THE BOGS OF IRELAND

 

It's 1892. Charles Stewart Parnell, the uncrowned "King of Ireland" has died, leaving his Home Rule party to tear itself apart over his relationship with Kitty O'Shea.  Home Rule for Ireland, so passionately and eloquently pleaded for by Prime Minister Gladstone, is about to go down to defeat. Worse, the perpetual Coercion Act of 1887, which, among other things, allows arrest and detention of Irish without Writ of Habeas Corpus, has been placed on the Statue Book.  It can be made law at any time. 

 Although fifty years have passed since the terrible potato blight, Ireland reverberates with Daniel O'Connell's vow that there be no further attempt at accommodation with England.  At best, she has proven herself incompetent to manage Irish affairs, at worst, she has used Ireland's misfortune to rid herself for once and for all of her troublesome Irish subjects.  She must grant complete independence or face constant rebellion.

English opinion is that the Irish are intellectually inferior, ignorant, easily led by Rome, and needing the firm hand of England to prevent them falling into savagery. In turn, the Irish mock the English for the impeccable manners and devotion to convention behind which they try to conceal the treachery of their hearts and viciousness of their character.  These are The Bogs of Ireland that threaten to suck in and drown all who live in them.

On a warm, August day in The Year of Our Lord, 1892, by sheer chance, the paths of the reclusive, ailing Protestant Earl of Wiltshire and Irish Catholic tenant-farmer's daughter, sixteen-year old Caitlin Donovan, cross.  For Caitlin, "This man standing before her, sick and suffering though he was, carried within him the blood of Satan’s dark angels. He was the enemy of all that was Irish and holy." The Earl describes his encounter with Caitlin as "She came crashing into my Hall like the proverbial bull in a china shop.  Neither I nor my Hall have been the same since."   Nothing in this meeting suggests that. ultimately, each will be forced to depend on the other to keep from drowning.

Theirs is not a romance. The love story in The Bogs of Ireland occurs between Caitlin and Dillon Banion, a boy she's grown up with, who apprentices himself to the Wiltshire Shipping Company and ends up on a tea plantation in India. The Earl is leery of any kind of romantic entanglement after his young wife leaped off his Hall battlements three years earlier in an apparent suicide. She was two months pregnant at the time. Yet fate determines that English Earl and Irish village girl traverse the treacherous bogs of Ireland  together. 

The Bogs of Ireland is a work in progress, with the invaluable editing assistance of Boston poet par excellence, Tom Daly.  Thank you, Tom!