An Irishman's Diary

YET ANOTHER small premium on the peace process will be paid off tomorrow, when the long-defunct William Carleton Society holds a first public event since its resurrection.

Fifty years have now passed since the society’s debut appearance, and its activities may have led the way for the Carleton Summer School, which has been held annually since 1992. Before that, however, during the grim mid-1970s, the society itself had fallen victim to the Troubles. A wreath-laying ceremony in Dublin tomorrow will mark its long-delayed comeback.

The problem was the location of Carleton’s homeland, in the storied Clogher valley of south Tyrone. It made him the writer he became – admired by WB Yeats as the first and greatest chronicler of Irish peasant life as lived before the Famine. But by the time the society had erected a plaque on his cottage in 1964, this was Border country, bitterly disputed and about to become more so.

Carleton’s life in some ways encapsulated the divide in Ulster and Ireland, then and now. He was born poor and Catholic in 1794, and would in later life claim to have been for a time a member of the Ribbon-men, an agrarian secret society of the era.

By early adulthood, however, he had converted to the Protestant faith, with changed politics to match.

It has been argued that this was a career move by a talented but ambitious man in search of patronage. But he was sufficiently convinced about his new identity that, in the 1820s, he actively lobbied Robert Peel against Catholic emancipation, offering to provide evidence of how priests, hedge-school masters, and Daniel O’Connell himself were all implicated in violence.

He had by then left Clogher, embarking first on a career as a peripatetic teacher and famously, in the process, passing south through Monaghan and north Louth in the aftermath of the notorious Wildgoose Lodgemassacre of 1816, which would inspire one of his greatest stories.

As we’ve noted here before, even this may have been adapted to fit his new agenda. In the first version of his fact-based but fictionalised Wildgoose Lodge, Carleton cast the central victim of the tragedy as a Protestant – “the only Protestant in the parish”. In real-life, the man was just as Catholic as his attackers.

And yet over time, as the summer school’s website notes, Carleton also managed to unite Ireland in his admiration. When in 1847, supporters petitioned the state to grant him a pension (he was still poor by then, despite all his efforts), they included the president of Maynooth College, a founder of the Orange Order, Maria Edgeworth, Daniel O’Connell’s son, and Oscar Wilde’s father, among others. Few people could have brought together such a coalition.

Carleton finished his days in Dublin – there’s a road named after him in Marino, where he lived for a time. And although synonymous with stories of the peasantry, he also left some vivid pictures of life in the city. Low-life too, as on a traumatic occasion in 1818 when he lost his teaching job and, unable to pay the rent, was forced to spend the night in one of those dens frequented – in the days before the Poor Laws – by Dublin’s conmen and beggars.

Considering Carleton’s social climbing, and his strong sense of propriety, there’s something unintentionally comic about the horror with which he describes having to abandon respectable accommodation and descend into a cellar off Bridgefoot Street (near Guinness’s), as if into hell itself.

Indeed, after paying two of his last three pennies for a bed, he entered a scene compared with which, he claimed, “Dante’s Inferno was paradise”. Many of his fellow lodgers were genuinely blind, or deaf, or lame. But they also included the professionally disabled, whom Carleton was seeing off-stage, as it were.

Thus he marvelled at the props department around him, where “crutches, wooden legs, artificial cancers, scrofulous necks, artificial wens [and] a vast variety of similar complaints were hung up on the walls”.

And retiring to bed surrounded by much drinking of every variety of hard liquor “from strong whiskey downwards”, his only consolation was that he had nothing worth stealing. Even so, he didn’t close his eyes all night: “So soon as the first thing like light appeared, I left the place and went out on my solitary rambles.” Happily, the 1847 petition did succeed in winning him some degree of security, eventually. The government thereafter awarded him £200 a year, although any generosity in the gesture may also have been tempered by the hope that the pension would prevent the writer straying towards radical causes, such as Irish independence.

Carleton died in Dublin on January 30th, 1869 and is buried at Mount Jerome Cemetery. More than 30 years ago, a group of admirers – including his fellow Tyrone writer Benedict Kiely, gathered there to mark the gravestone’s restoration, for which they had raised funds. No similar ceremony has taken place since. But the restored Carleton Society will mark its return to action by laying a wreath tomorrow, with an oration by the group’s president Jack Johnston.

Anyone wishing to attend should assemble at the cemetery’s main gate by 12.45pm.