Fethardism

Ireland, which enriched the English language with the word boycott,* has invented a refinement of the term. The new word: fethardism, meaning to practice boycott along religious lines.

When, eight years ago, Sean Michael Cloney, 22, a Roman Catholic farmer, married Sheila Kelly, 22, Protestant, in London, she made the usual agreement imposed by the Catholic Church on mixed marriages: the children would be brought up as Catholics. Sean brought Sheila back to his big brown farmhouse called Dungulph Castle, a 600-year-old rebuilt Norman mansion in the southern county of Wexford, two miles from the village of Fethard-on-the-Sea (pop. 107).

Unphair to Protestants. One day last April, while Sean worked in his fields, Sheila bundled their two children into the car and drove off. Later, a Belfast barrister turned up at Dungulph Castle with Sheila's terms for coming back: Cloney must sell the farm, move to Canada or Australia, agree to let the children be raised as Protestants. Cloney got a conditional order for a writ of habeas corpus for his children's return, and waited.

The Roman Catholic majority in Fethard-on-the-Sea did not wait. Toward the end of May an anonymous letter appeared in the Dublin Irish Times: "I wonder is your paper aware of the trouble and worry which is being suffered by the Protestant people of Fethard as a result of this case. They are being ostracized, their shops (two of them) are completely boycotted, their children without a school. The teacher of the Protestant school is a Roman Catholic and was threatened with stoning if she continued to teach."

Within a few weeks a fine Irish uproar was under way. Church of Ireland Bishop John Percy Phair journeyed from Kilkenny to Fethard to comfort the Protestant flock of 25 and advised them to meet their Catholic boycotters with "smiling faces" ("Fethard unphair to Protestants" punned the press). Letters flooded the newspapers with suggestions, e.g., all Ireland's Protestants should buy from Leslie Gardner's hardware shop and Betty Cooper's news agency-grocery in Fethard. Northern Ireland Unionists urged the government to start a fund for the boycotted Protestants, and a group of Belfast aircraft workers raised $400 in a cap collection.

Some Catholic laymen urged the hierarchy to come out against Fethard's fethardism. Replied Galway's Bishop Michael Browne: "Non-Catholics do not protest against 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." Even the venerable Taoiseach Catholic, Eamon de Valera, leaped into the Donnybrook: fethardism, he declared, is "ill-conceived, ill-considered and futile."

Peace? Back at the village, Farmer Sean Cloney was having a worse time of it than ever. Insisting that Fethard's Protestants had had nothing to do with his wife's departure, he had continued to patronize their shops and services, found himself shunned by many villagers as a result.

But even the most intransigent fethardist could see that something had to give. Last week Sheila Cloney's father, Thomas Kelly (a Protestant farmer and cattle dealer who lives half a mile outside Fethard), met in Dublin with a representative of the Catholics of Fethard-on-the-Sea. Kelly agreed to do all he could to find the Cloney children and restore them to their father, and the two men released a statement that all Ireland interpreted as a treaty of peace. As a reporter for the Irish Times put it: "There was no rejoicing in Fethard-on-the-Sea yesterday, but there was a new air of hope in the village. Obviously, however, [the boycott] will not disappear as though by the wave of a magic wand."

*From Captain Charles B. Boycott, a ruthless and grasping land agent of County Mayo who was humbled by the first "boycott" organized by the Irish National Land League in 1880.

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