Odds & Ends

From the Clare Journal, 1888

28 May

FIVE PEOPLE DROWNED ON THE CLARE COAST

Five persons were drowned on Saturday morning by a tidal wave on the Clare coast near Goleen Bay, half way between Kilkee and Carrigaholt. The unfortunate people were collecting seaweed when the wave suddenly overtook them and carried them out to sea. They were Michael Lynch, his son and daughter, and Michael O’Dea and his son, both men being farmers. Their bodies have not been recovered.

31 May

Further particulars of the sad drowning fatality near Kilkee on Friday, by which five poor people lost their lives, being swept to sea by a tidal wave, as briefly reported in our last, have come to hand. It appears that O’Dea and his son, and Lynch, his daughter and son, were descending the cliff at the western side of Dunlicky Castle by an almost inaccessible passage. They reached to the water’s edge, their objective being to cut seaweed. A long flat rock extends from the base of the castle to the sea, and at the terminations of this rock the water is about 30 feet deep. They had their work almost completed when the tide began to flow, but as the day was fine and the sea calm, they took no great precautions for their safety. A big wave, however, came up the slanting rock, and carried away young O’Dea; his father went to his rescue. Back went the others to render assistance, only to be carried away down the slope into the deep water. Two, however, escaped—a son of O’Dea’s, 14 years, by holding on to the roots of some seaweed, saved his mother, bringing her up the rocks; but were it not for a boy named Burns, who sometime afterwards, passed by on the cliffs overhead looking for sheep, heard their pitiable lamentations, and assisted them up the steep incline, they too would have drowned. The body of the girl Mary Lynch was found on Sunday evening, and the coastguards, with their lifeboat, are busily engaged every day searching amongst the rocks and seaweed between the cliff and Healy’s Island for the other bodies.

7 June

THE LATE DROWNING ACCIDENT NEAR LOOP HEAD

Up to Saturday last none of the remaining four bodies drowned in Goleen Bay, between Kilkee and Loop Head, has been found. On the day Miss Lynch’s body was extricated from a reef of rock in depth of 36 feet of water, two other bodies were seen a short distance apart, but beyond the power of the people to reach them, owing to a depth of 150 feet of water. The water there is always very rough because of the large swells of the Atlantic breaking against the rocks. There were eight persons cutting seaweed on this steep ledge of rock which runs into the sea, a distance of 200 feet, on the day of this sad event, five of whom perished. A centenarian says he never heard from any of his predecessors, nor within his own knowledge or recollection, that any person ever cut seaweed on these rocks.

A Freak Wave

In September 1979, Dualco De Dona and I went out to fish for mackerel at Dunlicky. The great cliff out past the ruined castle provided ledge rocks on which to stand and cast the ribbons and sinkers out and let them sink into the evening’s rising tide. The mackerel, if they were there at all, were always there in plenty. Dualco sat back under the overhang of rocks and watched me go about the labor—the long heave, the rising and reeling to make the ribbons move through the water and attract the silver fish. First one would hit, I’d set the hook, then wait to feel another and another. I’d set the hook again, the greater weight signaling the frenzy of fish below. Then I’d reel the whole wriggly business up the cliff—a hundred and fifty feet, or two hundred—the sinker bouncing off the rocks, everything from the rod to the reel to my body aching with these fish removed from their natural gravity. We were getting bagfuls and the day was fine, when a great roar came up from the rocks behind and a wave knocked me flat out with the weight of water, holding onto my rig, looking over the edge. Dualco said it was like the hand of God, from where he was sitting, sheltered in the stones—the great curling hand of God that smote me flat out, face down at the edge.

We walked back to Moveen then. I was sopped through and through. That night we called with Nora to the Carmodys’. They lived in the house on the ridge above the sea near where we’d been fishing earlier. Mrs. Carmody had been another Nora Lynch before she’d married Patrick Carmody, and her Uncle John, known as Kant Lynch thereabouts, was living there with them in his old age. When we told the story of the day’s adventures, old Kant looked up and spoke into the hush that suddenly had occupied the room.

“Mind yourself there, boy,” the old man said, the milky cataract of his blind eye boring into me, his good eye gone watery and red, “the sea’s ever hungry for Lynches there.”

The Irish Times—December 2000

WAVE SWEEPS BOY OUT TO SEA

A search continued last night for the body of a five-year-old boy who was swept out to sea by a freak wave at Doolin, Co. Clare, yesterday. Tragedy struck when the wave knocked over the boy, his mother, four-year-old sister and their two-year-old friend as they walked along a rocky shoreline near Doolin pier, before sweeping the boy out to sea. The alarm was raised almost immediately. Efforts to locate the boy failed when rough seas prevented the local Marine Rescue Unit launching its lifeboat. According to the Gardai, the boy was from the north Clare village of Kilshanny, five miles inland from Doolin.

The Clare Champion

A headline in the Clare Champion has lived rent-free in my brain since the morning some years ago I first beheld it.

“MISSING MAN FOUND DEAD IN PUB TOILET,” it reads, and shakes me the way no other thing has ever shaken me in seven words. The article that follows this horrendous declaration details the sad case of a local pensioner from Killaloe who went missing for three days before he was discovered “in the gents toilet of ‘Molly’s Bar’ last Friday morning by a member of the cleaning staff.” The publican, Mr. Horgan, assisted Gardai in their investigation. His explanation of what he calls “the whole sad saga,” set forth in the penultimate and ultimate paragraphs of the story, are worthy of quotation here:

“On the Sunday night before Mr. [name withheld with respects, etc.] died, one of the water cisterns in the toilet was vandalized. We placed an out of order sign on the door and it was locked using the childlock mechanism you see on a lot of toilet doors.

“We can only surmise that John must have been taken short, and when the other cubicle was occupied he opened the one that was locked. Sadly, he must have died when he was in there. As the toilet was out of order and the door was locked we did not think to check it out,” he [Mr. Horgan] explained.

Every time I read this I am chilled. Killed in a loo in Killaloe—Bejaysus if it doesn’t prove Himself is an almighty Joker after all. But what about your man the publican, with that little item—“taken short.” What does that mean to the North American ear? Does it cover a host of contingencies from poor bladder control to porter poisoning to something chronic and acute? A diabetic coma, myocardial infarction, a hemorrhage?

How does one prevent being “taken short,” ending up in the wrong stall of the gents’ room in a pub in Killaloe, dead for three days and undiscovered? Is there a regimen one ought follow? The Dear only knows.

In my own drinking days—an epoch that ran uninterrupted from August 1963, just prior to the assassination of JFK, until the last Sunday in April 1989—I’d often find myself, I daresay, taken short. I fell off a building once and cracked some bones. I’d made the usual fool of myself with puke and words and near-disasters. And many’s the time I’d crawl into the gents, squinting to read the bluey name of Armitage Shanks on the porcelain pisser. Like getting the eyes checked—so long as I could read the writing on the stall, I’d be good for another. Many’s the time I came up short. And many’s the time I went too long and many’s the miracle that got me home to Moveen or Milford safe and sound.

No sense can be made of it, but the chill is good, and I’m sober now with years and better for it.

Wakes

Once you put a dead guy in the room, you can talk about anything. This verity was part of a tiny e-mail correspondence that I kept with Alan Ball, the creator of Six Feet Under—the HBO TV show about a family mortuary near Hollywood. Every episode has its hapless cadaver floating through the hour’s narratives, along with Ball’s free-ranging agenda—love in all its flavors, sex at all its ages, the ordinary angst of living in the world. He wrote, “You funeral types have always understood. Once you put a dead guy in the room you can talk about anything.”

And it is so: once the existential ante has been upped, everyone can play for keeps and the constraints of social order are relaxed. Anything, to quote the well-worn bromide, goes.

It was the Irish who invented this. There’s nothing like a corpse on the premises to loosen the old tongue, quicken the conversation, free the miser from the miserlies, set the blood to riot, and put folks on their knees for a variety of reasons—rosaries, rage, and excess among them. They sorted this out eons ago—during a cattle raid or warp spasm. It was Maeve or Cuchulain first noticed it, I think.

Anyway, in Ireland they’ve never had a shortage of corpses nor any compunctions about putting them to work. And when one sees the ability of the Irish to rise to such an occasion, with civility and community and charity, it makes one wish for wakes that went on forever. There’s an appetite for sadness seasoned with beauty that is essential to the Irish table. Hence a man got dead in a ditch, a woman taken with a tumor, a hero killed at his heroics become props in a well-known community theatre. The news of death throws them into action. Someone is out getting clean linens for the bed. A coffin and shroud are ordered. The candlesticks and crucifix are polished up. Ham and cheese sandwiches are made in dozens. Loaves of soda bread, buckets of tea, biscuits and shortbread, bags of sweets. The house is quickly whitewashed and the street is swept, fresh wallpaper hung in the spare bedroom. Bottles of lager and porter appear. The neighbor lads go off to dig the grave with whiskey proffered by the next of kin. “Oh no, you
needn’t,” the chief grave digger protests, with one mitt on the bottle’s neck, the other on the spade. The priest turns kindly in anticipation of the stipends and honoraria. He ratchets up the homiletic gears to manage their full existential load. “The Lord,” he will say, “has given. And the Lord has taken away.” Amen.

Ah, God, it is a study in efficiency and humanity. There’s a cheerfulness about it that belies the loss. “Sorry for your trouble,” people say.

You don’t so much direct an Irish funeral, my late great father used to say, as you referee it. For any event that can be counted on to bring the best out of people can be just as certainly counted on to bring out the worst. If the wake is grand for excesses of love and fellow feeling, it is no less able to bring out the black rage and odiousities, the foul temper and fighting soul that’s in us. Bereavement and begrudgery are kissing and hitting cousins.

The dead mother or father is no sooner breathless than all the surviving sons and daughters start jockeying for the favored position—as if there were a sign to be given that “I Was Her Favorite,” or “He Loved Me Best.” Often this is connected to some bit of property—a field or a favorite chair or a portfolio of mutual funds. When everything is up for grabs, well, grabbing’s what we do. Or we hug. You see a fair bit of hugging at these obsequies, too. And the slapping of backs and nodding of heads in mum consensus as to the mystery of it all.

If there’s an opposite to the Irish funeral, it is the English one. Oh, they have their corpses, plenty of them, but they are, it would appear, embarrassed by them—it makes the empire that every Englishman has in him seem, well, vincible. Except for the Royals, who are still stuck in their Victorian habits and therefore must still go through the motions if not the emotions of a funeral, the English like their bodies disappeared and the untidy sentiments kept corked. The stiff upper lip is easier to manage when there is, shall we say, no stiff. The Mitfordian invention of the memorial service (fashionably renamed of late a “celebration of life”) is most notable for what is missing—the dead guy. The finger food is plentiful, the talk determinedly uplifting, the music transcendent, the secular or religious witness heavy on Edwardian poetry, and all of the flowers “home grown.” After which everyone seeks an orderly exit. The dead, of course, have been burned or buried on the sly without witness or rubric, and now occupy their urn or grave or columbarium, quiet as a hall closet full of outworn shoes.

These bodiless affairs lack an essential manifest. There’s nothing “wrong” with them and nothing “right.” Think of Disney World without the Mouse. They leave you with a sense of something missing. Whereas the English like such quiet, calm affairs, the Irish expect some weeping or retching on the dead’s behalf, either from laughter or intemperance, before the living or the dead are given rest. They like the whiff of corruptibility that only rises off a corpse, after plentiful remembrance and reverie.

Keenly aware that when the worst has already happened, the best is somehow more possible, the Irish see their wakes as occasions for comfort and betterment.

I remember one Friday taking the sad news of a local death to a neighbor who lived without a phone and put down a fair amount of stout most Thursdays after he’d taken up the pension check. “Patsy’s died in the night,” I said, and readied myself for the old man’s grief.

“Fair play to Patsy,” your man said, steadying himself in the cabin door, “he’s that tough job behind him, so.”

Once at a wake in West Clare I heard a widow tell her parish priest, in answer to his queries on the cause of death, “Gonorrhea, Father—it has poor Jamesy swept, Godkeephim.”

The churchman, blushing as churchmen use’t, said, “The Lord spare us, Mary, there was never a man in all of the parish that died of gonorrhea; leastwise, I never heard of such a thing before. It must have been that time he went up north, the cratur, and maybe fell in with the wrong crowd. Ah, God, there do be temptations in the foreign place.”

“Yes, yes, Father, the foreign place,” Mary nodded, and caught her breath and wiped away a tear.

“What harm,” said the priest, “aren’t we all but human? We’ll have Mass in the morning and no more about the other.” He walked away shaking his bald head, which shone with the sweat of it.

I was still in earshot when the dead man’s daughter came around to scold her mother over what she’d heard—whispering furiously. “Good Christ, Mammy! Why did you ever tell the priest Da died of gonorrhea? There was no gonorrhea in that man at all. It was diarrhea took him!”

“Hush, my lovely,” the widowed woman said, holding her daughter’s face in her hands. “I’d rather your father be remembered for the great lover he never was than the big shit he always seemed to be.”

Sunbeams shone through the windows during Mass. The children’s choir sang. His bearers bore him proudly to the grave.