Some years ago here, I wrote about a visit to the “remote” (my description) Tipperary outpost of Rearcross. The column was mostly about the village’s pretty tin church which, as I said, looked like a little piece of New England dropped among the Slieve Felim Mountains.
In fact, it’s more a piece of Old England, or Wales anyway – a former miners’ church that became redundant there when the congregation moved on, and was bought, dismantled and shipped to Ireland for a new life.
I was reminded of all this by an email from Prof Gerry Boyle, who edits a Christmas magazine, Echoes of the Hills, for the parish, including Rearcross, and asked if he could reprint the piece. Of course, I said.
But reading it in retrospect, I might have been inclined to apologise for calling the place “remote” – a bad habit of Dublin journalists – on the grounds that nowhere is remote if you live there.
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Except that, in return, Gerry has shared the following letter from his archives. It was written by a garda newly stationed in Rearcross in 1940. And its portrait of human misery, worthy of Samuel Beckett or An Béal Bocht, is all the more bleak because it’s dated the day after midsummer.
Friday 22/6/40
My Dear Paddy,
This is xxx calling to you from the Wilderness ... Life in a remote country station is as hard as ever and so far lonelier than I have ever known it to be. This is my first opportunity to write. I am sitting at the kitchen and it is 7.30pm. The evening is dull outside with an overcast sky, a strong wind is blowing, whistling and whining through this old wreck of a Barracks.
Rain is threatening, we are to have torrents soon. There is no fire. The old kitchen is small and devoid of furniture, except a table. The low ceiling, dirty walls, bad floor and sacks nailed instead of panes in the lower part of the only little window – in the best room in the house – leaves it more uncomfortable than you can imagine.
The station is like a shipwreck among icebergs at the North Pole. The mountain storm blowing at the moment is like a hurricane ... I am [undecipherable] and alone ... and because you are a sincere friend I feel it is a relief to describe the hopelessness of my position now.
This is a godforsaken place Pat. There is no village I may say – only about a dozen little houses ... far from each other on the mountain roadside. One of them is a public house and there is a corrugated iron Chapel. The country around here is without trees, nothing but bare craggy mountain and rough marsh land so cheerless to look at ... Some patrols take us a distance of 24 miles along rough hilly, deserted mountain by day and night. Inspections of patrols by the Supt are frequent so this duty must be performed conscientiously. One would have even a better chance of “swinging [the lead]” in Dublin ...
Limerick town is only 20 miles distant but Rearcross or Rea as it is called locally is so hemmed away in the mountains that it would be almost inaccessible but for the one mountain road to Newport (the “Bremer Pass” to Rearcross) that has been steamrolled and made fit for motor vehicles in recent years. Because it is a [big] climb from Limerick to Rea there is little communication between the two places.
The garda goes on to quote Ernie O’Malley, who mentioned the place in his War of Independence memoir, On Another Man’s Wound: “The country near Rea was without trees; it was a lichened skull that dogs had once picked clean. The mountains were clouded all day and rain poured down; it was a dreary country.”
But O’Malley had been there only long enough to attack the barracks. Faced with a posting in the same building, the 1940 letter writer was despairing:
“Paddy, I find this a hell of a change. I am so worried that I have a good cry sometimes ... I think I have told you all and ... will finish now. I hope you are very well and that if ever you have to leave your present position that you may not be sent to a remote region like this.”
[ For the birds — Frank McNally on folklorist and freedom fighter Ernie O’MalleyOpens in new window ]
That poor garda’s cry for help sent me back to my own copy of On Another Man’s Wound. Where, among other things, I discovered that O’Malley was writing of Rearcross in July or August 1920; the summer weather hadn’t improved since, clearly. But, remote as the place may have seemed, it hadn’t been remote enough for the IRA’s purposes.
The raid on the barracks was a debacle. Despite a roadblock manned by Dan Breen and others, the IRA men were outgunned and O’Malley badly injured. He’d been expecting 15 policemen; in the event, there were 35. This had been known beforehand, he was told by a “north Tipperary man”, but the intelligence was withheld from the volunteers “for fear they wouldn’t attack”.
