HISTORY: ROY FOSTERreviews The Fethard-on-Sea Boycottby Tim Fanning, Collins Press, 240pp, €14.99
‘THE BEST advice I ever got was from a priest in a religious order who told me to shut the gate when my wife and children were home and never let a priest, minister or bishop of any denomination past it.” Seán Cloney’s reflection, 30 years after the 1957 boycott of local Protestants by their Catholic neighbours, expressed a hard-won wisdom. It is also an uncharacteristically sharp riposte from the man at the centre of the storm: as Tim Fanning eloquently shows, Cloney’s dignity and generosity of spirit enabled himself and his family to survive a bitter episode in Irish social history. Very few other people come out of it with credit.
The boycott was instituted by the local Catholic priest, Father Stafford, backed by Bishop Staunton and powerfully supported by several Catholic journals. The point at issue was the education of the children of a mixed marriage, but Fanning adroitly shows the causes and resentments went back – as one local unguardedly revealed – “more than eighty years”.
Seán Cloney was a Catholic, his wife, Sheila, a local Protestant. After going to Britain to get married, and returning to some local disapproval, they agreed to continue to observe their own faiths, and – initially – to raise their children in both traditions. But Sheila, after clerical pressure, also agreed that the children should be brought up as Catholics, following the dictates of the Ne Temere decree, fiercely resented by Protestants, which ended the civilised convention of girls following their mother’s faith, and boys their father’s. In 1957, she refused to send her daughters to the local Catholic school, fleeing to Belfast with them, and then to Scotland. Father Stafford declared that this was done with the support and connivance of the local Protestant community, whose shops and farming activities were to be boycotted until the Cloney children were returned. Local support was widespread – though Fanning identifies the interesting exception of a group of old republicans, who had sustained a healthy suspicion of taking orders from priests.
The ramifications spread wide. Liberals such as Hubert Butler, Owen Sheehy Skeffington and Eoin O’Mahony took it up; so did less liberal Protestant as well as Catholic apologists. One of the strengths of Fanning’s treatment is to trace the behind-the-scenes activities of powerful local politicians, such as Jim Ryan, Minister for Finance, the Knights of Columbanus, and bishops of both denominations; and the striking part played by Eamon de Valera, whose public stance against the boycott was a vital factor in choking off potential support (notably from Archbishop McQuaid). There were sensitive political issues at stake: the boycott was extremely embarrassing for the Anti-Partition League, and provided a field day for Ulster Unionist propaganda. But it also violently contradicted de Valera’s own vision of how Irish rural society should operate.
Fanning also powerfully demonstrates how it exploited and fed off longstanding fissures and resentments in local society, stretching back not only to the Civil War but to the land war of the 1880s. Much as with a famous Kerry boycott in that era, involving the Curtin family of Firies, the campaign reflected not only the immediate “presenting problem”, but also resentment of a long-ago acquisition of land by an outsider.
The book traces the pressures and tensions of life in the Hook peninsula of County Wexford and the patterns of local power and influence; from his own childhood holidays there, and friendship with the Cloney family, Fanning constructs a memorable portrait of the man at the centre of the case, whose intelligence, independence of mind, and subtle sense of diplomacy helped him and his family to survive. Seán Cloney’s letter to the Irish Press repudiating the boycott and calling for ecumenicism and tolerance is a remarkable document. Sheila Cloney remains a more shadowy figure, which is apparently how she wanted it. And one of the parts of the story which remains shrouded concerns her flight to Belfast, the part played by Ian Paisley and Desmond Boal, and Sheila’s odyssey to the Orkney Islands, where Seán eventually went to find her.
The boycott was brought to an end, awkwardly and rather indecisively, with a patched-up agreement that annoyed many local Protestants. Sheila did come back; the two elder daughters, Eileen and Mary, did not go to the local Catholic school, but stayed at home. For them at least, it was hardly an unequivocally happy outcome and a certain kind of isolation persisted. However, their younger sister was baptised in the Church of Ireland and attended the local Catholic school; and Seán Cloney continued to take a prominent part in local life. He would experience controversy again, when he tried to expose the activities of the notorious paedophile Father Seán Fortune, who was appointed as curate to the parish in 1981.
By then, wounds between the two local communities had partially been healed through the deliberate efforts of a new generation of clergy, of both faiths, notably Father Richard Hayes and the Reverend Jimmy Grant. But the name and career of Seán Fortune acts as a reminder of the social authority that continued to be manipulated and on occasion abused by the Catholic church in Irish life, and the craven lack of accountability that persisted. One wonders if that priest who advised Seán Cloney to shut his gate against any clergyman trying to dictate to his family remained in his religious order. When Mary Cloney died 10 years ago, her funeral was fully ecumenical, involving both local churches; the Protestant rector was a former Catholic priest who had left the Church to get married and then been ordained in the Church of Ireland. It suggests a very different country from that revealed by the events of 1957. But one closes this thought-provoking book unable to decide whether the Fethard trauma delayed the development of a new Ireland or hastened it on its way.
Roy Foster is Carroll Professor of Irish History at the University of Oxford. His most recent book is Luck and the Irish: A Brief History of Change1970-2000 (Penguin)
