TO MENTION THE name of Biddy Early now feels like stepping back into an Ireland that time left behind. An anachronism of sorts. The sort of stuff that entertains the foolish.
Yet it’s hard to quantify how much credence was given to the idea that the Clare hurling story was, in many people’s minds, coloured by the events surrounding this historical figure.
Who was Biddy Early, and how did she claim such notoriety?
Prior to the 1995 All-Ireland success, various versions of different stories purported to be the basis of the ‘Curse of Biddy Early’.
One of the more outlandish ones was how she placed a curse on the team when they refused her a lift to the 1932 Munster final.
Notwithstanding she was almost 50 years dead at this point, the notion that there was a curse was repeated so often in conversation and newspapers that it became accepted folklore, given a higher level of credence than it merited.
Even prior to the 1995 All-Ireland final, the London Independent carried a feature about The Curse, irresistible catnip to sports journalists it would seem.
What do we know of the figure,m Biddy Early though?
In 1920, Lady Gregory’s ‘Visions and Beliefs in the west of Ireland’ was published. It was a collection of reminisces and recollections by the people she encountered around mainly Galway, Limerick and Clare over two decades.
Contained within is the genuinely-held beliefs of what some might unkindly label the peasantry. It is folk-memory, folk-tales and riddles from a period of history when superstition rubbed up alongside clerical control.
Biddy Early’s name appears frequently. At the age of 16, her mother Ellen Connors (née Early) passed away. She had what they called the gift of the cure and would make various herbal concoctions. She passed on these recipes to her daughter.
In time, she would acquire a blue bottle that she would gaze into as people recounted their ailments. She was said to have the gifts of being a diviner, and a Bean Feasa (wise woman).
In Lady Gregory’s book, accounts from a Mrs Cregan reads:
‘I was with this woman here (as we went) to Biddy Early. And when she saw me, she knew it was for my husband I came, as she looked in her bottle and she said, “It’s nothing put upon him by my people that’s wrong with him.” And she bid me give him cold oranges and some other things; herbs. He got better after.’
Another account, from a Mr McCabe tells of how she cured him of an injured thumb, and added, ‘She was a decent looking woman, no different from any other woman of the country. The boy she was married to at the time was lying drunk in the bed. There were side-cars and common cars and gentry and country people at the door, just like at Gort market, and dinner for all that came… Rich farmers would bring her the whole side of a pig.’
Undoubtedly, this culture is at odds with modern beliefs, but the practise of going to see someone for a ‘Cure’ is still strong in rural Ireland today.
In the much-quoted Seamus Heaney poem ‘The Cure Of Troy’, the extended metaphor for peace in the north beseeches that, ‘Believe that a further shore, Is reachable from here. Believe in miracles, And cures and healing wells.’
Even in a place like Tyrone, it is acknowledged by many that should two people with the same surname marry each other, not that uncommon in a land full of O’Neills and Donnellys, one will be gifted with the cure of the whooping cough.
The path and lines of Biddy Early’s life, as far as we know, seem unorthodox by today’s standards but perhaps not that unusual for the time.
Six months after losing her mother, her father died. She took the name of her mother when she moved to a poorhouse in Limerick.
She married Pat Malley of Feakle. He already had a son and he was twice her age – common enough. When living in Feakle though, she developed her cures and people travelled long distances to avail.
Folklore has though that to charge money for the cure would mean you losing the gift. Instead, people brought whiskey and poitín. Such were the crowds gathered at the house, it became a place to go to in order to play cards and drink.
She was widowed at 25. She married her son-in-law John Malley. That marriage lasted until John died from a liver ailment and she was widowed again at 42.
Her third marriage was to a man younger than her, Tom Flannery, from Quin in Clare. They lived in a two-bedroom cottage in Kilbarron where her fame reached its height.
In 1868 Tom Flannery died. She was widowed for a third time. The following year she married for the fourth time, at the age of 70 to Thomas Meaney, a man in his 30s, the arrangement as payment of sorts for a cure she performed on him.
Like others, perhaps owing to the proliferation of alcohol around the place, Meaney died through alcohol poisoning within 12 months of the marriage.
During her life she faced opposition from the Catholic church, various landlords and those that felt threatened. She was charged with witchcraft after an accusation from the local doctor in 1865 and brought to court in Ennis. But unsurprisingly, no witnesses would come forward.
She died in 1874, in poverty but attended to by a priest. The man who arranged her funeral and burial was a neighbour and friend, by the name of Pat Loughnane; a relative of the Clare manager in 1995, Ger Loughnane.
And for those that feel all that stuff is a hangover of paganism, there is an instant rebuke in how in-demand and sought after the former Meath football manager Sean Boylan remains to this day for his herbal knowledge and skills.
