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Animal Farm – Frank McNally on how 'Skin-the-Goat' Fitzharris was radicalised by the killing of a fox
James 'Skin the Goat' Fitzharris (1833 – 1910), about whom we were talking here last week, was synonymous with an animal he supposedly turned into a rug after he caught it eating straw from his horse's collar.
Less well known is how the death of another four-legged creature, back in the 1830s, may have helped send the infamous cab driver to the scene of the Phoenix Park Murders half a century later.
I'm indebted for the story to reader Brian Garvey, whose wife has ancestral connections to Fitzharris's Sliabh Buidhe (aka Bhui), 'where a crow never flew over the head of an informer'. She inherited it as part of family lore.
But it was written and first published in 1961 by the journalist and former Irish revolutionary, Commandant W.J. Brennan-Whitmore.
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The latter was also from 'Slievebwee', as he spelt it, and his parents' house was the first that Skin-the-Goat visited on his return to Wexford circa 1899, upon release from penal servitude for his part in the 1882 conspiracy.
Central to the story was James's father Andrew, an employee of a substantial farmer named Michael Sinnott, whose land was owned by the area's main landlord, the Earl of Courtown.
'One spring morning,' according to Brennan-Whitmore, 'Fitzharris was carting manure from the yard of his employer to the top of a field on Corrig Hill,' while his burdened mare 'zig-zagged' up the incline and Sinnott's large collie dog 'hunted the ditch'.
When the mare stopped for a breather, as was her habit, Fitzharris paused too and lit his pipe. He and the dog then waited patiently for the mare to regather herself. Meanwhile, floating on the breeze, came the sound of the Island Fox Hunt (from Ferns), which was somewhere close by.
The mare recovered, Fitzharris was about resume the climb when the unfortunate fox, fleeing one pack of hounds, hurdled the ditch and straight into the path of the collie, which promptly seized it.
This was bad news for the fox, but also for Fitzharris. He was thrown into a panic, not from animal welfare concerns but because killing foxes in those days was the preserve of the gentry. A mere peasant who did it, especially mid-hunt, could be in big trouble.
But despite his attempts to rescue it, the fox was soon dead. 'Terrified,' Fitzharris now looked all around him. There was no-one within sight, it seemed, so he carried the fox's carcase farther up the hill and flung it across the ditch into a dense heap of bushes and briars.
When the hunt arrived and the hounds lost the scent, Fitzharris was asked which way the fox went. He pointed towards the mountain, the same Slievebwee, and the hunt rode on.
The failure to pick up the scent would now be the dogs' fault, he thought. But a week later, as he was again working in the fields, his wife came running, distressed. They were being evicted, she said. Police and bailiffs had arrived and were throwing the family's belongings 'out on the roadside'.
Fitzharris hurried to the scene and grabbed a fork before neighbours pacified him. Then, hearing from the sheriff that the eviction was on the earl's orders, Sinnott intervened: 'Good heavens man, you can't throw a young family out on the side of the road whose father did no wrong and who owes no rent.'
Here the landlord's gamekeeper, a man named Rigley, spoke up to say that he had witnessed Fitzharris allow the collie to kill the fox. Hence the eviction, he explained. Fitzharris called him a 'damned liar,' but it was no use. The family was out, and forced to seek shelter that night in a barn owned by a relative.
The vindictive landlord and his gamekeeper, however, were not having that either. Learning of the arrangement, they warned the sheltering tenant that if he did not 'put Fitzharris on the road', he would be evicted too.
So next, the family sought refuge in a one-roomed hut on a property farmed by a Mr McDonald and owned by another, smaller landlord. The Earl then let it be known that he wanted Fitzharris out of there too. But the smaller landlord and the hut owner both stood up to him and the family remained.
According to Brennan-Whitmore, this is where James Fitzharris and his brothers, whom he knew well, grew up: 'James turned into a sturdy stock of a man, processing a fund of humour, with a tendency to harmless devilment and an ability to make ballad poetry. While in jail, he composed a ballad to his 'Old Grey Mare'. I often heard him sing it.'
Brennan-Whitmore had enlisted in the Royal Irish Regiment as a teenager, spending five years in India. The experience seems to have radicalised him. He left the British army in 1907 and became an ardent republican who fought in 1916 and later served in the Free State Army before retiring to be a writer.
His 1961 account for the Evening Herald, was headlined: 'The authentic story of James Fitzharris, alias 'Skin-the-Goat''. The subhead read: 'His first taste of landlord tyranny as an infant.' As the author told it, the accidental killing of a fox and its consequences may have helped propel Fitzharris to the Phoenix Park one fateful afternoon in 1882.
