Saint MacDara, whose feast day and associated pilgrimage by Connemara fishermen featured elsewhere in these pages on Thursday, is a rare example of a holy man known only by his surname.
This is because his first name was Sionnach, meaning “fox”. And it has long been a superstition among fishing communities, not just in Ireland but as far away as Brittany, that any mention of foxes on a boat is sure to bring bad luck.
Their belief was recorded by the antiquarian R.A.S. Macalister when, making the pilgrimage in July 1895, he pondered why the saint was so known:
“Sinach [as Macallister spelt it] was his proper name; but he is always called after his father, Dara...Whether the meaning of that word (a fox) had anything to do with its non-application…we can only infer; anyhow the fact remains that this name was dropped, and the Saint was one of the first to have a surname, for reasons best known to those who applied it.”
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Such was the strength of the superstition that anyone sighting or hearing of foxes while on the way to sea would turn back and abandon the day’s fishing. But it wasn’t just foxes, Macallister explained. Quoting John O’Donovan, of Ordnance Survey fame, he noted a range of four-legged animals equally dreaded by Galway fishermen:
“They cannot bear to hear the name of a fox, hare, or rabbit pronounced, and should they chance to see either (sic) of those animals living or dead, or hear the name of either expressed before setting out to fish…they would not venture out that day.”
This being a big hurling weekend, I’m reminded of an immortal quip from the late Micheál Ó Muircheartaigh, covering a game between Tipperary and Galway in the 1990s: “Pat Fox has it on his hurl and is motoring well now...but here comes Joe Rabbitte hot on his tail...I’ve seen it all now, a Rabbitte chasing a Fox around Croke Park.”
Well, witty as it was, that’s another story you couldn’t mention on a fishing boat off Galway, apparently.
Down in Kerry, meanwhile, the prohibition extends to pigs. According to the blog storiedkerry.com, sight or mention of anything porcine there was traditionally sufficient reason to give up fishing for the day. If a pig had to feature in conversation at sea, it was by euphemism, as “the fellow with the curly tail’.”
In similar vein, the fox was ‘the bushy-tailed fellow’ or ‘the fellow with the pointed ears’. Even the foxy words ‘red’ or ‘rua’ were avoided in boats. Hence a Blasket Islander named Pádraig O Guithin, who was known as Pádraig Rua on land but became Peadaí deaghdhathach’ (‘brilliant-coloured Paddy’) at sea.
Getting back to Oileán Mhic Dara, the saint himself had an ominous reputation. In his report on this week’s pilgrimage, Simon Carswell noted a tradition whereby boats passing the island dip their sails three times. Not to do so is (or at least used to be) an invitation to trouble.
Macallister quotes a story from 1672, about “a certain captain of the garrison of Galway” who, after passing the island without the usual ceremony “was so tossed with sea and storme that he vowed he would never pass there again without paying his obeysance”. It was too late. Before the captain had a chance to revisit the island, he went down in a shipwreck.
A few years after that, in the case of “one Gill, a fisherman of Galway”, vengeance was swifter and more direct. Refusing to strike his sail at the island, he went “not a mile beyond” when, on an otherwise calm day, the mast was toppled by a sudden gale “and struck him on the pate dead”.
The comic novelist Mervyn Wall wrote about Oileán Mhic Dara for The Irish Times in 1968. He noted then that the superstition concerning four-legged animals extended to deer. This being so, it seemed a sinister coincidence that there was a “Deer Island” close to MacDara’s, something that had proved very bad luck once for a group of British soldiers.
Wall heard from locals the story about how a fugitive named O’Donnell was arrested while disguised as a priest near the village of Carna, but bargained with his captors by claiming to have buried gold on Deer Island, for a planned escape to America.
So the five soldiers rowed there with him but made the mistake of getting out of the boat first and throwing him a rope. Naturally, he cut the rope and floated away, throwing himself into the hold to avoid their gunshots. Back on the mainland, he then dissuaded locals from rescuing the troops, who by the time they were found had starved to death.
It might have been just a story. But there was a place on Deer Island called the “Mound of the Strangers”. And an old man in Roundstone told Wall that as a boy, circa 1910, he and friends had dug a little into the mound, finding there a well-preserved belt buckle with the initials for “Highland Light Infantry”.
