![]() ![]() ![]() It seemed clear that as time was running out on his contract, Bishop Ireland used these poor people simply to buy time and fulfil his undertakings to his friends in the Railway company. Helped by a laicised Bishop Shannon we detailed his predecessor’s personal ownership of the railway land awarded to him for the purposes of Catholic settlement. ‘But,’ as Seosamh O Cuaig grimly said to me during the course of making the film, ‘I can read and I can write, in English’ Therefore we intensified our researches and the film eventually showed how these people had been used as scapegoats for the failed ambitions of the colonizing Bishop, a Republican and an entrepeneur. Nevertheless the slander of ‘laziness’ had persisted to this day, mainly because the immigrants could not defend themselves in English. They made a success of their lives, one of them eventually becoming mayor of the city.Īt least one Conamara family persevered on the prairie – that of Learaí Ó Flathartha – and also thrived. Paul – which was where they had thought they were going in the first place. In Spring the Bishop relented, the ‘Connemaras’ were delivered back to the city of St. But the Conamara immigrants, being neither literate or English speakers, could not defend themselves in that language, had no access to the print media. Naturally his urban flock and his separated brethren – the Freemasons of Morris County – did not doubt his word. The Bishop, responding to WASP criticism, said they were too lazy to work. The plight of those raw prairie dwellers was so desperate that they became the subject of national debate in the American Press. Then came the worst winter in living history with temperatures thirty below. For the fit and young of the same families the bishop organized jobs in the city of St. He had taken them from their rocky fields and canvas currachs in the West of Ireland, and settled the oldest and youngest members of the families, against their will, miles from the city on the vast prairies. We learned that the ‘Connemara’ slander originated in 1880 when a Catholic Bishop, John Ireland, publicly blamed his financial troubles on a group of fisher-families from this area. This was curious, because nobody in the 19 th century could survive on the rocky garrantaí of Conamara without hard, relentless physical work. Paul we were told that the term ‘Connemara’ was a century-old Minnesota synonym for lazy. It concerned an 1880 shipload of emigrants from Conamara. In the mid-1990s Seosamh O Cuaig and I were filming a programme for TG4 in the State of Minnesota. ![]()
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