Tithe records for the early 19th century document two Domhnall Ó Beólláins in Sligo, one in the township of Faramfarrel and the other in Knockacullen, near the shores of Killala Bay.
As a sept, the Ó Beólláins, descend from a royal daughter of Cineal Eoghan, an ecclesiastical tribe associated with the Erainnian Dal btFiatach. The ‘Applecross princess’ married a gal-gael king of Man and the Isles: Helgi Bjolan Kjetilsson[xviii].
Whilst the Norse tradition was for patrilineal succession, the Pictish-Gaelic culture of the princess was matrilineal and she was (probably) related through the female line to the hereditary abbots (co-arbs) of Bangor[xix] and Applecross (Abercrossan) across the channel from Skye[xx].
The princess was, probably, the great-great-great-great-niece of Maelrubha[xxi], Cenél Eogain (of the northern Uí Néill), a hereditary abbot of Bangor who subsequently founded the abbey at Applecross in 663 CE as part of Bangor’s mission to the Picts[xxii].
Helgi’s son, Bjolan[xxiii], is described in Irish Chronicles as a king in Alba and Helgi’s nephew became Earl of Ross[xxiv]. Helgi’s son, by a second wife, Kaðlin Hrólfsdóttir Møre de Normandie, was Ciarmac Ó Beólláin[xxv] and his grandson, Beollán mac Ciarmaic, King of the Lake of the Goats.
As well as hereditary abbots in Applecross, Ó Beólláins became co-arbs of Droim Chliabh (Drumcliff) in the North of Sligo and had lands in Dún Ultáin (Doonaltan) in Tireragh[xxvi] to the South of the Hy Fiachrach.
The monastery ot Drumcliff, though remote, was a famous seat of learning, charity and hospitality from at least 871 CE. Between the 11th century and 1503, the role of abbot, along with other clerical and secular offices, interchanged between Ó Beólláins and Ó Connails, suggesting a persistence of matrilineal inheritance.
Perhaps due to its remoteness, the monastery suffered less than most in Ireland, being sacked only by the Ó Rourkes and the Ó Conors during the 500 years after 1000 CE.
The Ó Beólláin lands in Tireagh had a less peaceful history.
Already, in 699 CE, the Cineal Fiachra (of which the Ó Beólláins were a sept) was losing ground to Cineal Caibre (ultimately the O’Conors of Carbury).
The Anglo-Norman invasions of Ireland, the introduction of Roman rather than Celtic Christianity and subsequent British plantations, disrupted and dispossessed the native gaels in Connacht as well as the rest of Ireland.
The Ó Beólláins (and Fiachrach) territories were squeezed first by other gaelic families, like the O’Rourkes and O’Conors, then by Anglo-Normans such as Maurice Fitzgerald.
As across Ireland, ‘title’ to the country was fiercely contested, since the first English invasions, between local magnates like the O’Connors and Anglo-Norman colonists like the Berminghams (McPheorais). In the mid 13th century, land in Tireragh was granted to the Berminghams following the murderous march across Ireland of Maurice Fitzgerald and other Anglo-Norman warlords. During that time, “the Foreigners left Connaught without food, clothes or cattle: and they did not carry off either pledges or hostages on this journey. They left neither peace , nor quietness, nor tranquillity, nor happiness in the country; for the Gaels were robbing and killing one another regarding the residues the Foreigners left in it on this occasion.”[xxvii]
In 1245, however, Godfrey O’Donnel (of Tirconnel) plundered the Anglo-Norman town of Sligo and mortally wounded Fitzgerald in battle (dying subsequently of his own wounds sustained in the same battle).
The decades that followed saw the inexorable rise of the O’Conors Sligo. In 1308 the O’Conors defeated the ‘English’ of Tireragh in battle at Ballysadare but the 14th century was marked by calamities greater than those inflicted by local warlords. Between 1348 and 1391, the towns of Ireland were afflicted by Influenza, Small-pox, ‘Barking Mania’ and five epidemics of Cluithe Righ[xxviii], (the Black Death) which left the country around Sligo depopulated.
Whilst the English restricted themselves to the Pale to the West of Dublin until 1541, the O’Conors of Sligo were riven with internecine rivalries and in constant conflict with other gaelic warlords for control of whatever remained.
The increasing incursions of the English into the West of Ireland under Sir Henry Sidney, eventually led to the submission of O’ Conor Sligo to the English Crown[xxix].
The Act of Uniformity, however, imposed fines on Gaelic Catholics for failure to attend protestant[xxx] worship and banned catholics from civic positions, resulting in the erosion of the power of local proprietors such as the O’Conors and the Ó Beólláins. Through royal grants, mortgages and purchase, English magnates acquired large areas of the area with John Taafe and Richard Lord Boyle acquiring tracts of land in Tirearagh.
The accession to the English throne of the Scottish King, James Stewart, intensified the persecution of Gaelic Catholics in the West of Ireland. In 1605, the Earl of Stafford ruled that King James held title to all the lands in Sligo. This was perceived by the native Gaels as preliminary to their clearance from their lands and tenancies. .
The Irish plantation in the early 17th century brought more Scots and English settlers to Tireragh and a progressive clearance of the ‘Old Irish’ proprietors and their tenants.
Insurrection finally broke out in the region in December 1641. The Gaelic proprietors seized Sligo and imprisoned the British settles in the local gaol. . In the aftermath of taking the town, the Gaels were implicated in the massacre of the British prisoners – men, women and children – in the gaol. This atrocity provoked Sir Frederick Hamilton, one of the British planters, to raid Sligo in July 1642[xxxi].
“A party sent towards Sligo where we met with a number of rogues. Hurt divers, killed 3 and brought their heads back to our Colonel, with a lusty prisoner we hanged next day.”
“Killed about 30 in 3 cabins and hanged our guide who died a most obdurate villain.”
“Killed and stripped many of their best men”
”Marched towards the Rosses where we killed 60 of their ablest men with 2 of their famous priests”
“Sent a party of horse and foot upon them , where we had good sport in killing nearly 60 of them with all their 3 Captains and Captain Teige O’Connor’s wife…and burned the town of Broadcullen with diverse small villages.”
“Took prisoner Charles Maguire after breaking his leg: to cure him carried him on a barrow to the gallows…”
Hamilton’s raid ended with his men entering Sligo where, at Hamilton’s exhortation, they burned all of the inhabitants in their houses, forcing those who tried to escape back into the flames, killing any others that they found and marching still others to the rivers where they drowned them “to the everlasting great honour and glory of God”.[xxxii]
The Gaelic confederates continued to hold strongpoints in Sligo until 1645 when Sir Robert Stewart with 8000 foot and 500 cavalry – all Scots or English Protestants – besieged the town and its castle . Faced with defeat the garrison commander agreed a surrender on equitable terms but, as the garrison left the castle the entire garrison of 200 men plus a ‘vast number of women and children’ were disarmed, stripped and massacred.
The execution of Charles Stewart and the establishment of a Commonwealth did not improve the situation of the native inhabitants of Tireragh. In 1651, Sir Charles Coote, on behalf of President Cromwell, initiated the clearance of the ‘native Irish’. When Gaelic resistance had been suppressed, Parliament granted the lands in Tireragh to disbanded Cromwellian soldiers – the Tituladoes. [xxxiii]
The new proprietors, – the ‘Usurpers’ – were a ‘garrison’ embattled in a hostile land and nurtured a culture of insecurity, blended with Puritan contempt. The government in London encouraged Puritan settlers in the Americas to return and settle the lands of displaced Catholics while the Tituladoes drove all overt practice of Catholicism underground and instigated the suppression of suspected (Jesuit) agents of ‘Rome’. The death of Cromwell and the Restoration of the (Catholic inclined) Stewart dynasty did nothing to relieve the tensions. In 1688, when the ‘Glorious Revolution’ installed the Dutchman, William of Orange, on the English throne, the population of Sligo and Tireragh factionalised. The Williamites moved first, seizing the strongpoints in the county but, when the Williamite garrison was called to Eniskillen in the interest of the wider war-effort, the (Gaelic) Jacobite faction, took control of Sligo’s strongpoints and held it until July 1691 when the Williamites besieged them and forced the Jacobites to surrender.
In the wake of the Williamite victory, another corpus of penal laws was imposed upon Gaelic Catholics. In 1697, laws to ‘prevent the further growth of Popery’ proscribed the leasing of land to Catholics – they were already banned from all public office[xxxiv]. Proprietor or cottar, the native Gaels who adhered to Catholicism were deprived of land, sustenance and civic status.
Whereas in the Scottish Highlands, mutual identification and bonds of pretended kinship and loyalty between cottars, tacksmen and proprietors persisted into the early decades of the 18th Century, the situation in Ireland was radically deracinated and abject.
“The treatment of the native Irish , as an incurably barbarous race , before the Reformation , and the various civil wars and confiscations which took place after the Reformation , had , at the period of the [Glorious] Revolution , so completely broken up the frame work of society , and so loosened men’s notions as to the obligations of law and morality , that it would have been a difficult task for the wisest and most beneficent government to raise the mass of the Irish people to the general level of European civilization . […] [T]he Government […] introduced the penal code against the Catholics , and treated the majority of the Irish people as outlaws . According to this system ( which has to a greater or less extent been acted on nearly up to the present day ) every Irish Catholic was presumed to be disaffected to the State , and was treated as an open or concealed rebel : the entire government was carried on by the Protestants and for their benefit ; and the Protestants were considered as the only link between England and Ireland . The English thought it for their interest that Ireland should belong to them , and they supported the Irish Protestants in oppressing the Irish Catholics, who , it was assumed , without that oppression would throw themselves into the arms of France . At the same time that a wide and impassable line was drawn by the law between the two religions in Ireland: the one persuasion was made a privileged , the other an inferior class , the whole of Ireland was treated as a province or colony , whose interests were to be sacrificed to those of the mother – country[xxxv] . Hence arose the restrictions on Irish commerce , on the exportation of corn , cattle , and woollen goods.”[xxxvi]
As Cornwalle Lewis remarks, “The system of Irish government , adopted in order to further the Protestant and English interest , and the severe penal code against the Catholics , though unsuccessful in converting the natives to the reformed faith , nevertheless so coerced the mass of the people , as to prevent any open insurrection . By degrees , however , as population increased , the closer contact of the miserable peasantry led them to form local and limited combinations , for the purpose of shaking off those burdens which pressed most heavily upon them , but which , when thinly scattered over the face of the country , they could not hope successfully to resist.”
As a consequence, the Irish did not rebel in support of Jabobite interests in the early 18th century. What occurred instead was the development of local oath societies resisting the roles of proprietors, clergy and state by direct and often violent action.
The first manifestation of rural resistance of this sort arose in 1761, around the time Domhnall Ó Beólláin was born, with an oath society known as the Whiteboys.[xxxvii] As in the Western Highlands, Irish proprietors, more usually absentee than even in the Scottish case, began squeezing their tenantry during the second half of the 18th century. The onset of the Napoleonic wars, moreover, inflated the price of beef and butter exports from Ireland to England, rendering ranching – and the enclosure of commons – lucrative to proprietors compared to arable farming tenants even in counties amenable to tillage like Sligo.
“About this time great tumults had been raised , and some outrages committed in different parts of Munster , by cottiers and others of the lowest class of its inhabitants , occasioned by the tyranny and rapacity of their landlords . These landlords had set their lands to cottiers far above their value , and , to lighten their burden , had allowed commonage to their tenants . Afterwards , in despite of all equity, contrary to all compacts , the landlords inclosed those commons, and precluded their unhappy tenants from the only means of making their bargains tolerable . Another cause of these people’s discontents was the cruel exactions of tithe – mongers[xxxviii] ; these harpies squeezed out the very vitals of the people , and by process , citation , and sequestration , dragged from them the little which the landlord had left them.”
The original Whiteboys (na Buachaillí Bána) were also known as Levellers since a major component of their modus operandi involved the levelling of enclosing fences around formerly common land. Whiteboys operated by direct action, binding local populations by oaths and intimidation of dissenters. This intimidation included the cropping of ears, cutting out of tongues, ‘excoriating’ with carding brushes and burying dissenters up to their necks in pits lined with brambles.
The government response to the Whiteboy insurrection were draconian powers to pursue and arrest members including the death penalty for anyone found guilty of administering an oath and life-time transportation to Australia for anyone taking an oath. Society members were executed. But the unrest continued, emerging in new waves in 1786 (around the year Domhnall Ó Beólláin’s and Caitrin Furey’s first son, Cathal was born).