OPINION (AN COLÚN): In the footsteps of hedge school masters and a raparee

WALKING in the hills around Upperchurch last week the words of Minister Malcolm Noonan were in my head following the opening of a beautiful Art Installation in Birr Castle the day before.
This is a very special Installation, called The Peatlands, and I urge everyone to go and experience it before it comes to a close at the end of December.
I say “experience” rather than “see” because this is a potentially deep and transcendental engagement with works of tranquillity and otherworldliness. One of the great things about Art and about Nature when we engage with them is the sense that the world with its complications, madness and judgementalism, has been set aside for a while and we are able to be who we really are, which is our souls that dwell within. The Peatlands Installation can do this for you if you are in the right frame of mind. I was fortunate because I had it to myself for half an hour. Seated alone, in quietness, undisturbed by people or the demands of the world, with the sounds of the bog in my ears and the beauties of the bog before my eyes, the soul emerged - a gentle thing and yet resilient.
Minister Malcolm Noonan said he knows this feeling too. Sometimes feeling mentally knocked about after a few days in the Dáil, he said, he finds the best antidote to be some time in nature or in the boglands.
It was obvious from his words that he also has a great connection to the importance of art in our lives. He thanked the artists behind the Installation for pouring their “creativity and passion” into the project. He also spoke of the fragility of nature, fragile before mankind's rapacious and thoughtless ways.
He finished with a very fine quotation by the American marine biologist and writer Rachel Carson: “Those who contemplate the beauty of the Earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts.” This is a theme which has been expressed by countless different writers over the centuries. The ancient Greeks and Romans expressed it. No doubt, millennia ago, in prehistory, our hunter gatherer ancestors would sometimes pause during the hunt and contemplate the Earth's beauty.
Last week I was contemplating the beauty of the hills surrounding the village of Upperchurch near Thurles. This is a special village community. They have a strong pride in their place and look after it very well. They have also created a number of hillwalks in the area which take us away from the tarmac and get us into the fields, and therefore into the spirit of the place.
Upperchurch began as a monastic settlement and the shape of the village is typical of a settlement based around a monastic centre. O'Sullivan Beare and his followers passed through the area during the winter of 1602-03 on their famous and harrowing march northwards following the Battle of Kinsale.
The route I was walking was a charming eight kilometre waymarked route called the Eamon an Chnoic Loop which is an example of the good things which forward-thinking communities can achieve because it passes through a lot of farmland. There is a lot of beautiful Irish countryside which we are denied access to because it is farmland. Eamon an Chnoic lived from 1670 to 1724. He was a famous raparee, a sort of Robin Hood figure, who robbed from the rich and gave to the poor. It's said he fought with Sarsfield in the Jacobite-Williamite War, after which he lived the life of a raparee in the hills in the Upperchurch region. He is believed to have written the well known Irish song which bears his name.
During the walk a notice board told me that there was once a hedge school on the laneway I was standing upon, which was run by a schoolmaster named Bourke. About a kilometre further down there was another hedge school run by a school master named Connolly. Under the Penal Laws from 1723 to 1782 all Catholic education was forbidden. However no hedge school teachers are known to have been prosecuted during this time. By the mid 1820s it's estimated that about 400,000 students had been educated in these places. They were replaced by the national school system in the 1830s. However some continued to operate up to the 1890s.
Brian Friel's famous play “Translations” is set in a hedge school which symbolises Irish culture holding out against a dominant, far-reaching colonialism. Friel was very cautious about the subject matter of his play being over nationalised by others (an easy enough mistake to fall into). He wrote: "The play has to do with language and only language. And if it becomes overwhelmed by that political element, it is lost.” In other words, he loved the Irish language and wanted to celebrate it, but he didn't want it to be politicised by others.
On the walk the attractive form of Sacred Heart Church in Upperchurch often catches the eye. At the end of the walk I was fortunate that a series of baptisms had just taken place and therefore the door wasn't locked. I met the PP Tony Ryan as he was exiting the church and he very kindly gave me a quick tour of the interior. It was built in the 1920s and has a lovely mosaic floor and a beautiful, high, barrel-shaped ceiling of dark oak (resembling a boat's hull). Fr Ryan told me he had walked the Camino de Santiago. I had walked it as well, in 2003, so we talked about that for a while. I undertook the last 200 miles of the Camino with my wife, mother and aunt, and the memories are very special.