'God help me this blessèd night.' ('Mun Carberry and the Pooka' by Robert Dwyer Joyce.)
A man is on the verge of ruin, or in some other great trouble, and the neighbours will say, 'the Lord will open a gap for him': meaning God will find some means of extricating him. Father Higgins, who sent me this, truly remarks:—'This is a fine expressive phrase showing the poetical temperament of our people, and their religious spirit too.'
When anything happens very much out of the common:—'Glory be to God, isn't that wonderful.'
At the mention of the name of a person that is dead, the Roman Catholic people invariably utter the little prayer 'God rest his soul' or 'the Lord have mercy on him.'
The people thank God for everything, whatever it may be His will to send, good or bad. 'Isn't this a beautiful day, Mike.' ''Tis indeed, thank God.' 'This is a terrible wet day, William, and very bad for the crops.' 'It is indeed Tom, thanks be to God for all: He knows best.'
As might be expected where expressions of this kind are so constantly in the people's mouths, it happens occasionally that they come in rather awkwardly. Little Kitty, running in from the dairy with the eyes starting out of her head, says to her mother who is talking to a neighbour in the kitchen: 'Oh, mother, mother, I saw a terrible thing in the cream.' 'Ah, never mind, child,' says the mother, suspecting the truth and anxious to hush it up, 'it's nothing but the grace of God.' 'Oh but mother, sure the grace of God hasn't a long tail.'
The following story was current when I was a
child, long before Charles Kickham wrote 'Knocknagow,' in which he tells the story too: but I will give it in his words. A station is held at Maurice Kearney's, where the family and servants and the neighbours go to Confession and receive Holy Communion: among the rest Barney Broderick the stable boy. After all was over, Father MacMahon's driver provokes and insults Barney, who is kept back, and keeps himself back with difficulty from falling on him and 'knocking his two eyes into one' and afterwards 'breaking every tooth in his head.' 'Damn well the blagard knows,' exclaims Barney, 'that I'm in a state of grace to-day. But'—he continued, shaking his fist at the fellow—'but, please God I won't be in a state of grace always.'
When a person is smooth-tongued, meek-looking, over civil, and deceitful, he is plauzy [plausible], 'as mild as ever on stirabout smiled.' 'Oh she is sly enough; she looks as if butter wouldn't melt in her mouth.' (Charles Macklin—an Irish writer—in The Man of the World.) This last expression of Macklin's is heard everywhere here.
A person is in some sore fix, or there is trouble before him: 'I wouldn't like to be in his shoes just now.'