Confessions of an Alien

The Carews have all gone from Lisronan and Glenview Manor is no more. The charred walls and outbuildings had to be demolished so that today not a stone rests upon a stone. When I was growing up, my father used to drive down to Maryborough (now re-named Portlaoise) to visit what he called ‘the lost land’. He was not bitter, just sad. As we sat under a tall oak tree gazing over the ground that was once Glenview Manor, he recited Psalm 137: By the waters of Babylon we sat down; there we wept when we remembered Zion. I could see the sadness in his eyes. The stately manor house was gone - the panelled halls, the great library, the spacious ballroom and the ornate banqueting hall all reduced to a pile of rubble. The ornamental gardens were no more, just a tangle of briars and nettles and a single magnolia tree in full bloom beyond the desolation. Soon, even the oak and pine trees would be cut down and sold. There would be no more boating on the lake, no more fishing in the Pot Holes, no more grouse shooting on the Sleeve Blooms, no more foxhunting, no more cricket on the green, no more Protestants on horses. The great national cleansing had begun. I knew that we were different, a different social class, known as the Anglo-Irish. We were always on the wrong side of history - on the British side and we were therefore aliens. We are now an endangered species. The ‘big houses’ that remained found it had to survive during the early years of Independence. Many of them changed hands. The pattern of changing ownership of the ‘big houses’ was repeated across Ireland. The old Irish had been dispossessed by shameless confiscations and plantations by foreigners and adventurers who became the landed gentry, retaining a strong affinity to Britain and the Established Church. They became in due course the Anglo-Irish, or in Brendan Behan’s phrase ‘Protestants on horses’. They lived in the ‘big houses’, right up to modern times. However, the cost of maintaining Palladian mansions and antique gardens became too burdensome and most of them had to be sold. They were frequently acquired by a religious order and converted into a boarding school or a house of formation. Then, in recent times, vocations to the religious life dried up and once again the ancient properties were sold and developed as elite hotels, golf clubs and wedding venues. Now, the whole nation is facing economic disaster and it is possible that the big houses, turned boarding colleges, turned hotels and county clubs may bite the dust and end up as prisons or mental asylums. One may recoil at the idea of the ‘big houses’ being reborn as luxury hotels but that was inevitable due to the cost of restoration and maintenance. At least the present owners have preserved buildings of great historical interest. We do not weep for the landed gentry who created and lived in those ‘big houses’ but for the loss of heritage. Within the stout walls of those country estates one can see a phase of the history of Ireland written in stone - a story that our history books tend to ignore. The owners were aliens and aliens do not belong. Their existence must be purged from our history books. Sic transit gloria mundi. (Thus passes the glory of the world.) Now, in my advancing years, I often ask myself: Who in Heaven's name am I? Am I of the Carews of Lisronan or was it all a dream? However, the Cromwellian plantation was no dream. Names are revelatory - Coote, Ireton, Jones, Carew, Ponsonby, Bayley, Skinner, Ludlow, Campion, Elliott, Deane – a very long list of land grabbers, disciples of God’s Avenger, Puritans to the marrow, utter aliens in Ireland. Did I really want to be associated with that lot? It was no good in my saying that most of the Cromwellians became enlightened Anglicans or that I was merely a distant cousin. Names do not lie. They announce that I too am one of them - an alien in my own land. The Normans who invaded Ireland in 1169 intermarried with the Irish and became more Irish than the Irish themselves; at least, that is what we were told in history lessons at school. All those anglicised French nobles - de Burgh, Butler, Barry, Devereux, Fitzgerald, were assimilated into the Irish nation. However, the Cromwellians remained aloof. Somehow, they remained aliens. I am a double alien in a sense - my father was a Carew and my mother was a Canning from Carlow. So there, I have made my genealogical confession. My parents were not Puritan in a Cromwellian sense. They were enlightened Puritans, who became members of the Church of Ireland. Most of our neighbours and friends were Catholics, or Huguenots (in Portarlington) and Quakers (in Mountmellick). There was no bigotry or animosity in our area. We were far removed from our bellicose ancestors, the Cromwellians, who went into battle singing psalms. They were jihadists. They waged a holy way on the infidel (i.e. Roman Catholics). They did so because they believed, quite wrongly of course, that Catholics were evil. They had strayed from the true path of the Bible. I often wonder what caused such blind hatred. Cromwell’s army did unspeakable things in the name of God. They murdered priests and friars and used churches to stable their horses. Why such wanton desecration? The Puritan regime proscribed the Catholic faith. It ushered in a reign of terror. Why did Cromwell and his deputies not follow the central tenet of all Christians - ‘Love they neighbour?’ They stole the land. That was really evil, especially in Ireland, where land is sacred. Why did they not heed the commandment ‘Thou shalt not steal’? One has to ask how these God-fearing men (there is no mention of women in their armies) acquired such a lust for blood. It is all beyond my comprehension. Possibly, their real motive was political. The Catholics of the Pale had formed a Confederate army and joined forces with the Royalists. They were the enemy. The Commonwealth was established to free England, Scotland and Ireland of Royalist tyranny, to bring about regime change. Cromwell came to Ireland as the sword of God, to scatter the heathen like chaff, to liberate the country from the yoke of Rome and to punish those who had in the past taken up arms to restore and defend the monarchy. However, the Cromwellian settlers mellowed over the years. By 1820, when Glenview Manor was built, the Carews had lost their Puritanism and become just Protestants, who lived their lives within the walls of the demesne, educated their offspring in Erasmus schools, Harrow School and Cambridge University. They were aliens but they were comfortable aliens. They knew that one day Ireland would be a Free State and they wanted an independent non-sectarian Ireland. The old Puritan ideal of total domination was put aside. The New Ireland was about to emerge. Of course, I am speaking only of events in the Republic. Many of the advocates of Home Rule and Irish independence were Anglo-Irish Protestants - Wolfe Tone, Robert Emmet, Charles Stuart Parnell and Jonathan Swift. It was Dean Swift who said: “Burn everything British except her coal.” My parents wanted Home Rule for Ireland as a prelude to full Independence. They felt that the old animosities needed some time to wither and that the New Ireland would evolve in due course when all Irish men of women, whatever their background, asserted their Irishness. However, their wish was not granted and the country ended up as a fractured nation. I suppose we are all, to some extent, victims of our history. It has left deep scars that may take a very long time to heal. I know I am scarred. I am an outsider in my homeland. I live in a state of perpetual alienation, but not hostility. I meet kind people everywhere I go. They do not see me as an alien. I am one of them. But deep down, I know I am different. I do not belong.