Clew Bay has, it is said, an island for every day of the year. On the outermost and biggest, Clare Island, there is a church whose walls, most unusually for medieval Ireland, contain some frescoes. In the south-east corner, there is a castle belonging to the O’Malleys. In 1530, it was held by Eoghan Dubhdara Ó Máille, chief of a clan of noted sea rovers and traders whose base in Clew Bay was protected by this castle. The O’Malleys controlled the coastal trade, imposed levies and taxes on boats fishing in their waters, and acknowledged the overlordship of the Burkes of Mayo. These were the Gaelicised descendants of the de Burgos, whose coastal lands were protected by a necklace of castles ashore on the mainland. One of these was Rockfleet.
In or around 1530, Eoghan was presented with a daughter who was to become one of the most famous women in Irish history. Gráinne ní Mháille was anglicised as Grace O’Malley, but she is better known to us simply as Granuaile, being the best attempt that English contemporaries could make to pronounce her name.
In no part of the Norman colony had the process of Gaelicisation been more pronounced than in Connacht. It was not the most remote province — that was Ulster — but it was the poorest. There is less good land, whether for tillage or grazing, in Connacht than in the other three provinces. This meant that it was more sparsely populated than the others, simply because it could only support a smaller number of people. That said, the west of Ireland (a very modern imaginative construct) is not an agricultural wasteland. The land is not as lush as the great limestone plains and valleys of Leinster and Munster, but it can and did support something more than a subsistence agriculture. In addition, there was a strong tradition of pre-industrial manufacturing in medieval and early modern Connacht: it was the triple combination of the industrial revolution, the railway revolution and free trade in the first half of the nineteenth century that condemned Connacht — along with many similar regions all over Europe — to relative backwardness, or what was perceived as such.
When Granuaile was born, Galway was a thriving port — the second in Ireland by volume of trade and by far the most important in Connacht. A glance at an atlas will show how well positioned it was for trade with the continental Atlantic seaboard. First and foremost, it imported wine. Salt was also an important commodity as a preservative. Its exports included woollen products manufactured in cottage industries all over the province in a manner typical of the pre-industrial world.
So the province into which she was born was poor but by no means impoverished. Her own family thrived on a mixture of trade and the levying of taxes on foreign vessels fishing in Irish coastal waters. (It is one of the smaller historical mysteries as to why the Irish did not develop their own fishing fleets.) At sixteen years of age, she married Donal O’Flaherty from the famous Connemara family, from whose depredations the citizens of Galway devoutly wished to be delivered. She bore him three children before he was murdered by a rival family and in the meantime she established her reputation as a seafarer.
We know so little about the lives of women in the sixteenth century, indeed in any century prior to the twentieth. So the exploits of Granuaile, even where they are sometime barnacled by legend, are a glimpse into a world of possibility. It was one only open to a high-born woman married to someone of her own rank, as she was. In 1566, she cemented an alliance with terra firma by marrying her second husband, Richard MacWilliam Burke, whose principal fortress was this tower house, Rockfleet Castle. The MacWilliam Burkes were divided by ancient feud into the Lower or northern branch — that into which Granuaile married — and the Upper or southern branch, also known as Clanrickarde. Between them, they were the most powerful family in Connacht.
By the middle of the sixteenth century, the province had passed almost completely out of the control of the English. As with the rest of the island, the second half of century brought a fitful attempt to re-assert the interests of the crown in Connacht, a process that culminated in the so-called Composition of Connacht in 1585.
In the meantime, the English advance meant trouble for families like the MacWilliam Burkes, long used to exercising their local power untrammelled by remote central authority. In 1569, Sir Edward Fitton was appointed first Lord President of the province and he sought to reduce the power of the magnates. He besieged Rockfleet in 1574 without success. Three years later, Granuaile met the English Lord Deputy, Sir Henry Sidney, in Galway, who was well acquainted with her exploits and spoke of her as ‘a famous feminine sea captain’. Fitton declared that she ‘thinketh herself no small lady’.
She was right: her seaborne power made her reputation and secured her the respect and enmity of the English in equal measure. They referred to her as a pirate queen, although she could not possibly have seen herself in those terms. She was simply applying marine codes and usages of ancient provenance. It was practices such as these that the crown tried to suppress by introducing English law and custom to Connacht in the 1580s. It was easy for them to denounce Granuaile as a pirate, ignoring — when not celebrating — the contemporary piracy on the high seas of Drake and Hawkins.
She was captured for a while and incarcerated in Dublin Castle but returned to north Connacht where her power survived the death of her second husband in 1582. Two years later, the ruthless Sir Richard Bingham became Lord President of Connacht and it was he, by brute force and terror as often as not, who prosecuted the scheme for the Composition of Connacht. He had greater success in the Clanrickarde lands near Galway than in Granuaile’s redoubt to the north of the province. None the less, he was a constant threat to her interests and eventually she so wearied of his importunities that she appealed directly to Queen Elizabeth in London, thus leading to one of the most remarkable meetings in Irish history.
In 1593, now in her sixties, she accepted an invitation to visit the queen. She commanded one of her own large galleys, sailing it all the way from Clew Bay to Greenwich. She gave assurances of her good behaviour to the queen — although, not for the first time in her career, she failed to keep them on her return home. Bingham, to his frustration, was instructed to go easy on her. She gave material assistance to the Gaelic lords of Ulster during the Nine Years’ War (1594–1603) in their rebellion against the crown and died in the latter year, the same year as the queen’s death. Hers had been a most remarkable life, a bridge between an old world and a new. Her old world was doomed: the English victory in the Nine Years’ War spelled death for Gaelic Ireland.
Clew Bay.
