[The following article will appear in the March issue of Irish Political Review on paper]

THE FIRST 50 YEARS OF THE AUBANE COMMUNITY CENTRE.

Jack Lane

A story of a townland

The people of the townland of Aubane celebrated 50 years of  their  Community Centre last year and an account of it includes the following item:

It would be difficult to give an adequate account of the Community Centre’s activities over the past 50 years and it would be impossible to do full justice to the level of initiative, commitment, sheer hard work and enjoyment that was involved in these activities. 

Like many people I have had to ask myself where all this zeal and enthusiasm came from in a small townland such as Aubane. 

And  it only becomes understandable  when we  realise that this is a continuation of earlier  projects that were created by the local people. 

A school was built and opened over a 100 years ago due to local initiative. The land was gifted by a local landowner and labour was provided locally. 

Just about a century ago a Co-operative Creamery was built again by local initiative and again with the land and labour provided locally. These were big undertakings in the context of their time  and an expression of the strong community spirit  that existed. The Community Centre is the current expression of that spirit and the key to its success. 

It’s a  spirit  which transcends all political and social differences   which of course exist here as elsewhere. 

I think it is worth looking at what this  townland once looked like  in order to get some perspective on  how and why it has developed over the years. 

We are fortunate in being given a clue to this by having a vivid  description of how people lived here two centuries ago and what they and their living conditions were like.  This comes from a  very insightful and observant  German visitor, Victor A. Huber, in 1828. Like many visitors/tourists of the time he was going from Cork city to see the  lakes of Killarney. 

Most of such travellers  were from the gentry and came via the Butter Road but there is no record of them taking any interest in the local people. Huber was different. He travelled  from Cork via  Macroom and  came over Mauma and describes  the  valley landscape in front of him that:

 “broadened out in rolling landscape towards the north as far as the eye could see. At this point the area is quite densely strewn with farmers’ dwellings, which I would call cabins if this word did not conjure up the image of houses that, compared to these holes in the ground, would have to be styled palaces. 

The majority of them are literally hollowed out of the remaining walls or terraces of turf cuts and covered over from above with a roof of only grass or reeds. Only in very few cases did I notice a door or window, or even an aperture for smoke; in short, everything that I saw could be described at the very most as the first stage of a dwelling culture. 

In one of these boggy dugouts, whose interior was at the most ten feet long and about half as wide, there lived a family of no less than seven persons whose appearance, as can only be expected , corresponded in misery to that of their habituation. 

The earth roundabout is probably cultivable in part, but completely neglected, barren and wild. One would tend to call the area the Vale of Tears if the inhabitants were not so unconscious of, or indifferent to, their poverty, indeed blither and wittier than their fellow countrymen in more prosperous districts. 

It is hard to imagine that only a few miles from this populated wasteland there lie the world famous lakes whose beauty lures hundreds of travellers every year from far and near.” (Skizzen aus Irland, 1832) 

         It should be noted that “witty” then meant clever as well as quick witted. Hence those not so fortunate were called “half wits.” “Blithe”  means happy go lucky, cheerful or carefree. Clearly the people here  did not allow themselves to be overwhelmed by their environment. 

Over  the next two centuries they were able to “pull themselves up by their bootstraps.”  From this we can get some idea of their calibre. 

It is a great example of what the people of  a  townland can achieve and  begs the question of what a townland is. 

Townlands are unique to Ireland, dating back to Gaelic Ireland and  the earliest  classification of land and areas. But they are much more than classifications of land. They identify and classify people according to their common  experience in an area over centuries, even millennia.  

This is very real but also has an intangible element that is difficult to fully explain. That is why townlands are not understood by the urban world and that now includes urban  Ireland. 

I think the best description was given by the acclaimed political philosopher, Edmund  Burke, who learned about life nearby when  he spent about six  of his pre-teen years, for health reasons,   with his mother’s family in  Ballygriffin,  the Nano Nagle family. She was his maternal aunt. He attended the nearby O’Halloran  Hedge School in Glanworth  village where along with the usual classical subjects he learned  Irish which he retained all his life.

He has a famous analogy to  explain what makes “people tick” and gave  them their basic  knowledge about life and its values. He  explained that people are formed and depend for these things on their “little platoon” and he said what it meant was:

“To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love to our country and to mankind.”

I think that while it can describe various situations for  individual people it  describes a townland pretty  well and  if Burke was not referring directly to townlands  (though it’s possible he was) he got the essence of it.

Aubane and its Community Centre shows that townlands are alive and well and with the Centre’s plans for its future I am sure the best is yet to come!

Some Comments:

This early experience of Burke’s meant he became acutely aware of the fact that he encountered  the reality of two societies  coexisting but alien to each other – the native Gaelic, Catholic one and that of the Protestant Ascendancy  who sought to control the former which in that era took the form of the Penal Laws that deemed the other  society  not to  legally  exist. 

By the way,  a  great  Irish historical  novel or play  remains to be written featuring Burke, Nano Nagle, who was as French as she was Irish, and their farm labourer, the Gaelic poet, Eoghan Rua O’Súilleabháin. Eoghan was also  tutor to the Nagle family  and had to flee for his life after some extracurricular tutoring with one of the females in the family.

I am sure such a novel or play would be far more enlightening and satisfying than the trivial musings of a fictional Jewish character in Edwardian Dublin.

Though technically a member of the Ascendancy society, in it rather of it, Burke developed a venomous contempt for it when he saw it in action  describing it as: 

 “A machine of elaborate contrivance, as well fitted for the oppression, impoverishment, and degradation of a people, and the debasement, in them, of human nature itself as ever proceeded from the perverted ingenuity of man.” . 

 His major contribution to political thought subsequently was  his critiques of the English government’s  a priori,  dogmatic reasoning towards other societies such as  America and India and English supporters of  Jacobin dogmas about all societies, particularly France.

No doubt what he experienced in North Cork was a laboratory for his world views. He saw two societies interacting with each other to the detriment  of one by the other and he considered it his duty and life’s work to  seek to avoid that in bigger settings. 

But he was not successful.  Neither has he been adequately   acknowledged here for his trenchant views on one ghastly period of Irish history and the subliminal effect they had on English attitudes towards Ireland. One effect, after his death, was no doubt to encourage the English Government to abolish his hated  “elaborate machine” by the Act of Union. He would have seen that as a fresh start with Catholic Emancipation included. 

But that was not to be as Emancipation was promised but denied for another 30 years and then grudgingly granted under mass pressure. 

As a result we, as well as his contemporaries, have been denied some more  great,  searing eloquence about another infamous episode in Irish history delivered  in his noted Irish accent and perhaps  with a North Cork lilt for especial  effect.

Jack Lane