Accidental revelations from private pages

`Heavy rain most part of the forenoon. Sent a letter to R. Hickson Esq, Surveyor of Dingle. Dr Harris paid me a visit, and ordered me to boil the bark of elm to a decoction, about one-third, and take a teacup full twice a day. We had a heavy fall of rain the whole night. Miss Carney poisoned herself."

Thus did one John Fitzgerald, a Cork schoolmaster, sum up the events of August 12th, 1793. The diary, as anyone will confirm who has dragged a dog-eared notebook out of the past and perused its scribbled entries with a mixture of nostalgia and nausea, is an oddly revealing form. Read in retrospect, diary entries often obscure the events they were intended to reveal, yet give the game away on some other, entirely unexpected front - the sting which occurs, in every tale, when self-awareness and self-delusion collide.

In the introduction to her newly-published anthology Diaries Of Ireland 1590-1987, editor Melosina Lenox-Conyngham shows an acute sensitivity to the quirkier aspects of diary writing when she confesses to the recent rediscovery, in her own childhood journal, of a long-forgotten Robert whose name, whenever mentioned, was wreathed in hearts; "Every morning I used to rise early in order to kiss Robert though he failed to requite my love, and on the 17th of February he bit me. I think he was the milkman's horse."

While the major set-pieces of Irish history over a 400-year period are all predictably present and correct in this lively collection, they are observed from resolutely unpredictable angles. You don't expect to read of the Siege of Limerick that "a bullet shot from the enemy rebounding along the wall was catcht in a boy's mouth without hurt the boy laughing", nor to find, amid the bitter bloodshed of the Battle of Boyne, William of Orange being presented with "a baskett of cherryes, the first he eat since he came to the kingdom . . . " Equally, Lady Gregory's extraordinarily prescient assertion in October 1922 that "if the idealists among the Republicans could realise that against the highlight of the desire for freedom are to be measured these dark shadows of covetousness and crime, they would themselves call for peace" does not alleviate the shock of James Stephens's offhand comment of April 26th, 1916: "Shooting, indeed, proceeding everywhere. During daylight, at least, the sound is not sinister nor depressing, and the thought that perhaps a life had exploded with that crack is not depressing either . . . "

There is, of course, no shock like the shock of seeing ourselves as others see us, and "others" are impeccably represented by the irascible Ludolf von Munchhausen - an ancestor of the famous Baron von Munchhausen - who, in 1590, made a secular pilgrimage to the monastery of Monaincha on an island in a bog near Roscrea. Scathing enough about "confession and other superstitious things", Ludolf reserved his greatest opprobrium for the standards of hygiene among the Irish peasantry: "The butter is full of dirt and hair because they don't strain the milk. The farmers don't wash the cans and dishes, so everything is covered with dirt". Not quite everything, though. "There were two things I liked well in the Irish houses in the country: a pretty maid and normally a pretty wind, sometimes also a pretty horse."

Women, on the whole, do pretty well in this anthology, whether it's the "Ladies of Llangollen", Sarah Ponsonby and Eleanor Butler, who created an enormous scandal by running away together to Wales and having the effrontery to live happily ever after, or the daughter of the Rev. Henry Hamilton of Donaghadee - who, if the dairy entries of John Scott for November and December 1707 are to be believed, spent an eye-opening number of hours closeted away with young Scott in various rooms of her parents' house. It would have taken a hardy soul of either gender, however, to closet themselves away with the redoubtable Elizabeth Freke, whose exclamation of relief that she had, in September 1677, arrived "safe in Cork Harbour" despite being pursued by north African pirates prompts the editor to add a sotto voce footnote concerning the fate of the Rev. Devereux Spratt, who had been sold into slavery in Algiers some 30 years earlier. The good reverend had remained in the city to preach the gospel long after his ransom had been paid.

"In failing to abduct Mrs Freke," Lenox-Conygham concludes dryly, "the Algerian pirates had a lucky escape."

Attacks of the barbaric variety have never been restricted to the high seas, of course, as Frank McEvoy's delightful account of Patrick Kavanagh's take-no-prisoners visit to Kilkenny in March 1958 makes all too clear. Having delivered a lecture which consisted largely of the words "This is a terrible place", the poet repaired to a nearby hostelry and began to down fearsome amounts of Jameson's whiskey. "He looked across at the stately-looking woman sitting on the opposite side of the fireplace. `What's your name?' he demanded. `Bellew.' `Mrs Bellew?' `Yes.' Somebody whispered `Lady Bellew'. `Are you a Prod?' `I am.' `I hate Prods,' he let his head fall sideways in a stupor and put out his tongue."

TO that there might, perhaps, be no answer - if it weren't for the exquisite and thoughtful account which follows, by Sean O'Riordan, of his attendance at a Protestant funeral in August, 1964. "I felt the hundreds of years between me and the Reformation slipping away when I looked into that holy place this evening. It was as though I had opened a door in my own soul that I had not had the courage to open until now . . . "

Diaries Of Ireland: An Anthology, 1590-1987, edited by Melosina Lenox- Conyngham, is published by Lilliput Press, price £25 in hardback, £11.99 paperback