FROM THE ARCHIVES:Poet Patrick Kavanagh described his Protestant neighbours in the Monaghan of his youth in this article.
THE NEWSPAPER report that the parish church of my native Inniskeen was to be de-consecrated and demolished was brought to my notice rather gleefully by a friend who presumed that it was one of ours.
Knowing the trend of population in that area, I was inclined to accept his assumption. However, on looking at the newspaper I saw that it was the Protestant church, that grey, narrow-shouldered building amid the weeds of the old graveyard beside the round tower and with the river Fane behind it.
The village would not be the same without it, but then the village is not the same anyhow, for the new houses that have gone up in recent years are replicas of the stereotyped design of any suburban building scheme. One must beware of becoming too sentimental about these things. Simplicity and good taste are the last steps in sophistication.
The reasons given for this disaster was “emigration” – but if they meant emigration to the graveyard they would be near the mark. The Protestant population of Inniskeen was never large. I knew every Prod in the parish, and, as I read the paragraph, my imagination brought them back from their graves.
Johnie White and his cousin, Lizzy Lundie; Willie Hughes, the Steeles of Cormoy, Sam Carson and his ten or eleven good-looking daughters. There were a few more stragglers here and there, such as an occasional stationmaster or porter, but the names I have given embrace the bulk of the Protestant population.
With the exception of the stationmaster, these Protestants were small farmers, indistinguishable from their Catholic neighbours. In my time there was no prejudice one way or the other. From the depths of the peasant wilderness they occasionally caught a glimpse of the loyal banners waving, but that was all, and their lives were occupied with the common myths of the small farming world.
I once helped Johnie White to thin – or rather not to thin – his turnips. It was a terrible hot summer that year and there was no breeze at all in the little triangular field along the road at Ednamo cross. So when I arrived in the morning, I joined Johnie, who would be taking his siesta among the giant nettles that fringed the field. For three weeks of that summer I lived like this . . . the turnips never got thinned. However, he got level with me, for he didn’t pay me.
Johnie had an armchair in the house which I always understood belonged to us and when I was leaving I demanded it. In fact, it was ours. [ . . . ]Sam Carson was a plate-layer on the railway, and his family lived in the gatehouse at the Mucker level crossing – my next-door neighbours. He had seven, eight or nine of as good-looking daughters as ever you saw; it is only in the retrospection from a city shabbiness that I realise now how luscious they were. Some of these people went to live further north, but most of them just died out.