Patrick J. Mahoney, or Pádraig Fhia Ó Mathúna, is an awardwinning historian and writer. He is currently a Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Galway. Between 2021 and 2023, he was a researcher on the Harvard-based Fionn Folklore Database. A former Fulbright scholar, his publications include a critical volume of the translated works of Irish language writer Eoin Ua Cathail, entitled Recovering an Irish Voice from the American Frontier (2021).
Cormac K.H. O’Malley was born in Ireland, moved to the USA in 1957, studied history at Harvard and law at Columbia, and enjoyed a successful thirty-year international legal career. In retirement, he has pursued research on modern Irish history and the legacy of his parents, Ernie O’Malley and artist Helen Hooker O’Malley. He has lectured broadly on his family legacy and Irish history.
This first volume of tales and legends from Clew Bay is dedicated to Sean Cadden of Westport, Michael Mulchrone of Castlebar and Peter Mullowney of Newport. Without their insight, dedication, knowledge of local lore, surnames, townlands, Mayo geography and history, this work would never have been put in publishable form.
Preface
Readers of this remarkable collection of oral literature will perhaps be surprised that it should come from the pen of a revolutionary and chronicler of Ireland’s War of Independence struggles. But Ernie O’Malley was imbued from his childhood with the wonders of storytelling; and it stirred his imagination and left him alert in his adulthood to oral tradition. He was by instinct a folklore collector – even during the difficult revolutionary years he was fascinated by local tales and legends – and on his return to Ireland in the 1930s he would have been receptive to the scholarly interest of the time in recording and studying folklore. In Dublin, he and his wife, Helen, mixed with artists and intellectuals, among them Séamus Ó Duilearga, Director of the Irish Folklore Commission, founded in 1935. His work in the Clew Bay region (1939–42) adds significantly to the folklore footprint of the county, and deepens our understanding of the impact of linguistic change on the oral tradition. This collection complements the documentation by several fine collectors working in the Irish language in the Mayo–Galway area
at the time, including Pádraig Ó Moghráin in Achill, Ciarán Bairéad in Louisburgh and Brian Mac Lochlainn in Clifden.
Compelling and highly realistic, the legends told in The Enchanted Bay are often closely linked to people and places. They are especially rich in terms of supernatural lore – an area of oral tradition in which O’Malley took an active interest. The abundance of fairy legends testifies to the strength of this aspect of folk belief at that time. In many of the tales, fairies play a key role, indicating their perceived mastery over land and sea. Often they are depicted competing with or threatening fishermen, but there are profitable exchanges in these encounters too – the gift of fish to a fairy boat crew is rewarded with special knowledge of where to fish, and there are striking accounts of phantom boats appearing to warn fishermen of a pending storm. Maritime lore is an exceptionally rich thread running through the book. Some accounts are historical in nature, recalling drownings and shipwrecks, including poignant stories of drowned fishermen returning from the dead to warn or assist boatmen in difficulty.
Historical events and figures also feature strongly, including local traditions of landlords such as Major Bingham and Sir Samuel O’Malley, who are often depicted against the backdrop of evictions and land agitation. Accounts of uprisings – ranging from Cromwell’s time to 1798, and the later Fenian uprisings – sit alongside stories of the exploits of remarkable men and women, outlaws and faction fights.
A number of the stories are ‘memorates’, first-hand accounts of supernatural experiences – a genre of folk legend that is comparatively rare in the folklore record. There are also migratory legends. These are stylised narratives with distinctive plots, adapted to local settings. They include the international legend Midwife to
the Fairies (‘The Midwife and the Fairy Child’ on page 24 in which a human midwife is called to deliver a fairy child, and The MilkStealing Hare (‘The Hare That Became an Old Woman’, page 27), in which a witch takes the form of a hare in order to suck a farmer’s cow dry.
The bulk of the stories focus on local tradition and belief but O’Malley also recorded stories with more universal appeal – the highly amusing cycle of tales dealing with the Gobán Saor, the master builder of Irish mythology, and very touching religious tales and legends. This latter genre of oral literature was once extremely popular in Ireland, dealing as it does with important social concepts such as justice, equality and morality.
Ernie O’Malley’s contribution to Irish folklore studies is significant. It serves as a fascinating and instructive backdrop to his later monumental task of recording the testimonies of his former military comrades. The skills and methods honed in the course of his folklore collecting, and his grasp and appreciation of memory and the inherent processes of oral transmission, were to stand him in good stead for the ambitious recording project he later undertook.
Dr Críostóir Mac Cárthaigh
Reflections on Ernie O’Malley and His Tales x
My father, Ernie O’Malley, once had his future told by an old fortune teller who informed him that fighting and trouble lay ahead. Her prediction came true, whether he believed it or not at the time. She may have just being telling a tall tale, but there’s no denying the profound impact storytelling had on my father from an early age. His first memoir, On Another Man’s Wound, begins with the words: ‘Our nurse, Nannie, told my eldest brother and me stories and legends. Her stories began: “Once upon a time and a very good time it was,” and ended with, “They put on the kettle and made tay, and if they weren’t happy that you may.”’1 His Nannie, Mary Ann Jordan, was from outside Castlebar, and knew the tales and legends from the countryside. She told them to the children of my staid, conservative, strict, Catholic grandparents, Luke and Marion Malley, who lived on the main street in Castlebar.
These extraordinary tales included legends of the ancient kings of Ireland, the mighty Fionn mac Cumhaill, Ferdia of Connaught
who was killed by Cúchulainn of Ulster, the Tuatha Dé Danann and local Mayo proverbs. These legends ignited a lifelong passion, and my father later developed a remarkable understanding not only of Mayo lore, but of Icelandic and Norwegian tales, and of legends in general. As he travelled around Ireland as an Irish Republican Army (IRA) organiser, he would hear of the local legends – the Black Pig’s Dyke in Strokestown2 – or have rural experiences in Dungloe, County Donegal that scared even him.3
In the spring of 1919 he was out on Inis Óir organising an IRA company. When it came his turn to tell a tale, he told them of ‘Till Eulenspiegel, some of Hakluyt’s sea tales, Bricriu’s Feast and the Story of Burnt Njal … and the story of Mac Datho’s Boar’.4
While in prison for twenty months during the Irish Civil War, he read extensively, including European myths and legends. When he met the Irish folklorist, Ella Young, in New Mexico in 1929, they spoke of the need to preserve Irish folklore and ballads.5 While he was in New Mexico and Mexico (in 1931), he visited several pueblos and was interested in the indigenous arts, cultures and tales, and recorded in his diaries what he heard and saw. He knew the American folklorist, Frances Toor, who wrote extensively on Mexican customs, myths and folkways. His library contains over twenty-five books on folklore, including Mexican and British folklore journals and Kuno Meyer’s books.
In the US in 1934, after completing his two memoirs, he began writing short fictional vignettes about military incidents during the War of Independence and Civil War that also included Irish folk stories such as ‘Maire Cain’, ‘Michael Óg O’Malley’, and ‘Sheila, Sean and the Fairies’ (unpublished).6
When he married my American mother, the artist Helen Hooker, in 1935, they returned to Dublin, where he settled back
into the life of an Irish medical student. On their weekends and in the summers, they started a four-year odyssey to photograph and record many of Ireland’s major and minor archaeological sites as well as the early and medieval ruined monasteries. My mother was captivated by the Irish countryside, with its bogs, mountains, cottages and rural life and customs in general. She captured these elements in her sensitive images.
During this time, he met folklorist, James Delargy (Séamus Ó Duilearga). His growing interest in the traditional expression of Ireland’s culture is evident in his notebooks, in particular. His extensive notes on Irish literature, folklore, poetry, songs and ballads (New York Public Library, 1928–34 and National Library of Ireland, 1936–38).7 On Another Man’s Wound includes thirty-two Irish songs and ballads collected during this time.
When my parents moved to Louisburgh, County Mayo in 1938, and later settled in their permanent home in Burrishoole Lodge, near Newport, they continued their photographic project. My mother’s photos complement the collection of stories, offering another medium for capturing the social history of the time and place. Her striking photos feature the beauty of Clew Bay’s landscape and give an additional layer of insight into the local physical and cultural environment in which she found herself living. My father had a passion for sailing solo in Clew Bay, and he got to know some of the Clew Bay islanders, such as Patrick Quinn, Inishcottle, and Josie Gill, Islandmore, who often visited at Burrishoole Lodge. His notebooks (summer 1939) contain numerous notes on Clew Bay islands: their stories and local anecdotes, animals, tides, fishing, types of fish, fair days and patterns.8
In the winter of 1940 he began writing down tales he heard from locals on the islands and mainland, and he continued in early
1942. No doubt, one informant recommended another, and he took down over 330 tales from at least nineteen men and two women. He recorded these stories in a notebook late at night, sitting by a fireplace, probably with a glass in his hand. His handwriting was extremely poor, almost illegible. Some tales were rewritten a little while later. There were many errors in his writing because he wrote what he heard phonetically and did not know the Irish language well nor know the spellings of local family names, townlands or islands. The sad thing is that he never revisited his notebooks to prepare them for publication. They lay untouched for forty years, until I discovered one of them in 1981.
When he returned to live part-time in Dublin in 1944, he switched his focus from folk tales to writing articles as an art critic. In 1947 he became the books editor for the Bell and immersed himself in the Dublin literary world. During this time, he commenced another project, interviewing 450 comrades from the War of Independence and Civil War. This work included handwritten ballads and songs. In many ways, these military interviews were a continuation of his earlier folk tale project. No doubt, for him, all these elements represented the background to the centuries of struggle for Irish independence. During this literary period, he started to write fiction again.
I had no idea my father was interested in folk tales until I started to edit these tales he had collected before I was born. But I recognised two of them, ‘The Flax Threshers Under the Sea’ (see p. 50) and ‘The Man Who Caught the Mermaid’ (see p. 52), which means he probably told them to me. The latter one inspired his short story ‘The Dark Girl’, as yet unpublished.9
Recapturing old Ireland and expressing the ancient spirit of the Irish culture through stories were part of my father’s lifelong
ambition. I hope that creating this collection of stories in The Enchanted Bay: Tales and Legends from Ernie O’Malley’s Irish Folklore Collection goes some way towards realising his ambition and capturing this ancient spirit.
Cormac K.H. O’Malley
Mermaid, Clonfert Cathedral, Co. Galway, 1939.