An Irishman's Diary

EN ROUTE through the Tipperary village of Rearcross – virgin territory for me – last week, I stopped to visit its rather unusual church. Appearing at first to be a wooden structure, painted pale yellow and green, it might have been a little piece of New England dropped among the hills to the south of the Silvermines.

And closer inspection revealed that, sure enough, it had been transported here from elsewhere. But in fact the church is closer to being a piece of Old England – or rather Wales, where according to an inscription in the front porch, it was first built in the 1840s, to serve a congregation of Methodists.

Moreover, its exterior walls are made not of wood, but metal: pure, corrugated, rust-proof tin. The wood is all on the inside. Protected by the tin and a layer of jute insulation is a pretty, pine-panelled interior with cross-beams and cosy balconies at three ends of the cruciform shape.

Further embellishing its eccentricity as a Catholic place of worship is a pair of small, stained-glass windows dedicated to two saints rarely featured in this part of the world – William and Thomas. That said, their choice is simply explained, by dedications to the similarly-named local priests in whose memory they were installed.

In its original form, the church was a product of and for Britain’s industrial revolution. So-called “tin tabernacles”, of which this must have been one of the earliest examples, were a cost-effective way of catering for the rapid population growth – and accompanying religious revival – that industrialisation brought.

They also had the advantage of flexibility. Later versions were even created flat-pack style, for ease of construction and dismantling when whole populations shifted in search of work.

That was what happened in Wales. By the 1880s, the methodist chapel had lost its flock to mines elsewhere, at which point the building was put up for sale. In Rearcross, meanwhile, church-less Catholics were still having to trek over the hills to Kilcommon, Toor, or Cappamore, for Sunday Mass: a distance of up to seven miles.

So the parish priest, Fr William McKeogh, went to Wales and bought himself a second-hand house of God: shipping it to Limerick, from where his parishioners brought it home in pieces by horse and cart. It was re-erected at Rearcross in 1887, with a flight of concrete steps leading up to it, courtesy of the local landlord.

IN YET another unusual touch, the (more recently added) baptismal font is inscribed with a piece of poetry I didn’t at first recognise: “By a silvery stream at evening/Lit by a slanting sun/Or some green hill/Where shadows drifted by,/Some quiet hill/Where mountainy men hath sown/And soon would reap/Near to the gate of heaven”.

The verse is from Pádraig Pearse's The Wayfarer,slightly adapted for its environs. In the original version, that first line is "little rabbits in a field at evening", which may have been considered too secular. The references to hills and mountainy men are unedited, however, and unquestionably apt.

Rearcross feels remote even now. But it must have been more so in the years immediately after Pearse’s death, when it was a dangerous place for state forces.

In 1920, two RIC men from the village were shot dead while cycling to Newport. And the shooting didn't end with the Treaty. In December 1922, during the Civil War, Free State troops were ambushed twice on the short journey between Kilcommon and Rearcross, although this time the rebels came off worse in what The Irish Timesreported as a "stiff encounter".

The Troubles also had a tragic echo the following year when a local man accidentally shot and killed his neighbour with a rifle found hidden in a cornstack as they worked together in the fields.

Its church aside, the area has other exotic touches, including a pub called the “Congo” and a river known in English as the “Bilboa”. The latter name bears no apparent relation to its Irish version, “An Chlaoideach”, and nobody I asked could explain it.

I have since discovered that there is also – or used to be – a place in Laois called Bilboa. Which according to John Feehan's Laois: An Environmental History, was a coal-mining village at the southern tip of that county. As such, it was one of three now-deserted mining settlements in Laois, the others being "Newtown" and – wait for it – "Moscow", whose name still lives as the venue of Crettyard GAA club.

At least the Russian influence has an explanation. According to Feehan, “The late 19th and early 20th century saw the growth in many parts of industrial Britain – particularly in mining districts – of villages which became little bastions of militant socialism. These [were] known popularly as Little Moscows, and Moscow in Laois is one of the very few Irish examples – perhaps the only one”.

Maybe the Bilboas of Laois and Tipperary have a similar origin, relating to their near-namesake, the Basque city of Bilbao. The latter is a big mining centre, after all. It also has a history of militant republicanism, being among other things the place where the Spanish civil war started.

Furthermore, the name Bilbao derives, apparently, from the Basque words for “river” and “cove”. Thus it’s tempting to think that the revolutionaries of Rearcross renamed their waterway in its honour. But maybe there’s a mountainy man out there somewhere who can tell me.