25/09/2024
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Patrick Pearse spent much of the last summer of his life (1915) in Rosmuck, Connemara with his brother Willie and a friend named Desmond Ryan.
It was a relaxed holiday although Pearse found the time to write one of Ireland's most famous speeches - 'Ireland unfree shall never be at peace,' spoken at the graveside of O'Donovan Rossa and considered by many as a key moment in the lead up to the Easter Rising.
Ryan recalled the summer fondly:
"The next day we proceeded to Rosmuck by train, or rather part of the way, for Rosmuck lies nine miles from a railway station, and we had a long drive by side-car through granite and peat from Maam Cross Station over winding, peak-screened roads.
It was a stirring view along those serpentine roads, ever winding and twisting to avoid the bog.
The horse trotted bravely while an O’Malley drove, and Pearse explained what famous people the O’Malleys were in Connemara.
All the while, bluish granite mountains soared and all around spread the peat-bogs starred by the tiny lakes, each with a local name and every name known to Pearse, who declared for the hundredth time he could find his way blindfold on any road in Connacht.
The Twelve Bens came in sight and Pearse waved his hand here and there over the land, naming lake, mountain and district away to the Joyce Country under its purple mist.
He told us many stories he had learned from the people.
Away there on that gloomy mountain yonder a stranger had lived for years, coming suddenly in the night from nowhere, henceforth a hermit, perhaps doing a penance of solitude and silence for some deed of blood.
We passed a peculiar green building of corrugated iron, a Protestant Church, [Screebe?] and then Pearse remembered that many years before the Bible Societies had carried out a proselytising campaign, and even in 1915 a small remnant of the Irish-speaking Protestant colonies still survived.
Once on his rambles, Pearse had met one of the members, an old man up in a cottage among the hills who opened his Gaelic Bible, read it aloud and argued with Pearse for an hour until the old man’s daughter came in and told her father that he had no manners and that he did not know how to treat a learned man who knew enough Irish and enough Bible to make up his mind for himself, and the attempted conversion of Pearse went no further.
A lonely letter-box on a post at a crossroads led Pearse to tell of the extravagant family, long bankrupt and extinct, who had had the box erected as a monument to their exclusiveness, recklessness and pride.
A barracks rose beside the rattling wheels and Pearse knew that the sergeant within was a crusty and cantankerous fellow companioned by six splendid constables, enthusiastic Irish speakers who spent their time in shooting wild ducks, fishing and studying with zeal the poems of Eoghan Ruadh O’Sullivan.
The car stopped at the schoolmaster’s house and Patrick Connolly welcomed Pearse warmly. His wife came out too.
Inside like startled birds, the four daughters of the schoolmaster retreated from our gaze while their mother laughed and said they would grow out of all that, but when young people lived among lakes and bogs they became curlews and mountain birds, easily startled by wild young men from the cities and poets from Dublin, all this for Willie and me whose ties and locks must have startled her ducklings.
We proceeded to the cottage, a white, thatched, oblong building with green
door, porchway and two windows in front, approached by a peat-sodded path from the main road. Here was the spiritual home of Pearse, which in the last years he visited every summer to pay a last farewell.
Below lay a fifty-acre lake legend tenanted with a Water Horse.
Beyond the rare walls of the cottage, the Atlantic heaved and moaned with tales of lost ships or murmured a summons to ride on its bosom to the Aran Isles on a fair day.
On every side rose the purple hills and peat, agleam with unnumbered lakelets. Pearse sat at the kitchen table writing the closing tales in his book of short stories, 'The Mother.'
He turned aside to discuss the completed stories with Willie and me, and said he thought the best the grimmest one, a tale of a woman under a curse called the “Black Chafer.”
Then he sighed that he had never written a story about turf or shown up enough the
hard life of the people. He said this sadly with almost the air of a man who all at once comes upon an intolerable personal grievance.
Sometimes he went down and bathed in the lake while Willie guarded him from the banks with a long, strong rope as Pearse was no swimmer. This tickled the brothers so much that they gave up the attempt with loud merriment and mutual criticisms.
Returning, Pearse mused on his cottage and said that one of the builders had been an old man who took his task very slowly and seriously, making progress by inches, but consoling Pearse’s impatience with the sole remark:
“Won’t it be a fine house when it is finished. Indeed it will be a fine house when it is finished.”
Pearse was more outspoken than I had ever known him before.
Night by night he spoke to Willie and me about everything by turns.
Much about the future of the Irish language. Here in this self-contained community which he had once known as purely Irish-speaking, English was creeping in among the younger generation.
It amused him when we walked abroad in the day-time to speak to the men working
the land and smile at the English expressions speckling the Gaelic:
“Becripes, tá . . . bedamned but tá...' from those who knew no other words of English, but he said this was the beginning of the end unless some great change came.
And what the change would be sometimes broke through his thoughts...
Who could have guessed that behind his gentle words and look, an insurrection simmered, a certainty that his days were irrevocably numbered and in this place he would never see in another summer?"
For more, see my book 'The Little History of Galway.' https://charliebyrne.ie/product/the-little-history-of-galway/
Pictured is Patrick Pearse and his brother Willie, neither of whom would live to see the summer of 1916.
Taken from Desmond Ryan's 1934 auto-biography 'Remembering Sion.'
