Family history in Scarrif

By rights I shouldnt be writing this  post as all the action concerns Boronia's side of the family.

On Tuesday (yesterday) we departed Killarney in pouring rain. The forecast for the week is essentially rain and more rain. We headed north towards Scarrif a small town where Boronia's great grandmother Anne Farrell was born. She and five of her siblings emigrated to Victoria in the last half of the 1800s, probably as a result of the Irish famine and the social consequences arising from changes in the inheritance of land. One of Anne's brothers, Michael, stayed on the small leased family farm; Anne and four other siblings all left. Boronia is yet to make contact with any of his descendants. The names Michael and Patrick recur down the family tree. Consequently it seems unsurprising and somehow rather appropriate that one of my sons should be named Patrick Michael.

We found the farm and its original stone cottage, three windows, three rooms and a slate roof. It is currently a cow shed on a road two kilometres out of Scarrif. Boronia's brother Tom had commissioned a report from the Clare Historical Society which laid out quite a lot of the family's basic history. We also found a number of graves in the local burial ground next to the church, with a sign telling us that it is Ireland's oldest catholic church still in regular use.

Boronia is out at the library here in Ennis doing some more basic research for her brother who is the keeper of the |Halstead family's geneaological records. Some of the papers she has already dug up on the history of the famine in the Scarrif region make scarifying reading, with tales of cemetries overflowing, workhouses full and overflowing, cholera and malaria rampant. That and the weather makes anyone's decision to emigrate understandable. The added prospect of actually owning land in Australia proved irresistable. It helps ot explain Australians focus on actually owning a quarter acre!

For my part, I have resisted the temptation to ring my sister Cathy and seek out what information she has on the origins of the Dillons in Ireland. It is enough for me to get a sense of the history, the geography, and the culture. I have come to realise how much Irish culture - accounts of Irish myths, Irish history, a bastardised version of the Irish sense of humour, and a scepticism for authority, particularly English authority was imparted by family and the very Irish De La Salle brothers who taught me in Armidale. While I dont feel Irish, I certainly feel an affinity. Of course, all of this is perhaps counteracted by my birth order (first) and perhaps more potently by the German genes on my father's mother's side. These reinforce my authoritarian tendencies and also scepticism of the English. Of course, the Halsteads are also a very English family....perhaps marriage to Boronia has forged me into the balanced individual I am today!

We have decided to spend another day here in Ennis some thirty kilometres from Scarrif, then we drive to Dublin on Thursday and essentially begin to wend our way home, via Frankfurt where we spend a couple of days in a classy hotel and living it up before the stringencies of unemployment take hold of me.

We havent managed to see much of Ennis itself. Its winding central streets have been full of cars, wind and rain. Its central square sports a monument some ten metres high  of Daniel O'Connall, an Irish patriot, so high above us we can barely make him out. The people we have met and spoken with have been uniformly polite and friendly, but this has been not enough to make us prefer the delights of O'Connall's gaze here to those of the ACT. We have been away so long that the joys of the ACT are beginning to become a dim memory.....we are both looking forward to getting home!

mike