`Lough Derg is peace, penance and prayer.'
Patrick Kavanagh went there. Seamus Heaney went there. They both wrote long poems based on the experience, called Lough Derg, and Station Island respectively. President McAleese went there in July 1998. Highranking clergy, royalty, high-profile business people have all been there. But most of those who have been there are not well-known: they belong to us in very personal ways; they are our mothers and aunts and grandmothers.
And they are predominantly female: women pilgrims have long outnumbered men by four to one at Lough Derg. As the bus to Lough Derg picks up pilgrims on its cross-country route, I watch sons delivering mothers to the bus at Sligo, carrying their bags for them from the car; husbands handing wives carefully up the steps of the bus when it reaches Ballyshannon, touching their shoulders in small gestures of farewell. To a man, they all stood back to wave and watch as the bus pulled off; their expressions somewhere between baffled respect for the pilgrim and utter relief not to be on the bus themselves.
Pilgrim: one who journeys to sacred place as act of religious devotion; person regarded as journeying to a future life. Pilgrims have been coming to the place called Station Island, or St Patrick's Purgatory, for hundreds of years. Lough Derg is four miles from the village of Pettigo in Co Donegal, at the end of a narrow hilly road, and Station Island is one of many small islands on the lake. Up to 12 years ago, pilgrims were rowed the half-mile out here in open boats which required three men on either oar. Now, the large blue motor boats makes the crossing in a few minutes. The saying is, if you look back at the island when you leave, you will return to make another pilgrimage.
The fact that Station Island is an island has helped the pilgrimage to endure for so many centuries. Where do you go to retreat from everything when you already live on the small island that is Ireland? You can go deeper into its physical and metaphysical landscape, to an island within the island. To a place where you forgo both food and sleep, where you are forbidden to bring mobile phones, walkmans, radios, games, musical instruments, playing cards, chewing gum, cameras, and food or drink of any kind, except water.
The season of three-day pilgrimages runs from June 1st to August 15th. Th e cost is £20, but even if you do not have the money, you will not be turned away. Pilgrims must fast from midnight the night before they arrive until midnight on the day they leave; they must remove their shoes on arrival on the island, only putting them on again just before they leave; they must perform nine stations during their three days there, three of which should be outdoors around the famous stone penitential beds; and they must stay awake for a 24-hour continuous vigil.
The car park on the shore had a considerable complement of 2000 Mercedes, BMWs, and four-wheel-drives. I don't know why this should have surprised me, but it did. It intrigued me. As did the sight of a Louis Vuitton handbag on the lap of the woman sitting opposite me on the boat-journey out to the island. Arguments about the success of the economy having the effect of elbowing traditional values aside do not seem quite so clear-cut here. Neither did I expect to run into anyone I knew, but I did: I met a journalist from another newspaper, there in a private capacity as a third-time pilgrim.
The current troubles of the Catholic Church, and its declining congregation, are well documented. The number of pilgrims visiting Lough Derg is also steadily dropping. In 1989, 27,661 pilgrims came to the island. By 1998, there were only 10,973 - the first time since 1929 that the figures had dipped below 11,000. In 1999, 10,134 came. The decrease in numbers since the 1980s is so rapid, it is happening in front of Monsignor Richard Mohan, Prior of Station Island, as he counts people stepping off the boat each day.
It is only in recent years that non-pilgrim members of the media have been allowed access to the island at all, but now they are actively welcomed. Communication between the island and the wider world is expanding rapidly. Hence this year, Lough Derg has published publicity posters for the first time, developed a website, employed a PR person to promote the island and is actively soliciting pilgrims in a very 21st-century way.
Last week, Monsignor Mohan went on Morning Ireland to tell how some 200 key business people and executives would be receiving information about Lough Derg in that morning's post. Describing them as "a select group of movers and shakers", he spoke of how they might perceive the pilgrimage as a way of alleviating "executive stress" and how it was considerably cheaper than a health farm.
On Station Island at 7.40 a.m., at exactly the time Monsignor Mohan is speaking on air, pilgrims are emerging bleary-eyed from the Basilica. These new arrivals have been there on all-night vigil, and are joined for 6.30 a.m. Mass by those on their last day. You can easily distinguish between them: those who have been up all night and must now stay awake until 10 p.m., move like astronauts and look chilled and exhausted, but stoic. Those who have almost completed their pilgrimage and will leave on the boat at 9.50 a.m. singing Hail Glorious Saint Patrick look, quite simply, ecstatic.
Why do people come? Angela O'Dwyer and Maura Dolan are sisters of advanced years and they have been coming to Lough Derg for many years. What does Lough Derg have for them, that Knock or Lourdes does not have? "It's a day out the others are. Like a day at the seaside!" sniffs O'Dwyer.
"Lough Derg is peace, penance and prayer," says Dolan.
Both sisters remark on the declining numbers of pilgrims, with a mixture of sadness and pragmatism. "It's no point in denying it, we like the smaller numbers. It's easier to get around the beds. Before, we used to have to queue for up to two, sometimes three hours to get on them," relates O'Dwyer.
During the two days I am there, almost everyone on Station Island is there as a repeat pilgrim. Out of some 150 people, only two are there for the first time. There are, also, perhaps inevitably, those who treat the pilgrimage like supermarket loyalty cards, clocking up absurd figures. There is a woman on the east coast who comes every week in season. Some have been 200 times; many people I speak to know those who have been more than 50 times.
"When I came first, in the 1980s," one man on his second pilgrimage tells me in the dining room, "there was a lot of religious snobbery. People were always asking you how many times you had done it before - there was a real sense of competition about it all." He is there for a "special intention". Children and grandchildren taking exams is a reason many cite for coming, although, understandably, many pilgrims decline to answer questions, explaining they have come to Lough Derg for private reasons.
Helen Phelan came here first in 1951, a year which saw 32,554 on the island. She has been here many times since. "When you take off your shoes, you're leaving the world behind," she says. Why does she think more women come than men? "We show our faith, men don't," is the reply.
"Women have a higher level of tolerance," says Mary Finnegan. "And if men do come, they certainly don't make return visits in the same numbers that women do."
Mid-afternoon. All the pilgrims are in the Basilica for the Way of the Cross prayers. The rain skitters off the lake, and the sound of singing can be heard now and then between the gusts of wind. I wander around the temporarily empty island with my notebook, looking carefully at the buildings without the self-conscious feeling that's always there when pilgrims look accusingly at my shod feet before turning away with polite - and sometimes pointedly impolite - distaste.
In the disused ladies hostel opposite the Basilica, where many of the current pilgrims would have once stayed, bats have colonised the top floors, and some of the windows are broken. The ground floor is the island's designated smoking area, and the room just inside the front door is now a makeshift cloakroom. It's here that pilgrims leave extra clothing, and whatever possessions they might need during the day, since the dormitories are locked most of the day.
Plastic bags hang from a row of Victorian coat hooks. The bags are glimpses of the world temporarily left behind, telling of shopping trips to supermarkets and clothes-buying expeditions: River Island, Dunnes Stores, Tesco, Shoe City, Gap, Spar, Superquinn, and boutique bags with rural addresses.
THE dormitories are new, as is the dining room; all of them built on reclaimed ground within the past 15 years, and laid out in a cloister-type shape. The dining-room floor is parquet; polished amber hues. There are rows of pew-like benches and long tables, simply laid with plain, white cups and sideplates. The sugar bowls on the tables are unusually big and deep, with the words St Patrick's Purgatory and a cross printed on them. Lough Derg soup is hot water, with salt and pepper. Lough Derg sandwiches are slices of toast sprinkled liberally with sugar.
Between 1.15 p.m. and 8.15 p.m. - outside prayer time - pilgrims come here for their one meal of the day. This consists of black tea, coffee or hot water, dry bread, dry toast, or oatcakes. You can eat as much of this as you want.
Everything is spotlessly clean. The smooth parquet floor gleams. The benches and tables shine with polish. There are long windows overlooking the lake. When the unpredictable sun shines, it floods the room. The parquet, you think, must be smooth and warm under cold feet. It's a bare room, yet there is nothing missing from it. It is a room that has dignity; a place perfectly designed for the purpose it serves.
The shop on the island sells a restrained line of religious items. You won't find any of the usual kitsch here that is touted in Knock, Lourdes, or Rome - snow-scene Popes in the Vatican and luminous Holy Marys. You will find, however, Lough Derg mousemats for £4.99, printed with the message Time Out for Body and Soul, Hamlet cigars, cigarettes, aspirin and cans of insect repellent, - to fight the infamous Lough Derg midges.
No pilgrimage is complete without several visits from the midges. They are the size of pinheads and several million in number. They keep their own vigils by staying awake day and night: trying to fly into your eyes, up your nose, and down your neck. Wherever they settle on you, they bite, leaving a disproportionally large mark.
The midges have religious omnipresence. They also cloud the air in the Day Room and Night Room - places where pilgrims can sit between stations, vigil, and prayer.
The pilgrims come in, silent in their bare feet, and sit at the wooden, rolltop benches, like those on old-fashioned ferries, looking out at the lake. They mostly sit in silence, too tired to talk. A few heads nod and snap up again. The water slaps close to the window. The wind sucks against the doors. The tiny island itself is a bit like a raft, since it floats on the many foundations that shore up its reclaimed land. Sitting there in silence, looking at the mantra of the water, it's hard not to think you are in fact, on a ferry, on a boat, making a journey, travelling somewhere.
Website: www.loughderg.org Pilgrims' Tales . . . and More, edited by Mary McDaid and Pat McHugh (published by Columba, £7.99). Lough Derg, by Joseph McGuinness (published by Columba, £4.99)