There are many things that reflect the changes that have taken place in this country over the past 50 years. None more so than people’s attitude to the Catholic Church and the influence that members of the clergy wielded.
Sheila Kelly and Seán Clooney were natives of Fethard on Sea on the south coast of Wexford. They married in London in 1949. That should have been the end of the matter but Sheila was a member of the Church of Ireland and Seán was a Catholic. They married in an Augustinian Church and then had their marriage blessed in an Anglican Church.
That was the time of the strict enforcement of the Ne Temere decree, which ordered that any children born to such a marriage had to be raised as Catholics. There were no exceptions. A Catholic was not allowed to marry unless the other partner agreed to the decree. That might seem harsh now but that was a time when if you attended the funeral of a Church of Ireland neighbour you had to go to the Bishop to confess your ‘sin’.
Seán and Sheila returned to Wexford to live and matters came to a head when their eldest child, Eileen, was due to start school. The local priest, Fr Laurence Allen, visited the house and ordered Sheila to send her daughter to the local Catholic school. Some years later, Seán recalled that the priest said “Eileen’s going to the Catholic school and there is nothing you can do about it”.
Sheila was not prepared to be ordered around so, with her two children, she left Wexford and eventually settled in the Orkney Islands in Scotland. This aggravated the local Catholic clergy and, at Sunday mass, another local priest called for a boycott of local Protestant businesses. Catholics stopped shopping at Protestant-owned shops, Protestant farmers could not sell their produce, the local music teacher lost her pupils and many other similar incidents occurred all because the priest said so.
Seán Clooney himself was boycotted because he ignored the boycott. He later said the only support he got was from old IRA veterans of the War of Independence who, themselves, had been excommunicated by the Catholic Church in their day. Speaking in Wexford, the very influential Bishop of Galway, Dr Browne said that there seemed to be a concerted campaign to entice or kidnap Catholic children and deprive them of their faith and described the boycott as “a peaceful and moderate protest”.
Barrister and later judge Donal Barrington described the boycott as the most terrible thing to happen in the country since the civil war and the Taoiseach spoke out against it in the Dáil. Eventually, Seán travelled to Scotland where he was re-united with his family and they returned to Wexford.
Their solution to the bigotry and boycott was simple. They did not send their children to any school but educated them at home. They felt that no matter which school they chose, it would be claimed as a victory by one side or the other.
The Fethard on Sea boycott, a most shameful episode in our history, arose from a sermon at Sunday mass and started on May 13, 1957, 53 years ago this week.