Digital Literary Atlas of Ireland,
1922-1949
Writers
Peadar O'Donnell
Adrigoole (1929) Errigal Mountain, Northwest County Donegal
'In the Lower Hills clearing up the fields at the end of the harvest was the best loved task of the year. Once the basket of potatoes had disappeared into the barn, and the last stone or sod had been fixed on the fence round the stacks of oats, neighbourliness had new freedom . . . Around blazing fires old men and stories; women leaning wise heads towards live words and sipping strong tea; the tinkle of dancing knitting-needles. From the shelter of grey rock, where stars spoiled the shadow, the gurgling laughter of couples. A blue sky roofing a grey night. And behind it all the mountains of Donegal, sombre, muscular, massive, full-breasted with earthliness, leaning against granite headed Errigal, sharp-edged among the stars'
timeline
View Peadar O'Donnell in a larger map
Lifepath
Peadar O’Donnell was born on February 22, 1893 in Meenmore, a townland located in the Rosses of north-western Donegal. His father, James Sheain Mor, leased acreage on the estate of the Marquis of Conyngham, an absentee landlord, who resided in Dublin. The family’s holdings consisted of a five-acre plot surrounded by ocean, bog and mountain. Unable to secure a livelihood on his acreage, O’Donnell’s father took part in the annual summer migration of farm laborers or ‘tatie hokers’ to Scotland. His mother Brigid, a strong supporter of the seminal Irish labour leader James Larkin, was employed as a low paid worker in a local clothing factory. As a result, ‘he grew up in a strongly matriarchal community, where women bore the burdens while men were absent for half the year. His mother was a strong, progressively thinking woman who obviously influenced him greatly’ (1).
Families in Meenmore participated in the collective activities of planting, harvesting, turf cutting and fishing, and the communal life of his townland became a ‘dominant motif in O’Donnell’s reminisces and literature; within it he identified the raw materials of a future socialistic society’(2). He attended St. Patrick’s Teaching College in Dublin, where he became influenced by the socialist revolutionary James Connolly and exposed to the works of Karl Marx. In 1913 he returned to teach on the Donegal coastal islands. In 1917 O’Donnell was elected teacher’s representative for the Derry Trades and Labour Council. Soon after, he became a full-time union organizer for the Irish Transport and General Worker’s Union (ITGWU) in Ulster. In 1919 O’Donnell organised strikes at the Monaghan Asylum and Caledon Mill which united Catholic and Protestant workers across the province’s sectarian divide. The eruption of the Irish War of Independence and British trade unionism in Ulster marginalised O’Donnell’s efforts and in 1920 he was appointed head of the East Donegal IRA.
The ratification of the Anglo-Irish Treaty established the Free State in 1922, and he joined the Republican resistance at the Four Courts in Dublin which sparked the Irish Civil War of 1922-23. Consequently, O’Donnell was imprisoned and with the constant threat of execution hanging over his head, he began writing in for a prison journal entitled The Book of Cells. In a moment of epiphany, laden with Gramscian overtones O’Donnell recalled realising:
‘I know that I know the insides of the minds of the mass of the folk in rural Ireland: my thoughts are distilled out of their lives . . . If I could say their lives out loud to these remnants of the Irish of history until they would nod their heads and say “this is us!” ’ (3)
O’Donnell’s fiction, read in the context of his lifepath and through a Gramscian lens, can be perceived as a dimension of his political activism; his representations of the ‘West’ of Ireland standing in stark contrast to ‘Gaelic Idyll’ depicted by urbanists and the cultural nationalists of ‘official’ Ireland.
Sources
The Knife was first serialized in An Phoblacht by editor Frank Ryan under the headline ‘Written of the IRA –For the IRA,’ during November and December 1930. The narrative contains a relatively sympathetic portrait of Ulster’s Orangemen and was informed both by his experience as an union organiser in the province where he was known as the ‘Stormy Petrel of the Transport Workers,’ (1) and his days as commander of the Second Battalion of the East Donegal IRA. The novel is set in a small planter district in the Laggan Valley of East Donegal between 1913-1923, (2) 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 (3).
The plot centers on a Catholic family named the Godfrey Dhus, and their oldest son, ‘The Knife’ a prominent republican, who buy land in the middle of a Protestant district, with ‘every rood of land owned by a solid Orange stock,’(4) after inheriting a sum of money from a relative in Australia. The publican Dan Sweeney and the local priest Father Burns comprise the local Catholic bourgeois of the district. They are uncomfortable with the social ambitions and political beliefs of the Godfrey Dhus, as are the Orange brethren. All parties fear that the family’s ownership of property will provoke planter reprisal and native uprising.
Sources / Notes
(1) Anton McCabe, ‘The Stormy Petrel of the Transport Workers’: Peadar O’Donnell, Trade Unionist, 1917-1920 (Dublin: Elso Press, 2000) p. 8.
(2) O’Donnell employs the local vernacular label ‘Lagan,’ as the place-name of the valley in The Knife. This is in distinction to its official topographical designation during the period. This vernacular use of place name in O’Donnell’s 1930 novel is not to be confused with the larger region in Ulster officially referred to as the Lagan Valley.
Digital Literary Atlas of Ireland, 1922 - 1949 (Email)