Sad skeletons hidden in our nation’s history
HALLOWEEN is a dark time of dastardly deeds and ghoulish goings on. Yet the undead are not nearly as lethal as the living, as violent scenes and random massacres around the world remind us. Though ghosts made a guest appearance during the Catalonian clashes, with some folk claiming to have seen the phantom of fascist dictator Franco scuttling around the blood-stained streets.
Proving that any season can be scary if behaviour norms turn brutal. As was the case in this country, when fearful acts of evil accompanied the birth of the republic. All of which burdened an already oppressed people.
“So much had gone on,” 88-year-old Jane, a Protestant born in a nearby town land, told her son-inlaw, Roger Buisson, in 1999. “Many people left because of the Famine early on, and then because of religious persecution as well, I guess. Then the landlords were taking everybody’s bit of land and making peasants of the people, and living on the fat of the land themselves. That was a bad time for everybody.”
But for some it got worse after “the uprising they had in 1916, and then another one in 1921, where they razed all the official buildings and the barracks, the law-abiding places, the law courts in Dublin”, Jane recalls. Add to that the economic fallout when “all the gentry’s homes that gave employment to everybody in the village — they burnt those down as well. So there were no work; people had to go”.
Jane was one of those who fled to England, which in her case was “a stepping stone” to a new life in Australia. For natives who did not support the new order, or who worshipped at the wrong altar, often experienced hostility that turned to horror for them in their homeland. “Law and order had gone,” Jane reflected. “If anyone said anything against them, there would always be someone to give them feedback and say so and so did such and such. They would take that man out at night and strip him and cover him with tar and feather him, then let him loose. Others they would shoot in the knees — kneecap them, as they call it — so they couldn’t walk.”
Enforced darkness provided convenient cover for these atrocities that were often committed at night. “We had curfew at that time, so an old black coat was put over the kitchen window. The Black and Tans were billeted by then in Woodstock, which was a Big House in Inistioge, right opposite our place but up on the hill.”
Jane recalled how “a house above us must have shown a light one night, because you heard this great crash. I was lying in bed, I remember, yelling ‘what’s that?’ and covering my head with the blanket”.
Jane’s father and brothers went out the next morning to see what damage had been done. They found a brass casing. The bullet hadn’t connected with the house above or Jane’s home. “But it could well have done. My father kept the casing in a cupboard.” Where it fitted snugly beside other sinister skeletons from our history.