If you see a group of tired-looking walkers heading westwards on the roads of Roscommon today, you might stop and give them a few bob. Their trek is in aid of a good cause: the Simon Community. But it is also an exercise in the social history of Connacht, because the walkers are following in the footsteps of the "Four Famous Flannerys,"writes Frank McNally
Chances are, like me, you had never heard of the Famous Flannerys until now. Indeed, their fame these days rests mainly with their descendants.
Fortunately, one of the trekkers - travel writer John Mulligan - is a grand-nephew of the brothers and has recorded what he can of their history. Following in the Footsteps of the Four Famous Flannerys is not just a catchy title for a walk. It's the name of a book he published earlier this year in aid of another good cause, the Aurelia Trust, which works for abandoned children in Eastern Europe.
To cut a long story short, the Flannerys left their home in southern Sligo in 1862 and, as poor emigrants did then, walked to Dublin (the fund-raisers are doing it in reverse). The youngest was 16, the eldest in his early 20s. None of them ever saw Sligo again. They took a ship to Liverpool, and later New Zealand, where they worked for a time on farms. Then they struck gold.
New Zealand was gripped by gold fever in the early 1860s. A series of discoveries in Otago tripled the population of the province in the space of a few months. But the Flannerys missed the rush. By the time they turned up, the promise of instant riches had evaporated. The best they could do was stake a claim to a part of the valley that other prospectors had abandoned.
They knew there was gold there. The problem, as their predecessors must have concluded, was a lack of water, vast amounts of which were needed to wash away the 100-feet-deep gravel deposits that lay on top. So the Flannerys took it upon themselves to bring the water in, via a 26-mile canal.
It was "a phenomenal undertaking", as Mulligan says. But it was supported financially by one Gilbert Sinclair, a banker to Otago's gold-diggers, who gambled on the Irishmen in more ways than one. In the mining towns, bets were struck on whether a claim would succeed or fail. It was futures trading, more or less. Sinclair doubled his money on the Flannerys with substantial wagers.
For all his speculation, the Englishman had an empathy with the miners he funded. At any rate, he provided an early example of that branch of philanthropy now known as "giving while living". As he neared death, the books recording his various loans were a potentially lucrative inheritance to relatives, who circled with interest. But one of Sinclair's last acts was to have the books burned. The debts burned with them.
The Flannerys, meanwhile, lived long enough to see their investment floated on the London Stock Exchange as the Undaunted Goldmining Company. Their grandnephew estimates that they uncovered $15 million worth of deposits in today's terms, though he doesn't know how much of this remained with the brothers. It was enough, at any rate, to buy tens of thousands of acres of farmland. The Flannerys had realised the Irish dream: "They bought the next valley over, basically."
Mulligan's book is not all about his ancestors. Part of it concerns another of his passions: the Royal Canal. A few years ago, he wrote an account of the Royal's southerly sister, the Grand, and had a planned a companion volume. When he realised that his granduncles had probably walked the canal route to Dublin back then, he rolled two projects into one.
The Royal Canal is a fascinating subject in its own right. It cost a fortune to build and, unlike the Flannerys' waterway, never came close to repaying the investment before its short heyday - barely 25 years - was ended by the railways. In fact, the Royal remains an expensive example of the limits of free-market competition.
It was created by a disgruntled director of the Grand Canal project - John Binns (unique in having a bridge on both canals named after him). And although he secured financial backing from the Duke of Leinster, this was a dubious privilege. The Duke insisted the canal should serve Maynooth, his ancestral seat - a costly diversion that nearly broke the company.
When it was finished in 1817, the Royal struggled to compete with the Grand. And its slow demise was already sealed in 1845, when the Midland Great Western Railway bought it out. Even so, the quality of the 200-year-old works - carried out when the concept of built-in obsolescence was unknown - can still excite engineers. And for walkers, the meandering Royal is a more interesting route than the strait-laced Grand.
Speaking of which, this might the time to admit that - from tomorrow - the fundraising walkers will no longer be following the Flannerys' footsteps. Having reached Sligo, Mulligan thought they might as well continue on to the west coast. A route that, inter alia, will take them through Charlestown in Mayo, where the late John Healy wrote a much less sanguine account of the west's emigrant experience.
Mulligan justifies the 60-mile extension of the Flannerys' odyssey by his love of walking around Ireland. In fact, it frustrates him that so many charities resort to exotic foreign treks as fund-raisers, when there are such good routes here. So he and his fellow walkers will carry on until they hit the Atlantic at Newport on Sunday evening. As John Healy himself would have said, no-one shouted stop.
Information about the walk is available at www.fourflannerys.com.