French exile in Ireland

Ten years ago we spent a long weekend at a Clifden hotel. On our first night, we were served dinner by a young Frenchman, Olivier Zaegel. He told us he came from the Alps. He had telephoned home the night before to ask about the snow. In March, he knew it would be nice and powdery and he and three or four of his friends would take off on skis and go into the valleys where there were no tourists - his eyes lit up at the thought of it.

Summer camp

Anne and I walked along the old Galway-Clifden Line the following day and drank our fill of the wonderful and whispering silence of the Connemara landscape. Olivier’s landscape was the snow-filled Alpine valleys. Two vivid memories jumped to mind: summer in Connemara and St Patrick’s Day in France.

My father did some work for Our Lady’s Boy’s Club, a Catholic youth club catering for the boys in the poorer part of Galway city. Summer camp was its major annual event. In the early years, the camp was held in Lough Cutra Castle just outside Gort.

It was there I found myself at the age of seven ready to take on the world. That was until I was asked to go and find Ding-a-Ling and get the key of the tent. I ran off as fast as my little legs would carry me before I realised I didn’t know who Ding-a-Ling was. It turned out he was James P. Cunningham, later club patron. When I made my request, he thought for a minute and said that to get the key to the tent, he needed the glass hammer and would I get it for him from the Half Door.

Off I took again to find that the Half Door was Paddy Mac Donagh, who seems to have been cooking for the camp since time began. He told me I’d find the glass hammer just inside the door to the lake and off I took again when all of a sudden, the penny dropped. Red-faced and sheepish, I walked back to the castle and swore and swore that one day I, too, would be a senior and get my own back.

Camp days were full of activity and finished with evening prayer in the dim-lit chapel. Every night, Fr Michael McGrath would wind up the ceremony with a special prayer for the countless boys who had to leave Galway to eke out a living abroad, “these our exiles”.

An exile in Paris

In March 1971, I was living in Paris. These were pre-common market days where there was virtually no Irish presence in the city. On St Patrick’s night, I found myself in the Rue Des Ecoles on the fringe of the Latin Quarter. Suddenly, out of nowhere, I could hear the music of a lone piper. Almost instantly and without warning, loneliness and homesickness swept over me like a cold wave.

For over an hour I searched for the piper. The music was haunting, coming, as it were, from the silent rooftops. Up and down the Rue Mont St Genevieve, round the Pantheon, towards the Place Contr’ Escarpe I wandered. Finally, unsuccessful, I walked home sad and desperately alone to my chambre de bonne on its seventh floor.

There are very few Irishmen or women who have not experienced the loneliness of exile. Nowadays, the exile is more transient. With modern transport and communications, the emigrant returns more often and has more contact with home. In recent years emigration was often by choice and not forced by political or economic circumstance. This is changing again as many young people leave to find work in Australia and Canada.

The Great Shame

Tom Keneally’s mammoth book The Great Shame tells of Ireland’s more familiar form of exile - one that was forced. During Keneally’s 1999 visit to Galway, he told us that the work was an attempt to face down this exile and lay its ghost to rest.

Its breadth and scale bring to mind Michener’s Hawaii, Uris’s Exodus and Hailey’s Roots. Each of these books deals with emigration, forced exile, the uprooting of whole generations.

The Great Shame opens in a townland outside Ballinasloe, where a small farmer, Hugh Larkin, finds himself accused of a form of radical nationalism called Ribbonism. He is dragged away from his young wife and family to Galway gaol, tried, convicted and transported for life to Australia. Keneally describes in some detail the conditions of home life, the reality of imprisonment and the run-up to final transportation. After three months at sea, the ship docks in Australia and the reader lives and feels the life of an Irish convict in that massive country.

All the time the reader is conscious that Hugh Larkin was Thomas Keneally’s great grandfather-in-law. Intermingled with this, the book revisits Ireland and the Young Ireland movement. We are given, again in some detail, the run-up, failure and aftermath of the bungled 1848 attempted Rising.

The book continues to mix the two stories, the day-to-day life and tribulations of the Larkin family, and the nefarious activities on the world stage, particularly during the American Civil War, of the dashing Tom Francis Meagher, John Mitchel and William Smith O’Brien. We watch the commercial activities of Hugh’s children as they make their way in Australian life, and the birth (and demise) of the Fenian Rising in Ireland.

Once again, we find our heroes transported to Australia and towards the end of the book there is a superb description of the Catalpa rescue. While The Great Shame contains some glaring historical inaccuracies (Eva of the Nation was born in Headford, not Portumna), these are irrelevant to its spirit. The book is not about historical fact but about taking the skeleton of our exile culture out of the cupboard and putting its ghost firmly and gently to rest.

This St Patrick’s Day, I remembered the key to the tent, the glass hammer, that Parisian night in 1971;. I thought of Olivier in his Alpine valley, raised a glass in spirit with Keneally in Australia and saluted, and drank to the ghost of “these our exiles”.

The Great Shame, Thomas Keneally
www.kennys.ie