Details
'Doc On 1’ with Michael Gannon. Broadcast Friday the 7th of February 2025 https://www.connemarafm.com/audio-page/
Comment
Details
'Doc On 1’ with Michael Gannon. Broadcast Friday the 7th of February 2025 https://www.connemarafm.com/audio-page/
Comment
'Doc On 1’ with Michael Gannon. Broadcast Friday the 7th of February 2025 https://www.connemarafm.com/audio-page/
Attribution NonCommercial 4.0
Others are free to share (to copy, distribute, and transmit) and to remix the audio as long as they credit the author and do not use the audio for commercial purposes.
Learn moreListen to Doc On 1 - 7feb2025 by Connemara Radio Archives MP3 song. Doc On 1 - 7feb2025 song from Connemara Radio Archives is available on Audio.com. The duration of song is 53:27. This high-quality MP3 track has 32 kbps bitrate and was uploaded on 9 Feb 2025. Stream and download Doc On 1 - 7feb2025 by Connemara Radio Archives for free on Audio.com – your ultimate destination for MP3 music.
Comment
Loading comments...
The High Chaparral pub in Gwisalde, Ireland was destroyed by fire. It was a well-known pub that hosted local festivals and boxing tournaments. The name was inspired by a famous western TV show. The documentary for the week was about the arrival of Huguenot refugees in Ireland in the 16th and 17th centuries. The Huguenots were French Protestants who came to Ireland to escape persecution. The documentary explores their history and the remains of their presence in Ireland. The Edict of Nantes granted the Huguenots rights and protections, but their freedoms were gradually eroded. It's difficult to determine the exact number of Huguenots who stayed in France or left, but it's estimated that about 10,000 came to Ireland. Ffari. Ffari. Good afternoon and welcome to this evening's broadcasting here on Connemara Community Radio and we're delighted to be back fully now after the turmoil of the storm. My name is Michael Gannon and this is our documentary hour from five to six every Friday. Now a little bit of news from up and down the country before I move on to the documentary. Very sad news from just up north from us, from the Arras area, an area that picks up our signal indeed and we have listeners up there. Up there in Arras in Gwisaile, which is on the Duhoma Peninsula. Just you would turn left after Bangor Arras on your way to Belmullet and head down that direction. Beautiful, beautiful part of the world. But sad news from up there that the local pub there in Gwisaile or Gwisalde, the High Chaparral, was destroyed by fire this morning at about five o'clock this morning. Thankfully and unfortunately nobody injured in that fire but it was a very severe fire and it has really destroyed that famous pub, the High Chaparral. The last remaining pub it was indeed in Gwisalde so we certainly do hope that it will be in time rebuilt and the village will have a pub again. It's a well known pub as I said, a great pub for its involvement in local festivals and also very well known over the years for hosting boxing tournaments. And it will be sadly missed but hopefully they'll be back on their feet again in the not too distant future. That's the High Chaparral pub in Gwisalde. And of course the name, that name the High Chaparral, you'd need to be my vintage now well up in the 50s and maybe a bit older probably to remember or to know what that means even in the first place and where the name came from. The High Chaparral was a very famous western back in the day and I remember as well seeing it and watching it in the 70s probably. But I was reading there that it actually finished its filming in 1971 so we in Ireland were probably watching reruns of it in the 70s and maybe up to the early 80s. So that was the High Chaparral, famous western and the other big one of the day at the time was of course Bonanza. I don't know if there are any pubs called Bonanza in Ireland but the High Chaparral was named after that famous western. And as I said we do hope that they'll be back on their feet and open again, opening doors again in the not too distant future. Now to our documentary for this week. Well we've had so much turmoil all over the world over the past number of years and so many refugees, hundreds of thousands if not millions now of refugees on the face of the earth and having to move from place to place. And many of course have come to Ireland and we may need to welcome and look after some more in the coming years, who knows. But it's interesting to know that refugees coming to Ireland, the phenomenon of refugees coming to Ireland goes back hundreds and hundreds of years. And perhaps even the first people that came to Ireland came as refugees. Maybe they came here because they had to move off continental Europe and this was the last remaining piece of land or island on the western fringes of Europe. But we do know for sure that in the 16th century, the late 16th and 17th century, we had refugees. We had actually refugees from the Huguenot or the French Protestant populations of France. They were being persecuted in the religious wars of the time and some of them, up to 10,000 of them had to come to Ireland. So we always, I suppose most of the time in our own mind, we associate the Protestant communities in Ireland with people who came to conquer us. But some of them, the French Protestants, the Huguenots, came actually as refugees looking for a safe place. This is an RTE documentary from 1985 about the arrival of the Huguenot refugees in Ireland. It's a beautifully made documentary about a fascinating time and it will also bring you to the places where you can see the remains of the Huguenot times and in particular the Huguenot graveyard, a very beautiful little graveyard right in the centre of Dublin. So let's go now to this week's documentary, the Huguenot refugees. Something like 200,000 refugees in all left France. The majority of Protestants stayed in France, but about 200,000 left. Now the largest single number went to the Netherlands. The next largest, probably 40 or 50,000, came to England. About 10,000 came to Ireland, I believe. Now in terms of the total population of the countries at the time, it's probably a similar number and therefore suggests perhaps a similar contribution. Strangers in Ireland, the Huguenots remembered 300 years on, with contributions from Jean-Paul Pétion, Michael Goldie, Robin G. Gwynn, Vivian Costolo, Patrick Kelly and John Miller. It's standard amongst French historians to divide the Huguenots into the southern ones and the northern ones. Particularly the Loire divides a group of Huguenots centered around Paris and then scattered in very small communities north of the Loire and a very high density of Protestants in some southern regions, particularly in Languedoc, around Montpellier, around Nîmes and in the southeast in the Dauphiné. So do you mean that what I'm trying to clarify is whether the Catholic-Protestant divide broke down in straightforward geographical terms, rural-urban? It didn't. The distribution really reflected the state of the communities after the 40 years of civil war in the 16th century. There were a high concentration in the south, dispersed communities in the north, but generally there was a patchwork of high-density areas as regards Protestantism and very low-density areas. But that geographic division is only the most elementary one. The more important one, I think, is that the religious divide cut across French society. It cut across the groups, the very social groups. There was a divided aristocracy, there was a divided bourgeoisie in the towns. It cut across even the families because of the extended notion that the family represents in the 16th and 17th century. You could not, I think, find in certain regions one family which wouldn't have members on both sides of the divide. The Edict of Nantes itself was clearly an important stage. What led to that between the early 16th century and its coming to pass? What kind of circumstances led to it? A situation of general civil and military dissidence in the kingdom. The need to bring in some truth between conflicting parties. At the last stage, just say the five years before the Edict of Nantes, there were armies commanded by Henry IV, who was to become Henry IV on one hand. There were armies commanded by the king, and there were also dissident groups of ultra-Catholics who had seized power in Paris. They're known as the League. For the 20 years which followed the formation of the French Calvinist Churches, the country was in more or less a permanent state of civil and religious war. The need to bring in the truth, to settle the situation, once Henry IV had acceded to the throne, having converted to Catholicism, was made imperative also by the situation on the borders. France was in a situation of permanent conflict with Spain as well. So, to settle the internal situation, to attempt to contain the religious struggle, Henry negotiated with the representatives of the juveniles and reached that agreement which is known as the League of Nantes. It looked on the face of it as if they were getting a reasonable deal. What price did the juveniles have to pay? Yes, they got a good deal in this respect that the Edict of Nantes, the major edict, that of the 13th of April, gave them a legal identity in the general corporate structure of the state at the time. In other words, although it was not said by name, they were instituted as an estate, an ordre, like the clergy, the first estate, or the aristocracy, the second estate. They had rights to representation at court, they had rights to hold ceremonies which signified, manifested, their corporate identity. They, of course, obtained the right of worship in those places where it could be established that there had been some Protestant form of worship before the edict. But, at the same time as that, the edict did not grant them specifically the permission to maintain a standing army, although in subsequent brevets, really concessions made privately by the king, a sort of contract between the king and the juveniles, they were allowed to maintain garrisons in some towns, and to have some kind of protection as regards access to office. And what about the freedom of power to evangelize? That was very much curtailed. It was curtailed by one of the articles of the edict, which prevented the spread of any literature, or the giving of any sermon, which could be considered seditious or likely to arouse the population. And that curtailed, certainly, the scope for further Protestantizing. In fact, what happens with the edict of Nantes is that the Huguenot population is frozen, legally and religiously, into the status that it had at that time. And from then on, a number of its advantages, privileges, or liberties are eroded. The permanence of religious conflict in different forms throughout the 17th century led to a state of constant unrest, a lot of administrative and judicial difficulties, and the rising absolutist states saw the Protestant question, above all, I think, as a question of law and order. This sort of legalized dissidence was unacceptable in the absolutist, statist perspective of the time. And now I want to get at the kind of general map of the dispersal, taking it in the two key stages, first of all in the early 16th century, and then later after the revocation. Did most of them go away, first of all? What percentage stayed? No, it's very difficult, of course, to reach accurate figures. But if you consider that there may have been perhaps one million French Protestants in the 1680s, that's one out of 20 million for the entire kingdom, then it's most likely that not more than 200,000 left the kingdom. And that emigration was not evenly distributed. The English and still more the Irish emigration are not, peripheral perhaps is the wrong word to use, but they are not the largest foci of Huguenot emigration. The largest concentration of refugees at this stage go to the Dutch Republic, which is perhaps not surprising. This is the great commercial crossroads of Europe, which has already very, very many links with merchants and businessmen in France. There is also very extensive emigration elsewhere. Other countries, in fact, other states, did much more to attract Huguenot immigrants than England did in 1685-1686, as we've seen James II's welcome was tepid, to put it mildly. Whereas some of the German states, in particular, made great efforts and sometimes rather fraudulent efforts to attract French immigrants. They were short of manpower, they were short of skilled men. They were even prepared to try and attract French peasant farmers. So you get extraordinary claim by one town right up in the north of Germany, up in Prussia, that the climate and the soil are wonderful for vine growing. The poor French peasant actually tried to grow any vines up in this place. They were in for a terrible shock. So there are almost employment agencies for useful Huguenots set up in Switzerland, and particularly at Frankfurt am Main, which were staging posts. They actually called it a turntable, through which Huguenots were dispatched in all directions, basically either up the Rhine towards the Netherlands or northwards and eastwards into Germany. In the light of your reading, what's your impression of the psychological profile, if you like, of the Huguenots? They are a mixed bag, as one would expect. It seems that very often it is not, in fact, the very rich, the really successful merchants who leave France. They will probably conform to the Catholic Church, swallowing their principles. They may send other members of the family, but they will probably stay on to mind the business, which in fact, in a sense, extends their business contacts. The same is true to a large extent of the bankers. One of the ironies of the wars against Louis XIV is that Louis XIV is actually funded to some extent by loans from Huguenot bankers, which is one of history's many ironies. Perhaps the business is much more important than religion, I don't know. For the rest, they are a mixture. Those who tend to go are those whose skills are mobile. Soldiers, sailors, artisans, often highly skilled artisans, whose services are very much in demand elsewhere. To some extent, merchants and businessmen, not all that often farmers, partly because the skills which you need, say, to grow vines in the south of France, are not skills that you can easily adapt to North Germany or to Ireland or England, for that matter. There is a high proportion of men on their own, although this is sometimes, I think, looking to establish themselves before sending for their wives and families. Occasionally you get, going through Frankfurt am Main, you've got not so much whole families as whole villages, or the Protestant part of the village would just up and go. There is another case of a village in western France where the Protestant part of the community just got up and went and walked through Spain to Cadiz, a whole lot of them, right round the coast. But this is the exception rather than the rule. They tend to be individuals with a very high proportion of males as against females. And I have to say that those that left and reached Switzerland only stayed there very often for a short time. That Switzerland acted as a sort of dispatching centre and that the refugees were then sent across to, say, Brandenburg or to Holland, or indeed even to England and Ireland. There is evidence, in fact, that a number of communal soldiers were recruited in Switzerland for the armies of William and eventually settled in Port Arlington. In the 16th century, after the Reformation, there were civil wars in both France and the Netherlands, and a good many Protestants came as refugees to England from those wars, but very few to Ireland. So that the first organised communities in England come in 1549-1550, but there isn't an organised community in Ireland until the Duke of Ormond is viceroy in the 1660s. So there's a gap of 110 years. Apart from that, what are the main differences in the way that the Huguenots were received in the two countries? I think there are obvious differences in the climate in England as opposed to Ireland. England was a very Protestant country in the 17th century. By and large, the Huguenots were welcomed. And in the 1680s, England's subjects, who were largely Protestant, felt a bit threatened by the Dragonnard in France, where troops were being used to compel Protestants to change their faith, and some of them feared that there might even be Dragonnard in England under the Catholic James II. Now, the situation in Ireland had to be different because the majority of the population was Catholic, and therefore, from a Huguenot point of view, a less desirable place to come. But weren't there many reasons why they mightn't want to come to Ireland apart from that? Well, they were taking refuge from religious persecution, so they wanted to worship in the way they were used to in France. It was easier for them to do that in England than it was in Ireland, because even once there was a French community in Dublin in the 1660s, it didn't worship in the same way that they had worshipped in France, whereas in England there were French churches worshipping in that way. So that is a further disincentive. Then there's the question of economics. I mean, they were refugees. Many of them had very little. They had to make a livelihood. Ireland's economic prospects were not particularly good in the 1660s. I think they'd improved a lot by the 1690s, and that is when the really large number of Huguenot refugees arrives in Ireland. But what about Ormond's attempts to attract them, to make the country more attracted to them? He did want to attract them, and he wasn't the first. The Cromwellian regime had wanted to attract foreign Protestants, and the Earl of Stratford in the 1630s had brought over people from France who he thought could act as weavers in Ireland. But these efforts, by and large, hadn't been very successful. Ormond himself had been in France as a refugee in the 1650s, and he had contacts with French Protestantism, and his hopes in the 1660s were certainly on a grander scale than the earlier ones. And he clearly did bring people over and settle them, certainly in Dublin, and he looks as though he encouraged settlement in some other places. For instance, in Chapel Isard, he set up weavers. But by and large, his efforts didn't work particularly well, and if there hadn't been more persecution in France in the 1680s, they probably wouldn't have survived. Perhaps you could tell us something about his 1662 Act and its implications. Well, the 1662 Act invites foreign Protestants into Ireland and offers them certain advantages which they couldn't have had in England. Most particularly, if they took the relevant oaths, the oaths of allegiance and obedience, then they could automatically become naturalised. Now, that wasn't the case in England, where it wasn't until in fact 1709 that there is an Act of General Naturalisation. So that's an important plus for Ireland, because naturalisation carried with it certain benefits in regard to trade and taxation, and the transmission of lands to your successors and heirs, and those were important advantages. But, as against that, Ormond was working against all these other hostile factors which made life difficult for him, and in addition he had to try and overcome the reputation Ireland had all over Europe, really, in the 1640s and 50s, certainly all over Protestant Europe, because it was well known that there had been massacres of Protestants in Ireland in 1641, and the reports of those massacres had been greatly exaggerated. But, the Huguenots no doubt believed them. Remember, you who are of old, when all our fathers worshipped stocks and stones, forget not, in thy book record their groans, who were thy sheep, and in their ancient folds, slain by the bloody Piermontese that rolled mother with infant down the rocks, their moans the veils redoubled to the hills, and they to heaven. Their martyred blood and ashes sow o'er all the Italian fields, where still doth sway the triple tyrant, that from these may grow a hundredfold, who, having learnt thy way, early may fly the Babylonian woe. When we're thinking about the Huguenots, we're inclined to think that the only problem of persecution in Europe is that going on in France, with the revocation and Catholic persecution, and in England, of course, by the 18th and 19th centuries, there was a tremendous sense that England means Protestantism and freedom and France means persecution and Catholicism. But the point I really wanted to make was that although that becomes true after the Glorious Revolution, when you do get toleration established in England, but before that, that's to say in the generation after the Civil War, in the reign of Charles II, there's an enormous drive to put down the Puritans. And this is the period when, after Cromwell's rule, the Puritans have been driven out, Charles II has come back to his throne. And there's a tremendous attempt by cavalier gentlemen, by the bishops of the restored Anglican Church, to get their own back. Very often it was a straightforward case of revenge, but of course it was also a strong commitment to Anglicanism, to the Church of England as the true Reformed Church. And so the Puritans are really out in the wilderness, the Quakers, the Baptists. I suppose the famous example is John Bunyan, who spends 12 years in Bedford jail. And so all these Puritans are campaigning for toleration in England. And when complaints begin in England, the English start saying, well, poor old Huguenots in France. The Puritans turn around on them and say, well look, you're as bad, you're persecuting in England, you've got to look to your own problems first, give us toleration. And they even say, not only do they use the example of the Edict of Nantes and say, look, at least they had some freedom, these Huguenots in France, we want freedom here. But they even start calling the Anglican bishops Popish, because they associate persecution with Popery. And so they say, until Protestants can be truly tolerant, they can't really call themselves Protestants. What, in your view, is the key to the transformation that did occur that allowed the kind of tolerance that made the reception of Huguenots something that was worthwhile and attractive for them? Well, of course, the crucial change is the revolution of 1688, 1689, when William of Orange came over. And you get an act of toleration passed into law in 1689. And the whole situation changes then. I think what is important is that when James II is on the throne, he's a Catholic. And there's a strong sense that Protestants should hang together rather than hang separately. Yes, but what underpins the legislation, in your view? I mean, what kind of shift occurred? I mean, it is astonishing when you think about it, that you have this kind of transformation within a comparatively short space of time. Yes, there is an enormous change, as you say, through just a few years. I think what you have to look at in the governors in England, the English ruling orders, is what are they most frightened of? They're frightened of two things. They're frightened of Puritans, the old Cromwellians. They don't want that Republican anarchy again. But they're also frightened of Popery and Catholicism. And the question is, what weighs strongest in their mind? In the early 1680s, they're desperately frightened of a new Republican uprising by the Baptists and the Quakers and so on. But once James comes to the throne, their fears all change about. And they're really, now, really frightened that James is going to impose Catholicism. So now they start hanging together with all the Protestants. So it is a question of their changing fears. In Ireland, the situation was very particular. In England, there were problems as regards to conformity and conforming to the Anglican ritual, and accepting Anglican ordination. Freedom of worship was granted to the emigres, so that they were entitled to practice their own form of worship, and were not required to accept for their pastors religious ordination. Before the 1690s, Dublin is the centre where a French community has been established. Then in the 1690s, a whole group developed. The person who's responsible is Lord Galway. He was a French nobleman who had fought for William in various battles in Ireland, of which Orwraim was probably the most important, because he made a major contribution. And he wanted his fellow countrymen, and King William also wanted to encourage the Huguenots to come. From his point of view, they were loyal subjects, they had nowhere else to go, they depended on him, they were needy, and they were going to give him good service. So he encouraged them. There has been a long tradition which has seen Galway as the enemy of Catholicism in Ireland, and the chief architect of the increased penal laws of the 1690s, who was attempting to obtain revenge for the sufferings of the Huguenots in France under Louis XIV, and making use of the same sort of techniques that Louis turned against the Huguenots to persecute the Irish Catholics. And when you began to look at the evidence, what did you discover? When I turned to the evidence, the picture was quite different, and in some ways much more fascinating. It showed that Galway had been consistently misrepresented, and that he was certainly not an active persecutor. First and foremost, Galway was a soldier. He was, I think, a fairly straightforward individual, taciturn, a man with strong family loyalties, and a man who took seriously his legacy as representative of the Huguenots at the court of Louis XIV into the very changed circumstances of exile, who saw himself as a leader in exile with a responsibility for helping and protecting the less fortunate members of the refuge. The myth that grew up about him was a deliberately fabricated myth. It's a rather complicated story. First, the myth was generated by agents of the Irish Catholic landed classes, who wished to block the legislation banishing the bishops and regular clergy from the country. And it was also exploited by the French, because of two reasons. One, that Galway had abandoned estates in France, which under the terms of the Treaty of Reiswick of the Pomeroy in 1697, he should in theory have been entitled to receive back now the war was over. The black propaganda was intended to make Galway appear as a rabid persecutor of Catholics, so that Louis XIV's Catholic allies, and we must remember that Catholic Europe, the Emperor and the Spaniards, supported Louis XIV against the French and the Catholic Irish. These people would not be prepared to seek in Galway's favour either to William or, more importantly, to Louis XIV and his minister. The second reason enters into the world of fantasy and has dimensions of a 17th century James Bond. Galway, before he came to Ireland to take up the governorship in 1697, had been William of Orange's ambassador in Savoy. In this position, he came to know of facts about Louis XIV's intentions to assassinate William of Orange, which the French king was very anxious to prevent becoming public. The French king consistently denied that he had any involvement with the attempt to assassinate William of Orange, but what Galway found out was that in 1696, Louis had entered into negotiations with a notorious Italian hitman called Count Bozzelli of Bergamo, who arranged to come to London in the entourage of the Venetian ambassador with 50 desperados, who were then to attack William in the streets of London and to dispose of him. Galway was then approached by other Italians, who offered in turn to dispose of Bozzelli in return for a large payment, and Galway, acting on William's instructions, refused this offer. Naturally, Louis would have found it very embarrassing indeed if any revelations of this kind had been made public. By blackening Galway's reputation, Louis effectively ensured that any revelations that he might make would not be treated with any seriousness by the rulers of Catholic Europe. Something like 200,000 refugees in all left France. The majority of Protestants stayed in France, but about 200,000 left. The largest single number went to the Netherlands. The next largest, probably 40 or 50,000, came to England. About 10,000 came to Ireland, I believe. Now, in terms of the total population of the countries at the time, it's probably a similar number, and therefore suggests perhaps a similar contribution. I'm thinking of, in your book, there's a reference to, you look at the sort of genetic, look at this under a kind of genetic heading, and I think you quote, is it Darlington? And I'm wondering if you can look at the Huguenots in terms of their psychology, their makeup as a people, what kind of thoughts have you on that? I think what strikes me at working on them is the fact that they were refugees, and because they were refugees, they are displaced, they have no option but to work exceptionally hard in order to survive. In order to get away from France, they hadn't just walked out, taking with them whatever they happened to have. They faced penalties which ranged from imprisonment, through execution, transportation to the new world, to the ultimate penalty, which was service chained aboard the French King's galleys in the Mediterranean, in order to get out. And therefore, to run that sort of gamut, and to face the King's ships in France, gassing the hulls of ships in case there were Huguenots in barrels trying to get out, to run those sorts of risks, you weren't just walking out with all your possessions. So many of them had very little. And if you're in that situation, firstly, you must have been very determined. And that's going to make an impression in the places you go to. And secondly, you have no option but to work extra hard. You just can't survive if you don't. Fortunately for the Huguenots, the majority of them were people who worked with, the skills were in their hands, weavers for instance, they carried their skills with them, they could move them. If they had mostly been, let us say, wine producers, what would they have done in Ireland? The records in Ireland generally are very bad, so it's quite difficult to find a particular family. You can be looking for a long time. But I suppose the first thing I would have done is gone to Lombard Street to look up the earliest possible births and marriage certs. And that will give you parishes and so on. And then you try to look up the relevant parish registers. Then you could go to the public record office. And when you're dealing with Protestant families, there are books of indexes of marriages and births and so on, and some wills. But quite often, the most helpful thing for a Dublin family would be the registry of deeds. If your ancestors ever had any property dealings whatsoever, and they're in the registry of deeds, you can find an awful lot of family details in deeds. And it was mostly through that that I eventually found them. What were the first things you began to discover about your own family, your own family name? Well, they had changed their name from Leclerc to Clarke, which made it very hard to find them because there's lots of Clarkes in Ireland. And just like many other Huguenot families who also anglicised their name over the years. But the first Leclerc I could find was a Pierre Leclerc, who was definitely in Dublin in 1710. And of course, there were Dublin parish registers for the Huguenots specifically. So you can get quite a lot of information for the early period from those. And this man married in Dublin in 1716, another Huguenot, and he set up as a wine merchant, which was a very wise move. Because all the people who were tradesmen that were involved in things like weaving, and so on, found it very hard to make ends meet. Whereas a wine merchant had no difficulty keeping going in Dublin, because the gentry drank phenomenal amounts of wine. And if you look at the importation of wine, it is an amazing amount per head of population in Ireland at the time. So this Pierre Leclerc became quite prosperous, and was able to raise his family in reasonable comfort. And his son, who I was also descended from, died young. But then his son again, Pierre Abercrombie Leclerc, would seem to have been quite a colourful character. He certainly had a lot of property dealings, both in Dublin, Wicklow, Wexford, Tullamore, and so on. And he managed to acquire four wives. And he was a linen merchant, by all accounts. What do you find, among people of your own family name, what kind of interest in their Huguenot past do you find? Well, I suppose they would have a certain amount. I think if one has a slightly unusual background, was always vaguely interested. But I certainly wouldn't myself have done anything about actually researching them either, if I hadn't felt I needed a hobby at the time. And I find my own family fairly boring, but the Huguenots as a group became fascinating. And in fact, the whole of Dublin in the 18th century was an amazing place, with the gentry entertaining on a lavish scale, on the other hand, dreadful poverty amongst the poorer people. And in fact, many travellers to Dublin at the time stated they never in any other city saw quite such a difference between the poorer classes and the gentry. Well, two things. I suppose the most important was the unpopularity of the Huguenots. This came out very clearly in a letter from William of Orange to Lord Galway in November 1698. I was surprised that the Huguenots were so unpopular with the Protestant colonists in Ireland, and also the way in which Irish Catholics saw the Huguenots. A mixture of fear and trepidation, because they thought the policy of the English government was to replace them in Ireland by Huguenot refugee settlers. And also, from the point of view of the Irish Catholics, the soldiers who had gone to France with Sarsfield, jealousy that the Huguenots were being so well treated by the English Protestants, while the treatment they received from the France of Louis XIV was distinctly shabby. There are differences between Ireland and the rest. Those differences are largely governed by the fact that there was no tradition of Huguenot immigration to this country before they came, for the main wave of immigration here. In Holland, there were already long-established Huguenot churches. The same thing was true for England. From the beginning of the 16th century. From the beginning of the 16th century, yes. But here they came into a totally new territory. They tended to concentrate either in the settlement of Port Arlington or in Dublin and Cork. They were few in numbers. It was probably more difficult for them to maintain their identity. I don't mean by this just simply their religious identity, but also their French identity. The two are connected. They attempted to do this through a number of devices, I suppose, such as, for instance, intermarriage. It's quite clear that for the first two generations, the Huguenot refugees intermarried. Very quickly, they become assimilated in, I suppose, what can be called the ascendancy here. What attitude or how sympathetic were they to Irish Catholics who, after 1690, were being persecuted? How did they view that? That's a very difficult question. I don't think there is any direct evidence that one individual or as a group, they expressed their views on the situation. It has to be said that they were, of course, men of the 17th century. They took it for granted that the state should impose religious conformity. They suffered from that, but this was part of their outlook, nevertheless. Most of those who came here were soldiers, professional soldiers. Aristocrats whose only trade was soldiering. A situation of war or of general unrest was not something they were unfamiliar with. I think largely, probably, they ignored the situation of the Irish Catholics. They probably were more sensitive to the situation of the dissenters here who were in a less favorable position because they were not formally granted freedom of worship than they, the Huguenots, were. However, as they settled, and it took them a certain time to settle, largely because of their profession, they went back to war. As they settled, I think one can detect a certain awareness of the penal law system which was applied in Ireland, and the parallel could not have failed to strike them. In this respect, there is a very curious text written by one of the leaders of the dissidents of the guerrilla warfare which took place in the first decade of the 17th century. As you know, in the 17th there was a rebellion of the Protestants who fought off the king's armies, the 14th army, for a very long time. Now, the leader, after a truce was made, came over first to England and to Ireland and indeed to Port Arlington, and he published his memoirs. It's the memoirs of the wars of the seven. His name was Jean Cavallier. And there's a remarkable preface written by him where he makes an argument for general toleration by the state of all religions, and although the Catholics are not designated by name, it is quite clear that he actually intends his text to be read as including them. In Strangers in Ireland, you heard the voices of Jean-Paul Pétion, Trinity College, Dublin, Robin D. Gwynne, Massey University, New Zealand, Michael Goldie, Churchill College, Cambridge, John Miller, University of London, Patrick Kelly, Trinity College, Dublin, and Vivian Costolo of Hoth County, Dublin, who descends from the Huguenot family of Leclerc. You've been listening, there too, to this week's documentary. A documentary from 1985 on the Huguenot refugees who came to Ireland in the 17th century, fleeing persecution from France. Beautifully made documentary there and a fascinating part of our complicated history here in Ireland. Now, coming up for the rest of the evening from 6 to 7, we have Linda O'Malley and Lyrical Allsports. We have Injury Time with Eamonn McLaughlin from 7 to 8, our weekly sports programme. And of course, sad news on the Irish sporting front today is the death of Paddy Cullen. Paddy Cullen, the great Dublin goalkeeper, the man who, I think he won three All-Irelands and four All-Stars during his time there, and a gentleman and a man who kept a pub in Dublin, very close to Lansdowne Road in the Paws Bridge area of Dublin, very close to the RDS as well. He had a glittering success on the field and in the goals with Dublin, but looking at his record here in front of me, he had to work hard to get to that place. He made his first appearance for Dublin in 1967 and he appeared every year then for six years running up to 1973. And for those six years, not only did they not win an All-Ireland, but they didn't even win a Leinster Championship at that point. They didn't progress beyond Leinster and in many of those years he only played one match. So in other words, Dublin were beaten in their first outing in the Championship for four of those six years. And for the other two, they only played two matches, they were beaten in the second round. So it was only 1973 then when they started to move forward a little. And then of course in 1974 came their first All-Ireland appearance for a long time and that was against Galway and it was on that day of course we all know that Paddy Cullen did a fantastic save against our own Liam Salmon from Liam Salmon's penalty late enough in the second half. And that really did win that match for Dublin. So Liam Salmon of course was a great footballer, a Salt Hill, Loch Nacarra man, a Galway man brought up in the middle of Galway. I'm sure Liam will be thinking about Paddy today and maybe back to those days. But from then on Dublin really took off and for the next six years, from 1974 to 1979, six years in a row, in those six years Dublin featured in every All-Ireland final. And I don't know how many of them they won, they won two at least, 1974 I think and maybe 1976 and maybe 1979 as well. Three they won in those six years I believe in the 70s. And most of those All-Irelands, or if not the semi-finals, were of course against Kerry and Armagh featured for one of those years as well. But it really was the Dublin-Kerry show for those years in the 70s and Paddy Cullen was at the heart of it. So condolences to his family and to all his old team-mates and his old rivals from Kerry and Galway and all over the country. And cunean dioghrasta i'r anam usal Paddy Cullen. Si'n an bhfuil bhfuil bhfuil bhfuil bhfuil bhfuil bhfuil bhfuil bhfuil bhfuil bhfuil bhfuil bhfuil bhfuil bhfuil bhfuil bhfuil bhfuil bhfuil bhfuil bhfuil bhfuil bhfuil bhfuil bhfuil bhfuil bhfuil bhfuil bhfuil bhfuil bhfuil bhfuil bhfuil bhfuil bhfuil bhfuil bhfuil bhfuil bhfuil bhfuil bhfuil bhfuil bhfuil bhfuil bhfuil bhfuil bhfuil bhfuil bhfuil bhfuil bhfuil bhfuil bhfuil bhfuil bhfu Bhfuil Bhfuil Bhfuil Bhfuil Bhfuil Bhfuil Bhfuil Bhfuil Bhfuil Bhfuil Bhfuil Bhfuil Bhfuil Bhfuil Bhfuil Bhfuil Bhfuil Bhfuil Bhfuil Bhfuil Bhfuil Bhfuil Bhfuil Bhfuil Bhfuil Bhfuil Bhfuil Bhfuil Bhfuil Bhfuil Bhfuil Bhfuil Bhfuil Bhfuil Bhfuil Bhfuil Bhfuil Bhfuil Bhfuil Bhfuil Bhfuil Bhfuil Bhfuil Bhfuil Bhfuil Bhfuil Bhfuil Bhfuil Bhfuil Bhfuil Bhfuil Bhfuil Bhfuil Bhfuil Bhfuil Bhfuil Bhfuil Bhfuil Bhfuil Bhfuil Bhfuil Bhfuil Bhfuil Bhfuil Bhfuil Bhfuil Bhfuil Bhfuil Bhfuil Bhfuil Bhfuil Bhfuil Bhfuil Bh
There are no comments yet.
Be the first! Share your thoughts.
