GOING HOME
Jerry Harkins
God does not create a longing or a hope without having a fulfilling reality ready for them. But our longing is our pledge, and blessed are the homesick, for they shall come home.
- Isak Dinesen
As it turned out, Moville was nothing like the town I had carried around in my imagination all these years. My father talked about it endlessly when I was a child but, of course, he had never been closer to it than Montauk Point. I’d read everything ever written about the town and seen hundreds of early pictures. I’ve known its gross anatomy since I was old enough to sing “Danny Boy,” the harbor, the main street, the country churchyards, the farms. I knew it was a small town—once called Bonafobble—on the West Bank of Lough Foyle about half way up the east side of the remote but storied Inishowen Peninsula, home to the O’Neills, the O’Dougherties, Saints Finian and Finnian, and to the famous school founded in the fifth century by the former who educated a whole choir of Irish saints and scholars. Home also to us. We were from Moville.
We are the Harkin (O’hearcáin) family, minor kings in Ireland, descendents of Saints Erc and Finnian. Moville looms large in our history and mythology. My grandfather, Big Hugh Jerome, left there under mysterious circumstances sometime in the 1870’s. His blood makes up only a quarter of my own which includes, in equal proportion, contributions from the counties Mayo, Roscommon and Cork. But if I am from anywhere—anywhere save Brooklyn—I am from Moville. This reality was imprinted on my self-awareness at an early age by a father who obviously thought it important. There are twenty-six of us second generation descendents of Hugh Jerome but I believe I am the only one with this sense of the home place.
I finally arrived in Moville three weeks before my seventy-first birthday. What I found was a prosperous, attractive town that looked, in some ways, like a neat American suburb. The houses are mostly newish, smaller than their counterparts in Westport or Yorktown Heights but clean, modern, well maintained and attractively landscaped. They sit in small developmentally related clusters. There are a few small coops repurposed from old forts and factories. There is still a commercial fishing fleet but it has moved to the satellite town of Greencastle. The dock from which so many emigrants left after the famine is still there although now used mostly for laying up slightly derelict work boats.
The district surrounding the town proper contains two “parishes” and fifty-five “townlands” or neighborhoods and, until recently, was smaller than before the famine. Both town and district are much larger than I have always imagined. All those new houses are on land that used to be small farms, not nearly as small as the pathetic tenant holdings of Mayo or Galway, but no larger than necessary to provide food and wool for a large family and barter for the few things you did not make yourself. Now, ten years after the Good Friday Agreement, many people commute to work across the border in Derry. There is prosperity even in a recession year.
The Moville of my heart is very different. It is a place where for generations things kept happening whose effects rippled out and came to rest against me. I will never know what they were or whether they were even noticed by those to whom they happened. Who knows which turn in the road changed everything utterly? But one of them caused Big Hugh to migrate to Brooklyn where he met Ellen Howard lately of County Cork. As Francis Thompson taught us, “Thou canst not stir a flower / Without troubling of a star.”
In 1837, the townships were home to 10,687 souls It was a remote, windswept landscape with an economy based on fishing and shipping. Almost every family farmed. They were culturally isolated but cultured nonetheless. The tradition of educating their children pre-dated Christianity and, in the early part of the nineteenth century there were a half dozen schools. After the Great Hunger, there were no schools, very few priests and no form of representative government at any level. Still, almost everybody could read and write English. Except for praying and singing, they spoke no Irish. The music of Inishowen, however, was noticeably different from the rest of Ireland. It consisted of three or four unique and antique Celtic styles whose scales contain bent notes and microtones not unlike those of the Delta blues. These derive from the most ancient of instruments and, until the advent of the electric guitar, were most easily realized on modern fiddles. Not surprisingly, Inishowen has given us some of the greatest fiddlers and fiddle music. The men of old included immortals like Neilly Boyle, Francie Byrne, Con Cassidy, Frank Cassidy, and James Byrne. Still playing are such notables as Vincent Campbell, John Gallagher, Paddy Glackin, Danny O'Donnell, and Tommy Peoples. Dozens of internationally known singers have come from Donegal including, currently, Enya and the two bands Clannad and Altan. Oh, yes, the music. Even as a child, I understood William Irwin Thompson’s claim that, “For a Celt, the world is made of music.”
The people I imagined were individualistic, enduring, phlegmatic. They were simultaneously generous, charming and welcoming. Most of all, they had a strong sense of the absurd and could laugh at their tormentors and themselves. Penal times persisted in Inishowen for decades after Dan O’Connell achieved emancipation in 1838 but the English had little presence and the Church of Ireland folks, as isolated as their neighbors, tended to be less sectarian than their Protestant, mostly Presbyterian brethren in the rest of Ulster. The isolation protected everyone against the Catholic bishops and their Roman masters who contributed so generously to British imperialism. Priests assigned to Donegal from Maynooth or reassigned from other places were being punished for some sin or other. Most easily accommodated themselves to the prevailing Pelagian heresy and those that resisted it were, often as not, dealt with. Some were merely ignored. Others were actively shunned. It is said that in 1873 one of the O’Neill boys actually killed a priest who was seen consorting with a local Cruelty Man and then killed the Cruelty Man himself by hanging him upside down and shooting him in the testicles.
One cannot imagine such a thing happening in modern Moville. Indeed, one cannot look at the town today and see the way it must have been 130 or 140 years ago when Big Hugh left. The thought that first comes to mind is the Old Fella wouldn’t recognize the place. But on reflection I realize he certainly would feel right at home. I know this because I felt the same way. For one thing, I had never been in a place where there were so many Harkinses—three and a half columns in the phone book, dozens of them in the old cemeteries. Main Street stores and offices: Harkin’s Gifts, Harkin Beauty, Harkin Solicitor and so forth. In all my life, I’d met only one other Harkins who was not closely related to me. But the connection was more than that. It seemed that the soul of the place resonated with my own soul.
Places, you know, do have souls. I have experienced a similar sense of presence standing in front of the Cathedral of Our Lady in Chartres, at the shrine of the North American Martyrs in Auriesville, New York, and in the American Cemetery at Colleville-sur-Mer, Normandy. In Moville, though, I had the immediate visceral sense that I belonged. It is not easy to explain.
Although I never thought about it, it was not surprising that the town would have changed dramatically between the 1870’s and the Good Friday Agreement. It did surprise me that it has changed even more since. Remote, beautiful, wind-swept Donegal is still a physical fact. Moville still rises from the shore of Lough Foyle. But remoteness no longer imposes isolation. The global village has arrived. The information revolution has linked the town to the emerging planetary uberculture. When the Troubles receded in 1999, citizens on both sides of the border understood that the political resolution might be temporary and even fragile but they decided to act as though it was now safe to ignore the politicians and other crazies. In 2002, I wrote, “If the Accord lasts 20 years, it may last 100 and that might be time enough to do some good.” Good in that sentence meant peaceful reunification which I believe will ultimately materialize even though I now realize that it is irrelevant to virtually everyone living there now. Back and forth they go every day and no one seems to remember where the checkpoints used to be. Not forgotten exactly, but like everything else in Ireland—the Flight of the Earls, the Wild Geese, the Penal Laws, the Transportation, the Ascendency, the Great Hunger, the War of Independence and the Civil War—the harsh history has done its work and acquired a soft edge. The Celtic Tiger brought prosperity and, with it, the business cycle. At the moment, Ireland is suffering from a terrible recession induced by the same forces that have wreaked havoc everywhere. Things are somewhat better in Derry due to a successful development plan undertaken in the late 1990’s and, as Derry goes, so go the communities of nearby Inishowen including Moville.
Things change but the soul of a place is cumulative. Nothing important is ever lost. A town retains its history and the repercussions—emotional and spiritual—of that history, its genius loci. In “The Gift Outright,” Robert Frost argues that people and their places belong naturally to each other. If we deny the connection, we diminish ourselves. “Something we were withholding made us weak / Until we found out that it was ourselves / We were withholding…” Standing for the first time in Market Square, I was not the tourist, the stranger, the other. I was part of Moville’s history, part of the story, a small offstage part and more important to me than to Moville, but still both a giver and a receiver.
