In 1978 MacLysaght published a memoir “Changing Times – Ireland Since 1898.” He had kept a diary for many years and some of the excerpts are priceless.
His people were wealthy. A great-uncle had founded a steel works in Wales and his father travelled the world as an export salesman for it but arranged to spend his summers in Ireland where he became Captain of the of the Lahinch Golf Club in Co. Clare, wore a Norfolk jacket and knickerbockers during a day’s rough shooting, oversaw the building of walls and outhouses, wrote poems and novels,and was a friend of the Canon Sheehan Parish Priest of Doneraile, an internationally known novelist who used correspond with Leo Tolstoy. The family, an old Gaelic one, had become Protestant after a “mixed” marriage following the end of the Penal Laws. Sidney Royse Lysaght, Edward’s father, was an agnostic most of his life but reverted to the Catholicism of his ancestors and Edward MacLysaght, who rescued the “Mac” prefix, chose Catholicism in his teens.
Edward was born at sea in the Indian Ocean when his parents were returning from a business trip to Australia. At the age of 14 he was sent to Rugby School where Rupert Brooke was head of his house “and his rather ridiculous pot-bellied old father, bawdily nicknamed ‘the tooler’ was the housemaster.” Edward observes that “going to school in England may have an Anglicising effect on Irish boys with a Unionist background, but it certainly tends to strengthen the Nationalist outlook of those who, like myself, were brought up to think of themselves as Irisn, not ‘West Britons’ .”
He later spent two terms at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, but “left the place abruptly in a disreputable atmosphere of whiskey and horses.” He worked as an apprentice on a farm in Somerset.Occasionally he went to a pub at night, and so far as he could hear from the locals’ talk, beer and fornication were the only subjects that interested them.”The semi-public copulation of a dwarf man and a giant woman (locals) has given them food for talk for the past four weeks.”
Having worked off his disgrace, the prodigal son returned home, where his father, back from a trip to Australia, offering him the chance to prove himself as a farmer, bought 600 acres “in a frightful state of neglect” half of which was “old woods or waste” in Co.Clare, on the West bank of the Shannon’s Lough Derg,
Ireland’s third largest lake covers over 50 square miles.So, in July 1909 – “Mr Crofton and Morgan came with us from Lahinch.We travelled in Ernest Brown’s motor car which accomplished the journey of more than forty miles without mishap. I enjoyed it but the weather was warm:these yokes must be fierce cold not to speak of wet in the winter.” Another of his diary entries about that time remarks on his having ridden a (fixed-wheel) bicycle “fourteen miles without a puncture.”
Nearly seventy years later he wrote “I remember my father referring to the village of Tuamgraney at our gate -‘This must be one of the most depressed and poverty-stricken places in Ireland:let’s do something to give at least one place west of the Shannon a better life.’ Within a year or two he established the nursery industry at Raheen, and this under the management of one of his grandsons has become one of the largest concerns of its kind in the country.Its establishment actually changed the appearance of the country for miles around us, for by 1923 the farmers had got from the nursery more than a million young trees to plant shelter beds and groves, and a few years later the Department of Lands, starting at Raheen, began an extensive programme of afforestation of east Clare. Timber being the requisite raw material, the selection of our parish as the site of the large chipboard factory was the final stage in the development.Since then our area has been less troubled by the problems of unemployment and emigration than most places.”
MacLysaght tried to turn his estate into a commune worked and shared by himself and the hired workers, but the latter thought that a steady though modest wage was a better bet than dependence on trading results for their incomes. But he established a Co-op with a store and a shop on the estate.
When the ITGWU organised farmworkers in the area, most of the workers joined. but two refused as they had higher wages and better hours and conditions than the Union was demanding. MacLysaght wanted them to join, but when they refused he refused to sack them. The Union decided that the men should strike, but at the critical time (in 1919) MacLysaght went down with the flu,and was hospitalised and by the time he went back to work the local branch of the ITGWU had dissolved over an unnecessary quarrel arising from stubbornness. But the business survived.
MacLysaght got very involved in promoting the Irish language and collected hundreds of Gaelic words used in the area, mostly related to farming, from locals who could not produce a sentence in Irish. The area had become culturally poorer as it had become materially pauperised and he saw its culturalrevival as important as its economic development. One of the workers, who denied any knowledge of Irish, would berate his wife very fluently in that language when he had drink taken, so demoralised had people become under foreign rule. (The first black female millionaire in the USA made her fortune by inventing a method of straightening black women’s hair. The burgeoning of Afro-styles in the 1960s was an assertion of self-worth in a country where black people were, and still are, struggling for equality.)
In June 1917 MacLysaght was saving hay on the farm when two strangers approached, Lawrence Ginnell and Eoin MacNeill, to canvass votes for the by-election, following the death in action in Flanders of William Redmond, brother of the Irish Party leader John Redmond. McLysaght says that the oppressive measures of Sir John Maxwell, which continued after his recall in November 1916, had finally roused the country from its previous lethargy, but the Irish Party quite failed to appreciate the revolution which had taken place beneath the surface and in the absence of a general election since 1910, still claimed to represent the Irish people. East Clare was not the first of the by-elections of 1917 which foreshadowed the Irish Party’s almost total eclipse the following year.
At a convention on June 14th “Edward de Valera, the hero of Ringsend” unknown in Clare, was selected to oppose the Irish Party’s candidate Patrick Lynch KC, a Crown Prosecutor. De Valera was still in jail for his part in the 1916 Rising and was released on 17th June.
The outsider de Valera took 5,010 votes to Lynch’s 2,035.
MacLysaght recalls – “The Freeman’s Journal, the organ of the Parliamentary Party, did not attempt to belittle the effect of the result on ‘the national cause’ beyond expressing the view that Clare had repudiated with contempt the principles of O’Connell, whose historic election in 1828 gave Clare the proud nameof the Banner County. The editor stressed the fact that it was the first election in which the issue was put straight to the electors. He also admitted that it had been fought out fairly. The Irish News (Joe Devlin’s organ) faced the situation equally frankly. The Independent which only a year earlier had been quiterabid in its denunciation of the 1916 men, used the occasion to pour scorn on the Redmondites.”
MacLysaght continues (in his 1970s commentary) in “THE IRISH TIMES, which was then a Unionist paper ( how greatly it has changed since those days) : ‘He who runs may read the immediate lesson of the East Clare election. It signifies the rise of a new party which must henceforth be an important, if not a controlling, factor in Nationalist politics. The Sinn Fein victories in North Roscommon and South Longford were remarkable; but nobody could have deduced from them the crushing character of Mr de Valera’s victory in East Clare. His own followers were surprised and the official Nationalists dumbfounded when the poll was declared ……The Sinn Fein policy, as explained by Mr de Valera with the utmost frankness, demands an independent Irish Republic, into which Unionist Ulster and all other minorities are to be dragged by force. It contemplates another rebellion -if that should be necessary- at some moment when England’s hands will be full of her own troubles. This policy has captured East Clare, triumphed over the memory of a devoted Irish soldier (William Redmond), defeated the authority of the Catholic Church, and swept the Nationalist Party out of a seat which it had held without opposition for twenty-two years.”
I will remark here that Republican candidates had not, at that time, stood as “Sinn Fein” candidates,
A Clare resident and former Unionist Candidate in East Clare, a Colonel O’Callaghan-Westropp “of a landlord family associated with the notorious Bodyke evictions” wrote to the IRISH TIMES and MacLysaght quotes him in part :
“The Gospel of Sinn Fein, as preached in East Clare, is essentially national and non-party, and it was wholly free from incitements to class or religious hatred, from abuse of opponents, and from personalities of the bitter and objectionable kind which formerly characterised similar contests, and this clean fighting was so widely appreciated that it must have been worth many hundreds, perhaps thousands, of votes to de Valera”
The Colonel went on to praise Sinn Fein and de Valera for several paragraphs.
Mr MacLysaght had a very long and interesting life and, to do him justice, his story requires further instalments here.
Read that book. Most interesting. He gives his name as Mac Giolla Iasachta. Was he not the head of Heraldry or something in Ireland32?
He was.