Sheila Cloney:SHEILA CLONEY, who has died aged 83, was a Co Wexford Protestant at the centre of an emotive dispute over Catholic education in the 1950s that sharply divided opinion in her local community.
It caused heated debate in the Dáil, attracted negative media attention at home and abroad and resulted in a shameful boycott of Protestants by the majority Roman Catholic population in Fethard-on-Sea, a village near Hook Head. The controversy soured relations between the Republic and Northern Ireland and created a legacy of bitterness that took many years to heal.
Born Sheila Kelly to a farming family in John’s Hill outside Fethard-on-Sea, she was educated at local schools and later emigrated to England, where she worked in domestic service. In London she met Seán Cloney, a Catholic farmer also from Fethard-on-Sea, who was visiting on business. They had known one another as children and were married in Hammersmith in 1949 before returning to live on his farm at Dungulph Castle.
By 1957 the couple had two daughters. At that time, the Catholic Church rigorously enforced the teachings of the papal decree ne temere, which required the children of “mixed marriages” to be raised and educated as Catholics.
One of the local Catholic priests visited Ms Cloney in April to say that her daughter Eileen, aged six, would have to go to the Catholic national school “and there’s nothing you can do about it”.
After this confrontation, Ms Cloney decided to leave home with her daughters, going first to the North, and later to Scotland.
Eileen vividly recalls the day her mother “took out the car” and told her they were “in a hurry”. She believes her mother “decided to go herself – it was impulse on her part”. Ms Cloney took some cash from the house that had been raised by the sale of pigs and went to her father who gave her another £30 – although he was appalled by her plan and advised her not to go away. Her husband Seán was working in the fields at the time and only discovered their disappearance when he returned to the house later that day.
The village was swept by rumours, allegations that “Catholic children” had been “kidnapped” and a widespread belief that members of the local Protestant community had “conspired” to send the mother and children away.
The Catholic curate, Fr William Stafford, called for a boycott of Protestants, which unleashed a period of sectarianism. Protestant-owned shops were boycotted, Protestant farmers were unable to sell their produce or hire Catholic labourers, and the Church of Ireland school was forced to close when the teacher (ironically a Catholic) was “advised” by women in the village to abandon her post. Not all Catholics agreed with or supported the boycott.
The case received considerable national and international attention, with donations being received from Anglicans around the world for the relief of the Protestant community. Contact was eventually made with Mr Cloney through a Belfast barrister, allegedly an associate of the Rev Ian Paisley, about the terms and conditions for the return of Ms Cloney and the children.
The boycott eventually crumbled after it was condemned in the Dáil in July 1957 by the then taoiseach, Éamon de Valera, as “this deplorable affair”. Later that year, Mr Cloney travelled to Scotland and was reunited with his wife and children. The following year they returned to Ireland where, as a compromise, the children were educated at home.
Although the case gradually faded from public discourse, the bitterness lingered. Four decades later, in 1998, the then Catholic Bishop of Ferns, Dr Brendan Comiskey, publicly apologised for the boycott. A film, A Love Divided, was released the following year but Sheila Cloney never went to see it.
An intensely private woman who hated being photographed, she shunned publicity and avoided talking about the past. A keen reader, competent piano player and music lover, she regularly attended productions at the Wexford Opera Festival and by the New Ross Musical Society.
She was a regular church-goer at St Mogue’s in Fethard-on-Sea and read the Bible nightly before bed. She was an active member of the local Tidy Towns committee, enjoyed farming, was noted for her commitment to animal welfare and always welcomed stray cats. In recent months she had followed, with concern, the career of Scottish singer Susan Boyle whom she had noticed on television and believed “would be damaged” by intense publicity.
Long before Mary Robinson’s celebrated reference to the spirit of “Mná na hÉireann”, 30-year- old Sheila Cloney displayed a streak of Wexford rebelliousness that incurred the wrath of the Catholic Church at a time when that institution enjoyed almost untrammelled power in the State.
In the Seanad last week, her “great moral courage” was praised by Senator Eoghan Harris, who described the boycott as “one of the shabbiest periods in Irish history” but “also one of the most noble”.
Sheila Cloney died peacefully last Sunday week in Wexford General Hospital. She is survived by her daughters Eileen and Hazel. She was predeceased by her husband Seán and another daughter, Mary.
Sheila (née Kelly) Cloney: born May 6th, 1926; died June 28th, 2009.