Maps

Emigration Map

Peadar O’Donnell’s first three novels Islanders (1928), Adrigoole (1929) and The Knife (1930) each represent  dimensions of the socio-cultural and natural landscapes of  Donegal.  Collectively their narratives chart a West to East trajectory, which can be mapped to trace  the  symbolic path  of emigration, experienced by the county’s natives during the early twentieth century.   The first site on the map above is Arranmore Island,  the setting for the novel  Islanders and the place where,  O’Donnell as a young school teacher just returned from St. Patrick’s Training College in Dublin, began to write.  His days as union organizer and commander of the East Donegal IRA, were ahead of him at this stage, But  O’Donnell’s experience of  witnessing his young island pupils emigrating,  began to radicalize him:

When I was in Arranmore, Gaelic-speaking children of Arranmore went across to the tatie fields of Scotland

Monkeys in the Superstructure (Galway: 1986) pp. 8-9.

The  Townland of Meenmore, in the Rosses of Donegal (the second site on the map above)  is   where O’Donnell was born in 1893 in a largely Catholic Gaelic speaking region on the coast of Dungloe Bay. The land was a part of the Marquis  of Conyngham’s estate. O’Donnell’s describes the small village looking out over Dungloe Bay:   

The tilled slope of a muscle of mountain, set sideways to the sea, houses are strung along it as corks along the back of a herring net.

‘Remembering Kitty’ The Bell Vol. 1 (1) 1940

The overwhelming metaphor of his second novel  Adrigoole, set in the foothills of Mount Errigal,  is the Bogland (the third site on the map above). The novel is  based upon the starvation of a family in 1927  along the  Cork and Kerry border, due State malfeasance and neighbourly neglect in the aftermath of the Irish Civil War. O’Donnell’s bog land is an ‘unkind environment,’ which  ‘subjugates’ its inhabitants: ‘But the rocks were sharp-edged, deep-rooted, broad-faced; the patches of soil were twisted around granite boulders; there were no ploughs, only spades; no horses, only donkeys.’  O’Donnell describes the desolation:

The grandfather looked at the empty, greyish bog [. . . ] Only low-lifed things could live in there; fat, bulbous, lazy frogs that come out of soft, lifeless, spongy spawn, and go out again in slimy, clammy death.

Adrigoole  (London-Toronto: Jonathan Cape Ltd.,1929) pp.  13; 27-28

O’Donnell’s Bogland metaphor conveys a counter-idyllic impression, laden with post-colonial implications and overtones: ‘a treacherous site of instability, the bog unleashes dark and recidivist forces [. . . ] Sodden grounds sustain a primeval past, operate as sites of agrarian and political strife, and seem to promise or, in some cases, threaten a future beyond colonial constraint.’ (1) In both Islanders  and  Adrigoole,  O’Donnell’s characters take up the path of emigration. The Plantation of Ulster in the sixteenth century and seventeenth pushed the native Gaels out of the fecund valleys and into the barren hills and mountains of the Western fringe of Ireland. The valleys in East Donegal by were settled by Scots farmers who were ‘planted’  by the English crown.  Hiring Fairs  (fourth site above) such as one held at  Strabane in County Tyrone  which O’Donnell  featured in Adrigoole, was a place ‘where Gaelic servants and the planter masters,’ met to‘ bargain year after year, since the native power was broken in Ulster.’  Within this quasi-feudal market, ‘the folk from the “back country”,’ many of them children, were hired out at a pittance as a manual agrarian labourers and domestic servants to wealthy Protestant farmers from the Lagan Valley of  Ulster.  Hughie’s experience of this sectarian space is  fraught and tense:

. . . he felt that even here the grown-ups were afraid. A buzz of hushed talk arose among the young folk, and instinctively it was in Gaelic. Round about the Gaelic whispers hung the heavy, solemn, Scotch accent of the stranger.  

Adrigoole  (London-Toronto: Jonathan Cape Ltd.,1929) p. 54; 53

Hiring Fairs supplied native labour to the Laggan Valley, (fifth site above) depicted in O’Donnell’s novel The Knife.  Set in a small planter district in the Laggan Valley of East Donegal between 1913-1923, where O’Donnell depicts the uneasy cultural topography of  its native and planter communities:  

A necklace of native farmers rings the hungry fringes of the plain, halting where the heather halts; the vibrant fields below are the booty of the planter. Back in the deepest reaches of the mountain tame natives serve the foreign landlord, and along the thickening veins of commerce native villages assemble around garrison posts. The native has taken root in the mountain.

The Knife (Dublin: Irish Humanities Centre, 1980 [1930]) pp. 11-12.

The last stage on this symbolic path is the Emigration Quay  in Derry / Londonderry (sixth site), which acts the gateway to the labour markets of Scotland and Britain. As a journalist, O’Donnell advocated on behalf of  the individuals for whom migration was not a choice but a necessity:

The order of life that impounds the Gael, that drags him to sleep on the steps of Glasgow Central, to slave in the tatie fields in Scotland.

The Irish Press, 15 November 1935

Sources