KENMARE BAY, FROM TEMPLENOE
Old Hunting Cap as head of the family played a great part in his nephew's youth, providing, it would seem, for the later stages of his education. The early one was cheap enough, for he was fostered on the mountains in the cabin of his father's herd (that tie of fosterage bound Catholic Ireland together, gentle and simple, with a strange intimacy), and he got his first lessons in one of the hedge schools which flourished in defiance of penal laws. It was no less typical of Catholic Ireland that he should go abroad to finish his training, or that he should have a kinsman high placed in the service of France. His father's younger brother, Count O'Connell, was the last colonel of the Irish Brigade: and when he was consulted concerning a place to send his nephews, in 1790, found himself much perplexed to answer, so troubled was the state of all the Continent. Daniel and his brother Maurice were sent first to the Jesuits at St. Omer; they were trained to detest the revolution which was driving their uncle out of the service of France: and soon the flood of turmoil drove them from Douay whither they had moved. At Calais, they learnt the news of Louis XVI's execution: on the boat were two passengers who spoke of it as willing eyewitnesses. These men were Irish Protestants, the brothers Sheares, afterwards executed for conspiracy. It is very notable that although Protestant Ireland, especially in Ulster, was much affected by the revolutionary and republican doctrines, these found very little echo in the Catholic part of the nation—and none at all among survivors of the old Catholic gentry, such as the O'Connells. Yet when the young O'Connell settled down to read for the bar in London, harsh measures of repression and the violent Toryism of that day soon drove him into revolt. He had a genuine hatred of oppression, of unfair play: later in life this devoutest of Roman Catholics was the most powerful advocate of equality for the Jews.
However, this is no place to talk of the great orator's career or his triumphs. To his own folk in Kerry he was always "the Counsellor", the wonderful advocate whose genius was like a flaming sword drawn for the terrified prisoner. No other Irish leader has ever been so near akin to the common folk; it was not for nothing he suckled the breast of a Kerry peasant, and learnt to speak his first words in the Irish tongue. Yet, oddly enough and pathetically enough, so little of a "nationalist" in our modern sense was he, that he welcomed and encouraged the growing disuse of Irish speech; all diversity of tongues seemed hateful to him, in his eighteenth-century cosmopolitanism. But no man was ever more in love with Ireland, or more devoted to one spot of earth than he to his Darrynane. He wrote to Walter Savage Landor of himself that he "was born within the sound of the everlasting wave", and that his "dreamy boyhood fed its fancies upon the ancient and long-faded glories of that land which preserved Christianity when the rest of now civilized Europe was shrouded in the darkness of godless ignorance".
"Perhaps," he went on, "if I could show you the calm and exquisite beauty of these capacious bays and mountain promontories, softened in the pale moonlight which shines this lovely evening, till all which during the day was grand and terrific has become serene in the silent tranquillity of the clear night—perhaps you would readily admit that the man who has so often been called a ferocious demagogue is in truth a gentle lover of nature, an enthusiast of all her beauties 'fond of each gentle and each dreary scene', and catching from the loveliness as well as from the dreariness of the ocean and the Alpine scenes with which it is surrounded, a greater ardour to procure the good of man in his overwhelming admiration of the mighty works of God."
That was how O'Connell thought of Kerry; and as you drive on from Caherdaniel along the high pass of Coomakista, which brings you out across a shoulder of mountain from the view across Kenmare River to a wider outlook full west on the Atlantic—why, you will have some inkling of the sublimity which he felt.
Below you is the little harbour to and from which the O'Connells worked their smuggling craft; and you can discern a narrow cleft in the rocks making a short cut for row boats on a calm day. Once, they say, a sloop of the smugglers lay in the harbour and was suddenly aware of a revenue brig rounding the headland from the south. The wind blew into the harbour. It was impossible to escape, and the sloop lay motionless and to all appearance idle. But just as the pursuer tacked and ran straight into the harbour mouth a sail was hoisted on the sloop, she began to move, and in a minute her sides were scraping through the tiny passage, while men with sweeps out fended her off this and that sunken rock; and in another minute she was out and away, cracking on full sail with a good half-hour's lead before the revenue boat could beat out of the narrow sound to chase her.
MACGILLICUDDY'S REEKS
From Coomakista the road descends steeply to Waterville, a famous place for anglers, where a new town has grown up about the outlet to Lough Currane, for here is now the chief station of the transatlantic cables. The first of these cables was laid from Valentia Island some ten miles farther north opposite the town of Cahirciveen, which will be your destination if you purpose to return by rail along the shore of Dingle Bay. But I commend to all, motorist, cyclist, or foot traveller (if such a one be left in these degenerate days), another way of exploring Iveragh. Also, if the sea is not your enemy, it is worth while to stay in Waterville—where the sea as well as the lake offer great chance to fishers—and try an expedition to the Skellig Rocks. Fine weather is needed, for there is difficulty in landing on these astonishing places where the gannets are the chief habitants: strong flyers, they nest nowhere between this point and the Bass Rock in Scotland, yet you may see them by dozens anywhere along the west coast even in the breeding season. On the Skelligs are old stone stairs of tremendous height, the work of old-time anchorite monks who established themselves here in stone beehive-shaped cells—still intact, for you to wonder at the discomforts of piety. And in the crevices of these rocks rare birds breed—the stormy petrel, the Manx shearwater, along with legions of puffin, guillemot, razorbill, shag, and the rest. But do not go there even with a light easterly wind, for it blows direct on to the rocky landing place; and if it blows at all from the south-west the swell may be too big even on the sheltered side. Nature is on a big scale, a rough playfellow, out here in the Atlantic.