FROM THE ARCHIVES:Playwright Lennox Robinson found himself overwhelmed by the dominance of the land and felt that he was beginning to understand land hunger as he journeyed by car from Dublin to the west. – JOE JOYCE
PAST KILCOCK, past Kinnegad, past Tyrrellspass (curious in an attractive un-Irish way) – but these villages seemed of little importance. Hour by hour, mile by mile, the land itself by sheer extent of its acreage, by its millions of grass-stems, by its numberless plots of potatoes and oats, took to itself irresistible force, took on a kind of majesty.
At last one became physically oppressed by it. These fields in all their June lushness – no meadow yet was cut – seemed to threaten to engulf the very road we travelled, we ran as on some slender dyke between two green seas. A few hours back other things in Ireland had seemed of such importance, certain ideas one had had of national culture, certain hopes of industries, the Shannon scheme; but moment by moment these things sank back into insignificance, dwarfed by this monstrous land.
Ballinasloe, reached just before midnight, was a little dead town; not a person, not a dog stirred. It seemed hardly less dead next morning: but how could it compete with the awful vitality of the land?
On a road outside the town men were cutting back the great arms of bramble that flung themselves with triumphant reckless daring halfway across the road’s pathway, other men were scraping and scratching at the grass which ever so insinuatingly had crept down and across. One felt if these men stopped scraping and scratching for a month, for a year, Ballinasloe and fifty towns like it would disappear, would be no more, would be like Carthage, all red poppies and wild barley: or, like Tara, clean green grass.
The hotel in Ballinasloe is dedicated to the land. Its guests move about it like priests bent on some great mission. There is, indeed, a portion of it reserved for “commercials” and their packs, but they seemed alien to the true spirit of the place, dissenters from the faith.
The missioners of the faith hurried hither and thither after breakfast; they bore great maps of estates, they moved away in motor cars in different directions.
There was a constant little stream of visitors asking for this Commissioner or that; the only questions in life, it seemed, related to acres and turbary and sporting rights; the only Acts of Dáil or Parliament with any importance were the Land Acts.
At last we escaped from the persistent visitors and by mid-day were again facing westward. But east of Galway town there had to be a halt, someone had to be interviewed.
A fine witty Irishman he proved to be . . . and again, all the talk was of the land, land varied only by oyster fisheries.
Yet they, ridiculous though it may seem, were land, too, for the land seemed to have rights over the sea; but by this time, benumbed by the endless fields, I could see myself upholding their claim to the Atlantic Ocean itself.
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