Chapter 4 THE SOUTH AND CENTRE The South Coast: Wexford, Waterford, south-east Cork The Blackwater valley: north-east Cork Glen of Aherlow, east Tipperary, Limerick The Shannon: Clare, Offaly Around Kilkenny: Carlow, Tipperary The South Coast: WEXFORD - WATERFORD - south-east CORK Wexford Beginning at the nearest landing-place from Wales for this part of Ireland, Wexford was the birthplace of Thomas Moore's mother -- which may seem a distant literary connection, but the poet Thomas (Tom) Moore (1779-1852) [1] was perhaps the most famous literary lion of his time: Wexford still regrets that his mother removed to Dublin in order to give birth to him. In 1835 Moore went to see his mother's house in Wexford and a crowd immediately gathered: While I was looking at this locality, a few persons had begun to collect around me and some old women (entering into my feelings) ran before me as to the wretched house I was in search of (which is now a small pot-house), crying out, "Here, Sir, is the very house where your grandmother lived. Lord be merciful to her!" Of the grandmother I have no knowledge... ... but, Moore adds in his Diary, he remembers that his mother, 'one of the noblest-minded as well as the most warm-hearted of all God's creatures, was born under this lowly roof.' The house is still a 'pot-house' -- a pleasant raftered pub now called the 'Thomas Moore'; the words about his mother are recorded on a plaque in its wall [2] . Oscar Wilde 's mother, (' Speranza ') also came from Wexford. Jane Francesca Elgee, later Lady Wilde (c.1824-96) [3] , was born near the 'Thomas Moore', in a vicarage by the Bull Ring (it is now part of White's Hotel). As 'Speranza' she was one of the most vehement contributors of nationalist verse to The Nation, mouthpiece of the Young Ireland movement. Her stuff is rousing: There's a proud array of soldiers -- what do they round your door? 'They guard our masters' granaries from the thin hands of the poor.' Pale mothers, wherefore weeping? -- Would to God that we were dead -- Our children swoon before us, and we cannot give them bread... This is more in the spirit of nineteenth century Irish nationalism than the ballads of Tom Moore. There is in some quarters a grudging attitude to the English success of genial, generous Moore. He however always believed he was advancing the cause of Ireland with his ballads, sung in the fashionable drawing-rooms of London. In print his verses can sometimes sound thin, but set to the Irish airs he borrowed for them they can be irresistible, as anyone who has heard the recording of John McCormack singing 'Oft, in the stilly night', would agree. The best of them carry their own music: At the mid hour of night, when stars are weeping, I fly To the lone vale we loved, when life shone warm in thine eye; And I think oft, if spirits can steal from the regions of air, To revisit past scenes of delight, thou wilt come to me there, And tell me our love is remembered, even in the sky... Bannow Of Moore's popularity in the Ireland of that time there can be no question. In his diary of 1835, when he was fifty-seven and at the height of his fame, he describes how, after he had been dragged to see his mother's house in Wexford, he drove to Bannow , a little further along the coast. It can only be described as a Triumphal Progress, preceded by a band playing his 'Irish Melodies'. We can follow his road still, a quiet, country one, and it can never have been as crowded as it was on that noisy August day: We came in sight of the great multitude -- chiefly on foot, but as we passed along we found numbers of carriages of different kinds, filled with ladies, drawn up on each side of the road, which, after we had passed them, fell into the line and followed in procession. When we arrived at the first triumphal arch, there was the decorated car and my Nine Muses, some of them remarkably pretty girls, particularly the one who placed the crown on my head; and after we had proceeded a little way, seeing how much they were pressed by the crowd, I made her and two of her companions get up on the car behind me... As we proceeded slowly along, I said to my pretty Muse, 'This is a long journey for you.' 'Oh, Sir,' she exclaimed, with a sweetness and kindness of look not to be found in more artificial life, 'I wish it was more than three hundred miles.' It was to prove a long two days for Tom Moore. There were addresses from the local people, in this vein: 'Sir, No sooner was it known that you were coming among us, than all was instant and electric gladness. You saw as you approached our confines the Reaper fling aside his sickle... If we must give utterance at an early day to the withering word Farewell -- Leave with us -- Bard, Scholar, Gentleman, Historian, Patriot, Friend! -- Leave with us the assurance that it will not be for ever...' But Moore was not the darling of London for nothing. He soon caught the tone: Went through my reception of the various addresses very successfully, (as Boyse [his host] told me afterwards), spoke much louder and less Englishly than I did the day before. I find that the English accent (which I always had, by the by, never having, at any time in my life, spoken with much brogue) is not liked by the genuine Pats. Then he joined enthusiastically in the dancing, but tore himself away, and went, or tried to go, for a solitary walk by the sea, but with my usual confusion as to localities, I missed the right way... felt now rather inclined to anathematise, having seldom ever thirsted more keenly for actual beverage than I did at that moment for a draught of the fresh sea air. Bannow is a curious place, The old settlement has been almost entirely covered by sand, no one seems to know quite when. About the new replacement Bannow nearby, Hall's Ireland (1841) is eloquent. Mrs S.C.Hall (Anna Maria Fielding, 1800-81), whose husband Samuel Carter Hall (1800-1889) collaborated with her on that vast three-volume work, had spent her childhood there, and laments the changes [4] : The good priest, who guarded every protestant of the parish during "the troubles", so that no drop of blood was shed there -- gone! the rector and his stately wife and smiling lovely daughters -- gone!..... But the people -- what quaint, amusing people they were; how they used to pour out their troubles, and enlarge upon their plans! The Halls were Irish-born and sympathetic to Ireland, but Anglicised and writing for English readers: the well-meaning condescension of that last sentence is typical of the period. The idea of the comic Irishman was already ingrained, and it is to Thomas Moore's credit that he both played up to it (as 'Tom' Moore, familiarly) and yet somehow altered it. He could play the fool, play the piano, and also play the gentleman. He probably dearly loved a lord, and his delight in his own success is endearing, but he was made indignant by suggestions that he had succumbed to the English gentry (and any Irishman, successful in England, has to watch his back in this respect). When he hears an American Southerner proclaiming the value of slavery to the poet Samuel Rogers, on the grounds that 'the highest gentlemen are to be found in the Slave States', and Rogers argues this is disproved by the gentlemen of England, who have no slaves, Moore comments: ... but certainly almost all free nations had such victims to whet their noble spirits upon and keep them in good humour with themselves ... the Spartans their Helots, the Romans their Servi, and the English, till of late, their Catholic Irish. Kilmacthomas -- Newtown -- Ballylaneen Not far from Wexford, there are traces of the Ireland Moore felt himself to represent, and from which he had escaped. The old, bardic tradition lingered on in remote places, doubtless attenuated, but still with life in it, and its representatives are still honoured now. Along the main road south-west, near Kilmacthomas , inside the graveyard gate at Newtown, is the gravestone, proudly inscribed in Latin and Irish, of 'Denis MacNamara the Red', Donnachdh Ruadh ["Donah Rua"] Mac Con Mara (1715-1810); a jaunty, roistering poet, at least in his early days. What is remarkable about him, and others, at the fag-end of a tradition, is how learned and well-travelled they were. MacNamara certainly went to Newfoundland, 'the Land of Fish', as did many Catholics emigrating from that part of Ireland, and his most famous song, 'The Fair Hills of Ireland', was probably written (in Irish) in America. He composed a long and graceful epitaph in Latin for his fellow-poet, Teague O'Sullivan (Tadhg Gaedhealach ["Tyge Gaeloch"] O'Suilleabhain) (d.1795), which stands, carefully renewed, in the old graveyard at Ballylaneen (south of the main road); translated it begins: This is the grave of a Poet, O Wanderer glance here in sorrow, Famous he was and beloved, weeds shade him now and grey dust... MacNamara was also memorialised in English, and his fame exaggerated in the Freeman's Journal: 'Oct 6, 1810, at Newtown, near Kilmacthomas, in the 95th year of his age, Denis MacNamara, commonly known by the name Ruadh, or Red-haired, the most celebrated of the modern bards.