Under the stones of Achill

They say if you turn over a stone in Ireland, or scratch the bark of a tree, you’ll find a story underneath. Most of us, of course, don’t bother. We simply sail from one day to the next, blissfully unaware of a whole other dimension, a historical and cultural legacy which shimmers beneath the surface of the everyday. And maybe it’s just as well. Because when you start digging into these things, who knows where you’ll finish up?

The author Mary J Murphy has lived in Caherlistrane, Co Galway, for some 25 years. For many of those years she holidayed with her family every summer on Achill Island. A few years ago she returned from such a holiday when her husband introduced her to a friend of his – who began to reminisce about another Caherlistrane woman, Eva O’Flaherty.

In the early years of the 20th century, he recalled, she founded a knitting factory on Achill which went on to produce stylish twinsets for the most fashionable Dublin shops of the day: Brown Thomas, Arnotts, Switzers.

For a journalist, local historian and, as Murphy herself puts it, “a curious creature”, O’Flaherty’s story was irresistible. “She was the belle of the ball at the Cafe Royal in Regent Street, where her beauty attracted a number of painters,” Murphy says. “She also had a hat shop in Knightsbridge. She knew Paul Henry, Heinrich Böll and Graham Greene. It was an irresistible combination of hats and fripperies and nonsense with deadly serious cultural pursuits.”

There was also a hint of an unhappy love affair, possibly with a married man. Murphy began to ask questions of the older people in the area – but hard facts were hard to come by. “Initially I could find nothing,” she says. “I didn’t know Eva’s date of birth, her parents’ names, when she was on Achill. Nothing.” Eventually she spoke to a retired solicitor whose father knew Eva’s father, Martin O’Flaherty. He said Eva had gone to school at Mount Anville in Dublin. Murphy found a date of birth in the school archive – and she was hooked.

"I couldn't leave it alone," she says. "I found photos and letters that had never been turned up before. It was a question of pulling, pulling, pulling – and then following the threads." An apt metaphor for a subject which has knitting at its heart. From those sparse details of O'Flaherty's early life Murphy want on to reconstruct the tale of St Colman's knitting factory which, at its height, provided employment for several dozen Achill women. The result was a book, Achill's Eva O'Flaherty: Forgotten Island Heroine (1874-1963).

By the time authors publish a biographical study, they’re often so fed up with their subjects that they never want to see or hear of them again. Not Murphy. “I see a documentary,” she says. “And then I see a movie with Meryl Streep as Eva O’Flaherty.” It has, she admits, become a bit of an obsession.

Since the book was published Murphy has made still more headway on O’Flaherty’s family tree. She discovered that Eva is related, not just to Oscar Wilde but to the mayor of London, Boris Johnson. But there’s still digging to be done on the O’Flaherty front: “There are,” as Murphy puts it in another of her knitting metaphors, “still a lot of loose threads”.

Despite her support for, and dedication to, the women of Achill, Eva never married or had children of her own. “So nobody carried the flame for her, or carried on her memory,” says Murphy. It was a cause of particular satisfaction to her, therefore, when a memorial stone was erected at the O’Flaherty family burial ground at Donaghpatrick earlier this year. And the recognition continues: on August 21st, there’ll be an Eva O’Flaherty 50th Anniversary Memorial Gathering at the cemetery as part of the Caherlistrane Gathering 2013.

Scoil Acla, the summer school which O’Flaherty co-founded in 1910, is also going strong. This year it runs from July 27th to August 3rd, and its programme of traditional music, language classes, sean-nós dancing and basket-weaving provide many good reasons to do so. Or you could just go and check out the big western skies on the island which are, as Murphy says, “eye-popping”. Just don’t turn over any stones or scratch any trees while you’re there. You might never come back.