County Clare in the 1970s
A Feature by Georgina Fitzpatrick
An abridged talk for the Celtic Club, based on an Obituary Tribute first published in the Australasian Journal for Irish Studies, Vol. 24, 2024.
Last year, my brother began delivering to me packages and packages of letters he had found scattered through our mother’s drawers and in her garage. It turned out that she had kept almost every letter I had written to her, including a full sequence between 1971 and 1999, covering my five years in England and my twenty years in Ireland. There were hundreds. As I began to read them, particularly those sent from County Clare in 1972 and 1973, I was thrown back to an Ireland that has, I think, completely gone. I also realised that the letters charted David Fitzpatrick’s fieldwork for his pioneering study of County Clare before and during the War of Independence, called Politics and Irish Life 1913-21: Provincial Experiences of War and Revolution. I told my mother about the elderly men and women we visited, who were eager to pull out documents and photographs which brought on floods of their memories, of encounters with the remnants of the landlord class in their big houses who also had records, of the testy interactions with a particular County official and about the local historians, teachers, clergy and journalists who generously shared what they had collected over the years, particularly from people long dead.
Today I am going to share with you some of these encounters but before I do, I will give you some background on David, for those of you who may be unfamiliar with his work in the areas of modern Irish social and political history. You may however know his third book, Oceans of Consolation, which explored experiences of Irish migration to Australia.
Background on David
Born in Melbourne in 1948, he was the son of Brian Fitzpatrick, the radical journalist, historian and, with David’s mother, Dorothy, one of the founders of the Australian Council for Civil Liberties in 1936. Dorothy was a Senior Tutor in the Monash History Department. Some account of their family life has been captured in a memoir called My Father’s Daughter by David’s older sister, Sheila Fitzpatrick, historian of the Soviet Union. With such a background, it was probably inevitable that he should decide on an Honours History course at Melbourne University and that he would top the final year. That is where I got to know him as a fellow student in some of the same classes in 1968 and 1969. After graduation, we both got full time tutorships – he at La Trobe and I at Monash – and we married, leaving Australia in August 1971 so that he could take up his Ph D scholarship at Trinity College, Cambridge. Following post-doctoral fellowships at Cambridge, Oxford and Melbourne, he got a lectureship in Irish history at Trinity College Dublin in 1979, where he stayed until his retirement in 2017. He was by then a Professor and a Senior Fellow of the College. He died in Belfast in February 2019.
First Experiences of Ireland
As it happened, our first experience of Ireland was Belfast in January 1972. It was an inauspicious start to dozens of visits and periods of residence. There had been some muddle with our Holyhead to Dun Laoghaire booking and British Rail re-routed us via Stranraer and Larne just as things were hotting up in Belfast. There had been a bomb the day before, but we decided to spend the day there before getting the train to Dublin. My letter home notes that about 60 people had been injured in the city centre.
There were shattered windows everywhere, boarded up with ‘business as usual’ chalked on. We saw wood and barbwire barricades ready for any action and grim-faced British soldiers with at least three sorts of guns hanging round their necks. There was a terrible tension and everyone was grim-faced and suspicious at David’s suitcases (which were thoroughly searched at the station for bombs – his transistor [radio] was listened to to make sure it was real). But if we asked people for directions they were very pleasant and cheerful, but their faces would close down once they had walked away (quickly).
This letter was written on 6 January just two weeks before Bloody Sunday in Derry.
We then headed for Dublin, where we hired a car and after a few days set out to tour many of the southern and western counties for the rest of January. David, who had already decided he wanted to write a local study of the revolutionary period in Ireland, needed to choose which county would be most fruitful. So, along the way, he would drop into county libraries and then follow up people whose names had been suggested to him. In Cork, for example, we spent an afternoon with a Mr and Mrs Langford. I wrote to my mother:
Mrs. was working for I.R.A. intelligence, until her discovery and dismissal in 1920, in the Mallow telephone exchange … And Mr. Langford was a Civil Servant who worked for the first Dáil government as Chief Commissioner for Public Health in the Cork Poor Law Union. In other words, he was a leading figure in the Irish [revolutionary] administration, which controlled local government … until the Treaty. So both of them could help David with 2 important aspects of his period – Intelligence and Administration. They had marvellous memories and tremendous stories which they would re-enact. Mr. Langford was particularly good as he recounted his lucky escape from capture in 1920. They were an awfully interesting pair and great fun.
The next day we were in Listowel having an interview (in a pub) with the Irish writer Bryan MacMahon. Then it was on to Limerick and Clare, Galway and Sligo, before returning to Dublin and the ferry back to England.
Why did David choose Clare?
In a talk he gave to the Merriman Summer School held in Ennis in 2008, David recalled how he wanted to find an untilled field. Accounts of the revolutionary period in the early 1970s were dominated by the memoirs of a few ‘celebrity’ rebels, particularly in Dublin, Cork and Tipperary; memoirs by, for example, Tom Barry and Dan Breen. David was looking for a less familiar revolutionary site.
Not only did Clare have many of its local leaders from that period still alive but there was a large collection of uncatalogued local government records in the garage of Mr Flanagan, the county librarian. It meant that David would likely be the first historian to work through them–if he could gain access! I am sure that the initial obstructiveness of Mr Flanagan only spurred David on. He was informed that the large volumes could not be brought into the library for him because they had not been listed and that they could not be listed because the garage was in use during the day and was unlit at night. However, Mr Flanagan had reckoned without David’s tenacity. He wilted and handed over the garage keys for use overnight.
I have very vivid memories of that evening. David parked the car so that we could work by its headlights. There were volumes everywhere in random, higgledy-piggledy piles, in a very dirty condition. While David lifted them and dictated names and dates from the spines, I listed each minute book and other records relating to the county council, district council and board of guardians for the relevant period (1890s to 1920). We tried to get them off the damp floor and I noted, where possible, the position of each set of records. We were there for several hours and were lucky that the car battery did not give up. By the time of David’s next visit to the county library, the volumes had found their way into the warmth, where David was able to discover in more comfortable circumstances the richness of these sources for his study. However, the county librarian made clear his irritation about ‘the trouble he’d been put to’ as I told my mother.
There were a couple of other factors which fed into the choice of Clare for the county study, but I can follow them up in question time, if you are curious, concerning accent and ancestry. However, I now want to share some of our experiences meeting the people of Clare.
Fieldwork in Clare
Although based in Dublin for the academic year, September 1972 to September 1973, so that David could work his way through Clare materials in the National Library or Dublin Castle, we made frequent visits to the county, renting cottages for weeks at a time. One, in mid-winter, was in the townland of Killaspuglonane, near Liscannor; the other was in the townland of Caherintedane, on the coast road between Lahinch and Miltown Malbay and not far from the site of the Rineen ambush of local War of Independence fame. It was just over the road from the West Clare railway cutting, a lovely place to walk along among the wild flowers in the stretched-out summer evenings while singing the Percy French song, ‘Are Ye Right there Michael, are ye right.’
In Clare, David spent much of his time visiting old people who had been members of the old IRA and Cumann na mBan, the women’s organisation. I would often accompany him. Each visitor would send him on to someone else although it took a while to realise that initially it was a Fianna Fáil chain of contacts. The Fine Gael people had their own networks. The names of the 36 people he interviewed are in his bibliography; several of them died before the book was published.
Two old revolutionaries whom I met stand out in my mind. One was Sean Macnamara, Commandant of the 6th battalion, Mid-Clare Brigade. The other was Peg Barrett, one of the Barrett siblings who went on to take the anti-Treaty side in the Civil War. She had been a very active member of Cumann na mBan, Mid-Clare Brigade. Along with the obligatory cups of tea, she brought out rolls of members, correspondence between her brother Frank and his subordinates in the IRA Brigade and several photographs. To see her, still vigorous and animated, and then to look at pictures of her in her uniform (I think with a revolver) was quite a lesson for me in my early 20s on positive ageing. She was good company.
Séan Macnamara of Muckinish was the other former IRA volunteer who made a big impression on me. A vigorous man in his late 70s or early 80s, he was a county councillor with, if I remember correctly, 17 children, of whom only two still lived at home. The others had grown up and had gone away. The family lived in a cottage next to the ruins of Muckinish castle. One daughter, a nurse, was visiting from her work in England the day we turned up. I was intrigued how, during David’s conversation/interview with her father, the daughter, unselfconsciously, went out to the well (there was no running water in the kitchen where we were), and filled kettles and pans to put on the turf range. When the water was hot, she filled a tub and proceeded to wash her hair. I later discovered that there was no lavatory; not even an outdoor ‘dunny’. I had to take to the fields. It was quite a revelation that someone who was a local official should still live like that.
With few exceptions, people were most hospitable when we turned up, sometimes unannounced because of the lack of phones in many cottages. As David wrote in a letter to my mother (she kept his occasional letter too):
My interviewing is fascinating & surprisingly tiring – making the small talk 3 times a day with strangers I find much more tiring than asking historical questions & analyzing answers. A few veterans of the old IRA (pre-Truce 1921) think I may be a spy but others take my interviews very seriously & evidently expect world distribution. One delightful IRA wife asked me in mid-interview if I was a Pioneer–no–but handed me a huge glass of horrible orange cordial all the same –‘I’ve seen interviewers on TV & they always have a glass in their hand.’ More often, thank God, whiskey, poitin or tea is brought forth & I am growing fat on the heavy yeastless breads & cakes & great slabs of home-churned butter which appear on every table.
In later life, when reflecting on this intermittent year of fieldwork, he noted that he was often roped into agricultural activities in return for time with a farmer. From hauling large pails of water from the well or grabbing a leg of a ‘frisky young animal’ to turning sods of turf, David, not long from suburban Melbourne, admits to being inept. I only witnessed the latter episode of ‘cooring’ and can confirm this judgement of his abilities and add that we were also both hopeless when we joined our neighbouring family in ‘saving the hay’ in the summer of 1973.
The interviews also included the remnant landlord class. At that time, only three or four were still resident in Clare: the Inchiquins of Dromoland, Newmarket-on-Fergus, Conor O’Callaghan-Westropp of Lismehane, Robert Tottenham of Mount Callan and Mr Ievers of Mount Ievers Court, Sixmilebridge. I never did learn his first name. David obtained interviews with all except Ievers who lived in a beautiful Queen Anne house. When we approached the iron gates barring the way up his drive, he advanced upon us with a shotgun. We drove away!
I wasn’t present when David went to Dromoland – the 17th Lord Inchiquin lived then in a house on part of the estate he had retained after the sale of the castle. However, I did accompany David on another day to the Dower House where the Lord’s aunt, Anne, Lady Inchiquin, lived. At the invitation of the Church of Ireland Dean of Killaloe, we had been invited to the installation of the new rector for the Newmarket-on-Fergus parish and a gathering at the Dower House after. The latter was a rather bizarre event for two young Australians but not as disconcerting as to be greeted by the imperious dowager with the words: ‘Ah yes. My father was Governor of New South Wales and of Queensland.’ Her father, Viscount Chelmsford, went on to be Viceroy of India, which is where she met Donough O’Brien, her father’s aide-de-camp and later 16th Lord Inchiquin. They married in 1921, so she turned out to be much more forthcoming than her nephew, who told David it was too soon to be raking over the revolutionary years. That was at over 50 years on!
The visit to Lismehane was also memorable but in a quite different way. Conor O’Callaghan-Westropp, who lived in a modern bungalow near the front steps of his recently demolished ‘Big House’, cooked us a meal while he talked. He lived in eccentric squalor with old newspapers inches thick on the floor, ‘scrabbled around by the dogs’, but he was an extremely courteous and gentle man. He gave David the run of his father’s correspondence, ‘all unsorted since the old house was pulled down’, I wrote to my mother. ‘It is a marvellous haul and he is letting David take some of it back to Dublin to read at leisure.’The father’s set of letterbooks from the period turned out to be the backbone of David’s chapter, ‘Protestants and Unionists’.
A very important source for David was Father Séamus O’Dea, for years the priest at Cross, ‘an isolated village in the tip of a bleak promontory’ as I wrote to my mother. This was on Loop Head, a more desolate place you could not imagine. He had somehow made a life for himself as an Irish folklore scholar and local historian, taping in both English and Irish, dozens of interviews with Clare people, many by then departed. I accompanied David on his first visit and experienced my first and only meal cooked by a priest, in a pressure cooker (chops, onions and potatoes), while he pulled down tape after tape. He had about 150 two-hour tapes. Those in English, David re-recorded on his more modern equipment. Those in Irish, the priest translated and posted to David.
Finally, there is one more interview that I would like to share with you today – going with David when he saw Eamon de Valera, by then a very old and lonely man in Aras an Uachtaráin (the President’s house). This took place on 28 March 1973. De Valera had been elected to Westminster for East Clare in the 1918 British election but, in keeping with Sinn Fein policy, did not take up his seat there but rather became a member of the first Dail. As involved so centrally as an elected politician for Clare, he was important for David’s research.
For years I have blamed my presence for turning it from an interview into an audience but, looking back, I think De Valera had already decided that that was the nature of the meeting and, as such, it was listed in the Irish Times – ‘The President yesterday received Mr and Mrs Fitzpatrick, of Melbourne, Australia’. And, on re-reading my letter home written just before the visit, I found that De Valera had offered the audience as a compromise. I wrote:
David wanted an interview but can’t get one because Dev. refuses to favour any historian and couldn’t cope with an interview with all historians, so it is just a courtesy call.
The President refused to answer any of David’s questions about his decisions concerning Clare and kept diverting the conversation into a discussion of Archbishop Mannix and his (Dev’s) visit to Australia in 1948. I saw that you have a photograph of this visit upstairs. I wrote in my next letter home:
For a 90 year old he is awfully fit-looking. His voice is very firm and he rather monopolised the conversation which revolved around the Eucharistic Congress, Archbishop Mannix and his retirement (in May) and his subsequent preparation for death … However he may talk to David about Clare … after retirement.
This did not happen.
Conducting interviews with so many people from all walks of life and across a wide range of occupations during the revolutionary period, from the young men and women of the revolutionary organisations to the landlord class, from strong farmers to administrators, from Catholic priests to Church of Ireland bishops, was one of the novelties of his book at the time. Other novelties discussed in recent years by fellow historians we can perhaps pick up during our question time.
Dr Georgina Fitzpatrick
Georgina lived in Ireland for twenty years (1979-99) following a memorable year in 1972-3 when she accompanied her husband, the late Professor David Fitzpatrick, on his original field trip to Co. Clare. Also a historian, her recent publications chart the history of Australia’s war crimes trials, 1945-51, and the military lawyers and interpreters
underpinning the trials.
Tinteán 