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  Sean and Sheila met at the local national school in Fethard-on-Sea. Sheila then moved to London, but Sean visited her when in town on business. They married in a registry office in 1949, as well as in both an Anglican and a Roman Catholic church. They later returned to Wexford to farm Sean’s land and had 3 children: Mary, Eileen and Hazel.

  Sheila signed the Ne Temere decree in London in order to get married in a Roman Catholic church, clearly to please her husband. But later she decided not to comply, just before her eldest daughter, Eileen, was due to go to the local Catholic national school. She decided instead that she wanted to send Eileen to the local primary Church of Ireland school, which ironically had a Roman Catholic teacher, Anna Walsh. There were only 11 pupils. However, the curate, Father William Stafford, insisted that Eileen went to the Roman Catholic school. He had been allegedly bullying Sheila Cloney; it became apparent that he had been dogmatic about the subject for some time, and made it clear that it was Sheila’s duty. Even her husband, a gentle person, took it for granted that Eileen was to go to the local Catholic school.

  Rather than conform, Sheila took her two children away from Fethard-on Sea on 27 April 1957. She packed suitcases while Sean was working on the farm, banged the car while exiting the yard, and drove to Wexford, where she caught the train to Belfast. Her father, Tom Kelly, had given her £30. He did not support her actions, but saw he would not be able to change her mind, so thought it best to make things easier for her.

  After Sheila had disappeared, Father Stafford went to Tom Kelly’s bank, the National Bank in nearby Taghmon, to ask the manager if Tom had made money available to Sheila. Quite properly, the manager said that this was a confidential matter. Not discouraged, however, Stafford returned soon afterwards and bullied a young bank clerk into revealing that Kelly had given £30 to Sheila. This was the evidence he considered he needed to declare a boycott of Protestants in his parish.

  A writ of habeas corpus was issued on behalf of Sean Cloney to produce the 2 children (the youngest, Hazel, was not born until after the boycott). Belfast-based barrister Desmond Boal, a friend of Ian Paisley’s, visited Sean, completely unknown to Sheila, some 3 days after Sheila arrived in Belfast. It has been consistently said, and said by Sean Cloney, that Sheila’s terms were that Sean must sell his farm and emigrate to Australia or Canada where the 2 children were to be raised as Anglicans. But Sheila’s daughter, Eileen, told me that this was never the case. In any case, Mr Boal advised Sheila on his return that she should leave Ireland immediately with her 2 daughters.

  After Mass from the altar of Poulfur chapel on 12 May 1957, Father Stafford instructed his flock to boycott the tiny Church of Ireland community, which he held responsible for financially assisting Sheila Cloney. But his action was in vain. How could her fellow parishioners have influenced Sheila? And how could they bring her back? They did not know where she was. Sheila had acted as a Protestant. She had her own relationship with God and no priest nor bishop of her husband’s church would tell her what to do.

  The boycott commenced on 13 May and lasted about 9 months. Roman Catholics were told not to go to Church of Ireland shops, not to work on Protestant farms, not to purchase milk nor cattle from Protestants, nor to support them. The local delivery of milk had, until that point, been carried out by a Church of Ireland man, Alex Auld, who lost 95 per cent of his orders for milk. J.W. Clarke lost the school transport at 16s a day for 33 days. The Roman Catholic teacher in the Church of Ireland primary school, Anna Walsh, withdrew her services. The local owner of the newsagents’ shop, Betty Cooper, even declared that Protestant children were forbidden to buy sweets in her shop and promptly lost 58 customers. By June, all Roman Catholics had withdrawn their labour from Protestant farms. One farmer, William Cruise, grew corn. A Catholic woman and her son left him to fend on his own and the results were dramatic: he had sold between £50 and £100 worth of corn in previous years, but only £15 worth in 1957. The local music teacher, Lucie Knipe, lost 12 of her pupils. Leslie Gardiner, the owner of a seed and hardware shop in the main street, found himself without customers. A boycott vigilance committee was formed and the boycott was extended to Catholics who defied it.

  Attempts were made to extend the boycott to Wexford town, 25 miles away. There was a large Protestant drapery shop – Jenkins – and customers were encouraged to boycott it. Father Stafford personally visited a bank in nearby New Ross, where he asked the manager to refuse to give credit to his Protestant customers. He was ignored.

  Bishop Browne of Galway stirred matters further on 30 June at the Annual Congress of the Catholic Truth Society by stating that all the local Protestants were guilty of the ‘crime of conspiring to steal the children of a Catholic father. But they try to make political capital when a Catholic people make a peaceful and moderate protest’. Dr Browne, however, defended the boycott in front of Cardinal D’Alton and 6 other bishops, calling it a ‘peaceful and moderate protest’.14 Hubert Butler, the courageous Church of Ireland writer, unlike almost all the leaders of his timid church, argued in his essay on Fethard-on Sea that the motivation for taking such a hard line was to demonstrate to Northern Protestants that the Roman Catholic church was in charge of such matters in the Republic and did not intend to make concessions to appease them in the event of a united Ireland.15

  Mr Boal arranged for Sheila to go to Edinburgh through Dun Laoghaire, as he knew Larne was being watched. She went to one of the Orkney Islands in Scotland, where she worked for a missionary society. A Mr Long in Edinburgh found a home for Sheila and her daughters in the Orkney Islands, where Sheila worked hard to earn her keep, milking cows and doing general farm work. She found herself in a tolerant, liberal environment, unlike home. Eventually, she read in Time magazine that there was a now internationally reported boycott in Fethard. Alarmed and upset, she contacted her husband and secretly they arranged to meet in Orkney. He persuaded her to return on condition the children were educated at home, a provision allowed for in de Valera’s constitution. She returned, but she was never the same again, nor were her children. They were homeless at home, living in isolation, a sort of exile. It affected them deeply all their lives.

  Revd Adrian Fisher, the clergyman who had arrived just before the boycott started, tried his best to cope. He was only 33 and this was his first parish. He had been a military chaplain with the British Army in Cyprus, and his father had been a clergyman in Newbridge, Co. Kildare. He remembers the archdeacon saying to his bishop, Percy Phair, right after his installation, that ‘there is going to be trouble in this village’. He had no inkling how bad the ‘trouble’ would be.

  Fisher believes Sheila left because she knew that her husband was not going to support her. He told me: ‘He broke his promise to Sheila that they would agree on which school the children would attend. They could not agree on the education of their child. The husband wanted to follow the priest’. He added, ‘I feel strongly that the Ne Temere is a curse on our nation. Brought forward in the early twentieth century, it is so very wrong to be so totalitarian, as if the church of Rome was the only church, that all other churches and denominations were outside the love of God.’16 But during the boycott, Fisher did condemn the action of Sheila in a letter to The Irish Times on 7 June 1957: stating, ‘I have already condemned the action of Mrs Cloney. We all deplore the break-up of a family home.’

  Fisher took action to negotiate an end to the boycott a few months after Sheila had gone. He phoned Father Stafford and asked to see him, as there was no question of Stafford making a gesture towards him. Stafford agreed to talk to him, but in his house, on his terms: ‘He opened the door and I was told to sit down at the table and in a flash of lightning his fist came down on the table in front of my nose with force. He said, ‘You are to go to Belfast, see a solicitor and do all you can to bring back Mrs Cloney’.

  Fisher was dumbfounded. He politely explained this was out of the question. He could take no such action, as the matter was a legal one for the Cloneys to sort out, and suggest
ed that Father Stafford should know his law before making such demands. Furthermore, Fisher had no idea where Sheila was and his first duty was to care for his flock.

  The Church of Ireland, marginalised and passive, encouraged Fisher to keep quiet:

  Just to have a smile on my face. Extraordinary! If I were free, I would have spoken up. There was no lead from the Theology department in Trinity College. Dr Luce, a godly man, wrote to me to tell me to keep quiet. The Dean of Christ Church silenced me, told me not to say a word. My bishop was the same. I do not think he ever visited the parish during the boycott. But we need to remember my hierarchy was afraid of tremendous repercussions at the time.

  Dr Luce wrote to Fisher to tell him the following:

  1. Do nothing provocative;

  2. Don’t exaggerate the dangers

  3. Be careful what statements you give to the press;

  4. Do not try to work up an agitation, unless things get worse

  5. Do what you can to improve relations locally, and respond to any olive branch.

  This was hardly a brave and forceful reaction to the behaviour of the Catholic Church. But Luce did say in a letter to The Irish Times, ‘These poor suffering Protestants are being persecuted for their religion. It is petty and mean at a distance but it is a terrible experience for those who are in it.’17 The Dean of Christ Church cathedral, E.H. Lewis-Crosby, sent Fisher a cheque ‘to assist your people in the evil boycott to which they are being subjected’. His bishop, Dr John Percy Phair, of Ossory, Ferns and Leighlin, told the press, ‘Of course I deplore mixed marriages. I do all in my power to discourage them. I think people should marry into their own faith and church. Then these things would not happen.’ But the bishop knew that it was idealistic advice. The gene pool of the Protestant community had been greatly reduced, increasing the rate of mixed-religion marriages all around him. He might have instead have spoken up against the effects of the Ne Temere decree on his vanishing community. Phair at first offered conciliatory advice, urging the Protestants in Fethard to have a ‘smiling face’, as this was better than a ‘sour and melancholy attitude’.18 He stated that he would not condemn the Catholic bishop of Ferns, the Most Revd Dr Staunton, as he was ‘a great friend of his’.19

  This weak approach was criticised by Canon Lindsay in an article in The Protestant, which stated:

  The Right Reverend Prelate failed, and failed miserably, in an hour of crisis. When his voice should have been as the voice of a lion, he was a sheep bleating on the mountain. When will our leaders learn that the only opposition Rome understands is the resolute, convinced, uncompromising Protestantism?20

  Phair wrote to Bishop Staunton to explain that Mrs Cloney’s flight had nothing to do with the Church of Ireland people and that they could not get her back. He told Bishop Staunton that the boycott was ‘doing very serious harm to the cause of Christianity in the country’.21 He wanted the publicity to end, but Owen Sheehy-Skeffington took the opposite view: publicity was the language that the Catholic Church would understand.

  Adrian Fisher was strong from the start. He wanted to approach the Papal Nuncio and the Taoiseach. He called on ‘His Lordship, the Catholic Bishop of Ferns, to use his influence to stop this boycott at once’22 and accused Father Stafford and his parish priest, Father Allen, of ‘taking the law into their own hands’.23 De Valera, meanwhile, urged Sheila to ‘respect her troth and to return’.

  The Roman Catholic Church needed to be challenged as, in the words of Fisher, it ‘was so powerful then. Ireland was quite primitive in those times.’ To explain ‘primative’, he told me an extraordinary story, later substantiated by Eileen Cloney, about Father Stafford:

  One day he killed an elderly man. Ran into him and the body landed on the bonnet of his car. I walked to the village after this happened and I saw two elderly country women, simple souls, and I mean this in no disparaging way. I said it was a tragedy that poor old man who lived down the road. The immediate reaction of these two women was to put their hands in the air and say, ‘Glory be to God, killed by a priest.’ Extraordinary. I walked on. The Gardai did nothing about it. In England there would be an enquiry straight away.

  A committee was established to administer a relief fund to aid victims. It was announced in The Irish Times and the Belfast Telegraph. Money came in mainly from Northern Ireland; not much from the south. After the New Statesman wrote about the boycott on 28 September 1957, donations came from England. The writer, Hubert Butler, visited Fethard and gave a donation. He also sent a small contribution from the wife of Terrence MacSwiney, who had died on hunger strike in 1920. Short Bros and Harland from Belfast sent a generous donation. A member of the Dublin and Wicklow Orange Lodge, Patrick Bentley, wrote to advise Revd Fisher to ask for funds in various papers, noting: ‘You have been let down badly by your bishops. The only two who spoke were Messrs Phair and Tindall and their utterances were painful to read.’ By 12 September, almost £1,100 had been subscribed.

  The campaign never ended officially. However, on 24 September the Belfast Telegraph reported that the parish priest, Father Lawrence Allen, had paid an overdue bill to Leslie Gardiner’s hardware shop, signalling his wish for the end of the boycott. It was at around this time that the vigilance committee formed to administer the boycott ceased to meet. However, the boycott did continue, with many Roman Catholics continuing not to buy from Protestants. But it was not a failure as far as the Catholic Church was concerned. It made clear to Protestants where they stood.

  Many Roman Catholics were outraged, and one brave Catholic in particular needs mention. Donal Barrington, later a famous and highly respected judge, spoke up and told the Catholic Social Study Conference that the boycott was ‘the most terrible thing that had happened in this part of the country since the Civil War’. But there was no general uproar. Most Roman Catholics did not protest, and the Roman Catholic hierarchy was unmoved. Protestants continued to be fearful and continued to exercise self-censorship as they lived from day to day in their outsider community. The Ne Temere decree continued to be enforced harshly and Protestant numbers continued to decline.

  Sheila, meanwhile, did not settle down. The Roman Catholic clergy continued to put pressure on Sean, and through him on Sheila, so much so that Sheila feared they would win through in the end and the children would have to go to the Roman Catholic national school. So she left again with Eileen and Mary, this time to Goodwick, near Fishguard in Wales. Sean came to see them at weekends, working on the farm during the week. He wanted her to return, and after about a year she gave in, but left Eileen behind with friends. Eileen was miserable and was soon sent home. But Sheila was still very unsettled, and suspecting she was about to take off again, Sean took the children away to stay with his friends for a few months. She must have felt pressure existed to have the children sent to the Catholic school.

  It had dreadful effects on the children and their grandfather, Tom Kelly. He was widely respected in the area where he sold and bought cattle. He managed to sustain himself during the boycott, selling cattle outside the parish. Eileen claimed that he was ‘psychologically broken, he was shattered. He was a decent man, looked out for people in hard times, lent animals to widows, brought them a cow so they would have milk. He was liked and fitted in.’ A broken man, he died shortly after the boycott ended.

  An interesting light is thrown on Fethard by a letter written by an old IRA man, John Ryan, a supporter of Fianna Fáil, to the then Taoiseach, de Valera. He stated that the boycott ‘was started by people who are not of our party’. What party started it? Fine Gael supporters? Labour? Fine Gael was silent on the boycott while Labour, in the person of Brendan Corish, supported it. Ryan believed that ‘the only thing that is happening is to split the Catholics’. One Catholic in the village ignored the boycott. He continued to sell petrol to Protestants on the pragmatic basis that they paid their bills on time.

  Approximately 40 years later, Gerry Gregg made A Love Divided, as mentioned earlier. In an interview on 16 Janua
ry 2004, he told me that in 1990 he heard about the story of the boycott in Fethard-on-Sea and decided to explore it. Gregg believes that from 1937 to the time when Charlie Haughey was removed from power, Protestants lived in an ‘ice age’, in a narrow Roman Catholic State that proved to be ‘an unappeasable host’, in the words of W.B. Yeats. He instanced the disappearance of the Dublin artisan Protestant class, largely caused by the Ne Temere ‘without too much protest from the Church of Ireland which was prepared to see its working class go’. The people of Sean O’Casey’s background went, people who were cabinet makers and wardrobe makers, plumbers and piano tuners. There are many Protestant churches in the inner city that are now FAS training centres, restaurants and shops.

  Gregg feels strongly about what happened:

  All the aspects of the erosion of certain civil liberties are shown in a microcosm in Fethard-on-Sea. It also showed the weakness of the temporal authorities which did not intervene and show leadership … the Fethard story encapsulates the awful stifling power of the Catholic church and a very narrow interpretation of its teachings. Sean Cloney met Sheila Kelly in London and they got married in a registry office and in the Anglican church which allowed freedom of choice to bring up any offspring in whatever religion the parents chose, or in no religion. Very different in the Catholic church in London where they also got married: the “true” marriage was when Sheila would have had to attend instruction from a priest and then sign the Ne Temere decree.