One Irish Summer

by William Eleroy Curtis

Miss O’Donnell, the lace teacher, and Miss Walshe, the nurse, told us that the pretty young women we saw in the lace school and the boys and girls we saw in the national school, all come from such cabins as I have described. Some of the blue-eyed, bare-footed urchins have complexions that society belles would give their souls for, and long, beautiful coal-black hair, yet they sleep on a mud floor with pigs and chickens, and many of them walk three and four miles and back for the privilege of attending school. With a little training these children make excellent servants, faithful, obedient, and tactful, and almost without exception they go to mass and confession regularly, and they have a high standard of morals and a conscientious devotion to duty. Although it costs as much to get married as it does to buy a ticket to America, there are no unmarried people living together here; illegitimate births are extremely rare and chastity is the commonest of virtues.

There is no compulsory education law, but the priests drive the children to school until they are fourteen and will not confirm them until they have passed a certain grade. A gentle, soft-voiced woman in a rude cabin in the mountain side told us the other day that her greatest trouble was that her daughter had been kept from school by sickness and she was afraid that the priest would not confirm her because she was so far behind the other girls in her lessons.

The same rule applies to the lace school which has been established by the government through the Congested Districts Board in the old building used by the Catholic church before the new one was erected. The government pays a teacher and advances the material. The girls get the price their lacework brings when sold in the shops of London or Dublin or at the Eccles Hotel here at Glengariff. Miss O’Donnell tells me that Mrs. Duke, the wife of the manager of the hotel, is their best sales agent, and a stock of samples is always kept where the guests can see them. Fifty-one girls are now attending the school, and some of them walk seven miles and back every day. Father Harrington will not allow them to attend the lace school until after they are confirmed, and it is a great inducement to join the church because they are able to earn forty, fifty, and some of them sixty pounds a year, which secures them better clothes, better food, and some comforts for their families. Last year this little school sold nearly three thousand dollars’ worth of lace, and the money was divided among fifty-one girls who made it.

Every young person who can get money enough goes to America. And if it were not for the money they send back here many of their parents and younger brothers and sisters would starve. A gentleman who handles the postal orders in one of the most forlorn and wretched villages of Ireland told me that the Christmas gifts of money that came from America kept many a family in food during the winter. It is the ambition of every young man and woman to go to the United States, and only the lack of steamship fare keeps them in Ireland. A sturdy lad of eighteen who guided us across the moor to the roadway this morning told me confidentially that he was going to Arizona as soon as his uncle, who was doing very well out there, was able to send him the price. He asked many questions about that part of the country. His uncle is working in a gold mine near Tombstone and is “earning more than a pound a day, steady, six days in the week, and they pay him double wages if he works on Sunday.” To a lad whose life is so barren and whose horizon is so narrow and who sees his father and his neighbors trying to wrest a scanty sustenance partly from the sea and partly from the land, and who scarcely catch enough fish or raise enough potatoes to feed the mouths of their own families, a pound a day looks like the income of an earl.

The Catholic church at Glengariff is a brand new building of stone, and looks large enough for ten times the population of this parish, which has only about four hundred souls, men, women, and children. It was built with American money raised by Father Brown, the late priest, who went to Brooklyn, Boston, and several other cities of the United States, hunted up the relatives of the people who live here and those who went from these parts, and obtained £3,000. He was a good man and took a great interest in the temporal as well as the spiritual welfare of his people. Since his death Father Harrington has succeeded him and serves four churches in a radius of seventeen miles.

We attended mass on Sunday. The church was crowded. All the aisles were filled with kneeling worshipers, up to the very feet of the altar and in the vestibule, or the steps, and around outside were forty or fifty men and women kneeling reverently upon the sod, although they couldn’t hear the voice of the priest. One of the men told me that he believed every person in the parish was present and that they always came unless they were too ill to move, that no storm could stop them. As a rule they came from mountain cabins five and six miles away, in carts and on foot, and some of them carried children in their arms the entire distance. Notwithstanding their poverty they were better dressed than the working people of Dublin. Their clothes were neat and well brushed and mended. However ragged the garments they wear on week days may be, they always have a decent suit to wear to the house of God. The solemnity of the service was very impressive. To these people the church is the gate of heaven. Its decorations and ceremonies appeal to their imagination, to their senses of color and sound, and the mystic rites sink into their souls.

Although there are six saloons for a parish of four hundred people the chief constable tells me there is very little drinking or disorder, and practically no crime. He hasn’t had a case of robbery for a year, and except upon convivial occasions like weddings and wakes the people are very orderly. Most of the saloons, he tells me, sell very little liquor, and some of their licenses run back for years, being renewed annually to the same family for generations. A liquor license in Ireland cannot be taken away except for serious reasons, as long as the annual fee is paid. They can be sold or transferred, but if they lapse they are cancelled.

In a neat stone cottage, surrounded by a well kept garden, among the rocky mountain sides that overlook Bantry Bay, lives Lacia Walshe, strong in body, strong in mind, and strong of purpose. She goes among the wretched hovels in this locality attending maternity cases which occur with amazing frequency, for the poorer the family the more children is the rule. Miss Walshe does not give her entire attention to midwifery, however, but treats every case of illness that comes within her ken, from sore fingers to delirium tremens. That is not a figure of speech, but an actual fact, for many a time at midnight has she been called from her cottage to some miserable stone hovel in the mountains to quiet with opiates a drunken ruffian who is haunted with reptiles and raving in his dreams. Miss Walshe belongs to the poor, and is kept here by a society with a name of fifteen words—“Lady Dudley’s Scheme for the Establishment of District Nurses in the Poorest Parts of Ireland.” She wears a badge the shape of a heart supporting a crown and in the center is a shamrock leaf encircled with the words of Another One who went about doing good as she does: “By love serve one another.”

The Countess of Dudley organized this work in 1903, beginning with two nurses in Geesala and Bealadangan, County Galway. And they did so much good that the number has now been increased to fifteen and they are located at as many places in the poorest districts of Ireland, where there are no physicians and where the people are too poor and the population too scattered to support a doctor if one could be induced to go there.

The most distressing cases are those of confinement in cabins of only one room, into which sometimes six, eight, and ten men, women, and children are crowded, sleeping upon the floor. We went into a hut of only one room, not more than twelve by fourteen feet in size, which is occupied at night by nine persons,—father and mother, and grandmother and six children, the oldest being eighteen years of age. We visited another hut where there were eight children living, and were told of one where there were seventeen, the births of most of them not more than a year apart. To relieve conditions that may be easily imagined, Lady Dudley’s society with the long name was formed, and is now doing an immense amount of good. Fifteen courageous and conscientious women are comfortably placed in localities where their services are most needed, at a cost of not more than a thousand dollars per year each, which includes a bicycle, the most convenient means of locomotion they can find, and an allowance for the hire of horses and jaunting cars when they can be obtained. Because it is impossible to find lodging and boarding places, it has been necessary to build cottages for the nurses, and in some cases the demands upon them are so great that they are allowed to employ assistance. They are equipped with surgical implements and medical stores. Each of the nurses has taken a course in surgery for emergency cases for they are frequently called upon to set bones and dress wounds and even to perform operations. They are also furnished with baby clothes, old linen, warm garments, stores of condensed milk and beef extract, and other delicacies, and although Florence Nightingale relieved thousands, her work did not compare in peril or privation or fatigue with the almost daily experience of some of these noble women.