Remembering the Year of the French: Irish Folk History and Social Memory

9. Multiple Heroes in Folk Historiographies

9 Multiple Heroes in Folk Historiographies How many heroes can one history accommodate? Brian Friel, Making History Local Heroes and Their Constituencies In the early 1930s, James P. Donnelan, a national schoolteacher on the Aran Islands off the coast of Galway and a native of Knock in county Mayo, wrote to J. F. Quinn’s local history column in the Mayo newspaper the Western People. It seems to me that an effort should be made to compile a list of the names, with biographical particulars as far as possible, of all the Mayo men who lost their lives or took a prominent part in the Rebellion. Mayo’s “Roll of Honour” has never been published. In almost every parish there are traditions of local people who suffered in one way or another that year. It is a pity that these should be allowed to die without an effort being made to preserve them.1 A couple of years later, this plea was addressed to some extent in the work of Hayes, to whom Donnelan willingly sent folklore traditions.2 It articulates the reality that information on the local heroes of the Year of the French was scattered in folk historiography throughout communities in the West and was mostly not collated. As shown in the previous chapters, provincial folk history-telling did not simply broaden the limited pantheon of national historiography by adding a number of additional figures who had left a mark on social memory. The truly democratic nature of folk historiography was manifested in the ways each locality remembered its own heroes. By accommodating numerous narratives, which referred to multiple heroes and were told in different versions, a corpus ( 168 ) of historical folk traditions is more a case of multiple histories than of a uniform history. Moreover, the notion of “folk” itself is not homogenous, as Dorson pointed out: “more than one folk exists, and each folk group records events and personalities of the past through its own particular lens.”3 Folk history, therefore , presents a complex and decentralized historiographical model. Though scholarly historiography, which offered a platform for lively controversies, is not monolithic, it consistently failed to acknowledge the central narratives and local variants of folk histories. This disparity is particularly noticeable in the case of events that were regarded minor “footnotes” in national history, which were generally considered unworthy of serious study by professional historians , but were often central episodes in folk histories. Folk historiography was not insular. Although folklore flourished in local communities, it was subject to influences from national discourses. Judging by local reception, national history did not enforce a uniform metanarrative to which regional folk histories were subjugated, but instead provided a kind of porous metanarrative, which facilitated a patchwork of variegated micronarratives . In effect, “history” served as a loose framework, in relation to which local communities could narrate an array of vernacular histories presented from provincial perspectives, thus relocating the focus of historical attention away from the metropolitan center. Because folk history-telling was, as a rule, locally oriented, each locality affected by the Franco-Irish insurrection and its repression generated its own heroes of the Year of the French. The pikemen heroes of Ballinamuck were not central to folklore elsewhere. Just twenty kilometers southeast of Ballinamuck , in the neighboring area of Granard, a voluminous body of oral traditions recalled the events of the local uprising, which was crushed on 5 September . Fugitives from Granard went on to join the Franco-Irish army at Cloone and to fight at Ballinamuck, and this caused elision in local folk history, which often mixed the two engagements, so that history-tellers were incapable of sorting out the correct sequence of events. Even an account collected for the Schools’ Scheme in nearby Ballinalee, county Longford (some ten kilometers from both Ballinamuck and Granard), which insisted in noting “the truth” in face of the “many mistakes given about this battle in history,” was riddled with inaccuracies.4 Though passing references were made to Ballinamuck heroes such as Gunner Magee and Robin Gill, Ninety-Eight traditions from Granard recalled a long list of local heroes, most distinguished among them were Patrick O’Farrell of Ballinree, Willie O’Keefe of Ballinlough, the O’Connells of Cranary (Paddy, Nicholas, and Harry), the Dennistons of Clonbroney (Alexander and Hans), Multiple Heroes in Folk Historiographies ( 169 ) the O’Reillys (Phil Dubh and Miles), and Captain Mulligan of Aghakine (who headed a...