Joe and the wonders of divining and folklore
DAVID MEDCALF VENTURED INTO THE HILLS ABOVE BLESSINGTON AND GOT MORE THAN HE BARGAINED FOR WHEN HE SPOKE TO BURGLAR ALARM TECHNICIAN TURNED WATER DIVINER JOE MULLALLY, AS THE CONVERSATION SWITCHED TO RURAL FOLKLORE AND HEALING
MADAM editor said ‘go and talk to the water diviner’. Your reporter dutifully wended his way to the home of the water diviner Joe Mullally at Ballysmuttan near Blessington. Your reporter went to Ballysmuttan expecting to talk to Joe about water divining. And we did indeed spend some little time discussing that topic as we sat in his sitting room looking out across upland pasture to the upper reaches of the River Liffey.
But water divining was not at the top of Joe Mullally’s agenda because he has many other things on his mind. Besides, he appears to believe that water divining, which seems to be miraculous magic to city bred folk such as your reporter, is actually a fairly unremarkable accomplishment. Water divining, as in finding the best place to drill a well, is a skill which he believes most people could master if only they took the time to do so. Granted, some people are better at it than others but Joe Mullally does not wish to be known only as a water diviner.
This smiley, energetic 64-year-old presents himself also as a healer, as an explorer of rural myth, as someone capable of lifting the occasional curse, as an explorer of the spiritual path. When we sat in his sitting room, this interviewee was not about to be confined to speaking about water divining. Over more than two hours of chat, there was mention of geopathic stress, of fairy forts, of sick land, and of country traditions – all that and burglar alarms too …
Asked about his background, Joe says that he grew up on a farm, in fact on this very farm, here in Ballysmuttan. The old farmhouse where Lar Mullally and Anne (née Fitzsimons) raised their brood of four – two girls and a couple of boys - may just about be seen from his sitting room, though largely hidden by a shelter belt of trees. Now modernised, it is the home of Joe’s sister Maria, while brother Michael resides in Galway and sister Anne is in the United States.
The 90-acre family holding where they enjoyed their childhood included plenty of rough mountainy grazing – no question of producing grain. Sheep and a few suckler cattle were the order of the day, almost as a sideline as Lar earned a more regular wage as a forestry worker. The place was remote, cut off for what seemed like an eternity by the snows of 1963. An aunt who worked in a Dublin hotel came home to Ballysmuttan for Christmas and never made it back to the hotel until April, or so the family legend goes.
The children attended the two-teacher Cloughlee National School, where there was no running water. Though he describes teacher Miss Peoples as a kindly soul, Joe looks back and muses that national school could be a very cruel place. His parents put great store on education and contrived to send all four of their brood to boarding schools, the girls going to Dublin while Joe and Michael were dispatched to Saint Kieran’s College in Kilkenny, famous for producing great hurlers.
The young bespectacled lad from Wicklow was not tempted to compete on the pitch with classmates who had a camán in their hands from age three. He concentrated on making friends and his lessons. Joe moved on to study electrical
engineering at Kevin Street in Dublin. During his three years on the course, he discovered a genuine interest in electronics and an ability to fix things, mending transistor radios to help pay his way through college.
The qualification in electrical engineering led naturally on to the burglar alarms, signed up promptly on graduation by the Allied Alarms company which had its headquarters in Donnybrook. He confesses that he was fascinated by a technology which was beginning to become affordable for ordinary householders. Previously, such security devices were exclusively the preserve of jewellers minding their precious metals or gems, and of rich paranoiacs.
But demand was destined to mushroom in the two decades up to the new millennium and Joe was set to grow with the business. He rose to become technical director, putting systems into banks and training staff for the ESB, Eircom and the gardaí. ‘Heady times,’ he sighs and smiles. He married in the early eighties, building the house ‘Anam’ in Ballysmuttan to accommodate his wife and five sons, now all adults. The marriage lasted 20 years before ending in divorce.
In the meantime, Joe was headhunted to join ITEC Manufacturing, who designed and made alarms at a plant in Tallaght, where he was put in charge of research and development. He was caught up in a world of sensors and phone lines, coming up with ground-breaking products which were in demand from a host of UK customers.
Joe Mullally appeared to be mister corporate man, promoted to become European product manager when Dublin-based ITEC was bought out by Belgium-based Aritech, ensuring that everything they manufactured met European standards. The problem was he wanted to remain in Tallaght while his bosses wanted him in Belgium: ‘People at the top in big companies just want people to do what they are told – no rewards for being innovative or taking the initiative.’
Made redundant in the mid-1990s, he attempted to start his own manufacturing enterprise in Blessington with a colleague. The venture proved short-lived so the time had finally come for Joe Mullally, corporate man to make way for Joe Mullally, water diviner. He traces the interest in divining back to his mid-teens when local diviner James McGrath from Athdown was invited by his father to identify the best place to find water at the farmhouse in Ballysmuttan. James’s efforts with a couple of simple timber rods made an impression on the teenager: ‘I picked up the sticks after he left and discovered I could do it too.’
The simplest of simple equipment all but jumped out of Joe’s hands to indicate an underground stream. He maintained an awareness of the topic, an interest which he took a step further when he came across an address for the Irish Diviners Society in a book he found in the library in Kevin Street. He wrote to the secretary and was informed by return mail that the society was due to stage a meeting at a school in Clontarf.
Joe later rose to serve a term as chairman of a society which has grown just as the popularity of ‘new age’ topics has grown. Of divining itself, he remarks: ‘It’s a skill that anyone can learn, the same as driving a car. The degree of sensitivity to underground water varies but 80 to 90 per cent of people can do it.’
If there is an explanation for the phenomenon, perhaps it is that the strength of gravity varies where there is water flowing underfoot, but Joe is by no means dogmatic on the matter. Tradition dictates that the best rods for the job are hazel wood, but he believes that the signal is received by the muscles of hand and arm rather than the timber. Involvement in the Diviners’ Society with its guest speakers and conversations over cups of tea reminded him that his late grandmother had a reputation as someone who could staunch bleeding wounds. He remembers that as a boy at play, he used to make little houses for the fairies.
He realises without resentment that many people dismiss talk of angels, of fairy forts, of geopathic stress, of psychic powers, of healing hands, of tarot cards, as hocus pocus. But he has dedicated much of his energy over the past two decades to exploring such things, tapping into a wealth of rural traditions which stubbornly refuse to wilt away in the face of modern science.
He began by running divining classes and manning stands at body, mind and spirit shows in the Mansion House and ended by writing a book called ‘ The Healer’s Secret’ exploring spirit and the land.
Nowadays he divides his time since re-marrying between Wicklow and Kerry, home of his new wife Mary, working as a diviner, a healer of people and a land healer too. He’s an Irish shaman, a person in touch with the spirit world, as country people, he finds, expect a water diviner to know about the fairies.
‘I am a country insider,’ he ponders, ‘ because I am walking the land with divining rods and I grew up in the country.’ Science, which dominates the thinking of the Western world, relies on producing reliable, predictable, measurable outcomes. Joe Mullally explores alternatives where ‘what matters is the result’.
‘You don’t have to explain the process.’
I PICKED UP THE STICKS AFTER JAMES LEFT. AND THEN DISCOVERED THAT I COULD DO IT TOO ... IT’S A SKILL THAT ANYONE CAN LEARN