2012-13 Edition of Our Newsletter
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10""... 29 32 ...y 37 c 43 to members) Editorial Welcome to the 2012-13 edition of our Newsletter. My thanks again to our president Bernadette Cunningham for her sterling work on the notices of books and research guides which are the backbone of our publication. This year she has also provided a report on our very successful outing to Loch Ree on page 32. Thanks to our article contributors, Gearoid O'Brien, Bernadette Cunningham, and Aengus Finnegan for excellent papers. My thanks to our reviewers, Paddy Duffy, Bernadette Cunning- ham, Raymond Gillespie, Margaret Murphy and David Fleming. This year our outing is to Trim. We will be based in the Trim Castle Hotel. The list of speakers and lectures, and information concerning registration and fees may be found on page 46 of this Newsletter. Dr Margaret Murphy and Dr Ingelise Stuijts gave lectures on behalf of GSIHS on Heritage Day, 25 August last in the Helen Roe Theatre of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland, 63 Merrion Square. Read a report on page 10 of this newsletter. These lectures were beautifully delivered and the large numbers attending demonstrated the interest of the general public in the research that we do. Many thanks to Margaret and Ingelise for continuing the very high standard and for bringing the acitvities of our Group to the general public. Our Secretary David Fleming has written a detailed synopsis of the lectures delivered at our Fifth Thematic Conference held in All Hallows College, 24-26 February, 2012 on page 34. The theme was Climate, Environment, Settlement and Society. We hope that it will not be long before we are in a position to organise another thematic conference. please note our statement on page 33 concerning the importance of maintaining the subjects history and geography at the core of the Junior Cycle curriculum. We would ask you to be alert to developments in this area and use what influence you may have to preserve these core subjects. I hope you will find this issue of the Newsletter of interest. I would make a special appeal to our conference speakers to contribute articles for the next issue. The articles in this issue are a guide to the length required. Our web site is: http://www.irishsettlement.ie/ After you first log on make a bookmark of the site. Give it a name (why not GSIHS). place it in your menu-bar for easy reference and then all future visits will require just one click. April 16, 2013 GSIHS Aitreabh Articles Figure 1 Islanders under sprint sail on Lough Ree Gearoid O'Brien had lost their lands in confiscations in the seven- Island Living: the modern story of life on teenth and eighteenth centuries and had taken to their boats in search of a new way of life. This the Black Islands on Lough Ree ties in with the anecdotal evidence of a number (Senior Executive Librarian of families including the Hanleys on the Black Aidan Heavey Library, Athlone) Islands and the Ganleys on Inchmore both com- In my paper for the conference I dealt with life ing down from Roscommon, the O'Hara's on the on several islands on Lough Ree but in this ar- Black Islands coming from Co. Sligo and I believe ticle I will confine myself to life on the Black the Duffys on Hare Island coming from Roscom- Islands. I have always had a great interest in mon. Lough Ree but when I met (and married) An- The Black Islands is the name given to an at- gela Hanley, and learned that her grandfather tractive archipelago of low-lying islands in the had been born on The Black Islands and reared civil parish of Cashel, Co. Longford. The islands in Athlone, following the drowning of his fa- are in the barony of Rathcline and the Poor ther on Lough Ree, I found that I became fasci- Law Union of Ballymahon. The largest island is nated with the social history of the Lough Ree is- King's Island (area c.17 acres), the other islands landers. Anyone who knows an islander knows include Nut Island (c.16 acres), Sand Island (c.4 that they are special people, people who have acres), Long Island (c.3 acres), Horse Island (c.2 been moulded by the strictures of island life, acres), Red Island (c.2 acres) and Girls Island people who have been happy to live on the clip- which is about a half an acre in extent. The pings of tin and people whose trust has to be Black Islands, although they have no recorded earned - and rightly so. They are (and were) ancient history, are nevertheless a most inter- a resourceful people who learned how to live esting sociological entity. within the law, well most of the time, and who The settlement of King's Island would seem to had principles to which they firmly adhered. be a relatively modern development. There is From my own researches I am convinced that no record in the Tithes Applotment Books for many of the families which had become estab- Co. Longford of any occupation of the island, but lished on the islands of Lough Ree in the nine- there is every reason to believe that a commu- teenth century were descendants of people who nity dwelt there at that time. The first record we 2 GSIHS Aitreabh have is the census returns for 1841, which indi- long before this way of life became popular. Mrs cate that the Black Islands had three households Hanly having given Hayward a meal "fit for a with a combined population of twenty-two peo- king" pointed out a cottage at the east end of the ple: ten male and twelve female. The earliest "street" and indicated that it was once a "wee named inhabitants turn up in Griffith's Valua- pub". Hayward was astonished by the need for tion of 1854 where Daniel Hanly, Michael Hanly a pub on such a small island but given the va- and John O'Hara are recorded as occupiers of garies of the lake and the harsh winters of the houses and land. Between them they farmed nineteenth century it seems that the islanders the seven islands and their landlord was a Mr were taking no risks. This pub or shebeen did phipps. not survive within living memory, but obviously, We know from the census returns that there as with so much other lore, Mrs Hanly had heard were consistently three houses on the islands about it from an earlier generation of islanders. from 1841 onwards. In 1841 the population I have been very fortunate to visit the islands was twenty-two but thirty years later this had in the company of Paddy Hanly, the last man dropped to ten, possibly indicating that almost to farm the islands, and he has pointed out to half the population had emigrated. We know me the dried out remains of a fish-pond. These anecdotally that certain Hanly family members ponds were used either communally or by in- settled in Providence, Rhode Island. By 1901 the dividual families to hold trout and other fish figures had once again risen above twenty. which were caught out of season. This gave the In recent years the islands have been uninhab- islanders a great advantage as they could bring ited, the last two islanders to live on the Black their fish to market in quantities as soon as the Islands were Paddy Hanly, a direct descendant season opened. of Daniel Hanly who was on the island in 1854, There are several reports of fish being sold out and the late Nancy (Babs) Conroy who was de- of season. One of which was reported in the scended from Michael Hanly, the second Hanly Westmeath Herald newspaper of 24th Decem- on the island at the time of Griffith's Valuation. ber 1859. It concerned a case which came before Both Paddy Hanly and Nancy (Babs) Conroy left the Court in Athlone on 20th December. Mary the island in the 1980s to live on the mainland at Hanly, of the Black Islands was summoned at the Lecarrow, Co. Roscommon. The O'Hara family instance of Iohn Dalton for having in her posses- had died out on the island many years earlier. sion nineteen trout on the 24th of the previous month, that being the close season. Margaret Jennings, a fish huckster, in whose possession the trout were found by the water-guard, was the chief witness for the prosecution. She ap- pears to have been a somewhat reluctant wit- ness who, rather than having an honest desire to uphold the law, obviously feared that she too could be gaoled for her part in the offence. Her evidence was that the defendant had brought Figure 2 The boats arrive home at the Black Islands, the trout, in a basket, to Mary Duffy's house LoughRee where they had then changed hands for 45. 6d. The Island Life Mr Potts said that the water-guard should have T he author, Richard Hayward, visited the Black summoned all parties. The plaintiffs attorney Islands nearly seventy years ago when he was said that he would not ask "the whole fine in- conducting research for his book Where the River curred to be inflicted" but instead he asked the Shannon flows. He was struck by the great hos- fine to be fixed as if Mary had sold only two trout pitality of the families. He learned that post out of season. The outcome was that the defen- was delivered to the island twice a week from dant was found guilty and fined £1 with 85.