For the birds — Frank McNally on folklorist and freedom fighter Ernie O’Malley

Among the stories in The Enchanted Bay: Tales and Legends from Ernie O’Malley’s Irish Folklore Collection – just published by Merrion Press – is one called “A Girl is Taken from the Bird’s Nest”.
The title suggests a fairy tale, perhaps along the lines of the Children of Lir. But on closer inspection, this is more a piece of oral history.
The Bird’s Nest in question was an evangelical “colony” in Achill during the Famine years, where children were fed and educated in return for becoming Protestant (“jumpers” was the term for them in local vernacular).
In this case, the impoverished parents of a girl named Maggie arranged for her to go to the colony after their deaths.
Then other, devoutly Catholic members of the family hatched to a plot to rescue her and, despite a posse of “other jumpers” despatched from the colony to bring her back, they made good her escape.
Maggie was first brought to a convent in Westport and later, like many in these stories – which are set mainly in western Mayo – she emigrated. Or “went over to America”, as the locals phrased it.
O’Malley’s chief contribution to Irish literature will remain the two best-written accounts of the revolutionary period: On Another Man’s Wound (about the War of Independence) and The Singing Flame (about the Civil War).
But he was also a part-time collector of folk stories, starting while he travelled the country as an IRA organiser during that period and culminating with a more deliberate survey or the lore of Clew Bay and its surrounds in 1939-42. Hence this belated anthology, partly edited by his son Cormac.
Stories of jumpers aside, the collection is full of such classic Irish folk themes as féar gortach (“hungry grass”), which confers insatiable hunger on anyone who treads on it; ceo draíochta (“fairy mist”), a sudden, bewildering fog; and fóidín mearbhaill (“disorienting sod”), also likely to lead you astray.
In an afterward to the anthology by Patrick J O’Mahony, we’re told that a young IRA officer once stood on a fóidín mearhbhaill in the Wicklow Mountains. As explained to him afterwards by his mother and other local elders, he had disturbed the “Good People” (ie fairies). Happily, he was able to break the spell by sitting down.
O’Malley’s slim if charming collection was part of a concerted effort in the early years of independence to preserve a tradition then in steady decline.
Hence the folklorist Thomas Johnson Westropp, an occasional visitor to the west in the early 1920s, wishing that those permanently resident there would preserve their traditions themselves: “but few indeed show interest in such a pursuit, and the old Ireland is passing away forever, more or less speedily.”
O’Malley did his part to preserve it, for which he deserves credit.
Unfortunately, mention of old Ireland passing away forever also reminds me of one of his less glorious contributions to archival history, when on June 30th, 1922, he presided over the destruction of the Irish Public Records Office in Dublin.
As Ireland descended into Civil War. Anti-Treaty forces in the Four Courts had stored their munitions in the Records Office, defying repeated Free State warnings – oral and written – that they were endangering a priceless archive.
In effect, history was held hostage in the stand-off. And when the shells fell and mines detonated, the hostage paid the price. As Tom Garvin wrote elsewhere in these pages a while back:
“At least 13 wired and booby-trapped mines were disarmed by Irish Army soldiers after the surrender, but one cleverly concealed ‘connected mine’ was accidentally triggered. The mine dutifully went off, maiming 20 soldiers and blowing the Strong Room of the Public Records Office and its precious national records to molecules.”
O’Malley, by then in command of the Republicans within, would later express regret that they hadn’t taken out more of the “Staters”. He was less effusive about the destruction of the records.
But the accompanying fires inspired the title of his Civil War memoir, The Singing Flame.
And speaking of birds’ nests, he resorted to avian imagery to better describe how the archive went up in smoke.
Against the dark backdrop, leaves of paper from the flames looked like “hovering white birds”, he wrote. Elsewhere, he describes them “gyrating in the upper air like seagulls”.
That was the sort of detail that made O’Malley such an evocative writer, setting him apart from other soldiers of the period who published more martial memoirs, including Tom Barry and Dan Breen.
Among his imagined seagulls, alas, were the census records from 1821 to 1851; church records dating from the 12th century; court records from the 13th century.
There were also ancient wills, financial documents, military records, details of imprisonment and transportation, including hand-written appeals for clemency. All irreplaceable and all reduced to ashes by the bitterness into which the pro-and-anti-Treaty forces had fallen.