Romantic Ireland? It's Complicated!
Italy may have had Romeo and Juliet, but Ireland has some of the most tangled and tragic love matches throughout its history. Leo Casey charts a course through our enduring love stories and why we like it when they don’t go too smoothly.
Ben Bulben mountain, Co Sligo
Irish people have an enduring interest in romance. Great love stories, passed down from history and mythology, are retold with new appeal for each generation. However, we have no time for ‘boy meets girl’ and ‘happy ever after’; that’s not the Irish way. When it comes to romance, we relish the hopeless and embrace the tragic. Our romantic heroes and heroines are couples who ‘should not’, ‘would not’ or ‘could not’ keep things simple. This is why we love them.
Let’s begin with the great mythological pairing of Diarmuid and Gráinne. This is one of our most popular stories and it dates from ancient times when Fionn McCool was leader of a band of warriors known as the Fianna. When he was getting old, he decided to make peace and settle his differences with the High King, Cormac Mac Airt. The two men made a pact and to seal the deal, it was agreed that Fionn would marry Gráinne, Cormac’s daughter. Gráinne was not consulted.
A feast was arranged to celebrate the engagement and Fionn and his warriors travelled to Tara for the party. When Gráinne saw Fionn she was not impressed at the prospect of marrying an old man. Instead she noticed the handsome Diarmuid among the visiting warriors and was immediately smitten.
As was the custom, Gráinne was tasked with serving a special drink to the guests and so she took the opportunity to drug them all except for Diarmuid. Gráinne suggests the pair of them run away. Of course he agreed and they fell deeply in love. So began the pursuit of Diarmuid and Gráinne, one of the great sagas of our folklore, with the two lovers moving around the country chased by an angry king and a humiliated old warrior.
There are many variations of the story, one version suggested Diarmuid tried to stay loyal to Fionn and resisted making love to Gráinne by placing a fishbone between them when they slept. I’m sure the arrangement did not last. Many years later, Diarmuid was fatally injured by a wild boar on the slopes of Ben Bulben. It is said that Fionn McCool was not far away.
The motif of the arranged marriage was very real and recurs throughout history. The Marriage of Strongbow and Aoife is one of the most remarkable paintings on show at the National Gallery of Ireland. The painting recreates a pivotal moment in the invasion of Ireland by the Normans. The year was 1170 and the depiction shows Strongbow, a Norman knight, taking the hand of Aoife, daughter of King Dermot McMurrough. They are surrounded by the slain and vanquished people of Waterford.
This strange wedding was part of a wider arrangement for the takeover of Leinster by the Normans. Were they a happy couple?
Nobody knows for sure but Strongbow died within a few short years and Aoife became a wealthy and powerful woman who lived a long life. Many of the noble families of England and Europe can trace their ancestry back to the marriage of Strongbow and Aoife.
Fast forward many years to the late eighteen hundreds. The most outstanding political figure at the time was Charles Stewart Parnell. He was leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party and had some success in negotiating the possibility of home rule for Ireland. There was a problem however, he was secretly having an affair with Katie O'Shea, the wife of one of his political colleagues. Katie was a wealthy woman and when Captain O’Shea applied for a divorce settlement, he named Parnell in the papers.
Details of the decade-long adulterous affair were made public. is did not go down well with the Catholic Irish electorate. They were even more put out when Charles and Katie got married in 1891. Parnell lost his leadership of the party and died at the age of 45 just four months after the wedding. He died in Katie’s arms.
In the same year another great Irish complicated romance was kicking off . This was far more one sided but it inspired some of the most wonderful lines ever written.
The young poet William Butler Yeats had met Maud Gonne two years earlier and he was infatuated with her. His proposal of marriage was the first of many. All were rejected. Many of Yeats’ brilliant poems derive from his woeful obsession with Maude:
Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
[Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven]
Yeats was devastated when Maude eventually married Major John MacBride. That turned out to be a disastrous union. When that marriage eventually broke up, Willie and Maude continued to simmer, always from afar, and tinged by constant rounds of proposal and rebuff . The winner was Yeats' poetry “Why should I blame her that she filled my days with misery” (No Second Troy); he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923.
Another poet Patrick Kavanagh was also inspired by a woman out of reach. His powerful poem became a powerful song made famous by a powerful singer. Luke Kelly’s rendition conveys Kavanagh’s trepidation when he first met Hilda Moriarty:
On Raglan Road on an autumn day I saw her first and knew
That her dark hair would weave a snare that I might one day rue;
I saw the danger, yet I passed along the enchanted way,
And I said, let grief be a fallen leaf at the dawning of the day.
Hilda and Patrick were never an item. It was the idea of her that inspired Kavanagh. He was of the land, a gifted poet but an awkward outsider in urban Dublin. She was educated and beyond his reach. A great Irish romance that slipped away ‘at the dawning of the day’.
Grace and Joseph, another song and another tragic tale. The scene is Kilmainham Gaol in April 1916. The leaders of the Irish rebellion have been sentenced to death. Among them was the poet and nationalist Joseph Mary Plunkett. In the hours before his execution he was allowed to marry his childhood sweetheart Grace Clifford. The bleak ceremony still captures the Irish imagination. Grace, an artist and cartoonist, never remarried and lived until 1955. The wedding of Grace and Joseph is poignantly captured in a popular song with many famous renditions including Rod Stewart:
Oh, Grace, just hold me in your arms and let this moment linger
They'll take me out at dawn and I will die
With all my love, I place this wedding ring upon your finger
There won't be time to share our love for we must say goodbye.
So there they are, a selection of great Irish romances. From Diarmuid and Gráinne, Strongbow and Aoife, Charles and Katie, Willie and Maude, Patrick and Hilda and Grace and Joseph; all stories of hope, struggle and the power of attraction.
In his poem 1913, Yeats’ famously claimed “Romantic Ireland's dead and gone”. I disagree. Irish love stories may be tragic and hapless but they continue to inspire our music, art and literature. Romantic Ireland is alive and well – it’s just a bit complicated, that’s all!