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the good life of the gentry kept her there, an eccentric about whom stories would be told long after her name was forgotten. Her son Finn, her fifth of six children, inherited his mother’s love of the mountains and the sea. The sea, however, is faithless and fickle and given to unpredictable outbursts of savagely bad temper. One Friday in January 1854, a large fishing fleet set sail from Carraghlin harbour in fine, sunny conditions. But some hours later those benign conditions changed dramatically, the tranquil sea turned tempestuous, and the fleet was storm-tossed in gales and driving snow. Thirty-six Carraghlin fishermen perished. Among them were Finn MacLir’s twin brothers. The date was Friday, the thirteenth.
That same year, 1854, Finn himself was a sailor on board the tea clipper, Gypsy Lady. Having crossed the South China Sea from the ancient walled city of Fuzhou with a full load of the first tea of the season, the clipper ship caught fire on the thirtieth of May in the Sunda Strait, off the coast of Indonesia. Aware that his crew were unable to control the raging fire, the captain took the decision to sink the fast, sleek ship. Some of the crew, including Finn MacLir, scuttled her by cutting holes on the waterline, and she sank in seventy-three feet of water.
Finn swashed through a life of Conradian adventures till 1880. Then the Land League, a political organisation founded in County Mayo in 1878 with the aim of helping poor tenant farmers to win back “the land of Ireland for the people of Ireland,” embarked on a campaign of violence across the ravaged countryside. The principal aim of the Land League was to abolish landlordism in Ireland so as to enable tenant farmers to own the land they worked on. So began the so-called Land War. Tenants refused to pay their rents, resisted evictions, attacked land agents. English-owned farms were burned, animals killed or maimed, haystacks set ablaze, the English owners set on like curs. The land-owning MacLir family, close friends of the land-usurping Hamiltons, was targeted. In one bleak October night old Brigadier Richard Hamilton was brutally butchered in his bed, and Finn’s father and older brother were locked in the barn behind their large house, and the hay-filled barn was set on fire. Bullets from the hill above kept any would-be rescuers away until the blazing barn collapsed in on itself and on the two hapless men within.
When his father and brother were murdered during the Land War disturbances, and both his sisters had married and moved to England with their husbands, Finn MacLir returned to Corrymore and took over the farm. He stayed on in the village, out of defiance, according to some;
Manolis Aligizakis 