Peter CostelloRoots of Faith: A Journey of Hope
by Fr Ray Flaherty and others
(Headford Parish Committee, €20 plus €5 p+p, from the parish office, St Mary’s Church, Headford, Co. Galway; email: headfordchurch@gmail.com)
The town of Headford in Co. Galway was very much a landlord’s town, under the influence of the St George family at Headford Castle, a Georgian residence built in the Elizabethan style that burnt down in 1906.
Back in 1837 the town consisted of a mere 217 houses. Today that is all changed with plans in hand for an enlarged sewage system to allow for the building of hundreds houses. Once used as a setting for The Quiet Man, the town has becoming a bustling modernised place, the main street now being controlled by a set of traffic lights, surely the ultimate sign of growing urbanity.
To celebrate the 150 years of St Mary’s Catholic parish church, Fr Ray Flaherty and a team of local people have put together a local history, which will appeal not just to the scattered kith and kin of the town, but to anyone interested in the course of Irish life and culture.
For all the talk about national ideals and Ireland’s place in the world, everything in Ireland begins and perhaps ends with local life.
Friary
The book begins with the deep past with St Fursa and the early centuries of the parishes of Killursa, Killower and Killeany and a glance at the friary at Ross Errilly. There is coverage of holy wells, lisheens and Mass rocks, with their modern counterparts in grottos and wayside memorials. And, of course, the local graveyards, places which every visitor to a locality should visit, as they are always so revealing of social and historical change.
These are very much the monuments, or rather the living expression, of piety and memory. To fill these chapters out Pat Duddy adds an account of the religious customs and practises of past centuries.
But the heart of the book is devoted to the creator of the church, Fr Peter Conway, and his involvement with the district, not merely spiritually, but socially and politically. He brought the Presentation Sisters to the area, and enabled the development of local education.
Today the Presentation College in Headford is the largest of its kind in the Western region.
The parish priests of 19th Century Ireland were vigorous and forthright men. Brendan Keene provides a focused account of life in Headford during the long ministry of Fr Conway between 1858 and 1872.
Brendan Keene again provides an account of the troubled years of the war of independence and the civil war, and other contributors cover other aspects of the old days, including the Freemasons.
However, this book like so many local histories that I have read and reviewed, sees history in some way as ending in about 1924. Of course, to write about more recent times can be a fraught experience and books of this kind have to avoid being too controversial.
Yet one has only to consider what has happened in the century of Irish freedom — the continuing emigration, the difficulties faced by both small famers and graziers, the isolationism of the ‘30s and the Emergency, the beginning of real development in the late 1950s, the advent of television, and later the arrival of the digital age — to realise that a great deal has transformed that small place of 217 houses into something very different.
Perhaps this committee in Headford, having done such good work in this attractively produced book, should turn their minds to the idea of producing a book on Headford in the hundred years of Irish Independence.
Honest local accounts by Headford parish, and indeed parishes everywhere, would make a lasting contribution to the decade of commemoration which the Government has imposed on us. Mere ceremonies and speeches are of passing interest. Written records of local life by those who lived it are really is what is needed.
The people of Headford can give a good example to the rest of the nation. In doing so they, and those other parishes who do likewise, will be doing something to preserve the real past for future generations.
