Fifty years after the Catholic boycott of Protestant businesses in Fethard-on-Sea, Co Wexford, sparked by controversy over a mixed marriage, one of the central figures talks to Tim Fanning.
Fifty years ago this week, the Rev Adrian Fisher was disrobing in the vestry of St Mogue's church in the Wexford village of Fethard-on-Sea, having just been invested as the new Church of Ireland rector, when he overheard the archdeacon whisper a warning to his bishop that "he feared there was going to be trouble in the parish".
The 33-year-old rector, who had grown up in counties Carlow and Kildare, had recently returned from Cyprus, where he had served with the British army as a chaplain during the Suez crisis. But any hopes of a gentle introduction to his new parish were to be dashed. Just four days later, the archdeacon's gloomy prediction was proved correct and Fisher became one of the central figures in a controversy that was a defining moment for the Church of Ireland in the South: the Fethard-on-Sea boycott.
The disappearance of a local woman, Sheila Cloney, with her two children, six-year-old Eileen and three-year-old Mary, was the catalyst. Sheila, a member of the Church of Ireland, was married to a Catholic farmer, Sean Cloney. The couple had known each other since childhood but had only started going out together when they met again in London, where Sheila was working, in the 1940s.
They were married in 1949, first in a registry office and later in an Augustinian church in Hammersmith. Under pressure from the priest who married them, Sheila agreed to the terms of the Ne Temerepapal decree, which stipulated that children of a mixed marriage be brought up as Catholics. Shortly afterwards, they returned home to Fethard.
By the spring of 1957, their elder child, Eileen, was due to start school, but Sean and Sheila still hadn't decided which school she would attend. The previous January, Fr Laurence Allen, the parish priest, had paid a visit to Sheila in the family home while Sean was out working on the farm. He told her that Eileen was going to the Catholic national school and there was nothing more to be said about the matter. As Eileen's first day at school approached, Sheila was under pressure to agree to the wishes of her husband and the local Catholic clergy. Though she had signed a written undertaking - under duress, it could be argued - to bring up the girls as Catholics, the mother-of-two felt a deep sense of injustice at having to abandon her own faith.
ON APRIL 27TH, while Sean was out working on the farm, Sheila left home for Belfast with the two children. A few days later, Desmond Boal, a Belfast barrister and later a co-founder of the DUP along with Dr Ian Paisley, arrived at the Cloney farm, informing Sean that he had seen Sheila and the girls and that she was prepared to return only if he agreed to sell the farm and emigrate. Cloney refused and began legal proceedings for the return of his children.
Two weeks later, as Rev Fisher was meeting his new parishioners, the Catholic curate, Fr William Stafford, announced a boycott of local Protestant businesses at Sunday Mass. According to Stafford, Sheila Cloney had been aided in her departure by local members of the Church of Ireland. The two girls - who, under the terms of the written pledge made by the missing woman, were to be brought up as Catholics - were being robbed of their faith, according to Fr Stafford.
The next day, Catholics in the village stopped going into the two Protestant-owned shops. By Wednesday, the Catholic teacher had walked out of the Protestant national school, citing the boycott. The elderly Protestant music teacher was left without pupils. Protestant farmers couldn't sell their produce, nor could they find Catholic labourers to help them work the land. Fr Stafford promised no let-up until Sheila Cloney returned with the children.
News of the boycott spread. The letters pages of the press were filled with angry denunciations and defences of the boycott. Unionist politicians in the North condemned religious intolerance in the South. The taoiseach of the day, Eamon de Valera, condemned the boycott as "ill-conceived, ill-considered and futile" in the Dáil. And Timemagazine described an addition to the English language - "fethardism: meaning to practise boycott along religious lines".
WHILE THE CATHOLICbishops swung their support behind the boycott, the Church of Ireland hierarchy refused to condemn its instigators, or supporters, or the Ne Temeredecree, instead deploring mixed marriages, press publicity and the actions of Sheila Cloney.
On June 7th, the Church of Ireland bishop of Ossory, Ferns and Leighlin, Dr John Percy Phair, told the press during a visit to Fethard: "Of course I deplore mixed marriages. I do all in my power to discourage them. I think that people should marry into their own faith and church. Then these things would not happen." He advised his parishioners "to be their natural selves, to be kindly and helpful and to go around with smiles on their faces".
AA Luce, Trinity College Dublin's professor of philosophy, wrote to Fisher urging similar restraint: "(1) Do nothing provocative; (2) Don't exaggerate the dangers; (3) Be careful what statements you give to the press; (4) Do not try to work up an agitation, unless things get worse; (5) Do what you can to improve relations locally, and respond to any olive branch."
Now 83, Fisher recalls his time in Fethard in the front room of his Georgian terraced house in Henley-on-Thames, about as far removed from the passions of rural Ireland in the 1950s as possible. His wife, Pan, who lived in Fethard after they were married in 1960, sits in the corner, occasionally prompting her husband. She's been watching the 1999 film made about the boycott, A Love Divided, and indignantly points out that her husband was in his 30s when the boycott broke out and was not the elderly clergyman depicted on screen.
Today, the clergyman laughs about being told not to "stir it up" and wonders how he could have made the situation worse when his parishioners were being intimidated, facing financial ruin and being attacked by the Catholic clergy and hierarchy in the press and from the pulpit. The open hostility they faced is encapsulated in Fisher's description of meeting with Fr Stafford in the curate's home.
"He said 'Sit down', rather peremptorily I thought," remembers Fisher. "I said 'Thank you'. I sat down and the next thing I was at the table sitting down and his fist came down with great force in front of my nose."
"He said, 'You are to go to Belfast and see a solicitor and bring back Mrs Cloney's children'. I had no idea whether she was in Belfast or in England, no clue. I said, 'I have no intention of going to the North of Ireland, to Belfast. My duty is here with my people, my parishioners. I've no intention, but thank you for your hospitality'."
There were those in the Church of Ireland who sympathised with Sheila Cloney's plight and the injustice of the Ne Temeredecree. "Conscience is a troublesome little instrument and I am not surprised that some people escape worrying by leaving theirs to the guidance of the bishops," a letter writer to The Irish Timesbegan, before adding that he would not be following the advice of the Church of Ireland hierarchy. "They say that certain people, having promised to do so, ought to abandon their children to indoctrination by what they believe to be false and baneful doctrines."
THE DEAN OFChrist Church Cathedral, EH Lewis-Crosby, wrote to Fisher enclosing a £3 cheque, "to assist your people in the evil boycott to which they are being subjected". He added: "I consider that you are holding the fort for us all. A defeat at Fethard will be a defeat for the church in the Republic."
Twenty years after the boycott, the writer Hubert Butler argued that "a great common gesture would have given us courage and confidence and arrested the sad slow Protestant decline. It would have reminded the northern Protestants that we belong together and that they belong to Ireland."
In the end, the Catholic Church called a halt when it recognised the boycott was causing adverse publicity, and Sheila and Sean Cloney were reconciled. But it was arguably the Church of Ireland that had suffered the worst damage.
As for Adrian and Pan Fisher, when they decided to leave Fethard in 1962, they found that no one was willing to have them and so the rector rejoined the British army.
"We tried other parishes and they all said, 'We don't want you because you might stir up or bring about a cursed boycott'," recalls Pan. "They were frightened of mutiny. They didn't want to be tainted."
Tim Fanning is a freelance journalist who is writing a book about the Fethard-on-Sea boycott. tadhgfanning@gmail.com