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Irish Times
3 days ago
- General
- Irish Times
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. READ MORE 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.
Irish Times
04-06-2025
- General
- Irish Times
As the Crow Squeals - Frank McNally on a mysterious Irish rhetorical device
It being Bloomsday season again, the subject of 'Skin-the-Goat Fitzharris' came up in conversation yesterday and I was reminded of the colourful expression he used to explain why he didn't turn Queen's Evidence in the Phoenix Park Murders trial of 1883. He would have earned £10,000 and a new life abroad had he done so. Instead, he served 16 years' penal servitude for his alleged involvement in the plot of the previous May, which included driving the decoy getaway cab. In an ironic twist, the man who cracked the case, Detective Superintendent John Mallon – a regular customer of Skin-the-Goat's – is said to have hired his cab again one day months after the murders and asked to be taken to the police station, where he promptly arrested the driver. Two decades spent mostly in jail later, Fitzharris (1833–1910) makes a shadowy, fictional appearance in James Joyce's Ulysses, as supposed 'keeper' of a cabmen's shelter. Six years after that, back in real life, he died in poverty at the South Dublin Union workhouse. READ MORE So why was he not tempted to take the money and save himself a generation earlier, as James Carey did, fatally for others (and for Carey himself soon afterwards)? Because, as the cabman boasted, invoking the Wexford townland of his birth: 'I came from Sliabh Buidhe, where a crow never flew over the head of an informer.' There must be a name for that figure of speech. And yet, despite trawling through the rhetorical alphabet from antithesis to zeugma , I can't find one that precisely covers Fitzharris's phrase. There are elements of hyperbole, circumlocution, and litotes involved in it. But none of those seeks to prove a truth by employing a random detail that purports to be conclusive while having no apparent relevance. If the question of Skin-the-Goat's likelihood to inform were being decided by a court of law, after all, evidence about the flying patterns of crows in North Wexford would surely be ruled inadmissible. I presume the expression, and similar ones, derives from Irish, although maybe readers will point me to examples from Shakespeare that escape me for the moment. As it is, I can think of only one other phrase, also Hiberno-English, that uses the same technique (and which featured here before in my History of Ireland in 100 Insults), namely: 'A bigger bollocks never put his arm through a coat.' Again, coat-wearing habits would seem extraneous to the issue of whether and to what extent a man (and it is always a man) can be a bollocks. The implication is that every man wears a coat, just as Skin-the-Goat's phrase implies that every inch of Sliabh Buidhe has been overflown by crows. But neither of those is demonstrably true - certainly not today. As has been pointed out on our letters page before, men's coats have gone mysteriously out of fashion in recent years. Most males under 60 now tend to prefer jackets, even in winter. As for corvid flight patterns, I doubt any Irish townland could ever have proved complete coverage. So both these phrases introduce an element of doubt even as they portend certainty. Be that as it may, if readers can put a name on the rhetorical device, or indeed provide other samples of its usage, my incident room is now open. *** Speaking of which, Detective Inspector Senan Molony of the Joyce Forensics Division has been in touch again with an apparent breakthrough in the case of the 'U.P. Up' postcard. A running theme in Ulysses, that first appears when Leopold Bloom meets an old flame of his, Mrs Breen, and inquires how her husband is. She intimates that the unfortunate man is highly agitated about an anonymous postcard he has received. This she shows to Bloom who, puzzled, reads the letters 'U.P.' on it. 'U.P.: up,' Mrs Breen explains: 'Someone taking a rise out of him.' Denis Breen is sufficiently outraged as to seek legal advice on a £10,000 libel case. But why? Well, Joycean PhDs have been written about what the message on the card means. The obvious answer was an established slang term of that time referring to people who were finished, physically or financially. It was all 'U.P.: up' with them, something that could be said of Breen, whose mental fragility is referenced on several occasions. But nothing is simple in Joyce studies. Other 'U.P.' theories include a urinary connotation, a reference to male sexual function (or lack of it), and even a sub-plot involving a group called the United Presbyterians. Detective Molony, however, draws our attention to the fact that the postcard is said to be 'folded'. As a recovering classicist, he then refers us to a mythological Greek character named Bellerophon, from Homer's other ('and superior') epic, Iliad. A handsome young man, Bellerophon is lusted after by a king's wife who, spurned, urges her husband to kill him. Unwilling to do this himself, the king instead dispatches the adonis somewhere with a 'folded tablet' that, unknown to the bearer, contains orders for his death (a plot twist later also used in Hamlet). The folded postcard of Ulysses is therefore a Homeric portent of death, explains D.S. Molony. For further details, see the forthcoming issue of the Bloomsday Journal 2025, which contains this and other breaking news from Joyce's now 103-year-old masterpiece.
