COUNTY VIEW: A record of the island lore and fairy legends of Mayo’s Clew Bay

Of the many fine books published last year – and it was a bumper crop – few will have as much Mayo resonance as ‘The Enchanted Bay: Tales and Legends from Ernie O’Malley’s Irish Folklore Collection’.
A revolutionary, man of action and IRA commander, Ernie O’Malley was a man of many talents – art collector, art critic, author, film director, publisher, but also assiduous collector of old Irish myths and legends as handed down in the great oral tradition of storytelling.
He was by instinct a folk collector, even in the years of the War of Independence when he was an IRA organiser, yet managed to combine his military duties with seeking out the ancient Irish tales still being told around the humble fireplaces of rural Ireland. When he and his wife, the American artist Helen Hooker, came to live in west Mayo – first in Louisburgh, later in Burrishoole Lodge near Newport – his fascination with the stories of Clew Bay were given new impetus. He had a passion for sailing solo on the bay and got to know many of the islanders, notably Patrick Quinn of Inishcottle and Josie Gill of Islandmore, who often visited him in Burrishoole Lodge. 
It was from these contacts that O’Malley began to keep his notebooks of Clew Bay and its islanders – their stories and local anecdotes, their talk of animals and tides, fair days and patterns, fishing and ocean storms, drownings and miracles.
In 1940, he began to transcribe the tales he had heard, so that eventually his notes extended to over 300 tales and legends. The notebooks were duly filled, but were left lying there untouched; he never revisited them to prepare them for publication. They lay untouched for 40 years, until they were discovered by his son, Cormac O’Malley, in 1981.
It was from this discovery that ‘The Enchanted Bay’ was to evolve, a compilation of over 100 of those stories that are as authentic as the Atlantic waves that give them their uniqueness. Co-authored by Cormac O’Malley and Patrick J Mahoney, the book is a rich tapestry of incredible stories of myth and legend, from changelings and fairy forts to mysteries of the sea, religious tales, rural traditions and stories of the supernatural.
Deciphering the 40-years-old notebooks was no easy task however. Ernie O’Malley’s handwriting was poor to the point, according to his son, of being illegible. There were many errors, because he wrote what he heard phonetically, since he did not know the Irish language well, and so the spellings of local family names, townlands or islands were often difficult to determine. In that regard, the co authors acknowledge the invaluable help of Sean Cadden of Westport, Michael Mulchrone in Castlebar and Peter Mullowney of Newport. It was their insight and knowledge of local lore, surnames and townlands, Mayo history and geography, which enabled the book to be put into publishable format.
Ernie O’Malley’s own interest in the legends and oral tales of the ‘peasantry’ had come, if anything, somewhat against the grain. Growing up as a child in Castlebar, his parents, Luke and Marion (Kearney), were of solid middle class, conservative stock. They were well-to-do, were closely associated with the business and administrative class of time, and would have had little affinity with the beliefs and culture of the rural class. It was Ernie’s ‘nannie’, Mary Ann Jordan, of rural stock, who regaled the young O’Malleys with stories of the countryside – from fairy forts to the banshee and to the supernatural beliefs ingrained in rural culture.
And so it was that the young Ernie found it easy to engage with rural folk, the islanders of Clew Bay and the small landholders of the western seaboard. The legends recounted in ‘The Enchanted Bay’ are closely linked to people and places. The abundance of fairy legends testifies to the strength of this aspect of folk belief at that time. Maritime lore is an exceptionally rich thread running through the book, recalling drownings and shipwrecks, including poignant stories of drowned fishermen returning from the dead to warn or assist boatmen in difficulty.
Of particular interest are the biographical notes on the storytellers whose tales are central to the book – the Gavins and Geraghtys, the O’Malleys and the Quinns and the O’Tooles. And, notably, many of the stories are ‘memorates’, first-hand accounts of the supernatural, which gives ‘The Enchanted Bay’ a very special significance.