Who were "The Men of the West"? Folk historiographies and the reconstruction of Democratic histories

Folklore, August, 2004 by Guy Beiner

The narratives about Robin Gill tell of his being pursued by soldiers who had the advantage of superior numbers and better equipment; despite the death of his comrades and his being wounded, Gill survived. These accounts are an example of how folklore provides a window into the experience of the local Irish rebel, as it was remembered by family and community. The mass slaughter of Irish rebels and hunting down of fugitives is acknowledged in all scholarly histories of the battle, yet this shattering experience is usually described by reference to crude estimated statistics. By restricting itself to standard archival sources, academic history cannot meaningfully qualify or personalise the effect of the defeat on the Irish participants, which is a characteristic feature of folk historiographies.

Robin Gill does not stand alone as a venerated hero of Ballinamuck. Other names of local rebels were remembered in folk historiographies of the battle. Foremost among them was probably Gunner James Magee, a Longford militiaman who changed sides by joining the rebel army at Castlebar and whose valour on the battlefield assumed legendary proportions in folklore. [10] When attempting an overview of the whole campaign of the Franco-Irish army, a survey of the corpus of folklore sources from around Connacht shows that every locality generated its own heroes who had participated in the Rebellion. Folk history-telling is essentially locally orientated. In the area of Knock, county Mayo, for example, '98 lore did not relate to the Ballinamuck heroes, but rather stories and songs tended to focus on celebrated local heroes, such as Captain Richard Jordan and his brother Patrick, Captain James O'Malley ("Seamus Ban"), Geoffrey Cunniffe and Thomas Flatley. The historiographical development of local folklore was also effected and conditioned by national and local events (Beiner 2000a), as in the case of the Knock heroes whose memory was reshaped and publicised by an initiative of a local committee to raise money for building a memorial in their honour (the fund-raising campaign began in the centenary year--1898--and resulted in the erection of a monument in 1904) (Hayes 1979, 316-7; Hayes Papers NLI MSS 13799 (7); IFC S vol. 108, 258-60). Collectively, folklore preserved the names of hundreds of rebels, each one a hero in his own right.

Who Were the Women of the West?

By and large, academic historiography neglected the study of women's involvement in the Rebellion of 1798 and, with the exception of Helen Concannon's pioneering work, has only recently begun researching this field in earnest (Concannon 1920; Keogh et al. 1998). Official historical narratives offer little information on the participation and involvement of women in the Connacht Rising, and therefore folklore sources relating to women in "The Year of the French" have a unique value. Any attempt to use folklore sources for researching the history of women in 1798 must take into account dominant male trends in the Irish folklore-collecting project. The leading members of the Commission, who presided over the fieldwork, were all men and no full-time female collectors were employed, although there were several part-time and specially assigned women collectors. Of the sources relevant to 1798 in the West in the Main Manuscript Collection of the Commission, over 85 per cent were written down by male collectors. In the Schools' Scheme, the local co-ordinators of folklore collecting were individual National School teachers, both male and female, who opted to participate in the project. It so happened that most of the teachers who supervised the documentation of relevant '98 material from the West were male. However, among the pupils who collected the relevant folklore sources, boys and girls were more or less equally represented.