De Tocqueville now stood before the stout James Hughes, aged about fifty, dressed in black, wearing riding boots and speaking with a pronounced accent. ‘A little common,’ was De Tocqueville’s comment in his journal. The priest took the visitors into a small room where the walls were covered with garish religious engravings interspersed with political caricatures. In a short time, a crowd gathered outside the priest’s front door, anticipating that the visitors might have brought some relief as few had eaten that day. ‘Most of them have been forced to dig up the new harvest and feed themselves on potatoes as large as nuts, which make them ill,’ said the priest.
The two local landlords were the Marquis of Sligo, based at Westport, and Sir Richard O’Donnell who lived not far from the priest at Newport House. These great landlords, complained the priest, gave nothing and did nothing to prevent the unfortunate population from dying of hunger. They let the farmers die before their eyes, or evicted them from their miserable dwellings on the slightest pretext. They had drained the energy from the people.
Three hundred paces from the priest’s house, the river divided into two branches and a promontory jutted between the two streams to form a hill. There, in the middle of a meadow, was the house of the Protestant rector, William Stoney. The visitors heard that there was open warfare between priest and rector, who attacked each other bitterly in the newspapers and in the pulpit, each believing passionately in his version of the truth. Rector and priest fought for souls.
Back in Dublin, de Tocqueville took soundings from influential people in an effort to understand the relationship between the Irish landlords and their tenants. What he heard was troubling: ‘There is no moral tie between the poor and the rich. The Irish landlords extract from their estates all that they can yield.’
Why was the agricultural population poor if the farm yields were so good?
Yes, the yields were immense, but none of the wealth remained in the hands of the people. The Irish were raising productive crops, carrying their harvest to the nearest port, putting it on board an English vessel, and returning home to subsist on potatoes.
By the end of his visit, Alexis de Tocqueville was convinced that the profound chasm between the aristocracy-cum-landlords and the Irish people was widening by the day and he set out his thoughts in a letter to his father before his departure: ‘England and Ireland have the same language, the same laws, the same social structure, they are subject to the same government, and there are no [two] countries that present a more different appearance. Both have been for a long time, and are still in many respects, subject to a powerful aristocracy. This aristocracy had produced great wealth in England, and frightful poverty in Ireland.’7
It was, he concluded, as if two entirely distinct nations occupied the same Irish soil: one rich, civilised and happy, the other poor, half savage, and overwhelmed by misery. ‘If you wish to know what the spirit of conquest and religious hatred, combined with all the abuses of aristocracy without any of its advantages, can produce, come to Ireland’.8
The aristocracy and landlords were to blame for the plight of Ireland, concluded the Frenchman. The land system was rotten, said John MacHale. Popery and the Catholic clergy were at the root of the country’s misery, said Edward Nangle, and he was determined to do something about it.
***
Edward Nangle crossed the strand in Achill Sound at low tide and stood for the first time on Achill soil, having travelled with a scripture reader by horseback from Newport the previous day. Afterwards, he would describe the desolate sight: ‘The deep silence of desolation was unbroken, except by the monotonous rippling of the tide as it ebbed or flowed, or the wild scream of the curlew disturbed by some casual intruder on its privacy.’9
A couple of years earlier, a young Anglo-Irish gentleman on a leisure trip to the west had noted: ‘To look at the map of County Mayo, one could imagine that nature had designed that county for a sportsman.’10 The gentleman had chronicled his successful hunting exploits in Achill, returning from the mountain at the end of the day to the coastguard station with bulging bags of game, having shot seven hares and thirteen brace of grouse.
Achill Island presents a landscape of contrasts: an island with the shape of an upside-down boot, the hardness of its coastline countered by the black softness of the bog land that makes up most of its centre. The incessant coastal sounds of breaking waves and screaming birds are in contrast to the melancholy loneliness of large tracts of the island’s interior.
Today, the main approach route from Westport to Achill hugs the eastern and northern shores of Clew Bay via Newport and Mulranny, then swings in an arc around Corraun Hill along the edges of Blacksod Bay. It follows the route of what was once the Midland Great Western Railway line, extended to Achill at the close of the nineteenth century. Nowadays, the disused railway line forms The Great Western Greenway, a 43km stretch of cycling and walking pathways, while the adjacent roadway carries motorists who follow the ingeniously branded Wild Atlantic Way along the entire stretch of Ireland’s Atlantic coast.
Measuring fifteen miles from east to west, eleven from north to south and the population distributed through several villages, it appeared to Edward that much of the Achill land had not been broken for cultivation since the deluge. He took in the crude houses with the roofs resting like domes on massive walls, giving the appearance of beehives. The worst aspect of the island to his view was the moral condition of the islanders: it was a place of ‘ignorance and barbarism, of intellectual and moral degradation’.11 This was not entirely surprising to him since, he observed, it was then a widely held view that Achill was a byword for barbarism and paganism.
The pair headed north along rugged, zigzagging pathways for, had they taken a direct route, their horses would have sunk to their knees in the marshy swamp. It took an entire day to reach the coastguard station perched on Bullsmouth channel in the north-east corner of the island, an innocuous stretch of water between Achill and the small beast-shaped Inishbiggle, where the tidal swell could make a boat passage treacherous. Clergyman, scripture reader and horses welcomed the coastguard’s hospitality.
The next day, they pressed on in the direction of the purple-black mountain of Slievemore at Dugort on Achill’s north coast. Edward Nangle looked upon the slopes covered with peat and overgrown with heath and hard-stunted grass, the sheltered eastern flank sliced by chasms bringing water in its torrents into the sodden swamp below – a place so inhospitable that, according to the locals, a hare could hardly walk over it.
This was the mountain area on which Edward Nangle set his sights. He needed land and decided to return to Newport and seek a meeting with the head of the Burrishoole estate that comprised most of Achill Island. Sir Richard O’Donnell was favourably disposed to the evangelicals, having closely followed events at Lord Farnham’s Cavan estate, and quickly agreed a thirty-one-year lease on a tract of land at Slievemore.
Over thirty years later, Edward reflected on the difficulties he encountered in securing occupancy on even this poor-quality land from Sir Richard O’Donnell on a lease of thirty-one years: ‘This was not easily to be had, as the land was all leased to tenants, who were very tenacious of their rights. With much difficulty, they were induced to surrender 130 acres of wild mountain, without any building or a rood of cultivated ground upon it’.12 He was certain that the Roman Catholic priest, had he known what was intended for the land, would have prevented him from getting it. Goodwill money of £90 was paid to the occupying tenants.13 The tales of the island people would afterwards speak of the pain of those they believed were dispossessed of their Slievemore fields at that time.14
A few weeks after his first visit to Achill, Edward sat down in Dublin to write to Christopher Anderson whose book had fired his soul five years earlier. Not only did he have a vision for his west-of-Ireland project, but he also had the organisational skills and the financial flair to drive forward his concept. He fleshed out a plan which he presented to some supporters: five directors would oversee expenditure on erecting the Achill Mission buildings, two Irish-speaking missionaries would be recruited