But there was no problem selling the thirty-three salmon. The O’Neill boys made their sacraments dressed to kill.
Poaching was not always this lucrative or easy. The danger and awful thrill of it lay in the ongoing battle of wits with the fishing bailiffs who patrolled the river at night. To my uncles Jim and Brendan, these nocturnal escapades from the middle of the last century are as vivid as ever, and they are still able to give detailed and amazed accounts of their close shaves and run-ins with the forces of law and order, stories of flashlights and car-chases and gunshots fired in the air – stories that nearly always end with the bailiffs foiled and flat on their faces like cartoon goons.
Even the time uncle Jim was caught is retold as a triumph of sorts. One night in 1957, they were netting the river just west of Bandon, near the Welcome Inn – my grandfather and his sons Jim and Brendan, twenty and nineteen years old respectively. The river at that place turns like a horseshoe, with a gravel strand on the inward bank of the turn. Engines and other hitches had been thrown on to the bed of the pool to stop poaching, but my grandfather knew exactly how far down the hole the net could be dropped without snagging. Two fish were twitching on the gravel when suddenly the bailiffs’ torches were bearing down on them. Brendan, who was on the far bank, immediately bagged the fish and pulled the net out of the river. ‘Lie down or I’ll fire,’ he shouted, bluffing, and the two approaching bailiffs dived for cover.
My grandfather ran upriver and uncle Jim went downriver, splitting the patrol. When uncle Jim got some distance away, he turned round and shouted obscenities to attract attention to himself and give the others a chance of getting away. Sure enough, the bailiffs both turned on him and, joined by a third bailiff, soon had Jim cornered in a field. When asked who he was, Jim asked them who were they to ask. ‘We’re water keepers,’ they said. ‘Well, so am I,’ said Jim. They grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and marched him away. Jim stumbled and fell. ‘I can’t see a thing,’ he complained, ‘could you shine a light?’ The bailiffs complied, and the flashlights alerted Brendan and my grandfather to their pursuers’ whereabouts.
Uncle Jim was led past the hidden getaway car to the Welcome Inn. Phone-calls were made, and just as the bailiffs were about to take Jim back to the river for further questioning, four uniformed guards appeared. They asked Jim who he’d been poaching with. ‘Well,’ Jim (a teetotaller) said, ‘I was in the pub, addled – I was after drinking a few pints – and a fellow I knew to see asked me whether I wanted to make a few shillings. Jesus, I wouldn’t know his name at all. The third fellow,’ Jim informed the guards, ‘was a fellow we picked up in Bandon. John was his name, I believe.’
Two of the guards rolled up their sleeves. ‘Right, you’re going to tell us what happened.’
‘Lads, take it away,’ an older officer said, ‘he’s only a young fellow.’ He took Jim aside. ‘Listen, son, the judge will go easy on you if you help us out. You’re only carrying the can for the two others.’ But Jim stuck to his story, and after the interrogation ended, he asked whether there was any chance of a lift to Bandon. ‘Ah, sure why not,’ the guards said.
Once in Bandon, my uncle starting walking. Even though his feet were killing him – he wore oversized Wellingtons – he took an indirect route home, via Toureen, in case he was followed. (On the morning of 22 October 1920, five British soldiers were shot dead in Toureen.) It wasn’t until he’d tramped the eight miles to Toureen in the darkness that a car finally drove by. He stuck out a thumb and the car came to a halt. Who should be in it but the chief fisheries inspector and his assistant – Scanlon and Buckley. Even though they knew young Jim had been out poaching, they drove him into Cork and dropped him at the door of the house. If Jim was expecting a warm and relieved welcome when he got home, he was disappointed. His father and brother were in bed, fast asleep.
The next day, water bailiffs found the nets Brendan had stowed in a ditch two fields south of the river. Salmon scales in the net were sent for analysis to Dublin, where they were identified by Dr Wendt as the scales of two salmon. Uncle Jim was summoned to court and charged. He didn’t comply with the summons and on the day of the hearing was in West Cork, looking for guns for the IRA campaign in the North. He learned about his convictions on four charges – poaching, possessing a net, and possessing parts of two salmon – and his fine (£21 10s. 10d.) from a headline in the Evening Echo.
Uncle Jim, on his wages of £7 a week, was unable to pay the fine. He wrote to the Minister of Justice, explaining that he was the eldest of ten children and his earnings weren’t his to keep. The Minister replied that the best he could do was grant Jim an extra three months in which to pay the fine.
Three months was all Jim needed. Three months took him into the next fishing season. On the first night of the new season, they caught enough salmon to pay the fine and plenty more.
My uncle Jim’s decision to draw the bailiffs to himself was not a spontaneous self-sacrifice but the implementation of a plan that, whatever else happened, my grandfather was not to be caught: two years before, Jim O’Neill Senior had picked up a conviction and a large fine for poaching, and a second offence would have had very serious consequences. The irony was that his conviction arose from an entirely innocent visit to the river. My grandfather, at that time, was working at the ESB marina power station, where he befriended a man from Donegal, Jimmy McCloughlin. Jimmy was set on buying a car, even though he couldn’t drive. My grandfather said to him, ‘I know where there’s a nice little car for you; and I’ll teach you to drive.’ So Jimmy bought a 1946 Hillman Minx for £40 and my grandfather obtained full use of the vehicle for the duration of the driving lessons. In the course of one such lesson, they decided to go for a spin in West Cork. It was a beautiful summer’s evening, and the two men were accompanied by their wives. The lure of the river was always with my grandfather and as usual he couldn’t resist casting an eye over it. The day-trippers were sitting on a bank of the Bandon, admiring the scenery, when bailiffs appeared and asked what they were doing. ‘I’m out showing these Donegal people West Cork,’ my grandfather truthfully answered. Nevertheless, the next day there was a raid on the O’Neill house. By chance they uncovered two coal bags with scales of two salmon in them. Jim O’Neill was convicted and fined £48. It was a massive penalty, but it was the first and last time they ever caught him.
The time my grandfather was arrested was the only time his son Kevin, my father, saw him drunk. My father (the third oldest son, after Jim and Brendan) said that he was occasionally taken poaching. ‘I hated it,’ he said. ‘It scared the hell out of me. For me, West Cork was about ambushes and murders and the Black and Tans. It was a bloodstained, haunted kind of place – spooky. The roads and fields were dark and isolated. Men were shot and buried there. I wasn’t like Brendan,’ my father said. ‘Brendan was fearless, as crazy as my dad.’
Jim O’Neill wasn’t frightened in West Cork. He was at home there day or night: at home in townlands around Enniskean like Curraghcrowley, Desertserges and Farranasheshery, and at home, too, in further-flung Clonakilty, Kilbrittain, Drimoleague, Skibbereen.
To my ears, these place-names continue to have the lyricism of the unfamiliar, even though I’ve now been to the villages and small towns they identify; and although I’ve seen the bunting that overhangs their streets and seen their houses sunlit in fresh coats of coral and mustard and avocado, and noted, furthermore, the signboards that designate them as Heritage Towns, Development Zones or West Cork Trail attractions, I continue to think of them, and places like them, as grey-brown, inward-looking, and vulnerable to flooding by a past that, like the local water-table, lies just beneath the surface.
It might be said that the persistence of these notions, and their romanticism, show me up for what I am: an outsider. I’m not sure about that. If mythic West Cork abides anywhere, it is in its own people, who, it can sometimes seem, are apt to ascribe some history to its every rut, puddle and tree. Some spots give voice to the past by their names, like the inlet in the Bandon known as the Punchbowl because centuries ago wines and spirits were poured into it by banqueters at Togher Castle and for two days after the locals drank freely while they swam; but most places are dumb. The uninformed visitor cannot know that Meehan was thrown from his horse at that gate and died,