How love lasted despite divisive faith crusaders
The Cloney family controversy pitted powerful forces against each other in Fifties Ireland, says Bridget Hourican
The Fethard-on-Sea Boycott
Tim Fanning
The Collins Press, €14.99
THE diocese of Ferns has a talent for negative publicity. Bishop Denis Brennan's recent appeal to parishioners to pay a collective €60,000 annually for 20 years to meet the legal bills and compensation claims for clerical child abuse met with predictable incredulity and rage -- at least predictable to all except Ferns. It took the diocese 20 years from the first accusation against Fr Sean Fortune to dismiss that priest, and it was Ferns that hosted that seminal church controversy, the 1957 Fethard-on-Sea boycott. Already the subject of a film, A Love Divided (1999), it is now that of a riveting book by Tim Fanning, an historian who knows both the area and the family at the centre of the controversy.
The story is well known: on her marriage to a local Catholic farmer, Sheila Cloney, a Protestant, signed the Ne Temere decree agreeing to bring any children up Catholic. However, when her elder daughter reached school age in 1957, she considered the Church of Ireland school. Hectored by the Catholic clergy and feeling unsupported by her husband, she fled with both daughters to the North, and then secretly to Scotland.
Fethard's parish priest, Fr Stafford, accused the Protestant community of aiding and abetting the kidnapping of Catholic children and, with the implicit support of the bishops, called for a boycott of Protestant businesses until the children were returned.
The boycott was in force for two months and continued, less strongly, for another three, during which time it had become an international scandal. Sheila Cloney, hiding out in an evangelical community in the Orkney Islands and in touch with no one at home, read about it in an evangelical missive from Peru, that quoted a Time magazine article.
Behind these familiar facts is a story of simmering sectarian tensions, economic deprivation, growing Dublin anti-clericalism, political manoeuvring by Catholic and evangelical churches, and the clash of two forceful personalities, Sheila Cloney and Fr Stafford.
The boycott was inevitably depicted by evangelical Protestants, such as the rising star Ian Paisley, as evidence of Catholic submission to the clergy, and so in part it was. However, as Fanning shows, there were also economic considerations. It was the Fifties, that decade of emigration, and businesses and schools needed all the custom they could get. It was no coincidence that
the vigilantes enforcing the boycott were shopkeepers and teachers. The historical tensions between the two communities went back to 1798 and earlier -- it was also no coincidence that Wexford, rather than the Pale, provided the location for the drama.
Fr Stafford made a crusade from a domestic row (presumably a marital crisis underscored Sheila's decision to leave, although Fanning doesn't get into this) -- and so did the northern evangelicals. Sheila and the children were welcomed in Belfast.
Unionists, long accused of bigotry towards Catholics, had a field day with the boycott, and this contributed to de Valera's determination to end it, although he was also animated by what Fanning calls "his own sense of religious fair play". His strong words in the Dail -- "ill-considered, ill-conceived ... futile ... unjust and cruel" -- elicited a defiant and very unionist "not an inch" from Fr Stafford, but this was the beginning of the end for the boycott. On New Year's Eve 1957, Sheila returned home after eight months. She withheld her daughters from both schools; they were educated at home.
The heroine of the story, fully deserving of Fanning's final generous encomium, is Sheila Cloney. Whatever the contributing factors, without Sheila there's no story.
The clergy exerted force from the start: when the couple began going out, Fr Stafford banned Sean from the parish drama group. Sheila trumped this by getting married in an English register office and keeping their London address secret. But a priest found his way there and persuaded her into marriage in a Catholic church. The clergy presumed a similar successful outcome when, eight years later, three priests turned up at her house to tell her: "Eileen's going to the Catholic school and there's nothing you can do about it". Not the most diplomatic way to address a strong-minded woman. She showed them what she could do about it. On the evidence of the recent diocesan appeal, diplomacy is still not a strong point with the Ferns clergy.
However, heroic mould-breakers and their families generally pay a price, and this is true of the Cloneys. The boycott left scars in the village and the family kept to itself. The eldest child, Eileen, recalled that they didn't play with local children, and stayed sitting in the car when they went to the village: "We lost out badly. We never felt we were on an equal standing with other people because we had no education." That is almost the most heartbreaking line in the book. It was quite a price a pay.
The girls did, however, get a life lesson in tolerance and individuality; both Sheila and Sean continued to worship in their own churches, to respect the other's faith and to be vigilant to corruption; in the Eighties, Sean compiled a large file of evidence relating to Fr Fortune's abuse of children and alerted Bishop Comiskey.
A Love Divided remains, however, a sadly accurate title for their lives and deaths -- Sean, who died in 1999, is buried with his parents in Templetown church, while Sheila, who died last year, is buried in the Church of Ireland graveyard at St Mogues. It was left to their second daughter, Mary, who predeceased them, to unify the traditions and the family: her funeral in 1998 was held in the Catholic church at Poulfur, followed by burial in St Mogues.
- Bridget Hourican
Originally published in
