Even though my 12-week old grandson Little Austy made his maiden voyage to the island for Paddy’s Day, we didn’t have time to bring him on a walk out the Green Road. It was on our to-do list since his great-grandfather, Austy Bob, had trodden that winding route for over 80 years when the storms and gales of winter abated.
Then it was time again to cut the turf, slice it with the sléan into blancmange sods, be eaten alive by midges, smothered by the smoke from the fire when the kettle was singing for the tae.
As you might imagine, the Green Road on Clare Island isn’t really a road and thus not very buggy friendly. In fact, when the walls of mist roll in from over the horizon – a regular occurrence – the ghosts of the past come out to play: there are donkeys carrying children in cliabhs (cleaves); young bucks herding their sheep before the land was striped in the 1890s; lighthouse keepers’ wives bringing their children home from the East school.
It was up this soft and sometimes soggy thoroughfare that Austy Bob went to the East school in his bare feet and in the evenings heard whispers around the hearth about Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s assassination in Sarajevo, and rumours of a boatload of guns having landed in Howth with the help of two men from Gola Island, up the coast in Donegal.
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The Green Road on Clare Island isn’t really a road
Born in 1901, in a traditional thatched cottage that these days is abandoned and known as Sammon’s barn, Austy Bob O’Malley was a gasúr when his family moved down the village of Glen to one of the first slated houses built by the Congested Districts Board.
Its purchase of the island in 1895 heralded a plethora of radical changes to the farming and fishing infrastructure with a wide variety of modernising initiatives offering hope for the future sustainability of the island.
The 1800s had been a seismic time for the island with the exigencies of the Great Famine causing the population to collapse from 1,615 in 1841 to 845 in 1851. Of course, the potato crop failed many more times during the 19th century, compounding the regular realities of British gunboats sailing from Westport to impound cattle, break down doors with battering rams, condemn whole families to emigration or the workhouse.
While the fight for national sovereignty dominated the early life of Austy Bob O’Malley, baby Austin Nicholas Mills was born last January into the precipitous era of Trumpism and the ongoing fallout from his challenges to globalisation and cultural, social and racial diversity, and even basic human rights.
Like his great-grandfather, he has come into this world at a time of seismic change and not only in crude political terms.
However, the smell of turf is no longer a wafting odour that he will recognise. He lives in a brand new house in Kinsale where there are no fireplaces. Its state-of-the-art heating system is air-to-water and is so well regulated that the word “draft” is no longer in the daily lexicon.
Indeed, this house is a mecca of modernity with so many digitised contraptions, if Austy Bob happens to come back from the other side for a visit, he would undoubtedly take a deep pull out of his pipe and shake his head in wonder, if not disbelief.
Well, after all, he was aged 82 when “the power” came to the island in 1983. This was a man who had read up to three books a week in the flicker of a Tilly lamp or gaslight. His diet was simple but largely organic. The praties (potatoes) were grown in the garden across the road alongside cabbages and carrots, turnips and rhubarb. His boiled eggs were an absolute favourite and was always cracked open with the precision of a sculptor. They came from the generations of hens that pecked and picked, laid and clucked around the hillock at the back of the house.
When Austy Bob passed away in 1992, in the bed he had shared with his wife Katie Ann for over 60 years, my daughter Saoirse, who is Little Austy’s mammy, was six weeks old.
As he quietly faded away, he held her on the day of her christening. It was in the island’s church, in the shadow of the Cistercian Abbey where 16th-century pirate queen Grace O’Malley is reputedly buried, and where he was christened too. Indeed, he received his First Holy Communion, was confirmed, and married in this church.
So it made sense then that on Little Austy’s maiden voyage to the island of his maternal forebears his parents brought him for a visit to the graveyard, where the story of one line of his past is told on the headstones.
