When I was a child in the suburban Dublin of the early 1970s my father used to take us on holiday to Connemara. It was a place we loved, a wonderland of delights. Summer would arrive and the talk would turn quickly to the matter of when we would make for the west. The preparations, the small ceremonies of the annual pilgrimage, simply became part of our lives.
The Atlantic was the essence of Connemara's allure. At home in Dún Laoghaire we lived near the coast, but our local version, for all its charms, seemed tame. We had ice-cream vans, public baths, a forlorn chipper - Gene Vincent on the jukebox and the Child of Prague on the wall. Old ladies shuffled the pier, arm-in-arm, tutting at the greasers and their bell-bottomed motts. But it wasn't the real thing. It was Brighton with nuns. You could walk from Glasthule all the way to Booterstown and scarcely set eyes on a grain of sand.
You didn't see the waves roar in from the horizon, those thunderous breakers born off Newfoundland, or feel the shocking tang of spray in your mouth. In Dublin we had the sea. In Connemara they had the ocean. We were the Wombles. They were the Stones.
If Connemara's history is a ghost story, its phantoms are sea-ghosts. Grace O'Malley of Inishbofin, the pirate queen. The smugglers who took refuge in the coves of Ballynahinch, safe from the muskets of prowling revenue agents. The Princess of Connemara, Mary Martin, who voyaged to New York only to die in a cheap hotel. Cartography includes such phantoms, and many more. The gazetteer accompanying Tim Robinson's magnificent map of Connemara is both masterpiece of linguistic archaeology and roll-call of the departed. Scailp Johnny: the grotto that hid an outlaw from the yeomanry in 1798. Lochán na hOinsí: The foolish woman's lake. Meall an tSaighdiúra: the hummock of the soldier; landscape's commemoration of an unnamed English trooper who died after profaning a holy well. This coastline seemed to me then, as it seems to me still, a storybook of spectres waiting to be opened.
Yet for all its familiarity, Connemara felt exotic. I remember sitting in the back of my father's Hillman Hunter on those wearisome, annual westward drives, reading the place-names of coastal Connemara from his fraying AA roadmap. Bunnahown, Rosroe, Kilkerrin, Tawnaghbaun, Aillenacally, Aillebrack, Curhownagh, Ardnagreevagh. If you said them aloud the result was poetry. What would these havens be like when we saw them again? Could they possibly be as beautiful as their mellifluous names? For how ethereal that vowelly geography sounded, how thrilling its music on a Dublin tongue. To speak it you had to use every muscle in your mouth. It gave you the feeling that language was love.
It was on one of those blissful childhood jaunts into Connemara that we stopped at the village of Letterfrack. I can remember the moment I first set foot in the place, with my father, Seán, in about 1972. Three decades have passed, but whenever I drive through Letterfrack now, I am struck once again by its strange appeal. It's a neat little hamlet, not far from the coast, with thatched cottages, cosy pubs; chocolate-box pretty. An aroma of the sea drifts in on the air, commingling with that Connemara redolence of peat-smoke and rain. Turf stacks are silhouetted on the stony hillsides. Trawlers churn the whitecaps off nearby White Strand.
Not far from the town is the manor where Yeats honeymooned. Close-by is the ruined grave of one Commander Blake, a 19th century landlord despised by his tenants. (He appears in my novel Star of the Sea.) His tomb, in the weedy rubble of a long deserted Protestant chapel, overlooks a seaside campsite on the outskirts of Renvyle. Nearby you can stroll on a shingled beach. Sea-wrack, gull-call, Atlantic breezes - the eerie loveliness of certain Irish coastal places. There is a sense of continuities, of things unchanged for generations. But all this is illusory, the wishful thinking of the interloper. Modernity has indeed touched Letterfrack. Father Ted might be playing on the TV in the bar. The guesthouses offer en suite bathrooms, as well as turf fires.
We tourists take pleasure in the emptiness of Connemara, its remorselessly jagged coastland, its broken-down piers. We don't think of unemployment, emigration, rural poverty. For centuries, the fantasies of outsiders have been projected onto this place. It has been Connemara's burden to be regarded as a repository of authenticity, and it struggles, still, to be what we want. Our feet crunch its beaches; our lenses try to capture its unfathomable atmosphere, as much as our adjectives make the same attempt. An army of others have tried before us. The arc leads from John Synge all the way to John Hinde, from The Quiet Man to The Beauty Queen of Leenane. How photogenic those ruined cabins and deserted coastal villages. How marvellously lunar, all that Becketty barrenness.
Yet this coastline's elusiveness approaches the surreal. A currach rots on a shale-strewn strand, its crossbeams bleaching like the ribcage of a whale. A tumbledown pigsty is choked by wild rhododendrons. A rusting Edwardian bathtub on a bogside boreen is pressed into duty as water trough. From Hyde to Pearse, from Heinrich Böll to Richard Murphy, artists have encountered on the bleak western shores the banshee-muse that translates silence into beautiful image. But the making of images is an ambiguous enterprise. There are reasons why such a silence exists.
You would not think, as you amble the impossibly lovely waterfront at Cashel, that you might be walking over a burial ground. As you are stilled by the twilight descending on Dog's Bay, as you stroll the tidy fishing village laid out by Nimmo at Roundstone, it does not feel that you are moving through a space that was once a disaster zone: the Ground Zero, perhaps, of Victorian Europe. These beaches, those pebbled strands, saw astonishing suffering, as famine devastated the region in the 1840s. There was heroism, too; there was extraordinary courage. But this sea-land so hallowed by poet and tourist board alike witnessed tragedy so immense that many of those who observed it would be traumatised for ever by the sight. The graves can still be discerned around the shorelands of Connemara: unmarked mounds, like middens for rubbish.
Like the age we inhabit now, this was an era of technological advances, of artistic brilliance and scientific progress. Great novels were written; revolutions shook Europe; democracy budded; new engines were invented. But little of that trickled down to the starving of Connemara's coastline, as little enough of it matters now to the starving of Africa. The world was organised as a pyramid of power, with the affluent at the summit and the destitute bearing their weight. Then, as now, free market politicians treated the poor to oratorical whip-cracks: inequality was regarded as economically progressive. Those who worked the hardest possessed the least wealth. Those who did nothing at all owned the most. With the wretched at the bottom were the nobodies of this shoreline: white Ethiopians of the Dickensian world. Many of the powerful regarded them as subhuman.
Tens of thousands died. Entire families, sometimes. Within a few years the amazingly populous seaboard on which they lived was decimated. A great many more would also have perished, but for the efforts of two gentle English people. James and Mary Ellis were a prosperous Quaker couple from the industrial city of Bradford. Despite having no apparent connection with Connemara, they moved from Yorkshire to what is now Letterfrack in 1849. There they paid for the building of homes and roads, a school, a store, a doctor's dispensary. They employed the locals fairly and treated them with dignity. "A finer race of people no one could wish to see," wrote Mary. "Gentle, polite and easily made happy."
The story of this coastland is incomplete without the Ellises, whose compassion altered its moral history as well as its geography. They believed that the world need not be a slum; that we live in a society, not just an economy; that every human life is unutterably precious. The imagery of holocaust is sometimes used about the Irish famine. If that's what it was, James and Mary Ellis are our Schindlers. The coastline they loved commands authentic memory. It is there to be read, and it has much to say.
On Cashel Hill, Connemara, there is a famine-era cemetery that is still in use today. Caiseal Ard looks down on a rock-strewn inlet that opens, dramatically, into the Atlantic. It is one of those loftily lonesome places that the folk music shared by Ireland and Appalachia somehow translates into sound. Oceanic windstorms buffet Cashel Hill; the trek up is dizzying and arduous. On the wintry afternoon I last made the climb, Christmas Eve 1999, a small stars-and-stripes pennant had been placed on a tombstone. It marked the grave of a young man of Connemara and Massachusetts, his surname a common one in this corner of Galway. He was 21 when he lost his life, very far from home. He should be alive today, dandling grandchildren, but that was not to be his emigrant's fate.
Locals recall that on the icy morning when his family and comrades came to bury him, the jeep that bore his casket could not manage the steepness of Cashel Hill. So he was carried up the mountain to his final resting place, up the rocks to Caiseal Ard, as his ancestors had been. He lies among those others whose names are long forgotten, who were abandoned in the latitudes of hunger.
His grave, and the desolate coastline that enspaces it, is a powerful reminder of many things: among them, the awful cost demanded by patriotism, the wrongs we have done to one another for love of country, the dreadful waste that is racism, all those unaccepted friendships, but the hope that the world can yet be a fairer place. If the text of Connemara's coastline includes any moral, it is a potent forewarning about hatred and bigotry. The sea divides. It also connects. Much depends on how you regard it. All who have found peace on this silent shore have something to learn from the stony words that commemorate him. In some sense they remember not only his own short life, but all the nameless who lie around him - wherever in the coastland of Connemara they lie, and in other Connemaras, across other seas.
"L/CPL Peter Mary Nee: United States Marine Corps Born August 15, 1947 Died March 31, 1969 Vietnam."
© Joseph O'Connor
Star of the Sea, Joseph O'Connor's novel of famine-era Connemara, is published in paperback by Vintage (€8.99). It was recently named a Novel of the Year by the American Library Association