The Rev Edward Nangle would not have approved: his 19th-century church on Achill is described today as ecumenical. Nangle belonged to the evangelical wing of the Church of Ireland. The plaque in St Thomas's Church, Dugort, records that from 1834 he devoted his life to the welfare of the people. Memorial plaques rarely tell the full story. The main aim of his Achill Mission was to wean the poor from popery, writes Brendan O'Cathaoir.
Nangle, who was born near Athboy, Co Meath into a Catholic family background, combined the zeal of a convert with the energy of an entrepreneur. His Achill colony included churches, schools, a hospital, orphanage, dispensary, post office and a mission press - which printed William Neilson's Introduction to the Irish Language in 1845.
Asenath Nicholson, an American visitor who castigated hypocrisy wherever she found it, contrasted the comfortable lives of the missionaries with the desperate poverty of the islanders. Nangle feared she was a social as well as a religious revolutionary. He railed against her in his Achill Missionary Herald for creating a spirit of "discontent among the lower orders, making them see their superiors as unfeeling oppressors".
Divine visitation
Nangle's proselytising activities continued throughout the Famine. He believed the potato blight was a divine visitation for doctrinal and moral errors. The conservative Castlebar Constitution said his fundamentalist attitudes were "a provocation to the people". In 1847 he urged them to have done with "Romish mummery", the "cursed wafer made in the priest's saucepan" and "cease to trust in the Virgin Mary, in saints or angels or Masses".
While most Established Church clergy were embarrassed by his sectarianism, the ultra-Protestant world lionised "The Apostle of Achill". Although Nangle denied the charge of souperism, the Tablet asserted that "nothing is given of all the money which comes from England and elsewhere for the poor of Achill except what is given in exchange for consciences".
In 1849, when the fortunes of the colony were at their height, Bishop Thomas Plunket confirmed 400 converts. In his book Rebel Hearts, Kevin Toolis relates that his great-grandfather - known subsequently as Pádraig an Phaidrín - was among 1,000 island schoolchildren saved from starvation by the Protestant missionaries. The sobriquet, "Pat the Rosary", speaks volumes, however for the genuineness of those conversions.
By 1851 Nangle owned two-thirds of the island. The population had declined from 6,392 in 1841, to 4,950 a decade later. Prof Desmond Bowen concluded in Souperism: Myth or Reality that zealots such as Nangle represented cultural as well as religious imperialism.
In Dugort churchyard there are monuments to a scripture reader, a "faithful and trusted servant", to coastguards, and to two British seamen found in 1940 and "known unto God".
In her epic The Great Hunger, Cecil Woodham-Smith saw Irish neutrality during the second World War as retribution for the Famine. Along the west coast, in Mayo especially, are a number of graves of naval personnel, representatives of many hundreds drowned because Irish ports were not open to British ships.
Crumbling friary
Archbishop John MacHale, who was almost as pugnacious as Nangle, sent a Franciscan mission to counter his influence. The crumbling friary is now a sheepfold. It sounds like a commentary on the Catholic Church in Ireland today. On the other hand, new life was springing from a tree in the abandoned orchard, while it is planned to build a naíonraí Gaeilge (kindergarten) and other facilities on the Caiseal site.
Achill's deserted village - comprising the ruins of two pre-Famine clachans - is a monument to the depopulation of the west. The lazy-beds engraved on the landscape remind one of the mass graves in Grosse Île, Quebec, on the other side of the Atlantic. I may have visited the graves in Grosse Île of Achill villagers who joined the panic-driven exodus in 1847. During a fever epidemic which broke out on the quarantine island in that year, at least 5,424 emigrants, fleeing famine and pestilence in Ireland, found in North America but a grave.
Kildownet cemetery contains victims of the Great Hunger and other calamities, such as the Kirkintillock bothy fire. This churchyard, dating from a 7th-century foundation by St Damhnait, was particularly hallowed ground. Coffins were carried over the mountains from Keel: resting platforms can still be seen, together with a stone confessional chair, where a priest sat facing Croagh Patrick across Clew Bay.
Heinrich Böll (1917-85), winner of the Nobel Prize for his contribution "to the renewal of German literature", was one of many writers attracted to Achill (Peadar O'Donnell wrote his fifth novel, On the Edge of the Stream, there). Böll built a cottage on the island. Through the munificence of the Heinrich Böll Committee, Mayo County Council and the Arts Council, this diary was written in that hermitage.
Böll served in an infantry unit during the Hitler war. (The Casualty explores the horror of that war from a German soldier's perspective.) Ernst Pawel of the New York Times compared this "stubborn Christian" to Solzhenitsyn. The secret of Böll's appeal was "integrity and a dash of genius; the utter, uncompromising integrity of the man coming through his work".
Affectionate picture
His Irish Journal is an affectionate picture of the country in the mid-1950s. He observed that Ireland held the world record for the ordination of priests, and exported "her most precious possession: her children".
In an epilogue added 13 years later, he noted the rapid pace of change in Irish society. He regretted that the contraceptive pill would reduce the number of children: "Nowhere in the world have I seen so many, such lovely and such natural children."
One day, when he was driving downhill, his car brakes failed. To avoid a "laughing horde of boys and girls", this brave old soldier crashed into the nearest wall.
Achill is becoming an island of holiday homes. It is to be hoped the maximum number of emigrants or their children will return, and that those fortunate enough to own a holiday home will develop some of Böll's appreciation of this enchanting island.