reams of speculations on cliff-fortresses and the cliff-dwellers who manned them in the dim and distant misty stone and bronze ages. PRIESTS OF INNISHBOFIN AND INNISHARK The people cherish vivid kindly recollections of the many priests who ministered amongst them. Every child in the parish knows how Father Redmund Martin Fadden, in A.D. 1834, buried the dead, with his own hands, during a cholera plague, caught the contagion and died in a house in which he was attending a stricken parishioner. His simple annals are recorded on his tombstone 1: Here within the walls of St. Colman's Church sleeps, until death is swallowed up in victory, Redmund Martin Fadden, Coadjutor of this parish. This faithful priest Lecanvy gave to the Tuam priesthood and Boffin gave to heaven on the Ides of March, A.D. 1834. When there was no inhabitant to bury the dead, owing to the prevailing fear of the cholera, the good pastor piously, with reverent hands, used to carry the beloved sheep to burial. Crowned by a holy life and a holy death in the same island in which St. Colman founded his Church he is thus buried. He died of the fever. monument is erected to his memory by the islanders. R.I.P. This Memories remain also of Fathers Duffy, Moore, MacManus, Flannery, Tom McDonough McWalter, Loftus, O'Connor, O'Boyle, Brennan, Healy, Stosby, Rabbitte, Colleran, Corcoran, McHugh. In the last twenty years, Fathers Lavelle, Mylotte, McGough, Kelly, Rhatigan, Coyne, Lynch, ministered in the islands. The superb new church was 1 I had some difficulty in deciphering the epitaph, but I discovered a man, eighty-seven years old, who had been baptized by Father Fadden, and thus able to fix the date. Note that XIV. of line six goes with the next line seven. Hic intra muros Sancti Colm ani Ecclesiae dormit donec mrs abso erected by Father Rhatigan, and Father Coyne energetically completed and cleared the structure of all debt. Mr. Cyril Allies co-operated in the undertaking in a munificent manner. Father Tom McDonough was appointed administrator by Dr. McHale in A.D. 1855 and the Archbishop selected the site and design of the presbytery, fronting the harbour entrance. Both live in island-story, and old veterans love to recite recollections of loved John McHale and his confirmations in the little parterre before the priest's house. In the high garden, beside the presbytery, stood Guarim's castle, redolent of 'old, unhappy, far-off times and battles long ago.' Tradition says that two assassins, instigated and subsidized by Guarim, slew six monks at Clyessaun, and Haneby and Halligan were the ruffians' names. Innishbofin folk are a long-memoried race. About Father Tom's time proselytism first showed its forbidding face in the islands, under the patronage of the agent of Lord Sligo, Henry Hildebrand, the son of a Prussian from Hamburg. The unwarranted intrusion was so fiercely and so to say valorously resented, that, in after years, souperism looked in vain at the islands from the opposite shores of the mainland, and never succeeded in planting one blade of heretical-cockle in St. Colman's or St. Leo's patrimony. In 1860 the Hon. Henry William Wilberforce acquired the islands for £11,000 from the Sligos. He was a relative of 'the amiable, the gentle, the intellectual and refined John Henry Newman,' afterwards the illustrious Prince of the Church, Cardinal Newman. From Mr. Wilberforce the Administrator acquired a competency of land. Cyril Allies secured the proprietorship of the islands in 1876 by discharging the liabilities of Mr. Wilberforce to Newman and Coleridge, London. Cyril was the son of Thomas William Allies, to whom Newman wrote on the eve of his conversion, wishing he (J. H. N.) had one-tenth as much faith as he had intellectual conviction. Allies followed Newman into the Catholic Church, surrendering £800 a year as vicar of Launton, Oxfordshire. Cyril Allies and Canon Allies lie interred in St. Colman's cemetery. Their sumptuously furnished home is now a hotel. The State Department which succeeded this ideal, sympathetic landlord cannot boast overmuch of its deeds of high achievement since its acquisition of the islands. CIVIL HISTORY OF THE ISLANDS The islands, hitherto the patrimony of the O'Flahertys, came into possession of the O'Malleys, Lords of the Owles, probably in the time of Owen O'Malley (1360-1370). Grania Uaile, the 'Dark Lady of Doona,' fortified the harbour on both sides of the entrance, in her day of power, towards the close of the 16th century. Her son, Theobald, became an Earl in 1628, and his descendant, John, was made Baron of Innishbofin in the reign of James II. Don Bosco the Spaniard lives in tradition as a man of large stature, strictly equitable at home and a corsair on the ocean. He had a chain-boom across the entrance, and defended his stronghold for a fortnight against twenty-two ships of the line. He capitulated to the Commonwealth forces in A.D. 1652. Sir Hardresse Waller and Colonels Hewson and Sankey recommended the abandonment of the islands A.D. 1655, and £600, with the barque Elizabeth, were offered to any contractor to block the harbour. In A.D. 1656 it was decided to erect a fort and repair the fortifications of Innishbofin; that fourteen small cannon and three long cannon be installed, and an able, pious and orthodox minister of the Gospel be settled. We know from Scott what that meant the edge of the sword, and all that.' Sir Charles Coote ordered Colonel John Honnour, in charge of Innishbofin, to clear the island of disaffected persons, and seize all boats. Coote was murderer of Archbishop O'Queely, Prior Tady Connell and Friar Augustine Higgins, at Ballysodare, in 1645. Next year the planter Darcy of Ballynahinch complained that he was losing all profit through the seizure of boats. Those men, Coote, Waller, Hewson and Sankey, conceived and executed the plan of general transplantation of all Irishmen into Connaught. The order, signed by them, is copied by Hardiman from the original Council-Book, Dublin Castle. With such men in command of fierce soldiers, and a minister to make them zealous to slaying,' one can conceive the lot of thousands of unhappy prisoners in the Castle cells and in the underground prison in the frowning north-east cliffs of Innishbofin. There is a tradition here of a massacre as bloody as that of the McDonalds of Glencoe. Fields are still pointed out near Simon King's house which are said to be deeply dyed with the blood of the massacred. When scoundrel hearts, in buff coats and bandoliers, with muskets in their hands and sanctimonious jargon on their lips, could mercilessly kill defenceless victims at Drogheda and Wexford, VOL. XV-16 Innishbofin would be only a mere bagatelle to their demoniac rage. Macaulay says: Cromwell gave free reign to the fierce enthusiasm of his followers, and they, waging war resembling that which Israel waged on the Canaanites, smote idolaters with the edge of the sword.' This is described as his policy in Ireland. In Innishbofin they chained a Bishop to Bishop's Rock at low water, and allowed him to be drowned in the flowing tide. Certain it is that the island was a prison for all priests caught on the mainland, many of whom were shipped to the West Indies. In the new church there is a tablet presented by a Queen's County lady, with the inscription : In memory of many valiant Irishmen who were exiled to this Holy Island and in particular Rory O'More, a brave chieftain of Leix (now Queen's Co.), who, after fighting for Faith and Fatherland, disguised as a fisherman escaped from this island to a place of safety. He died shortly afterwards, a martyr to his Religion and Country, about 1653. He was esteemed and loved by his countrymen, who celebrated his many deeds of valour and kindness in their songs and reverenced his memory, so that it was common expression among them: 'God and Our Lady be our help and Rory O'More.' Sarsfield was Rory's nephew. On the surrender of Galway on 12th April, A.D. 1652, Colonel Stubbes and his halberdiers captured the bishops and clergy from all parts of Ireland who had taken refuge in the city, and they were imprisoned, some in dungeons in Galway, some in Arran, and some in Innishbofin, until occasion offered to transport them to France, Spain or the West Indies, in whose unhealthy climate they perished. Many were slain, for it had been enacted in this very year by the Cromwellian State Council that every priest in the realm was to be deemed a rebel liable to be hanged, drawn and quartered. The persecution of the clergy in its ferocity is likened by Oliver Burke to that of the early Christians under Nero and Diocletian, and he quotes a manuscript of A.D. 1653 which describes the life of the hunted priest as a warfare and a martyrdom, and states that they breathed by stealth among the hills and woods, where wolves then were numerous, that never was the chase of wild beasts more hot and bitter than the rush of the priest-destroyers. We have a concrete example of an important dignitary imprisoned in Innishbofin in the person of the Rev. James Fallon, Vicar Apostolic of the diocese of Achonry. In his 'Vita Kirivani," a Latin life of the Bishop of Killala, John Lynch, Archdeacon of Tuam, born A.D. 1600, tells us that the Very Rev. John Fallon, a native of Galway City, escaped when Stubbes secured that stronghold. For two years he lived in a hut, covered with leaves and osiers, in the mountains of Connemara. He was seized in 1654, and even his Breviary was taken from him. With many other captive priests he was imprisoned for a time in Innishbofin and then in ArranInnisboffiniae Araniaeque Insulis.' Insulis.' They were released after the Restoration in A.D. 1662, but the Vicar died this same year from the hardship he endured-after more than forty years in Holy Orders-Post annos plusquam 40 in vinea Domini.' Lynch was a school-fellow of Roderick O'Flaherty and MacFirbis. The masonry of Guarim's and Graine Uaile's castles, and the cut stone from St. Colman's Church, were used in the construction of Cromwell's Barracks. This military fortress occupied an area of 80 feet by 45, its walls were over 20 feet high south side, and on the north were 50 feet high, abutting sheer on the perpendicular rock. Three diamond-shaped bastions guarded its corners, ramparts ran all around, with thirty loopholes in the curtain walls; nine apartments were used as kitchen, store and guard rooms and the courtyard had a well in its centre. It is now a ruin and the canting puritanic tribe, the sour, sulky system, which retained no heat, imbibed no light and transmitted none, but flung its broad shadow over the island cursed with its visitation,' is remembered with execration. Colonel O'Riordan, the Jacobite, surrendered Innishbofin to Colonel Horton, the Williamite, in A.D. 1690. About 1700 a John Burke, sent as Clanricarde's agent, dismantled the barracks and erected a residence, now used as R.I.C. barracks, on the upland across the bay. Father Lockington, in his Martyrdom of Ireland, says:- For be it always remembered that adherence to the ancient faith was the primary cause of Ireland's being broken on the wheel. The priest was described as a beast to be extirpated and was classified with the wolf. Every church was destroyed; every altar desecrated; every tabernacle broken, in vain endeavour to tear the Faith from the heart of the nationthe Soggarth Aroon! The high sea-cliff saw them bound back to back and pushed to death on the black rocks below; trapped in the Mass-cave, they died in a reek of smoke, sold to the slave trader, they worked under the lash of their owner. Innishbofin and Innishark have their ruined shrines and pillaged altars, their field of blood, their Bishop's Rock, |
