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It is hardly surprising that the Sawdoctors' song The Green and Red of Mayo is the anthem du jour for all those fans of the comeback kids who recently caused chaos in Croke Park on a rainy Saturday evening.
As it happens, the musical maestros from Tuam sneaked back into the charts earlier this month with a remastered vinyl version of their debut album, If This Is Rock And Roll, I Want My Old Job Back.
However, for this islo-maniac diarist, it is a song from their third album, Sam Oul’ Town, that resonates deeply.
As a regular sailor to the Clew Bay outpost of Clare Island, the sun is always high in the sky and the sea is shimmering when these lyrics echo across the waves.
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“Will you meet me on Clare Island/ Summer stars are in the sky/ We’ll get the ferry out from Roonagh/ And wave all our cares goodbye./ Gettin’ weary of the city/ Seems so many things have changed/ Let’s head off for Nora Daly’s home/ Where she’s walked, It never rained.”
When she was finally discharged she discovered that her mother had died of starvation, proud to the last
For the uninitiated, the mystical story of Nora Daly is part of the island's rich folkloric tradition with the attendant universal themes that infuse such narratives.
Like so many other Co Mayo people dependent on the lazy-bed, the loy and the Connacht lumper potato throughout the 1800s, she was victim of the toll inflicted by repeated famine, poverty, eviction, emigration and child labour in a cotton mill in Lancashire. It was there she fell in love with the foreman, Tom Dean. Engaged to be married and happy at last she worked hard in a bid to improve her widowed mother's circumstances. Tragically, Dean was fatally injured in an accident at the Mill and the sight of his butchered body left her with a "brain fever" and in an asylum.
When she was finally discharged she discovered that her mother had died of starvation, proud to the last, she had refused the help of the Poor Law Unions.
It couldn’t have been easy for this vulnerable woman to make her way back to her native island but that is what she did. There she must have discovered that her little thatched cottage had either been razed to the ground by the peelers’ battering ram because of failure to pay rent or had fallen into disrepair. So she took to wandering the byways and boreens of the island and was the subject of many kindnesses and generosity by her fellow islanders while whetting the imaginations of the children with her witch-like ways.
The Nora Daly story was still part of the island's oral store well into the 20th century. This may have been helped by the fact that it had appeared in print in a publication called the Irish Peasant and was later published in the Mayo News on July 21, 1906. It was written by Margaret Kelly, the wife of a Congested Districts Board official who had been posted to the island after its purchase in 1896.
She set off gambolling and pirouetting like a kid goat until she suddenly sensed the presence of another person
She writes how she struck up a friendship with Nora, when out walking one summer’s day, she suddenly heard “a droning chant that rose high and low, shrill and quiet again, until it suddenly stopped, breaking off after shriek after shriek of laughter”.
Oblivious to being watched, Nora was standing in a stream and, after bathing her face, she pulled out “a tiny pocket glass” and began to tidy her hair.
Satisfied with her reflection she set off gambolling and pirouetting like a kid goat until she suddenly sensed the presence of another person.
“Who may you be and what do you want?”
“I am Mrs Margaret Kelly, wife of a Congested Districts Board officer, and on my way for afternoon tea with the lightkeeper’s wife. I am sincerely apologetic for my unfortunate intrusion on you.”
“I could expect no better from a poor mainlander.”
“If I may ask your name.”
“Do you realise it is bad manners to question your betters.”
Witch-like, gap-toothed with long wispy grey hair and always dressed in bright colourful clothes, Nora wandered from village to village – Bunnamohaun to Ballytoughy, Kille to Capnagower – in foul weather and fair, entering houses on a whim, offering songs and dances in return for whatever hospitality might be available.
But there was no way she would ever be persuaded to sleep indoors. And for the 40 years she lived after her return to the island, “it was the fragrant heath and the wide sky that nursed her at night”. Until one morning, after the heavy snowfall of 1905, she was discovered lying for her eternal rest under an overhanging rock in a little garden that once was her father’s.
Indeed, Nora Daly was lying under the same sky that inspired the Sawdoctors song after they spent time on Clare Island during the 1990s.
Appropriately, their regular mode of marine transport was a little boat called “The Nora Daly”.