Saints and Scholars

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In Killenaule, a small town about 9km from Derrynaflan, where you can still get your groceries and a pint of draught Guinness in the same store, people will happily tell you everything you need to know about their beloved treasure island and how you can get there. Expect the lowdown to be wrapped in legendary banter and generations of folklore. But that's another cherished story for locals to tell. After the 8th Century the Church here went into a period of decline that lasted up to about the 12th Century, which was a natural decline because if you have the early Irish Church pumping energy for hundreds of years, you’re bound to run out of steam sooner or later,” Fr Ó Ríordáin says. Many of Yeats’s life milestones happened here: he became a father, a politician, won the Nobel prize for literature and published poetry collection The Tower. The Winding Stair, which followed in 1933, is named after the moon-shaped stone steps that curve their way to the top of the keep. His friend (and the co-founder of Dublin’s Gaiety theatre) Augusta Gregory lived nearby at Coole Park, where he signed the Autograph Tree along with JM Synge, George Bernard Shaw and Sean O’Casey. Yeats also mounted a plaque on the castle walls for posterity with the words: “I, the poet William Yeats/With old mill boards and sea-green slates/And smithy work from the Gort forge/Restored this tower for my wife George;/And may these characters remain/When all is ruin once again.” While in the area, don’t miss Kilmacduagh, an impressive monastic ruin with the highest round tower in the world, which, some say, leans more acutely than Pisa’s. If you’re staying, drop by for mussels at Moran’s on the Weir.

Another Irish saint from this era with some interesting legends was Saint Brendan. Known as the navigator it is said he discovered the Americas, sailing from his home county of Kerry, sometime in the 5th Century. Then in the 12th Century you had the reform of the Church which meant the transition from a monastic church to a diocesan structure,” he continues. “That’s basically the Norman Church – even though they had reform before the Normans came but that’s another matter, but from about the 12th century onwards you didn’t have the same approach towards the canonisation of saints.” I’m eternally working in a kind of multidisciplinary world where I’m drawing on resources from all kinds of sources, whether it be history or theology or hagiography or a whole range of other things. So, I would set out to find out first of all what do we know historically, and very often I would dip into Thesaurus Paleohibernicus, which is kind of a collection of primary sources,” he says.

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Now, their literary output in the Middle Ages wasn’t very great, in terms of how their commentaries on the Bible were utterly boring,” he says. “They weren’t developing, if you like, they were just repeating. Whereas on the poetry they had some lovely little poems – a limited number, but nonetheless still lovely in terms of love of nature and so forth.” There is, of course, an abundance of books out there about ‘Celtic spirituality’ that owe rather more to the ‘New Age’ beliefs and practices than the historical Church in these islands, but Fr Ó Ríordáin says it’s important to focus on the Christian character of the Irish saints. Focus Things had reached a very constricted pitch in the 2nd, 3rd and 4th Centuries in terms of how you had one opportunity of repenting after baptism, and if you blew that you were gone,” he says. “The Irish come along then, when they’re going to the continent, and they had this notion of the ‘anam cara’, the soul friend or spiritual director, and they would hear, if you like, the confession of a fellow monk, people admitting their faults and failings, and then gradually the tradition coming in of letting it go, and going ahead and living your life.

It was certainly quite common in the Celtic world,” says Fr Ó Ríordáin. “What happened to the Columban rule is that it was too strict for the continentals, with the result that they moved towards the Benedictine rule, which was more benign. As a result nearly all the Columban monasteries on the continent became Benedictine abbeys. Derrynaflan is not a typical island. This tiny 44-acre, privately owned mound, in Ireland's biggest inland county, isn't surrounded by an ocean or a lake. Unusually, it pops from the Bog of Lurgoe in Tipperary's vast brown swampy peatlands like a vibrant green mirage. Nevertheless, by dictionary standards, an island it categorically is.Hagiography is fascinating, especially Irish hagiography, in particular the lives of early Irish saints. This ancient literary genre was an important way of recording the extraordinary lives of saints and the miracles and incredible feats attributed to them. The book explains how the monks here were well connected to earlier thinkers, for example the sixth-century philosopher Anicius Manlius Severinus Boëthius and his pivotal work De Institutione Arithmetica – De Institutione Musica. "There is a very lively engagement with mathematics between Ireland and Britain; it is high- level mathematics." But what's especially interesting about Derrynaflan is the priceless buried treasure likely left here by the monks. Discovered just a few decades ago, it changed Irish law and turned out to be one of the most exciting archaeological finds in the history of Irish art. He kind of transcends all the centuries and that affection is there and has been there all the centuries,” he continues. “I can’t explain it otherwise, except that it is what it is. I suppose the whole thing of going into exile, with our most recent history of emigration has a lot of meaning for them.”