Poet of the Glens, but not of the Rising…

John Skrine is a grandson of ‘Moira O’Neill’. Born in Dublin, after a working life in England he has retired there, and is currently researching and writing about her life and her wider Higginson family.

Sluggerites visiting the Old Church in Cushendun for the Big Day Out might be amused to know how a locally-known figure, popular in the early twentieth century for her verses celebrating the beauty and people of the Glens of Antrim, came a cropper for her political views.

As you approach the church you’ll see to the right of the door a blue plaque to ‘Moira O’Neill (Agnes Higginson Skrine)’. Her Songs of the Glens of Antrim, in print from 1900 into the 1930s, are still quoted locally for descriptions of the landscape and poignant, if sentimental, portraits of local people.

She had some empathy for the hard condition of their lives. Go to the strand and look back at the country behind, where she walked as a young person (harder to do that nowadays). She wrote a poem of exile and return-to-find-the-girl-dead about the people of the little cluster of cottages up the hill there, with the refrain:

All the gold in Ballytearim is what’s stickin’ to the whin;

All the crows in Ballytearim has a way o’ gettin’ thin.

Then turn to your right, where

There’s a house upon the sea-sand, a white house an’ low,

The gulls are flyin’ over it, the red roses blow.

By night the waves are breakin’, an’ the moon is on the sea;

Sure all that I love are there, all that love me.

This is Rockport Lodge, the elegant home of her heart—but not of most of the years of her life, which were spent in Mauritius, Italy, England, Canada, and finally the south of Ireland.

Nesta (the name ‘Moira O’Neill’ actually called herself) was married in the Old Church in 1895 to an Englishman, and joined him on his cattle ranch in Canada, after which they moved to the south of Ireland.

When they lived in County Wexford in 1916, the Easter Rising brought out another view of local people. Penning an immediate response, published in Blackwood’s Magazine that June, she described the scene nine miles away in ‘about the most disloyal town in Ireland’, where it was ‘unaccountable how the leaders in Enniscorthy controlled their following even for the short while that they did, and prevented them from getting drink’. Nearby Ferns, ‘was full of the rabble for days . . . Boys of fourteen and fifteen were given rifles and bayonets, and flourished them freely in the face of respectable people’.

But her greater anger was based on a sense of betrayal: ‘In Ireland disloyalty is the chief recommendation to place and power: for loyal subjects do not command enough votes to make them of any importance to a British government anxious about its own tenure of office.’

It was bad luck for her that Robert Brennan, Commandant of the Wexford Brigade, was shown the article after he returned from imprisonment, his death sentence commuted. He recalled it late in life as ‘a fantastic and mischievous account of our depredations’.^[1]

A journalist, he was head of the Sinn Féin Press Bureau from 1918 to 1921. I could be wrong, but considering that her home was burned down by the IRA just a few days before the truce—the indictment cited her journalism—Robert Brennan may have felt that a score was settled.

He went on to an illustrious career in the media and government, serving as Irish Minister at Washington, 1938-1947—he wrote mystery stories and a play, too. Nesta wrote a last novel and a few more articles for Blackwood’s.

The Skrine family bought the house next door with their compensation money. My father kept his life-long smouldering resentment well-hidden; in the present generations, the fire is out. Nesta’s grandson still farms the land, living in a house near the ruin, from which he took the granite pillars of the porch for his new one.