Alexander Synge was an uncle of the playwright John Millington Synge (1871-1909), who is more closely associated with the middle island, Inish Meáin. Alexander Synge later became Vicar of Ipswich.

The roof was taken off Saint Thomas’ Church in the 1960s (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2019)

Synge was followed by the Revd William Kilbride in 1855. Kilbride had a genuine interest in the ancient monuments of Aran and a keen interest in the Irish language. He had been a Bedell Scholar in Irish in Trinity College Dublin (1847), had served as a curate on Achill Island, but had been assaulted at Derygimla and Clifden because of his missionary work.

Although Kilbride was a member of the Gaelic league, his time in Aran brought him into conflict with the Land league, which had strong support on Inishmore. The story of those times is told in Tim Robinson’s ‘Stones of Aran’ books, Labyrinth and Pilgrimage, and in Miriam Moffit’s Soupers and Jumpers.

At the south end of the church are some older graves and at the north end are two fine headstones. One is in unusual Irish and is dedicated to the memory of Kilbride’s wife, Máire, who died in 1891. The other is to a young Scottish boat builder, James R Sim, from Fraserburg in Aberdeenshire. He was 25 when he died in 1904 and the monument was erected by his heartbroken young wife, Sarah.

At its peak, the Anglican community on the island only ever numbered about 25 to 30 people and many of these were coastguards who came and went. Kilbride remained the Rector of the Aran Islands until he died in 1899.

The next and last rector was the Revd Landen Thomas Lennon, who was born in Kilrush, Co Clare. But Church of Ireland numbers on the island dwindled by the early 20th century.

The 1911 census shows only 16 members of the Church of Ireland living on Inishmore, including Landen Lennon, who was then 44 and unmarried, six members of the Chard family and household, including Richard Chard, the court clerk, four English-born members of the Parnell family, including a coastguard, four members of the Ward family, three born in England including the father who was a coastguard, and a coastguard named Edwards.

The Commissioners of National Education reported in 1914 that ‘the number of Protestant children on the Inishmore Island is very small, and they have the opportunity of attending the national schools on the island, which are open to children of all denominations.’

Lennon met the widowed Catherine Philpot Curran Davis, daughter of Charles Curran, a journalist and a descendant of the celebrated lawyer John Philpot Curran (1750-1817), when she visited Aran in 1901 with her nephew during a tour of Europe with her nephew. They kept in touch by correspondence and were married 13 years later in Saint Nicholas Collegiate Church, Galway, on 30 April 1914. They gave their addresses as the Royal Hotel, Galway, and the Railway Hotel, Galway. When they finally left Aran, they moved to another island: an inland island on Lough Corrib.

After the formation of the Irish Free State, most of the coastguards sent to Inishmore from Britain were English Roman Catholics. Most of the English-born coastguards seem to have left in the 1920s and 1930s.

The Anglican community on the Aran Islands went into decline. Occasionally, the Rector of Galway would visit and say prayers of remembrance for people buried there. The roof was removed in the 1960s, the ruinous state of the church accelerated, and a sturdy sycamore tree now grows within the walls of the former church.

The Aran Islands remain part of the Galway Group of Parishes, where the principal church is Saint Nicholas Collegiate Church and the Rector is the Very Revd Linda Peilow, Provost of Tuam.

The ruins of Saint Ciaran’s Church, said to date from the sixth century (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2019)

The harbour and streets of Dingle are colourful even on a rainy day

Colourful boats in the harbour in Dingle, Co Kerry (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2017)

Patrick Comerford

Last week’s tour of the Dingle Peninsula came to an end in Dingle, the only town on the Dingle Peninsula. Dingle has a population of about 2,000 and sits on the Atlantic coast, about 50 km south-west of Tralee and 71 km north-west of Killarney.

Dingle is the largest Gaeltacht town in Ireland and it depends almost entirely on tourism.

But is it Dingle?

Or is it Daingean?

And would we find Fungie the Dingle dolphin?

The Irish Government officially abolished the name of Dingle in 20015, decreeing it could no longer be used officially in government papers, on road signs and or on street names. The town was the be known officially and on signposts only as An Daingean. The name Dingle was taped over and removed from all road signs throughout Co Kerry.

Dingle may be the capital of the Kerry Gaeltact, but the people of Dingle would have none of it and a lengthy dispute erupted between the people of Dingle and the government.
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The people of Dingle rebelled, and in the Dingle Plebiscite in 2006, 93 per cent of them voted to restore the town’s historic names, Dingle in English and Daingean Uí Chúis in Irish.

Legislation was eventually introduced in in 2011 to recognise the mandate. Today the town’s traditional names, Dingle and Daingean, sit comfortably side-by-side in the one place.

The name Daingean or Daingean Uí Chúis is said to mean the Fortress of the Hussey family, recalling the Husseys, who were of Norman-Flemish origin and who lived in the Dingle area from the 13th century.

However, there is a second interpretation of the meaning of Daingean Uí Chúis. The Annals of the Four Masters, compiled by four Franciscan friars in 1632-1636, refer to a pre-Norman chieftain named O Cuis who ruled the area before the arrival of the Anglo-Normans. According to this version, he had his principle fortress in Dingle, and gave his name the name Daingean Uí Chúis.

Whatever the true meaning of the name, the earliest records show the two names of Dingle and Daingean Uí Chúis side-by-side from the mid-13th century. The story of the town dates back to its foundation by the FitzGerald and Rice families. They developed the town into the second largest port on the west coast of Ireland, second only to Galway.

Dingle prospered thanks to extensive trade with France and Spain, and by the 14th century importing wine was a major business. The 1st Earl of Desmond, who held Palatine powers in the area, imposed a tax on this activity around 1329.

Dingle was also a starting point for pilgrims on their way to Santiago de Compostella to begin the Camino and set off on the pilgrimage to the shrine of Saint James. It is said that the mediaeval church in Dingle, dedicated to Saint James, was built by the Spanish.

By the 16th century, Dingle was one of Ireland’s main trading ports, exporting fish and hides and importing wines from Continental Europe. French and Spanish fishing fleets used the town as a base. The connections with Spain were particularly strong. In 1529, the 11th Earl of Desmond and Gonzalo Fernandes, the Spanish Ambassador of the Emperor Charles V, signed the Treaty of Dingle.

Commerce and trade Dingle were enhanced in 1569, when an Act of Parliament was limited to 15 the number of ports in Ireland through which wines could be imported. The Act named Dingle among those towns and refers to it as ‘Dingle Husey, otherwise called Dingle I Couch.’ That year, the merchants of Dingle also applied for a ‘murage grant’ to build walls to enclose the town, but their application was not successful on that occasion.

In 1579, James FitzMaurice FitzGerald brought a small fleet of ships into Dingle and launched the Second Desmond Rebellion. But he was killed soon after in a minor skirmish with the forces of a cousin. The fleet left Dingle after three days, anchoring at Dún an Óir on the western end of the peninsula, leading eventually to the Siege of Smerwick in 1580.

Colourful narrow streets in the old town in Dingle (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2017)

Following the defeat of the Desmond Rebellion, Queen Elizabeth agreed in 1585 to a grant of a royal charter to Dingle, incorporating the town as a borough. This would allow building town walls, and traces of these town walls can still be seen, while the street layout preserves the pattern of burgage plots. The town was enclosed by a strong wall, with two gates in what is now Dykegate Lane, enclosing an area that included the present Main Street and parts of John Street and Goat Street.

Although Queen Elizabeth agreed to grant this charter to Dingle, the charter was only obtained in 1607. On 2 March 1607, King James I granted the charter, although the borough and the corporation were already in existence for 22 years.

The head of the corporation was the sovereign, who was the equivalent of mayor. The sovereign was elected annually on the Feast of Saint Michael, 29 September, and the corporation consisted of 12 burgesses.

The area of jurisdiction of the corporation was all the land and sea within two Irish miles of the parish church, and the borough had an admiralty jurisdiction over Dingle, Ventry, Smerwick and Ferriter’s Creek ‘as far as an arrow would fly.’

The charter also made Dingle a parliamentary borough, sending two MPs to the Irish House of Commons until the dissolution of the Irish Parliament at the Act of Union.

From the mid-17th century until the 1920s, the Dingle Peninsula was controlled by Lord Ventry and the Mullen or de Moleyns family, who lived on the Burnham Estate.

Dingle suffered greatly in the wars in 17th century, and the town was burnt or sacked on several occasions.

Dingle began to recover in the 18th century, due to the patronage of the FitzGerald family, Knights of Kerry. Robert FitzGerald (1717-1781) succeeded as the 17th Knight of Kerry in 1779. He was MP for Dingle from 1741 until he died. He imported flax seed and by 1755 a flourishing linen industry had been established, producing cloth worth £60,000 a year.

James Louis Rice, the son of Black Tom Rice, was a member of a family of prosperous wine traders and merchants with extensive links with France and Spain. Their ancestral home, the Rice House, stood on the corner of Goat Street and Green Street.

James Louis Rice was educated in Belgium and joined the Austrian army. He became an intimate friend of Emperor Joseph II of Austria, who made James Louis and his father Black Tom counts of the Holy Roman Empire.

Queen Marie Antoinette of France was a sister of Emperor Joseph II. When the French Revolution began in 1789, she, the king and their two children were gaoled in Paris. Rice and his circle formed a plan for her escape. They bribed some gaolers and prepared relays of horses to take Marie Antoinette to the coast. There, Count James Louis had one of his father’s wine ships waiting to take her to Dingle, where rooms at Rice House were ready for her.

At the last moment, however, Marie Antoinette hesitated and refused to abandon her husband the king and her children, and so she remained.

The flax and linen trade in Dingle collapsed with the successful industrial production of cotton in Great Britain, and was virtually extinct by 1837.

During the Great Famine in the 1840s, up to 5,000 people died in the Dingle Poorhouse alone, and they are buried in the paupers’ burial ground that overlooks the town. The town also fell victim to a cholera plague in 1849.

Meanwhile, the family of Lord Ventry sold Burnham House in the 1920. The house is now an Irish-speaking boarding school for girls known as Coláiste Íde.

All we saw of Fungie last week was his statue in the harbour in Dingle, Co Kerry (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2017)

Today, with mountains at its back, Dingle faces into a sheltered harbour. Three main streets rise from the level ground at Strand Street at the edge of the harbour and at the Mall beside the Dingle River: Green Street, John Street and Main Street.

About 1,200 people live in Dingle, but the number of residents increases dramatically at the height of the tourist season.

However, we missed one of the main attractions, Fungie the Dolphin. Fungie is a full-grown, middle aged, male bottlenose dolphin. He weighs about a quarter tonne (500 lb) and is about four metres (13 ft). long.

During the summer months, Fungie is often seen taking fish in the harbour mouth. During the winter months, he travels further afield for food.

Paddy Ferriter, the Dingle Harbour lighthouse keeper, first began watching a lone wild dolphin escort the town’s fishing boats in and out of the harbour in 1984. By that August, the dolphin was officially a permanent resident of the entrance channel and self-appointed pilot of Dingle’s fishing fleet.

Over the years, the dolphin moved from being a timid but inquisitive observer of human life into a playful, mischievous, companion. Everyone receives playful attention, from swimmers and divers, to canoeists, windsurfers and day-trippers and children paddling on the beach.

Boats from Dingle Boat Tours and the Dingle Boatmen’s Association leave Dingle Pier at regular intervals throughout the day, every day, all year round, weather permitting, on a one-hour trip to see Fungie wild and free in his natural habitat.

The boats also offer trips from the harbour along the coast of the Dingle Peninsula and to the islands, including the Blasket Islands.

Our stop-off in Dingle was too short to go in search of Fungie. After lunch in John Benny’s Pub on Strand Street we went for a walk along the Mall and the narrow streets that date back to the Middle Ages and the days of a walled borough.

Even on a rainy day, as summer was turning to autumn, the narrow streets of Dingle were packed with tourists and visitors and colourful with their brightly-painted shop fronts.

Dingle’s streets are colourful, even of a grey, rain-soaked day (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2017)

A fresh take on the Blasket Islands despite memories of Peig Sayers

The Blasket Islands seen from Slea Head (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2017; click on image for full-screen view)

Patrick Comerford

As a schoolboy, Peig Sayers were the bane of my life.

Her books were part of the reading list on the Irish-language courses. And until I spent the summer of 1966 in Ballinskelligs in the Kerry Gaeltacht, I was on course to fail the ‘Inter Cert’ exams in Irish – and so I was on course too to failing the full exams and to finding myself on the way to school in England.

I cannot blame my negative teenage views of the Irish language on Peig Sayers … but she did nothing to leave me with a positive view of a language that was foreign to me, despite an increasing interest in the Irish language at the time of the fiftieth anniversary of the 1916 Rising.

Anyone of my age who was a schoolboy in Ireland in the 1950s and the 1960s has memories of Peig Sayers (1873-1958) and her autobiographical memoir Peig. It was only later in life that I learned that she never wrote the book, and that she dictated her reminiscences to others, who redacted and edited them.

Her book Peig depicts the declining years of a traditional, Irish-speaking way of life characterised by poverty, devout Roman Catholicism, and folk memories of gang violence, the Great Famine, and the Penal Laws.

The oft-bleak tone of the book begins with the very opening words: ‘I am an old woman now, with one foot in the grave and the other on its edge. I have experienced much ease and much hardship from the day I was born until this very day. Had I known in advance half, or even one-third, of what the future had in store for me, my heart wouldn’t have been as gay or as courageous it was in the beginning of my days.’

The other Blasket islanders we were expected to read, or to know about, included Muiris Ó Súilleabháin, author of the autobiographical Fiche Blian ag Fás (Twenty Years a-Growing), and Tomás Ó Criomhthain, who wrote An tOileánach (‘The Islandman,’ 1929), satirised by Flann O’Brien as An Béal Bocht (‘The Poor Mouth’).

But as we headed out the Dingle Peninsula last week, we were reminded that Peig was neither from the Blasket Islands, nor did she die there. She was born in Vicarstown, Dunquin, she was educated in English, she was illiterate in Irish, she spent her first working years in Dingle, and she was only in her mid-50s when the stories in Peig were recorded by Robin Flower, who gave her the voice of an old and dying woman.

I was surprised to realise that she was still alive when I was born. By the time she actually had ‘one foot in the grave and the other on its edge,’ she was living in a nursing home in Dingle, where she died at the end of 1958, when I was almost 7, and she was buried not on the Blasket Islands but on the mainland in Dunquin.

Freed from the myths about Peig Sayers and memories of her morose memoirs, I was able to have a fresh view of the Blasket Islands and Dunquin last week.

Indeed, the Blaskets have always been an intrinsic part of Dunquin. The Great Blasket was always known simply as the Island, or the Western Island, or the Great Island, while the other islands were the Lesser Blaskets.

From the end of the 13th century, the Ferriter family leased the islands from the Earls of Desmond, and from Sir Richard Boyle after the dispossession of the Desmond Geraldines at the end of the 16th century.

The last of the Ferriters on the Blasket Islands was the poet and rebel Captain Pierce Ferriter who hanged in Killarney in 1653. However, Charles Smith, author of The Ancient and the Present State of the County of Kerry (1756), claimed the Great Blasket was not inhabited, except by ancient monks, before 1710.

The population of the Island grew with the influx of tenants evicted from their holdings by Lord Ventry in the first half of the 19th century. By 1840, the population of the Island estimated at 150. The stones of the Ferriter castle were used to build a Church of Ireland school in 1840, but this school closed in 1852 when the population of the island fell dramatically after the Great Famine.

Another Famine hit the island in 1878-1879. At the time, the Earl of Cork was the landlord of the Islands and much of the mainland. Richard Edmund St Lawrence Boyle (1829–1904), 9th Earl of Cork, supplied Champion and Black seed potatoes free to all his tenants in 1880.

The Congested Districts Board bought the island in 1907, and the population is said to have reached its peak in 1916 at 176, although the maximum number of houses on the island was never more than 30.

Visitors to the island from the early 20th century included the playwright John Millington Synge, who first visited the Blaskets in 1905, the Norwegian linguist Carl Marstrander, who visited in 1907 and was called ‘the Viking’ by the islanders, and the Celtic scholar Robin Flower, who first visited in 1910. Others included George Derwent Thomson, the great Greek scholar, and Kenneth Jackson, the Celtic scholar.

Island life had been a constant struggle and the population began to decline in the early 1930s. Finally, in 1953-1954, the islanders abandoned the Blasket Islands.

The former Taoiseach Charlie Haughey bought Inishvickillane, one of the Blasket Islands, for £25,000 in 1974. His few guests there included President Francois Mitterrand, in whose honour a French flag was raised on the island in 1988.

Whatever happens to Inishvickillane may still be an open question. But, for me, Peig Sayers remains a closed book.

The sandy beaches at Dunquin on Slea Head (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2017)

Two gravestones in Castletown illustrate diversity in one parish

The Irish-language gravestone of Canon George McCann in Castletown Churchyard (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2017)

Patrick Comerford

Two of my predecessors in Kilcornan Parish, Canon George McCann and Canon Daniel Hevenor, are buried side-by-side in Castletown churchyard, and the inscriptions on their gravestones illustrate the diversity of priests and people in this group of parishes in west Limerick and north Kerry.

Canon George McCann (1899-1974) was Rector of Askeaton and Kilcornan (1954-1973). His gravestone is in Irish, and his reputation remains as an Irish-language scholar.

George McCann was born in Lurgan, Co Armagh, in 1899, a son of James McCann, Principal of Queen’s Place School, Lurgan. He was trained as a teacher at the Marlborough Street Training College in Dublin and then studied for ordination at Trinity College Dublin (BA 1930, MA 1935).

As a student, he took an active interest in the Irish language, and at TCD was the Bedell Scholar (1928) and the recipient of the Kyle Irish Prize (1929). He was ordained deacon in 1930 and priest in 1931.

His first appointment was as curate of Saint Peter’s Church, Aungier Street, and Saint Audeon’s, Dublin (1930-1934). After this, he was Curate in Oldcastle, Co Meath (1934-1938), and Curate-in-Charge of Kilmacshalgan, Co Sligo (1938-1944), in the Diocese of Killala.

He was a fluent Irish speaker, and at Aghadoe in 1934 he conducted in Irish the wedding of the Canon Francis Roycroft, his predecessor as Rector of Dingle (1935-1944) and May Blennerhassett. A year later, on 7 August 1935, George McCann married Sarah Maude (Sadie), daughter of Robert Stephens, and they had a daughter, Gráinne.

For ten years, he was the Rector of Dingle (1944-1954), Co Kerry, where he campaigned for the establishment of an Irish College in the town ‘open to all interested in the restoration of the Irish language.’

He was appointed Rector of Kilcornan in 1954, when Kilcornan and Kilkeedy were united, and in 1961 he became a canon of Saint Mary’s Cathedral, Limerick, as Prebendary of Donaghmore.

Kilcornan was added to Askeaton in 1966, but Canon McCann continued to live at the Rectory in Castletown rather than move to the Rectory in Askeaton. He died suddenly at the Rectory in Kilcornan in February 1974, on the same day he had told his parish of his intention to retire.

Sadie McCann later lived at Kingston College, Mitchelstown, Co Cork, and died in Mallow on 25 January 2010. Her funeral service was held in Kingston College Chapel, Mitchelstown, and she was buried with her husband in Castletown churchyard.

The gravestone of Canon Daniel Miner Stearns Hevenor, ‘Missionary Priest’, in Castletown Churchyard (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2017)

Canon McCann was succeeded by Canon Daniel Miner Stearns Hevenor (1904-1977), who was Rector of Askeaton and Kilcornan from 1974 to 1977.

The Hevenor or Heavenor family were of Palatine descent. Daniel Hevenor’s paternal grandfather, Gideon Hevenor (1838-1936), was born in Pallaskenry, Co Limerick. Gideon emigrated to North America during the Great Famine with his sister Rachel, their brothers, Benjamin, Harvey and Robert, and their parents, Harvey Hevenor (1786-1862) and Jane (Supple) Hevenor (1790-1861).

The family first lived in Boston, but Gideon, who trained as a coppersmith, later moved to Saint John in New Brunswick, Canada, where his older brother Benjamin had a bakery. Gideon married Alice Elizabeth Stearns and died in Saint John on 12 September 1916.

Their son, Daniel Miner Stearns, who would return to Co Limerick, was born on 10 September 1904 in Saint John, New Brunswick, and was named after his maternal grandfather, the Revd Daniel Miner Stearns (1844-1920).

Stearns was pastor of Grace Atonement Church in Germantown, Pennsylvania, a church in the Reformed Episcopal Church. He has been described as ‘one of the most dynamic and influential pastors, Bible teachers and writers of the late 1880s to his death.’ He founded the DM Stearns Missionary Fund and the Stearns Hall at Dallas Theological Seminary was named in his honour in 1929.

Daniel Miner Stearns Hevenor was born in Saint John, New Brunswick, on 10 September 1904 and attended Trinity College in Boston. He was in the insurance business in Canada and the US for many years prior to his ordination in 1957 in Seattle by Bishop Stephen Fielding Bayne of the Diocese of Olympia.

He was a curate of Saint Mark’s Cathedral, Seattle, until 1959, when he became Vicar of the Pacific County Mission in South Bend, Washington. He moved to Bremerton in 1961 as rector of Saint Paul’s Church and then to Sequim as the Vicar of Saint Luke’s Church (1969-1973).

He came to Askeaton and Kilcornan in 1974. He returned to the US in 1977 as Vicar of Saint Hugh’s Church, Allyn, and Saint Nicholas Church, Tahuya, Washington. He was also a canon of honour of the Diocese of Olympia.

But he died suddenly shortly afterwards in Washington on 21 October 1977. He was 73. He was survived by his wife, Winifred, two daughters, Sarah and Sue, and two stepsons, David and Michael.

A Memorial Eucharist was celebrated at Saint Nicholas Church, Tahuya, five days later. His body was cremated and his ashes were brought back to Ireland to be buried in Castletown churchyard.

His gravestone describes him simply as ‘Missionary Priest’.

Two houses in Churchtown and Rathgar with links to the playwright JM Synge

The birthplace of JM Synge (1871-1909) at Newtown Villas in Churchtown (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2016)

Patrick Comerford

My walks in search of mid-afternoon coffee or on the way home in the evening have led to two unexpected finds of houses in the Churchtown, Rathfarnham and Rathgar area that are associated with the great Irish playwright, John Millington Synge (1871-1909).

Synge was the author of plays, poems and essays, and played a pivotal role in the founding of the Abbey Theatre, alongside WB Yeats and Lady Gregory. His stylised realism set the tone for great writers who followed him, including Sean O’Casey, Brendan Behan and Samuel Beckett. Indeed, Beckett’s novels and plays are often indebted to Synge’s casts of tramps, beggars and peasants.

Around the corner from the Church of Ireland Theological Institute and Braemor Park, Synge House in Newtown Villas is now part of a discreetly-hidden gated community on the corner of Braemor Road.

Edmund John Millington Synge was born on 16 April 1871 in Newtown Little, then described as being in Rathfarnham and now Synge House, No 2 Newtown Villas, Churchtown, Dublin 14. Synge was the youngest son in a family of eight children and spent the first year of his life in this house.

The former country house has been converted into duplex accommodation, with one imposing two-storey-over-basement residence stuck back-to-back to an identical property. Both have steps leading up their main entrances on opposite sides, and have been divided into apartments.

Edmond John Millington Synge was born here in 1871, the youngest of five children. His father, John Hatch Synge, was from a landed gentry family that was seated at Glanmore Castle, Co Wicklow, and moved to Dublin to practice as a barrister.

The Synge family was descended from Edward Synge (1614-1678) from Shropshire, who became Bishop of Limerick and later Bishop of Cork. The family was closely identified with the Church of Ireland over several centuries, providing archbishops, bishops, deans, archdeacons, and clergy in abundance.

The playwright’s branch of the family derived its fortune from John Hatch, the son of Sir William Temple’s agent, who amassed estates in Co Wicklow, Co Meath and Dublin. In Dublin, John Hatch gave his name to Hatch Street, and he owned a townhouse on Harcourt Street that later became the High School.

Glanmore Castle, standing on a 4,000-acre estate in Co Wicklow that included Roundwood Park, was built by John Hatch’s son-in-law Francis Synge, who inherited Glanmore from his uncle, Sir Francis Hutchinson.

Francis Synge’s son, John Hatch Synge (died 1845), the playwright’s grandfather, was known as ‘Pestalozzi John’ after the Italian educationalist whose theories he applied in the estate school, incorporating its own printing-press for teaching materials.

The family estate in Co Wicklow was lost by his son, also John Hatch Synge, under the terms of the Encumbered Estates Act of 1848. The family bought back some of the estates at auction in 1850, and his brother Francis Synge re-established Glanmore Castle as the family seat. Both brothers were members of the Plymouth Brethren, which had a stronghold in Co Wicklow.

In 1856, John Hatch Synge married Kathleen Traill, daughter of the Revd Robert Traill, the Rector of Schull, Co Cork, who is described as having spent his life “waging war against popery.” He was the principal of the Schull Relief Committee during the Great Famine, and died of famine fever in 1847. His translation of Josephus’s The Jewish Wars was published posthumously.

Soon after John was born at Newtown Little, his father John Hatch Synge, a lawyer, contracted smallpox, and died in 1872. He was 49 and the child was just a year old.

No 4 Orwell Park, Rathgar (right) … the childhood of JM Synge; his grandmother lived in the neighbouring house (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2016)

The widowed Kathleen Synge was left with an income of £400 a year from a Galway property, bolstered by annuities for her children from an uncle. She moved to 4 Orwell Park, Rathgar, to be next door to her mother, Mrs Traill, whose house was afterwards occupied by his sister Annie and her family – maintaining the practice of living together as an extended family of evangelical religious temper under the tutelage of Kathleen.

John was always sickly and was kept at home by his domineering mother who tutored him there. Overshadowed by her through most of his early years, he would live with her for most of his life and even take his holidays with her. For her part, Kathleen Synge was her father’s daughter, a dour evangelical who mixed only in devout circles.

A neighbour wrote: “Mrs Synge conducted her household by a rule as strict as that of a religious order and supposed that her children would acquiesce without question.”

The banks of the River Dodder, behind Orwell Park, inspired Synge’s early interests in nature (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2016)

Nevertheless, Synge seems to have had a happy childhood. He developed an interest in nature and in bird-watching as he wandered behind Orwell Park along the banks of the River Dodder, with clusters of wild flowers and a variety of birds and wildlife, and in the grounds of nearby Rathfarnham Castle. Family holidays were spent at the seaside resort of Greystones, Co Wicklow, and at the family estate at Glanmore Castle, Co Wicklow.

The cruel irony for Kathleen Synge was that the long hours of reading she allowed her son to indulge in ultimately took him to Charles Darwin – as a 14 year old he kept The Origin Of The Species hidden under his pillow – and eventually he abandoned his religion completely.

Nos 1 and 2 Newtown Villas … John Millington Synge was born in No 2, the house to the right (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2016)

Robert Synge, a brother of the playwright, settled in Argentina as an engineer. Another brother, the Revd Dr Samuel Synge, was a CMS medical missionary in China (1896-1914) with the Church Mission Society (CMS) and the Dublin University Fukien Mission (now the Dublin University Far East Mission), before returning to Co Wicklow as Rector of Deralossary (1923-1951). In his letters to his daughter, he discussed JM Synge’s religious doubts and lack of paternal direction.

A third brother, Edward Synge, became land agent to the Synge estates and later to Lord Gormanston. He was involved in evictions in Galway and Wicklow, causing JM Synge to reproach his mother, to which she replied: “What would become of us if our tenants in Co Galway stopped paying their rents?”

His sister Annie also married a solicitor; an aunt Jane dandled Parnell on her knee and later lamented his politics.

The family later moved to two adjoining houses at Crosswaithe Terrace in Glasthule (Kingstown, Dun Laoghaire), where Mrs Synge continued to instruct her children and grandchildren. She wrote: “John – poor boy ... He had not found the Saviour yet.” He later wrote: “By the time I was 16 or 17, I had renounced Christianity after a good deal of wobbling.”

JM Synge was educated privately, at Mr Harick’s Classical and English School on Upper Leeson Street, and later briefly at Aravon School, Bray, Co Wicklow. The family spent summers in Delgany, Co Wicklow, and later in Duff House, a rented home at Lough Dan.

He studied the violin with Patrick Griffin for two years, and became a student at the Royal Irish Academy of Music, playing the piano, flute and violin and winning awards for counterpoint and harmony.

He entered TCD in 1889 and studied Irish with the Revd James Goodman (1828-1896), an “amiable old clergyman who made him read a crabbed version of the New Testament …” He studied Hebrew in his final year, read George Petrie on Irish antiquities and the Aran Islands, joined the academy orchestra in 1891, and graduated from TCD with a BA (Pass) in 1892.

In 1893, he campaigned against Home Rule in the belief that it would provoke sectarian conflict.

Later, he studied music in Koblenz, Wurzburg and Paris, and then studied literature and languages at the Sorbonne. In 1896, during a return visit to Dublin, he proposed to Cherrie Matheson, the daughter of a leading member of the Plymouth Brethren. Later that year in Paris, he met WB Yeats who encouraged him to visit the Aran Islands.

But in Paris, he also found Maud Gonne’s group – Irlande Libre, with a newspaper of the same name – to be mendacious and gave up attending their meetings. By then, however, he was suffering the first symptoms of Hodgkin’s Disease, and spent much time in hospital.

He travelled to Inishmore and the Aran Islands in 1898, and was invited to Coole Park, where he met Lady Gregory, Yeats, and Edward Martyn that summer 1898. He would spend the late summers of 1899-1902 on the Aran Islands. By coincidence, his uncle, the Revd Alexander Hamilton Synge, had been the Rector of the Aran Island, where he tried to ban Sunday games.

Synge stopped first at Aranmore but soon decided to “move on to Inishmaan, where Gaelic is more generally used and the life is perhaps the most primitive that is left in Europe.” He continued living mainly in Paris, but returned to the Aran Islands regularly.

This was followed in 1902 with two plays, Riders to the Sea and In the Shadow of the Glen, set in Glenmalure, Co Wicklow, near the Synge family home.

He left Paris in 1903 and moved to London. Later that year, In the Shadow of the Glen was staged for the first time by Irish National Theatre at the Molesworth Hall. It was criticised by Arthur Griffith in the United Irishman and other critics in the nationalist press as “a slur on Irish womanhood” and “a vile and inhuman story told in the foulest language we have ever listened to.”

When Riders to the Sea had its premiere in 1904, it was attacked by Patrick Pearse, who described it as “a sinister and unholy gospel.”

He was then living at 31 Crostwaithe Terrace, Glasthule, but he moved to 15 Maxwell Road, Rathmines, later that year.

He was appointed literary adviser to the Abbey Theatre at its foundation in December 1904. He became a director with Yeats and Lady Gregory when the limited liability company was formed in September 1905. His play The Well of the Saints also attacked by nationalists when it was stage at the Abbey in 1905.

Synge spent the summer of 1905 in Ballyferriter, Co Kerry, perfecting his Irish. He moved back to Croswaithe Terrace, in November 1906. At the time, he was writing The Playboy of the Western World, based on the story of a man who killed his father with a [turf-cutting implement.

The Playboy was first produced at the Abbey Theatre on 26 January 1907, with Riders to the Sea as a curtain-raiser, amid riots triggered by the phrase “chosen females in their shifts alone.” At the time, the word “shift” was also used in conversation as reference to Kitty O’Shea and her adultery with Charles Stewart Parnell. The rioters were egged on by a band of Trinity students who sang God Save the King. Theatre seats were torn up, Yeats turned up on the second night to appeal for calm, speaking as “The author of Cathleen Ni Houlihan,” and the Dublin Metropolitan Police were called into the theatre to keep the peace.

But Hodgkin’s Disease was taking its toll. He was working on his play Deirdre of the Sorrows, but spent much time in hospitals and nursing home. He was visited daily by Molly Allgood, aka Máire O’Neill, and they became engaged.

He read the Bible in a brown-paper wrapping during his last days, and he died on 24 March 1909, just short of his 38th birthday, in a private nursing home in Lower Mount Street, Dublin. He was buried in a Synge family grave in Mount Jerome. But the Synge family refused to permit Molly to attend his funeral. Deirdre, which was left uncompleted, was written for her and was performed at the Abbey in January 1910 in a version prepared by Yeats and Molly Allgood.

In his speech accepting the Nobel Award for Literature acceptance speech, Yeats said Synge was “incapable of a political thought or of a humanitarian purpose,” – meaning that he was pure imagination.

In 1927, Vaughan Williams wrote an operatic version of Riders to the Sea, which had its premiere in London in 1937 at the Royal College of Music.

The Abbey Theatre presented Pope John Paul II with a rare edition of The Playboy in 1979, during his visit to Ireland.

Today Newton Villas has been renamed Synge House. No 2 carries a plaque on the outside commemorating Synge’s birth, and Newtown Villas is surrounded by a gated residential scheme.

The plaque on Synge House, No 2 Newton Villas, commemorating JM Synge’s birth in the house (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2016)

For other postings on the architectural heritage of South Dublin see:

Berwick Hall.
The Bottle Tower, Churchtown.
Brookvale House, Rathfarnham.
Camberley House, Churchtown.
Dartry House, Orwell Park, Rathfarnham.
Ely Arch, Rathfarnham.
Ely House, Nutgrove Avenue, Rathfarnham.
Fernhurst, 14 Orwell Road, Rathgar.
Fortfield House, Hyde Park, Terenure.
No 201 Harold’s Cross Road, the birthplace of Richard Allen.
Homestead, Sandyford Road, Dundrum.
Kilvare House, also known as Cheeverstown House, Templeogue Road.
Knocklyon Castle.
Laurelmere Lodge, Marlay Park.
Marlay Park.
Mountain View House, Beaumont Avenue, Churchtown.
Newbrook House, Taylor’s Lane, Rathfarnham.
Old Bawn House, Tallaght.
Rathfarnham Castle.
Sally Park, Fihouse.
Scholarstown House, Knocklyon.
Silveracre House, off Sarah Curran Avenue, Rathfarnham.
Synge House, Newtwon Villas, Churchtown, and No 4 Orwell Park, Rathgar.
Templeogue House.
Washington House, Butterfield Avenue, Rathfarnham.
Westbourne House, off Rathfarnham Road.

It was the summer before the ‘Summer of Love’. But did I learn much Irish in Kerry?

Memories flow into the mind like the tide and are washed out like the sand … on the beach in Rethymnon earlier this week (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2016)

Patrick Comerford

How are memories triggered? How do our memories from childhood and our teen years wash in and out of our minds like the tide and the sand on a beach?

My walks on the beach near Rethymnon over the past three weeks brought back memories of long walks and long summer afternoons on the long sandy beach in Ballinskelligs, Co Kerry, fifty years ago in July and August 1966.

Irish was a compulsory subject in all schools in Ireland in those days. You had to pass the Irish language paper, or else you failed all your exams, and risked either having to repeat the “Inter Cert” or the Leaving Certificate exams – or, if your parents could afford it, being sent to school in England.

It was a year that I was growing uncomfortable with Irish politics. Nelson’s Pillar had been blown up a few months earlier, and presaged the political climate that was developing around the fiftieth anniversary of the 1916 Rising.

My parents were worried that three of us were becoming a risk because we did not have enough Irish and could become extra liabilities. We were packed off to spend four week in July and August in Colaiste Mhichil in Ballinskelligs, on a remote western tip of Co Kerry, off the Ring of Kerry (N70), and off the R566 and R567 between Cahersiveen and Waterville.

We were told we risked being sent home if we were caught speaking English, although this might have been a problem for the three of us – I think my parents were on holidays in England or Spain at the time.

I had been innovative earlier that summer and found a paper round with a local newsagent, and so I headed off with a secret stash of cash that I knew would give me extra spending capacity. I was putting into practice an early lesson in economics.

It was also an early lesson in geography: it took more time that day to get there than it takes me to get to many parts of the world today. The lengthy train journey to Faranfore was followed by a tortuous bus journey in the rain along the Ring Kerry. When I arrived I found I could not understand the local people. They thought my poor attempts to pronounce Irish were risible, and when I realised the threat of being sent home carried no punch and reverted to my own first language they thought I was English. I did not understand them either, and did not know the difference when they were speaking English or Irish.

I can still name seven or eight of the teenage boys of my own age group who squeezed into the Sugrue farmhouse in Dungeagan for those few weeks. I was the only one who lived in Dublin at that time, most of them came from Cork. Two (Dick and Tom) were my first cousins; two more (Mattie and Jerry) were from the village my mother grew up in; and for a few years after I kept in touch with two brothers (Terry and Brian) from Cork, and with Donal from Nenagh who also stayed in the house during those four weeks.

In the mornings, we had classes in Irish in a wooden-built schoolroom that was partitioned into two classrooms. Much of the work was on grammar and vocabulary. Of course, every essay could truthfully open, without fear of being clichéd, with those two well-spun sentences: Lá brea samhraidh a bhí ann. Bhí an ghrian ag taitneamh go hard sa spear. I imagine the teachers thought they were introducing some lighter moments to those boring mornings when they tried to introduce us to poetry and songs.

In the afternoons, there were walks to a long sandy beach or out above the bay, and the blessings of hindsight have turned each and every day into one filled with summer sunshine. I never learned to swim that summer, but there were impromptu football matches, and lengthy discussions that boys of that age revelled in – on politics, sport, literature and the pop culture of the time.

There was a smaller, stony, rocky beach nearer Dungeagan, where we were not supposed to venture, but it was a popular venue for smoking and for secret meetings between boy and girl.

As teenage boys in groups on the longer sandy beach, we thought we were talking about sex, although we knew nothing about it. We were probably not even being risqué, and although this was the summer before the ‘Summer of Love’ (1967), it was the summer after the ‘Bishop and the Nightie’ storm created by the Late, Late Show.

It was the summer the Beatles were topping the charts with ‘Yellow Submarine’ and ‘Eleanor Rigby,’ and with ‘Paperback Writer,’ it was the year Simon and Garfunkell were listening to the ‘Sound of Silence’ and would soon invite us to ‘Scarborough Fair.’ It seems now that on the walks back from the beach every afternoon we sang ‘Sunny Afternoon’ by the Kinks. I remember dressing most days in black roll-neck sweaters and blue jeans, and I imagined myself on marches against the bomb and the Vietnam War.

Culturally, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and the Kinks were far more important than the Irish songs our teachers tried to impart at the ceili dances in the evenings. Those dances had names that were strange and inexplicable – the Walls of Limerick, the Siege of Ennis … -- but we boys put up with them because they provided opportunities for close encounters with girls of our own age. The boy from west Cork who could play Wooden Heart on his tin whistle never got to do a star turn at a ceili … I wonder whether he grow up to do Elvis impersonations?

There were rambling stories from the seanachai, Seán Mhártain Uí Shúilleabháin, sometimes in the morning classes, and sometimes too at the ceili dances in the evening. Most of his stories were very long and I doubt whether any of us understood them, no matter how long we listened, or how many times they were repeated.

By that age I was already a precocious reader. I remember reading The Diary of Anne Frank on the sand dunes while others were swimming. If we were not supposed to speak in English, then I suppose we were not to read in English either. But I also remember reading Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, George Orwell’s Animal Farm, Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood and travel books by Wilfred Thesiger.

By then I was also reading newspapers every day. The Irish Times was not available in places like this at that time, but with my accumulated paper-round earnings I could afford The Irish Press every day. My uncle and foster-father worked there on the News Desk, and The Irish Press was on the cusp of a revolution in Irish journalism, attracting new writers and creative journalists.

It was the summer when a U-2 plane disappeared over Cuba. The Vietnam War was at its height, the Civil Rights movement and its marches were spreading across the US, John Lennon had to apologise for remarks about Jesus and popularity, the Cultural Revolution was launched in China with Red Guards waving Mao’s Little Red Book, and Mao swam across the Yangtze River.

There were times too when we did nothing more than just hang around. There were three shops in the village, but we seemed to prefer John Jo’s shop, sitting on biscuit boxes, sipping coke, wondering about the goings-on in the back bar, and being entertained by his fascination with Jean Shrimpton, the ‘Face of the ’60s.’ If I never learned to swim that year, I never learned to smoke either.

We got away from it all one day with a bus trip and a ferry crossing to Knightstown on Valentia Island. I had no interest in Gaelic football, but I remember some of the group becoming excited as they realised they had seen the Kerry footballer Mick O’Connell. Curiously, we then sang what were then called ‘rugby songs’ in the back seats of the bus all the way back to Ballinskelligs.

I was slowly developing an interest in rugby, aided by the infectious interest in rugby by two brothers from Limerick. But I had been brought up on a diet of English boys’ comics and football magazines.

My cousins persuaded the nuns in a nearby holiday convent that their mother knew some of them, or went to school with one of them. The accuracy of the story mattered little. The convent had one of the few televisions in Ballinskelligs, and the nuns let us in one Saturday afternoon, and they fed us with biscuits and orange juice as we watched the World Cup Final in Wembley.

It was Saturday 30 July 1966 and England beat Germany 4-2 after extra time. It is still England’s only World Cup trophy, and I still remember Geoff Hurst’s hat-trick – the first one ever in a World Cup Final – and that controversial third goal.

I was the only boy in the group cheering for England. I am perplexed then, and still am to this day, when Irish fans can cheer any side but England. But it was 1966, and the fiftieth anniversary of 1916. The songs in the charts in Ireland that summer included ‘The Sea Around Us’ by the Ludlows (‘Thank God we’re surrounded by water’) and ‘Black and Tan Gun’ by the Johnny Flynn Showband (‘It was down in the town of old Bantry ...’). Dermot O’Brien was soon to have a hit with ‘The Merry Ploughboy’ (‘We’re off to Dublin in the Green’).

I thought I had found my first girlfriend. But she did not think so. I imagined I was heartbroken, but that feeling was dissipated when my foster parents decided to take me back to my grandmother’s farm near Cappoquin, Co Waterford, for a few days. I was back among the people I loved and who loved me before I went back to school that September.

When we were asked later ‘Did you learn much Irish in the Gaeltacht?’ we all thought it was witty to reply: ‘No, but I learned a lot of French … kissing.’ But did those four weeks in Ballinskelligs improve my Irish?

I must have learned something. At the end of the four weeks, I came away with the fáinne airgid or silver ring awarded to speakers with a basic working knowledge of the Irish language. I received a pass mark on a pass paper in the ‘Inter Cert’ a year later and did the same at the ‘Leaving Cert’ in 1969.

After the ‘Leaving Cert’ I returned to Ballinskelligs once, and stayed a night in a tent pitched in a field beside the Sugrue family’s farmhouse. I have been back to Kerry many times since, as recently as two months ago [28 May 2016], but I have not been back to Ballinskellings … yet.

Next Saturday [30 July 2016] is the fiftieth anniversary of that World Cup final between England and Germany. Memories like this seem to be embedded in everyone’s mind. But did my stay in Ballinskelligs leave me with an interest in Irish?

I never use the language, partly because of the impression that the Irish language was already being hijacked in 1966 for political purposes by people who used it as a cultural brand in a way that I knew excluded me. I can still understand the news in Irish on television, but have greater difficulty when it comes to the news on the radio. Like sand on the beach, my memories of the Irish language have been washed away by the tides of time.

I still know just enough Irish to grind my teeth every time I hear Gerry Adams trying to speak it. Part of my cultural heritage was robbed from me at a time when I did not know how to offer any resistance.

My memories of the Irish language have been washed away by the tides of time (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2016)