I was sheltering from the rain in a pub in Virginia, Co. Cavan, waiting for the 11:36 bus to Ballyjamesduff. To be precise, the pub was part of a double-barrelled business under the ownership of a James Matthews – Lounge Bar and Funeral Directors. I would guess they have a monopoly on wakes in the area. This hostelry-cum-final resting place was a fitting symbol for the transition between life and death – an emotional and physical borderland that strongly resonated since I had recently returned from a long journey to Christchurch, New Zealand, to experience the last few days of my mother’s life and departing, aged 90. As a staunch Catholic, she had already received Supreme Unction – a ritual designed to connect the body to a spiritual realm – by the time I got to her bedside. As Rosemary Hill eloquently puts it, ‘Supreme Unction at the approach of death involves anointing the portals between the body and the material world – the eyes, nose, lips, ears and hands – to mark the end of the senses’ dealings with the things of the earth.’ (‘Was Plato too Fat? LRB, 10 October 2019, p.35). My mother’s death was precipitated by an inability to swallow, the beginnings (or endings) of a slow starvation, due to cancer of the oesophagus. The threshold condition of the ‘James Matthews’ also stood for the final shift in state signalled by the inability to drink, to swallow – the transitional drift from the pub lounge to the funeral parlour, to last rites and ashes, from the corporeal to a realm beyond (at least according to the Catholic ritual).
Of course, my mother did not willingly succumb to the sacrifice of starvation as did the republican hunger strikers of the Long Kesh and other Northern Irish prisons in the early 1980s. The most famous of the ten men who starved themselves to death in Long Kesh in 1981, protesting against the removal of Special Category Status for political prisoners, was Bobby Sands, who died on 5 May 1981 after 66 days on hunger strike, aged 27. The diary entry he wrote to launch his fasting reads: ‘I am standing on the threshold of another trembling world. May God have mercy on my soul.’ As South African journalist David Beresford recounts in his book on these events, Ten Dead Men, the 1981 hunger strikes hark back in Irish history to the practice as used by early twentieth-century republicans during the flashpoint of the Anglo-Irish conflict at the time. Prominent amongst these was the poet, playwright and philosopher Terence MacSwiney – the Lord Mayor of Cork and commanding officer of the local brigade of the IRA – who was captured by British Troops and sentenced to two years’ jail for sedition. Protesting that the British had no jurisdiction in Ireland, MacSwiney immediately went on hunger strike and died in Brixton prison on his seventy-fourth day without food. MacSwiney wrote a famous line often quoted on murals in the Bogside and the Falls: ‘…the contest on our side is not one of rivalry or vengeance, but of endurance. It is not those who can inflict the most, but those who can suffer the most who will conquer.’
Beresford refers to W. B. Yeats’ 1903 play The King’s Threshold, in which the poet Seanchan goes on hunger-strike against the king Guaire. The play weaves a narrative around the ancient history of the hunger strike in Ireland as a weapon to protest grievances:
KING: …He has chosen death:
Refusing to eat or drink, that he may bring
Disgrace upon me; for there is a custom, that if a man
Be wronged, or think that he is wronged, and starve
Upon another’s threshold till he die,
The Common People, for all time to come,
Will raise a heavy cry against that threshold,
Even though it be the King’s.
The King’s Threshold, by W. B. Yeats
Both Troscadh (fasting on or against a person) or Cealachan (achieving justice by starvation) are recorded in the Senchus Mór – the ancient civil code of pre-Christian Ireland. The legal tract specified circumstances of the action of a complainant fasting on the doorstep of the defendant with the aim of recovering a debt or objecting to a perceived injustice. The defendant, who was also obliged to fast, was disgraced if he did not submit to the procedure and pay (or pledge to pay) the debt. If the fast ended in death, Beresford writes, the defendant ‘was held responsible for [the complainant’s] death and had to pay compensation to his family. It is probable that such fasting had particular moral force at the time because of the honour attached to hospitality and the dishonour of having a person starving outside one’s house.’ (Ten Dead Men, London: Harper Collins, 1994, p. 15)
This speculative link between honour and hospitality – or the dishonour of allowing someone to die on the threshold of your home – offers a pointed take on the treatment of stateless human beings fleeing war and persecution in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In 2012, among some 300 other fasting detainees, the Iranian asylum seeker Omid Sorousheh carried out a hunger strike for 50 days on the island of Nauru, the remote site used by the Australian government for the ‘offshore processing’ (double-speak for indefinite detention) of people seeking asylum, protection, resettlement and, ultimately, liberty – in wider ethical terms, hospitality. The Australian government preside over a policy of inhospitality, designing the camps as dumping grounds or deterrents, according to a Guardian report, ‘to discourage anybody from seeking sanctuary in Australia by boat.’ Close to death, Sorousheh was air-lifted to Brisbane for treatment. As soon as he was deemed fit for travel, the Australian Department of Immigration returned him to the Nauru detention centre. Back to the scarcely human, inhospitable, dishonourable, ‘threshold of another trembling world’, having been barred from crossing another threshold into a home that might offer a place in the world. Closer to these shores, on 23rd October 39 Vietnamese people, including 10 teenagers, were found dead in the back of a truck parked in an industrial park in Essex, having been shunted across borders from Vietnam, Bulgaria, Belgium and onwards. And, in an action that Una Mullally calls ‘abhorrent and pathetic’, four Fine Gael MEPs voted to block a European Parliament resolution to try to stop migrants drowning in the Mediterranean. An appalled Fintan O’Toole, who reminds readers of Ireland’s extensive history of post-Famine economic migrants, comments that:
We know them. They are our grandparents and aunts and uncles. They are not commodities to be trafficked or spectres to frighten voters with. They do work that needs to be done. They have names and lives and families and the same desire for decency and dignity as we have. They are us and, if we let them die so casually, we kill something in ourselves.
Before her father (a Matthews, or ‘the’ Matthews perhaps?) bundled her away, a wee girl showed me her ‘list’. ‘I’m doing my list’ she told me. The impulse to produce lists is understandable given the business of administration that the girl (of no more than four or five years old) no doubt espies on a daily basis – inventories, purchases, totting up takings etc. The list comprised a freeform cloud of doodles and squiggles. I asked about the most coherent of these – an upside-down spiral with a line running through it. She told me it was a bottle. ‘Is it a particular bottle?’ I asked, thinking she may have copied the symbol from a label on one of the bottles behind the bar. ‘No’, she forbearingly explained: ‘It is all bottles. Every bottle.’ It was a shadow image on Plato’s cave. Or an archetype. This clumsy adult had failed to access the primitive unconscious at play in the formation of this list. A very human impulse, a seed in the soul of an Irish girl to make sense of her world. A seed in the spirit of a line from the 1992 story ‘Time and Tide’ by Irish novelist Edna O’Brien, in which the protagonist, Nell, a book editor, gives some advice to a would-be writer, Millie: ‘The seed is within yourself. “How?” I hear you ask. Simple. The sperms are the moonbeams and sunbeams and shadows of every thought, half thought, and follicle of feeling that have attended you since your first breath of hardship. Think only of big things, Millie, big sad, lonely, glorious, archetypal things.’
The girl in the pub is, of course, right to begin her study of symbology early. Ireland is steeped in symbols and signs, and there was a time not so long ago, during the Troubles, when a misreading of symbols, from the complicated iconology of Orange Order banners to the myriad symbols adopted by republican factions, may have been a matter of life or death. While I was in Ulster, I had direct experience of this sensitivity to symbols. In Donegal, the blue colour of my seemingly innocuous M & S rain jacket, bought especially for the trip, meant I was accused of being a member of the police. Twice. And again (I think, though not in so many words) in the Falls Road in Belfast. Spotting my blue-clad figure coming towards him, a local tapped a metal ruler he was holding (a tool of his trade?) on the edge of a rubbish bin. I took this to be a throwback to the practice, used by republican communities during the Troubles, of hitting bin lids to signal the approach of the Royal Ulster Constabulary or the British Army (it was also used to mark the death of hunger strikers in 1981 and to rally ensuing protests). Thankfully, my kiwi accent distinguished me as a harmless tourist (and, crucially in some circles, not English). An Irish artist friend speculated that the identification of me and my blue raincoat with the police may have had something to do with the state of attentiveness such a recce requires – I don’t know, but it was a curious thing indeed. Maybe it was paranoia. Across the way on the Shankill Road, no such doubt: the appearence of a Donegal tweed cap I was wearing, which I’d picked up in Glencolumbkille (Co. Donegal), prompted a spotty youth to shout: ‘F**k off back to Donegal.’ Happy, by the way, to be associated with that fine county, and at least I was no longer being branded a cop, ‘that seeming incarnation of a hostile world’, as Hannah Arendt put it. (The Jew as Pariah: Jewish Identity and Politics in the Modern Age, p. 88).
So, I was in this slightly dark and gloomy pub in Virginia, sheltering from the rain while I waited for the bus, literally because of sperm: the birth of my maternal great-grandfather – James ‘Jimmy’ Cooney – was registered in Ballyjamesduff, hence my pilgrimage. My research on distant relations in the vicinity was pretty lack-lustre due to a feeling of entropy produced by bereavement, so I was heading there pretty much on spec. Just ‘blowing in’, as my mother would’ve said. An email from an extremely dedicated family archivist with the lowdown on the Cavan Cooneys – ‘my people’, as they say in Ireland – arrived a day too late — I’ d already moved on. Fortunately, a friend in Dublin had spoken of a Ballyjamesduff family connection. Apparently, she herself had spent many a childhood summer in the area and her first cousin was currently the director of the Cavan County Museum. The cousin was ‘great craic’ and bound to be of help, so my friend reassured me. The bus trundled through green, gentle, rolling hills and fields. The sun tried to nudge through the clouds.
In the Irish country song ‘Come Back Paddy Reilly to Ballyjamesduff’, written by Percy French in 1912, Ballyjamesduff is remembered, lovingly, as a garden of Eden: ‘The grass it is green, as from Ballyjamesduff,/And the blue sky is over it all.’ I wonder if Jimmy Cooney heard the place calling for him all the way to Oamaru , in the South Island of New Zealand (over 19,000km), as did Paddy Riley, the ‘toil-torn and rough’ emigrant to Scotland. In the song, a voice: ‘Still whispers over the sea’:
‘Come back Paddy Reilly to Ballyjamesduff,/Come home Paddy Reilly to me.’
While the real Paddy O’Reilly, a local jarvey (driver of a hackney coach or jaunting car) who drove round the town, often with French as a passenger, eventually returned to Ballyjamesduff (according to this Belfast Telegraph article), the majority of ‘Paddies’ left, never to return. Jimmy Cooney was amongst these, though he did not forget his far-off homeland. Having become a successful businessman in Oamaru, he was to play a minor role in the early twentieth century fight for home rule in Ireland. According to his death notice in the local paper, published on July 27, 1938:
As an Irishman he was staunch and in the bad old days when Ireland was fighting for freedom and Irish delegates paid visits to New Zealand to enlist financial assistance, ‘Cooney’s Store’ was the focus of activity by local Home Rulers for the cause of Ireland’s valiant fight, and Mr Cooney acted as treasurer for all the committees formed to assist the delegates.
It’s amazing to think how this small-town shopkeeper, perched on the far reaches of the Empire, was to remain interwoven in this international network. A photo of himself in front of what became known as ‘Cooney’s Corner’, showing the shopfront festooned with flags (including what I guess is the Irish tricolour), suggests he was very much aware of this internationalist outlook.
It is clear that Jimmy developed into canny businessman in his adopted hometown after he arrived in 1878. He’d found his way there via a spell in Queensland for a few years, having left Ballyjamesduff aged 16 or 17. In an article in The Tablet (21 February 1999), written to celebrate the affixing of a plaque on the site of ‘Cooney’s Corner’, the writer Fred Howard recounts that the population of Oamaru was around 5000 at the time and the country was in a depression. Since wool was being sold off at a song, farmers turned to growing grain to supplement their income. Jimmy set himself up as a grain and seed merchant, with a sideline importing tea from Sri Lanka (then Ceylon). (Remember too that this was less than 40 years after the signing in 1840 of the Treaty of Waitangi/Te Tiriti o Waitangi between representatives of the British Crown and Māori chiefs (rangatira) acting on behalf of their hapū (sub-tribes), so this was a very new colonial set-up. As a comparison, the Irish plantations – the foundations of the colonisation of Ireland by England – date back to the 16th and 17th centuries. In fact, Cavan town was the first Ulster town under the Ulster Plantation scheme to be incorporated and receive its charter, in November 1610.)
I wonder if Jimmy’s departure from Co. Cavan around the end of the 1860s was accompanied by an ‘American Wake’, which is described in a caption at the Cavan County Museum as an Irish ritual that mirrors the vigil kept over the dead until their burial. The ‘American Wake’ acknowleded the sense of bereavement felt by the family of the emigrant, since it was in many cases a farewell to a loved one who might never be seen again:
The American Wake was a combination of celebrating the person who was leaving and mourning over their going. It would be marked by singing, music, drink and tobacco and continue through the night until the early hours with serious conversation and advice for the young emigrant. As the time to depart drew near women noted for their ability to keen (wail or lament) would be called upon to acquaint listeners with the virtues of the emigrant and the suffering brought upon the parents by the departure. This eulogy was given in a high pitched wail, resulting in a room full of keening women and weeping men.
These sad farewells would have been a common feature in the social life of Ireland both before and after the Great Famine of 1845-9. The population of Ireland sank from 8,200,000 in the early 1840s to 4,400,000 in 1911, with a dramatic loss of 2,225,000 of the population between 1845 and 1851 through disease, starvation and emigration. (R. F. Foster, Modern Ireland 1600-1972, London: Penguin, 1989, p. 323). At least 3,000,000 emigrated from Ireland between 1845 and 1870. (Foster, p. 345). Jimmy’s emigration (along with many of his siblings) from a smallholding in the Cavan townland of Carricknamaddoo (Irish: Carraig na Madadh: the rock of the dogs) is probably in part explained by what R.F. Foster identifies as an ‘intrinsic part of the Irish rural mentality: the need to preserve the family farm.’
Emigration after the Famine did not release land for consolidation into larger units, as the theoreticians had hoped; farm owners were not emigrating. Their ‘assisting relatives’ were … to clear the way for an undivided inheritance by leaving. Subdivision and partible inheritance had long given way to the ‘stem family’ method of descent, where one inheritor took over, often late in life. (Foster, p. 351).
Jimmy’s future wife, Margaret Page, was also the offspring of an Irish farmer, in her case from Galway.
In the middle of the composition, set in a Cork farmhouse, the stooped figure of a father of a young woman, on the eve of her departure to America, lays his hand on her green travelling box as the engraver finishes decorating the carving of her name ‘O’Connor’ and destination ‘New York’. Behind these two, on the left, the young woman is adjusting her hat and talking to her mother. To the right, her younger brother carries turf into the kitchen, in a creel on his back. A shadowy figure behind him contemplates the scene.
When I got to the Cavan County Museum in Ballyjamesduff, I met my friend’s first cousin – Savina Donohoe, who was the director of the museum. Like a whirlwind, she was soon on the trail of the Cooneys of Co. Cavan until we stumbled across a name I recognised from my mother’s archival papers – one Eithne Brady. Eithne and I arranged to meet the following day. She picked me up from my hotel in the morning and our first stop was St. Mary’s Church cemetery, Clanaphilip (Eaglais Chlainne Philib), in the townland of Termon (An Tearmann), in the parish of Killinkere (Cillín Chéir – the little church of Cair). This is where some of my ancestors are buried, but the gravestone erected by my great-great-grandfather, Peter Cooney, Jimmy’s father, solely commemorates his first wife, Jimmy’s mother and my great-great-grandmother Susan Cooney (nee Cusack), who died on 17th June, 1857, aged 32.
The inscription on the gravestone reads:
Peter Cooney in memory of his beloved wife Susan Cooney who died June 17th 1857, aged 32 years
Adieu dear friends wipe off your tears
Here I must lie until Christ appears
and when he comes I hope to rise
unto a life that never dies
Eithne’s great-grandfather and my great-great-grandfather Peter Cooney’s remains are also here. One of his sons from his second wife Elizabeth (Eliza) Brady (b. 1838, d. 1901), Thomas, managed to buy out the Carricknamaddoo farm, where my great-grandfather Jimmy was also brought up. Thomas’s son Peter is Eithne’s father. She still lives on the farm today.
