I was interviewing my oldest living O’Leary relative on his farm in the Kerry foothills. Micheál was well into his 90s, but stood six foot two and had a farmer’s strength still, flinging open the metal door of the barn to show me the wall of the cottage where my grandfather Denis – his uncle – was born.
The census captured my grandfather, aged two, living in this cottage with seven siblings and his grandmother on the night of April 2nd, 1911. The census counted two rooms and three windows.
Just one wall of it now remained, the sodden stones flecked with white paint, making up one side of the barn where dozens of sheep stood silent witnesses to the passage of time.
“All the families were born there,” Micheál said. “Christ, it must be hundreds of years old. I don’t know how many hundreds it would be.”
RM Block
Anglicisations are unstable. The townland of Readrinagh is named for its geography, ‘An Ré Dhronnach’ – the humped stretch of ground. The name mutates through the archives. Réidh droigheanach, Raydrinnagh, Readrinah. Laoghaire, Laoire, Leary.
A century of gravestone inscriptions and land valuations capture the combination together, putting O’Learys on the land since at least 1853.
One useful set of records are the rent ledgers of the earls of Kenmare.
The earls became earls because they were the descendants of Valentine Browne from Berwick-upon-Tweed, a provisioner of Queen Elizabeth I’s army who was awarded vast tracts of Kerry during the Munster plantation. This great wealth of land allowed his descendants to accumulate the trappings of nobility, and they hosted the King of Belgium and Queen Victoria in their Killarney home in the 1860s.
This was to prove the high point. They made the mistake of building a lavish new mansion at the outset of the Land War. The house almost immediately burned down. Mass agitation by tenant farmers then swept the countryside. Tenants stopped paying. Between 1880 and 1882, arrears to the earls of Kenmare doubled.
An ink-blotted page in the Kenmare Estate rental ledger is dedicated to the payments of Widow Mary Leary of Readrinagh.
The widow was a survivor. She had lived through the Great Hunger, married, and had four children, the youngest just a year old when her husband died, leaving her to farm alone at Readrinagh.
The rent ledgers shows her paying £12 10 shillings twice a year from 1874. From 1880, written in cursive in the left-side column of her page is the repeated word “arrears”.
The British government established a Land Commission to fix rents in a bid to quell the unrest of the Land War. Mary Leary’s rent was revised down from £25 a year to £17 and 10 shillings, a Land Commission document shows.
It wasn’t enough to quieten Ireland. The British parliament passed successive Land Acts, transferring ownership to tenants. The Kenmare Estate began to be broken up.
In 1870, just 3 per cent of Irish farmers owned their land. By 1929, 97 per cent of farmers did.
The landlords were bought out. The British government raised the money by selling land bonds to investors. The repayments were charged to the former tenants. Instead of rent, in effect they now had mortgages. The payments were called land annuities, but colloquially they were still known as “rents”.
By the turn of the 20th century, the O’Leary family had become part of this revolutionary transfer of land. By 1901, Widow Mary Leary’s son Jeremiah is listed as the owner of the farm at Readrinagh.
In 1911, the census shows the widow still alive, now 88, sharing the cottage at Readrinagh with eight of her grandchildren. One of them was my grandfather. He spent his first five years of his life with her; she died aged 93. He must have remembered the Irish-speaker, the Famine-survivor, who lived with him in the two-room cottage when he was small.
The history of Ireland – the hunger, the loss of the language – was so much closer than I knew. The change had been so fast from my grandfather’s life to mine.
For many, land ownership turned out not to be a cure for poverty. In March 1927, TD Timothy O’Donovan told the Dáil that a mother, father and two of their children had starved to death in west Cork that year.
Memories of the Famine were fresh. A deputy in the chamber shouted out “47!”
[ The forgotten famine and how it put the fledging Irish Free State on the brinkOpens in new window ]
“There are seven, eight, 10 or perhaps 20 in the same locality who are practically in the same circumstances, and because they hold small plots of land they have been deprived of home assistance,” O’Donovan said.
That was the year my grandfather got his ticket out of Kerry. It was a letter from Brother O’Sullivan, principal of the Monastery School in Killarney, reporting his good results in the intermediate certificate exams that had been recently introduced by the Free State.
“I have much pleasure in recommending him as suitable for a position of responsibility,” Brother O’Sullivan wrote.
It was his passport to a job in Dublin, and to a life of comfort for his descendants. He ended up becoming a buyer for the old McBirney’s department store on Aston Quay. He kept that letter all his life.
Many farmers fell behind on their annuities payments in the upheaval of the revolutionary years. When the Free State government began to try to collect in the later 1920s, attempts to seize livestock or property as payments for debts began to be met with the same spirit of defiance as the Land War long before.
“These lands were confiscated by force of arms. The confiscators had no legal right to the lands,” wrote Peadar O’Donnell, editor of An Phoblacht and an abstentionist Sinn Féin TD whose own father was a Donegal farmer deeply in arrears.
“If Land Annuities be considered legal, the British conquest must be considered legal also.” O’Donnell sensed political opportunity. “Republicans could roast the treaty in the fire from this kindling,” he wrote.
Éamon de Valera saw political opportunity too. In 1929, he argued to the Dáil that the Free State was under no legal obligation to hand the collected annuities over to Britain, a sum of about £5,000,000 a year.
In opposing positions that still seem familiar a century on, Fine Gael’s antecedent Cumann na nGaedheal insisted Ireland must not default to protect its international reputation.
“The credit of this State at the present time is high ... the outside world believes that we are prepared to honour our obligations,” Dublin North TD Vincent Rice told the Dáil.
“This country will have to go into the market again to borrow money. I hope this House will not give any encouragement to the idea propagated by Deputy de Valera and his Party, that we ought to hoist the pirate flag and refuse to pay our debts.”
[ John FitzGerald: Economic fallout of Anglo-Irish Treaty was not all badOpens in new window ]
Fianna Fáil swept to victory in the 1932 election. That summer, De Valera stopped handing the annuities over to Britain. Britain imposed a 20 per cent import duty on all goods from the Free State in response.
The economic war had begun.
More than 90 per cent of Irish agricultural exports went to Britain at the time. Tariffs were followed by counter-tariffs, and quotas by Britain limiting livestock imports from Ireland. The Irish market was now flooded with spare cattle, now worthless.
This was the time that Micheál remembered as the English, in his words, “starving” the Irish.
“We were very badly off that time. We used to go catching rabbits to buy meal or flour or things. The rabbits were dearer than cattle,” he remembered.
“They’d be killing the calves and they’d be getting a few shillings for the hides.”
Micheál’s father died suddenly in 1936, leaving behind seven children, the youngest six months old.
“My mother had an awful time trying to rear us, seven of us – she had no money or anything,” Micheál recalled.
One field was always set aside for growing potatoes. Meat was usually pork, which would be salted and hung in a barrel from the roof. Neighbours would gather together in “meitheals”, traditional working parties of 15 or 20, to get the day’s work done or go to cut the bog.
“The trains were the timekeepers,” Micheál recalled. Phones and electricity were still decades away.
Import tariffs had caused a shortage of coal in Ireland. One of Micheál’s earliest memories was his grinding hunger – a recurring feature – as he struggled to drive an errant donkey back from Killarney where he had sold a cartload of turf.
In 1938, Ireland and Britain agreed to end the economic war.
Micheál took over the farm in 1950, when his mother died. All she left behind was “a good set of pigs and banbhs,” he remembered. “I managed anyway.”
Young people began to move away in search of work in England or America. The large families thinned out. When some emigrants came back with money, it encouraged others to go. Between 1946 and 1966, Kerry’s population fell 16 per cent.
Micheál’s siblings moved away, marrying or becoming priests. He married himself and became a cattle dealer, renting out fields in Limerick where the land is better.
“The land here wouldn’t fatten cattle at all,” he said.
Micheál claimed to have very little Irish, though he used Irish words frequently, and the grammar of the language formed the foundation walls of his speech.
The chain had been broken just one generation before him. Micheál’s father was the first person in the O’Leary family, in 1901, not to set down Irish on the census as his mother tongue.
Some of Micheál’s best stories were about death. One was about how my grandfather stole his own funeral.
Once when he won £5 at the races, my grandfather went to his local, Fagan’s in Drumcondra, and paid in advance for his wake. “Under pressure and under persuasion, Fagan took it,” Micheál recalled. When my grandfather died, many decades of inflation later, Fagan honoured the deal.
That funeral is just on the edges of my memory. I was too young to speak to my grandfather about his life when he was alive. My conversation with Micheál was a chance to recapture time.
Birds could foretell a death, he told me.
“A bird used to come to the window when someone would die,” he said.
“I remember being inside there and the crows landed outside in the field. Someone said: ‘God knows, they didn’t come for anything good, they’re going to carry someone.’ And didn’t one of them die that evening.”
The day was growing late around the Readrinagh farmhouse. Micheál invited me to come back again, so we could visit the chapel and old graveyard, where he could show me where the old families were buried.
That was 2019. Before I could get back, Micheál O’Leary died. Whether the crows had come for him, I never heard.
