In September 1907 Stephen L Gwynn MP set out for a prolonged cycle-walkabout through Connemara. He was a very well known man in the Galway area, which he had represented for more than 12 years at Westminster as a member of the Irish Parliamentary Party. He was, as well, a literary man and a poet, who took genuine pleasure talking with, and meeting people. With fishing rods and knapsack, he set out on his bicycle on what turned out to be an eventful journey, along Cois Fhairrige to Clifden, through the mountains to Killary and Leenane, across Joyce Country to Lough na Fooey, then on to Ballinrobe and Tourmakeady, and home again along the coast road.*
Along the way Gwynn observed many of his constituents going about their daily lives. He sat in on the Congested District’s Board meeting at Leenane where he heard to his dismay that 3,260 families in the Oughterard Union struggled on land valued at less than £ 5. He saw for himself the ‘new wonder’ of Marconi who had already employed 200 men building a vast complex of dynamos and masts and were also engaged building houses for the engineers and developers.
He heard that there was considerable interest in the Royal Commission, still accepting submissions, and what it might say; and he listened to the age-old complaints of the restrictions caused by land ownership, and the poverty of the people, all of which found particular interest and sympathy with Gwynn, yet his moderate nationalism would soon be eclipsed by the growing popularity of Sinn Féin.**
But he was genuinely amazed to find a different kind of Ireland at Kilmilcin, or Muintir Eoin, in the heart of the Maam Valley. Although there was a national school there, English was the vernacular through which all subjects were taught. But this was O’Malley country, several families of the same name, all bright, intelligent people, totally fluent in Irish, and successful sheep-wool traders, had no faith in the local school which taught through English. Among themselves they employed their own teachers, and opened two Irish language ‘hedge’ schools, initially for their own family members. These schools were immensely successfull, producing several generations of medical doctors and teachers of medicine, and a love of learning that continues today.
But at the time it was revolutionary. After some years the local landlord, Lord Leitrim, demanded that the O’Malley schools be closed; but it was too late to quench the boys' thirst for learning. They simply turned and taught the youngest, among themselves, until the family was sufficiently endowed to get into any university of their choice.***
There was another man at Kilmilcin with an urgent message which needed to be understood, this time because lives depended on it, and that was the extraordinary Dr Séamus Ó Beirn. He was on a mission to explain in a language people knew since childhood, that tuberculosis (TB ) was killing generations of people, and even though there was no medical cure, people could be educated how to avoid, and how to deal with it, and if necessary, accept the drastic measures which sometimes had to be taken, such as burning a family’s home to the ground if the disease was generational. And to everyone’s astonishment, he burnt down their houses.
Poverty and disease
In the years before streptomycin and other anti-tubercular drugs, there was little that could be done for TB sufferers, but rest, good food (If available ), and clean fresh air. Hopefully all this would be provided later in specially designed sanatoria, but that was two decades away from Dr Ó Beirn’s efforts. The disease was particularly feared because it often struck several members of the same family. It was very contagious. Sometimes TB bacilli could lodge in a house for generations. If detected in a family, that family was shunned by the community, because people were afraid.
Sadly poverty and the disease were inextricably linked. In Dr Ó Beirn’s time there was no social welfare safety net. As a result it was not unusual for people to hide their symptoms, and knowingly remain at work to sustain incomes as long as possible, and to avoid community censure. TB could not be cured during the early decades of the last century, but it could be prevented.
Gwynn tells us that working as the dispensary doctor at Clonbur and Leenane, Co Galway, Ó Beirn initiated a pioneering health education scheme. He presented a series of lectures on the human body, and the origins of the disease which he delivered in Irish, illustrated with lantern slides. ‘And since the schoolhouse at Leenane was not at his disposal, he was obliged to begin here at Kilmilcin - riding his cycle a matter of seven hilly miles each way after a day’s work.
‘At first the attendance was sparse, but as the neighbours grasped what his project really meant, the house filled up…’
Dreadful scourge
The Tuam Herald, in February 1908, acknowledged the tremendous work that Dr Ó Beirn was doing. 'Who has not heard of Dr Ó Beirn and his efforts to stem the rising tide of that dreadful scourge, the White Plague along the western seaboard?…From the mouth of the Killary in Joyce country to Oughterard, and on to the islands of Gorumna and Lettermullen, he has delivered a course of Irish lectures on the dangers of tuberculosis, and on the most practical means of exterminating this dreadful scourge from the homes of the simple poor.
‘He is a plain simple dispensary doctor whose soul is aflame with Christian charity, and the love of his native tongue. He is Irish to the backbone, and in God’s good providence his lot is cast among an Irish speaking population. His heart is in his work and the work is two-fold: the extermination of tuberculosis from the homes of Connemara, and the revival of the Irish language.’
Dr Ó Beirn would later appeal to Conradh na Gaeilge, the successful promoter of Irish since the 1890s, for its help in bringing his lectures further afield, which would be taken up in Dublin where TB was rampant in the ramshackle tenements of the city, many of them occupied by native Irish speakers who had emigrated there from rural Ireland.
When asked to comment on his methods of TB education by the surgeons of St Vincent’s Hospital, Ó Beirn told them that he had succeeded in getting a house in the parish where he worked, burnt down. ‘It had killed out two families within my knowledge of it, and it was in the process of killing out a third’.
In a letter to Stephen Gwynn one the surgeons commented that this was a remarkable case. ‘Remarkable, not because of the house that killed out three families, but because it was burnt down’.
NEXT WEEK: More on Dr Séamus Ó Beirn, and how Conradh na Gaeilge helped spread the word.
NOTES: *His adventures and meetings along the way were published in A Holiday In Connemara, by Methuen and Co., 1909.
** Later Gwynn was one of five Irish Nationalist MPs who enlisted and served in the British army during World War I, the others being J L Esmonde, Willie Redmond, William Redmond and D D Sheehan , as well as former MP Tom Kettle .
Together with Kettle and William Redmond, Capt. Gwynn undertook a recruitment drive for the Connaught Rangers and other Irish divisions. While holding a meeting in Galway’s Town Hall, it ended in a riot following a blackout and incessant interruptions.
*** Gwynn immediately saw the value of teaching through the language children spoke in their homes, which in Connemara was Irish. Ridiculing the way children were being taught at the time, he writes that children were being ‘instructed only as parrots might be through the medium of English which they did not understand, a language they did not know, by a teacher who in many cases did not know a word of their own language…’
I am very grateful for the assistance of Aisling Mitchell, senior library assistant, Galway Co Libraries.
