Inishmore, Inishmaan, Inisheer
If, as it was reported dimly, the war in Ireland reached the Aran Islands, then there is no spot left untouched in that ancient kingdom and new free state. The story says the forces of the English Crown heard those windy western islets harboured men on the run, and went after them, patrolling the sea with boats and raiding the land. Two civilians are said to have been killed in the mimic battle, three wounded trying to escape, and seven arrested. But only the barest details ever got back to Dublin.
Like enough there were men on the run here and there among the island cottages. There have always been. Didn’t John Synge when he was on the islands hear of a Connaught man who killed his father with a blow of his spade because he was in a passion, and who fled to Inishmaan, where the natives kept him safe from the police for weeks till they could ship him off to America? The impulse to protect the criminal is universal in the Irish west. Chiefly this is because the people, “who are never criminals yet always capable of crime,” feel that a man would not do a wrong unless he were under the influence of an irresponsible passion. But partly, too, it is because “justice” is associated with the English. How much more than in Synge’s day was that the case in the day of this episode when “justice” was trying to level Ireland under its iron feet, and many a fine young man must have had to run to Inishmore or Inishmaan or Inisheer! Even in Synge’s day the most intelligent man on Inishmaan declared that the police had brought crime to Aran. The Congested Districts Board has done something to modernize Killeany, but elsewhere the island population changes very slowly.
A quaint story has come to light about the islands. They were being used, it says, by the Irish Republic as a place of internment for its prisoners, though there is, of course, no jail there. And it seems that when the forces of the Crown crossed Galway Bay from the mainland and offered these prisoners their freedom they rejected it completely, desiring rather to stay where they were than to go free to any other part of the British Isles whatever. I see the seed of legends in this story. Pat Dirane, the old story-teller who made Synge’s day delightful, is dead now; and Michael (really Martin McDonagh) has married and come to America. There will be others, however, to carry on the tradition among a people who still pass from island to island in rude curaghs of a model which has served primitive races since men first went to sea; who still tread the sands and invade the surfs of their islands in pampooties of raw cowskin which are never dry and which are placed in water at night to keep them soft for the next day; who make all the soil they have out of scanty treasures of clay spread out on stones and mixed with sand and seaweed. Old Mourteen on Inishmore told Synge about Diarmid, the strongest man on the earth since Samson, and believed in him. Pat Dirane told tales that were the island versions of Cymbeline and The Merchant of Venice, tales known elsewhere in the words of Boccaccio and of the Gesta Romanorum. Michael’s friend sang “rude and beautiful poetry... filled with the oldest passions of the world.” How then shall the story die of how men who were put away on Inisheer or Inishmaan or Inishmore found that prison sweeter than freedom and would not go back when the chance was offered them?