Edward Nangle was rankled at the manner in which MacHale and his priests were using the national education system and took his complaints repeatedly to the National Board, complaining that the Achill schools were adhering neither to the principles nor the regulations of the national programme. His most serious objections were made against James O’Donnell, master of Dugort national school in close proximity to the colony who, he protested, had provocatively carried a flag in a welcoming procession for John MacHale. This clearly contravened the National Board policy that school masters should refrain from any activities detrimental to carrying out a common system of education. Edward had an additional grievance: that the same teacher, James O’Donnell, had, ‘with a knife in his hand threatened to take the head of one of the children attending a school under [mission] patronage’.
The National Board, through its secretary Thomas F. Kelly, took a benign view of the school master’s conduct, maintaining that ‘these are allegations of what passed amongst unlettered men, and amongst angry men’,7 and that the charges, while unwelcome, did not warrant the teacher’s dismissal.
Sometime after this dispute, Edward was called to give evidence before a parliamentary select committee of the Lords and Commons which was examining the new Irish education system, and his testimony provides a compelling and direct account of his mission’s goals and mode of operation in its early years.
Was it true, Edward was asked, that the conversion of the people of Achill was his main objective in coming to the island?
‘Most decidedly. I desired to be an instrument in the hands of God. It was perfectly understood; we never made any secret of our object.’
But did he have other objectives in Achill, like improving the destitute conditions of the people?
‘Certainly; we considered the reclaiming of them from the errors of Popery as the main object of the greatest importance, and the other as subservient to it.’
Were there any schools in Achill before the mission schools?
‘There was no school except one; a pay school attended by very few children, I understand.’
Why did he consider that the establishment of national schools by the priests would have a negative effect on the mission schools?
‘When the priest established another school then it became an act of more daring rebellion against his authority to pass by that school and to come to ours.’
Did he always address the people in the Irish language?
‘Not on all occasions; I did occasionally.’
How many families were there on the Achill Mission grounds?
‘There are thirty-four families altogether living on the mission grounds, twenty-seven of these families are persons who have been brought out of the Church of Rome; some of these came to the island with us; since we came into the island eighteen or nineteen families have been brought out of the Church of Rome.’
What conditions were applied to the people who were given ground at the colony?
‘The manner of our proceeding is simply this: we give a cottage, and we give an acre of reclaimed ground, and for this they pay us a yearly rent of £2 5s, getting constant employment from us in reclaiming the rest of the land; they are employed as our labourers in reclaiming land.’
Was it a condition of residence at the colony that the people were Protestant?
‘All the persons living on our mission ground are Protestant with the exception of one female; the place is intended as a refuge for persons wishing to be protected from the tyranny which everyone acquainted with the state of Ireland knows is practiced upon those persons who leave the Church of Rome.’
Would the colony house people who converted from Roman Catholic to Protestant?
‘Yes, and are suffering persecution.’
Were the people who became converts and were admitted to the colony in a better position than the most destitute Catholics in Achill?
‘They are in a better condition, certainly. But when we strive to better their temporal condition, it is insinuated that we attempt to induce them to change their religious profession by bribery.’8
The words were unequivocal: Edward Nangle had come to Achill to convert the Catholic people to Protestantism and all else was subsidiary to this objective. The real honey pot was the schools, for the people thirsted for education, but John MacHale and the priests sought to out manoeuvre him by setting up their own schools and the scandal for Edward was that the priests were aided and abetted by the national education system. The prizes on offer to woo the people to the colony were enticing: land and employment for any who could overcome the power of the priests and the taunts of neighbours – tantalisingly seductive if you lived a wretched life.
The explosion of new schools in 1830s Achill was remarkable. By 1837, there were almost 400 pupils, only 20 per cent of whom were female, enrolled in five national schools under the patronage of the Catholic parish priest while the Achill Mission schools, which were outside the national system, struggled to retain their earlier pupil numbers.9 The antagonism between Edward Nangle and John MacHale at least had the merit of triggering the introduction of widespread education in Achill.
***
The contrast was astonishing between the conditions of the women associated with the Achill Mission colony on the one hand, and the common drudgery of the native Achill women on the other.10 Eliza Nangle was a Protestant woman, reared in a comfortable, sheltered middle-class home and imbued with the evangelical values of the period. Like others of her contemporaries, she gave her whole-hearted support to a strong, evangelical figure, in her case her husband. From the early years of their marriage, as a pregnant woman and mother of a young daughter, she had accompanied Edward on the arduous famine relief journey to the west. She set up home with her young family in the most inhospitable conditions imaginable, sublimating the family needs to Edward’s enterprise. For a woman imbued with the virtues of orderliness, cleanliness, temperance and domestic virtue, and attempting to inculcate these qualities in her young daughters, the relocation to Achill would have been traumatic. She could not have envisaged how the family’s first year in Achill would turn out: extreme and inhospitable living conditions, her husband’s poor health, the eruption of violence against the colony and a dead infant son. Most painful of all must have been the ferocity of the opposition to the mission’s work for a woman who desired to do good for those less fortunate than herself.
Eliza had little in common with the island women who eked out an existence in one of the most remote and economically-deprived areas in Ireland. The Achill woman lived in ‘fourth-class’ houses with neither chimney nor window, had no formal schooling, could not read or write and looked after the animals and tillage when the men took on seasonal migrant work in England. The island landscape was her domain: she harvested turf and carried it home on her back; hauled seaweed from the shore to fertilise the soil; planted, weeded and harvested the potato crop; baited and gutted fish; sheaved and stacked oats and drove cattle. It was arduous physical work. The gulf between the lives of the colony women and their counterparts on the island was immense.
There was no administrative or commercial centre on the island and no middle class with the exception of the coastguard families. For over a decade, the coastguard was the most visible government agency charged with preventing smuggling, shipwreck plundering and illegal distilling. Margaret Reynolds, a Catholic woman married to the Protestant Captain Francis Reynolds of the coastguard, arrived in Achill a couple of years before the Nangles and this couple was the closest Edward and Eliza had to island friends.
Margaret’s