The anatomy of an ‘atrocity’

THAT violence was endemic to 19th Century Ireland will come as no surprise to readers of Patricia Byrne’s The Veiled Woman of Achill, which is published this month.

By John Rainsford

This was, after all, a period in Irish history when ‘Captain Moonlight’ cast a long and bloody shadow over the countryside, bitterly dividing the nation along racial and religious lines. Indeed, using the Island of Achill as a metaphor for our divided past, the former director of enterprise with Shannon Development forces us to take sides all over again. By the book’s end, it is by no means certain that we emerge with any great sense of closure, having juggled our collective consciences between tribal loyalties and a heinous crime.
Patricia explains, “I was born in East Mayo, between Ballyhaunis and Knock. When I retired from Shannon Development, I wanted to do something different with my life and was always interested in the use of language and words.
“Brother Paul Carney, a Franciscan Friar, who lived on Achill Island and  befriended James Lynchehaun, the man convicted of the 1894 atrocity, was, in fact, a relative of mine. Subsequently, he wrote his own account of the life of Lynchehaun, eulogising him as a folk hero in Ireland and abroad.  This heightened my sense of interest in the case.”
The victim of the attack was an English landowner called Agnes MacDonnell, who acquired Valley House and its 1,000 acre estate in 1888. James Lynchehaun was her land agent for a time until they fell out and the pair became bitter enemies.
“On October 6, 1894, the stand-off culminated in the burning of her home and a savage attack as she tried to flee but was dragged behind a haystack. Agnes, whose husband, Barrister John Randal MacDonnell, resided in London, lived alone and suffered horrific injuries at the hands of her assailant. She survived but her face was so disfigured that she wore a veil in public for the rest of her life,” says Patricia.
Lynchehaun was arrested soon after the attack. However, within days, he escaped custody and was on the run for several months. Instead of being ostracised by the community, however, he quickly grew into a folk hero.
The writer, John Millington Synge, visited North Mayo in 1904 and 1905, when Lynchehaun’s fame was at its height, and decided to locate his most famous drama The Playboy of the Western World there. Lynchehaun was one of Synge’s influences for the main character, Christy Mahon, the misunderstood ‘wildman’ worshipped by the local community for killing his father.
The premier of Synge’s play was greeted by euphoric shouts of ‘Hurrah for Lynchehaun’ when shown at The Abbey Theatre, Dublin in 1907 and newspaper headlines proclaimed, Play alleged to be founded on the Lynchehaun Case.
“The thing that I really found interesting was how the story encompassed the major Irish historical events of the day,” says Patricia. “People need heroes, particularly in difficult times but they do not always choose the best people to hero worship. Stories of James Lynchehaun’s exploits captured the community’s imagination and became more fantastical with each retelling.
“Achill Island is a remote place with the most magnificent physical landscape. The story, which I tell in The Veiled Woman of Achill, occurs at a historical juncture marked by agrarian conflict, economic deprivation and political tension.”
Agnes MacDonnell had originally purchased the Achill estate from the Earl of Cavan, who had used it as a hunting lodge. She ran the place with a single-minded determination, regularly resorting to the courts to pursue her tenants. By contrast, the local man James Lynchehaun was a mercurial figure, often in conflict with the law and exceedingly volatile when he drank.  He was initially hired by Agnes (earning £15 per annum), who seemed to like him at first but after three months, came to distrust him, giving him notice to leave the cottage, which he occupied as part of his job.
However, Lynchehaun refused to leave and used his knowledge of the law (it was said that he once worked for the Manchester Metropolitan Police in England) to frustrate and delay that eviction.
Following his escape from custody, just two weeks after the Valley House attack, Lynchehaun took refuge in a ‘safe-house’ on Achill. With a £300 bounty on his head and over 300 Royal Irish Constabulary officers on his trail, however, he was soon betrayed and recaptured. Justice Gibson, in sentencing him at Castlebar Court in 1895, equated the effects of his crime on the victim with that of ‘murder’.
After serving only seven years of a life sentence, Lynchehaun escaped from Maryborough Prison in 1902 and made his way to America, where he was embraced as a hero of the land campaign. He was now becoming a legendary figure, in word and song, the length and breadth of Ireland.
Indeed, his notoriety was set to soar even higher when he was recaptured 82 days later, after Pinkerton detectives tracked him down. Charles W Moores, a US Commissioner, ruled in a landmark case in Indianapolis (1903) that his crime was ‘political’ and that he could not be extradited back to Ireland to finish out his sentence.
Crucially, in his defence, Lynchehaun now claimed he was a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), the forerunner of the Irish Republican Army (IRA). He stated that his actions were conducted while on ‘active service’, reclaiming Irish land from an English landlord. This claim was greeted with some incredulity even back in his native Achill.
When pressed, Lynchehaun could produce evidence of only ever having attended one meeting of the Irish National Land League. Its president, Michael Davitt, was at pains to distance the organisation from him, as indeed did the majority of Irish-Americans, who were appalled at the Valley House attack. In fact, Lynchehaun’s witnesses in Indianapolis were widely regarded as having perjured themselves.
The decision also detrimentally affected Anglo-American relations. The London Globe looked to the assassination of President McKinley two years earlier and warned, “The next assassin of a president will plead Commissioner Moores’ judgment with irresistible force if he escapes across the Canadian line. The Americans will have no cause for complaint if the [Lynchehaun] result throws out of gear the whole machinery of extradition between the United States and Great Britain.”
This was of little interest to Lynchehaun, of course, who was reported to have brazenly returned to Achill on a number of occasions, once in 1907 disguised as an American tourist, and again in 1918, when he was arrested and deported back to America.
Agnes MacDonnell lived on in Achill until 1923, when she was found dead with a wine glass at her feet. Holding on to her estate, she had successfully resisted all attempts to have her lands transferred to the Congested Districts Board for distribution among her tenants. Indeed, court records from the period reveal the many cases brought by her seeking compensation for malicious acts, ranging from damage to her property to the suspicious deaths of her horses, over the years.
As for James Lynchehaun, he became a destitute figure in his later years. Returning to County Mayo, he was recruited in 1937 to form part of a seasonal harvester squad seeking work in Scotland. He died soon afterwards in a Glasgow hospital.
Unlike many other big houses in Ireland, Agnes’ reconstructed Valley House survived the horrors of the Irish Civil War. Her only son, from an earlier marriage, Leslie Elliott sold it to the Gallagher family in 1943. The same family continue to run it today as a hostel.
“Throughout my research,” explains Patricia, “my emotions swayed between admiration for Agnes MacDonnell’s tenacity of purpose and abhorrence for James Lynchehaun’s crime. There was also a deep empathy with the plight of the Achill islanders during the period.”
She adds, “I enjoyed the research phase of the book more than the writing. For example, I travelled to the New York Public Library’s magnificent Schwartzman Building where the records of James Lynchehaun’s ground-breaking (1902) extradition trial are held.
“The National Folklore Collection in Dublin also has details about the Achill atrocity, which were gathered by folklore collectors in 1947. Crucially I was also able to read the hand-written journals of my great-granduncle, Brother Paul Carney, the Franciscan Friar who befriended James Lynchehaun.”
An account of the incident, by James Carney, The Playboy and the Yellow Lady, was published in book form in 1986 and 1998 and a film called, Love and Rage, starring Daniel Craig and Greta Scacchi was released, with the entire film having been shot on Achill Island.
At the heart of the film, a fictional account of the Valley House story, is a passionate sexual relationship between Agnes MacDonnell and James Lynchehaun, an affair that Patricia was unable to substantiate in her research.
What this timely account ultimately reveals is how easy it is to build and glorify heroes, particularly in difficult times and how often this process serves to distort the truth. The story recounted in The Veiled Woman of Achill occurred at a time of enormous historical tensions and economic distress but, as Patricia is at pains to point out, two wrongs never made a right.

Minister of State, Jan O’Sullivan will launch Patricia Byrne’s book The Veiled Woman of Achill on Thursday, April 26 at 7pm at O’Mahony’s Bookshop, Limerick, in association with The Collins Press and the Limerick Writers Centre. Ms Byrne will also read extracts from her book at the Valley House, Achill, on Saturday, May 5, as part of the annual Heinrich Böll Memorial Weekend, May 4 to 7,  2012.