Clare Island mourns local legend

The late Bernie Winters, with some of his traditional homemade baskets pictured at his home on Clare Island in August 2013.?Pic: Michael McLaughlin

Clare Island says farewell to Bernie Winters


Last week the islanders paid their last respects to an old friend

Willie McHugh

WHAT better could Fr Ned Crosby, poet and practising preacher, have used in his homily at the Funeral Mass of Clare Island’s most famous son, Bernie Winters, last Thursday than the lines from his own composition, ‘Ode to an Island elder’.
Ned Crosby was the last serving priest on Clare Island and he penned it while ministering there about his friend and neighbour Bernie Winters.

“Up early and out into the hymns of morning,
To read the first paragraph of the day’s weather in the passing clouds,
To listen to the forecast in the tunes of the wind,
Another day to praise”

They’d come from all compass bearings to say a last farewell to an iconic islander. On the ferry journey from Roonagh Pier, Kieran Burns remembered a footballing midfielder who out-fetched the highest fetchers.
“But the modern game doesn’t allow for that skill,” he said.
Also crossing to solo the last few yards with Bernie was Mikey O’Toole of Inishturk, himself the holder of three All-Ireland medals won in the sundown of his career with Mayo’s Masters, and other competitions like the O’Toole Cup on the island teams with Bernie.
“He was a great friend always, and whatever bit of football skill I had I learned it from Bernie,” recalled Mikey. “And I don’t know where he got it from because there was very little coverage in them years. The first game we saw on television was the 1965 All-Ireland Final between Galway and Kerry. Johnny Geraghty, the Galway goalie, dived full length to save a shot. We never saw a goalkeeper doing it before.
“After the match Bernie brought me down to the field, he went in goal, and got me to kick the ball low either side of him. In no time at all he had Geraghty’s technique mastered. If he’d gone to college on the mainland he’d have played midfield for Mayo along with another islander John ‘Tony’ Burns. They could outfield the best of them. When we’d be arriving in Louisburgh the local lads would be stretching their necks hoping to see that Bernie was with us.”

Solemn island
From the pier they made their way up the island road to Kill. The events of Clare Island and happenings of the mainland too stood still for the day. They were bidding farewell to the man who epitomised all that is magnificent about a proud island people and the rich tapestry of traditions they preserve.
Clare Island was the needlepoint Bernie Winters stitched the embroidery of his life from.
The island boreens were his Fifth Avenue. A loyal servant of Mother Nature and ‘self-sufficient’ long before the term became vogue. Bernie Winters baked his own caiscín bread, churned his own butter and dug his own spuds. He respected the soil, the ocean, and the livestock that provided his sustenance. No mechanical contraption ever turned its carbon wheel on Bernie’s patch.
He eschewed all technological advances. On hearing of the passing of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, “a pity it didn’t happen fifty years ago” was Bernie’s tongue-in-cheek riposte.
But if Homer nodded once then so could Bernie Winters. An internet message posted on his behalf advertising a flock of ewes for sale went viral. So widespread that Bernie fielded more calls about it than enquiries regarding the sheep.
By his gable wall, Eddie O’Malley spoke lovingly of the neighbour who influenced another generation of young islanders. “Bernie gave us all a love of football. He had the only football on the island of our youth.
It was a leather one, and my abiding memory is of Bernie stitching it with hempen wax and drying it in a blind chimney at the back of his fireplace.
“Every day he came over to the schoolyard during lunchtime and stood in goal and coached us. Whenever he sailed to the mainland, playing matches on a Sunday, my father would have the cows milked for him when he returned home in the evening.
“We formed a team here in 1970 and played in the Mayo junior championship,” continued Eddie. “Islandeady came to play us in the first round in Louisburgh thinking all they had to do was turn up but we beat them.
“Years later I met Enda Kenny and when he heard where I was from he inquired about Bernie Winters and spoke about that match. He said they didn’t get home to Islandeady until after dark and didn’t show their faces in public for a week afterwards.
“Along with other islanders, John Burns and Bernard McCabe, he played on the West Mayo team that beat Castlebar to win the 1960 Mayo senior football championship. Rough seas marooned them on the mainland for days afterwards and Bernie never got his winner’s medal. That was a regret of his.
“I remember him in his garden doing spring work and he listening to a rugby match on the radio back in the days of Tom Kiernan, Willie John McBride and Mike Gibson. The rest of us didn’t even know what a rugby ball looked like. He was very well read but I don’t know when he got the time for reading because his house was always full of visitors.”

Final journey
Neighbours Michael Gerry O’Malley and Austin Burns called by most day and nights. They had their daily coffee break in Bernie’s kitchen. Just as Michael Gerry tells us they were doing on April’s opening day when Bernie’s beckoning came. “I was sitting west of the range, Bernie in the chair opposite, and Austin at the table. We heard him sigh and he slumped back in the chair.
“Austin ran for Padraic O’Malley and I held Bernie’s hand and kept talking to him until help arrived. And fair play to Padraic for doing all he could but it was already in my head that Bernie wouldn’t survive. But it will always be a comfort to us that we were there with him because we’d never forgive ourselves if he was alone when it happened, and all the times we visited him.”
They draped his coffin with the last Clare Island jersey he wore. Chaperoned by an honouring guard of men and women footballers, and a few old comrades, they carried him to the church just a road turning away.
To the backing track of Maura Moran’s moving commentary they placed remnants of his living years at the altar. The sickle he reaped corn with, a puck of potatoes in the straw baskets he weaved, Bob Dylan and Nanci Griffith recordings, the radio he listened to RTÉ’s Céilí House and Donnacha’s ‘FΡilte Isteach’ on, and the wooden butter spades (or butter cards as Maura so eloquently described them) he patted and shaped his churnings with.
They read from the Book of Wisdom, Sara O’Malley sang Nanci’s ‘From a Distance’ and Ned Crosby recited his poem. A ceremony-ending island wordsmith par-excellence.
Olof Gill delivered a eulogy to Bernie Winters (see below). It was as fine an uttering ever echoed from a lectern in any synagogue or house of worship. Already there’s talk of etching it in stone and erecting it for posterity on the wall of Bernie Winter’s iconic cottage. Olof Gill’s masterpiece deserves no less a setting.
And hardly had they backfilled the last shovelling of loamy Clare Island soil on Bernie’s grave than he was creating another historic Clare Island first.
Ned Crosby read a message received earlier from An Taoiseach Enda Kenny tendering his sympathy. A humorous missive it was too, where he referred to a picture in the national media of a nonchalant Bernie Winters executing his duties in Clare Island polling station during a general election. Enda also mentioned the 1970 West Mayo Junior championship defeat.
“The Islandeady crowd are still sour about that,” someone among the mourners gently quipped.
Paddy Flynn then recited ‘Clare Island in Mayo’ a poem essayed in exile by his uncle. Bernie Winters, Clare Island’s most famous son, is interred ‘neath the gable of the old Cistercian Abbey. He was its last key holder and Grace O’Malley, a daughter of the Clew Bay fortress is buried within. 
He lies between the slopes of Knocknaveen and the Atlantic lapped southern shore.
Bernie Winters, footballer, fisherman, organic farmer, straw basket weaver, sage and scholar has rowed beyond the sea. But Clare Island in Mayo will ever be where his spirit roams free.
It was the Kingdom he called home.


Eulogy to Bernie Winters

Composed by Olaf Gill, and read by him at Bernie’s Funeral Mass on Clare Island last week

Bernie,
You were not designed to live supported by machines.
Your life, your work, was “all organic, boy!”
No synthetic substance or mechanical might powered your loving labour.
Only your big, tough hands:
digging, dragging, sowing, mending, minding, crafting, knowing.
 
The hands that nurtured April lambs, and poured the evening tae,
The hands that dug the neatest drills, and cocked the neatest hay.
The hands that caught the high ball far behind your arching back,
The hands that searched the southern shore for sea-hearts, and for wrack.
 
Mother Nature’s Son, brought home to nature.

Gone, but never gone.
As long as people talk, they will talk about you.
As long as people remember,
they will remember you.
 
As you pass from man to myth,
we mourn your absence as keenly as we sensed your presence.

We feel your absence in the lowing of the cows,
and the plaintive braying of the ass.
We feel it in the die-straight ridges waiting for the certainty of your spade.
We feel it in the raindrops turning earth to mud and muck.
We feel it in the too-silent churn, and the unbasketed straw.
 
You were not designed to live supported by machines.
When your big heart gave out, they placed you in the human hospital.
Machines breathed for you, machines tapped out your pulse.
Amid that sterile symphony of robotic bleep and artificial hum, your body wilted.

But your mighty, gentle spirit had long since fled - flown up,
up, away from that repellent cage,
Home across the bay, back to your animals and familiar clay,
Back to the Parliament of Buckos sitting waiting by the range.
 
And now your spirit always and forever walks the land,
Your grey elf-eyes twinkle, and with each loping stride
The only sounds are bleating lambs, and birdsong, and the tide.