Mallacht an Ghiorria
by Seán Fitzgerald
Zine #54—June 2026
Listen to Sean narrate the feature on the Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness podcast as well as an interview with Sean about the hares, curses, the hidden effects of colonization, and being an anarcho-squatter punk in the 80s in Ireland.
Based on the stories of the Derryveagh evictions in 1861.
In Ireland, we traditionally start a story with the words fadó fadó, meaning “long, long ago,” or sometimes in Hiberno-English as “long-go.” There is a warmth to those words. However, when telling old stories about where you live during an armed occupation, opening words like that do not resonate in the same way, as there are layers and layers of pain and suffering when you tell stories of how people had no food in their bellies, or for many not even a shirt on their back. Every word spoken or wrote is a heavy load with echoes of survival, sorrow, and suffering.
In olden days, this reality shaped storytelling. Even the shawl over your shoulders was more than just cloth; it was a lifeline. When the wind and rain blew, the shawl was pulled over the face like a púicín, with nothing showing but the tip of the nose and the white of the eyes. The same shawl was your blanket at night, or it was used for carrying apples, spuds, or any other commodity, lifting them by the four corners and raising it onto your back like a rucksack. This story begins when the shawl was ripped from you and the earth beneath your feet taken by the Crown’s forces.
Only the voice of the bailiff could be heard this month in Dhoire Bheatha. The terrifying shout of the eviction decree as rain poured over the ribs of the mountain, showing through the rough skin of peat and heather. A battering ram, suspended from a heavy wooden frame, loomed over fallen dry-stone walls and thatch.
On a height above the destruction and dispossession of her family’s house stood Kitty. The dry-stone walls of her home below breached, prised apart by crowbars, with the roof now sagging like a broken back. The Peelers stood in dark coats, boots sunk in the muck as the landlord’s agent watched in his caped overcoat, neat as a pin with his face pinched with distaste, as if they were tearing apart a rat’s nest.
Above them, Kitty had let her hair down. Her hair fell in a grey sheet, coarse and long, striking the earth when she bent. Women did not wear their hair so. Hair was bound, braided, hidden beneath shawls or caps. To loosen it was to announce danger, a stepping beyond the rules that kept the world from tearing. The old people knew this. The Peelers did not, though they felt it in their guts.
She struck the ground with her bare hands, again and again hammering the earth with mud splashing up at her face and shawl. Her mouth worked words the men did not understand, Irish curses thick and bitter as sloe juice.
“Bríd na tine,” she cried, calling on Brigid of the forge, “Bríd, shábháil mé —come to me now.” She named saints half-forgotten and older powers remembered only in fireside whispers. Then she called on Goibniu, the smith who never missed a blow of his hammer, whose weapons struck true and whose ale gave strength without sickness.
In the old way, she named him fully, ‘Goibniu son of Tuirbe Trágmar’ and as she did so she shaped him in her mind: the anvil set firm in the earth, horn pointing east where the sun rises, hammer lifted high. Each word was a strike. Each breath was heat.
The men laughed. They laughed at the sound of the language, at the sight of her hair and her mud splattered appearance, at the spit flying from her mouth as she cursed. One Peeler wiped his eyes and called out to the others, mocking her sounds. Another nudged his companion and said she had lost her mind with the hunger.
“Go on, then,” the agent called. “Have your say, woman. It won’t put a roof back on your head.” Kitty’s voice became louder until it cracked into a scream and slapped the harder. She was dragging an older justice out by the roots, using older names piled one on another. Names of old ones whose stones had sunk into bogs centuries before. Her throat burned. Her words turned hoarse, then fell away altogether, leaving only a raw sound.
In the end she lifted her hands to the sky, fingers clawed, and forced the last of her breath out in a guttural howl that carried far down the glens. “Go bhfeicfidh tú tine ifrinn go luath agus go tobann,” she rasped, every word tearing her. May you wither by the fire of hell, soon and sudden. “Go lobhfaidh an fheoil de do chnámha romhat féin.”May the flesh rot from your bones before your own eyes. “Agus go mbeidh cloch teallaigh ifrinn mar do philiúr go deo.”May the hearthstone of hell be your pillow forever.
The Peeler’s laughter faltered. One of them, an Irish-speaking Peeler with a reputation for brutality, had learned his trade elsewhere and his Irish at his mother’s knee, felt his skin prickle. He spat to the side and yelled in the native tongue, “Fia-chailleach!”— unruly wild hag of the hills. “Witch!” another shouted, forcing bravado.
Kitty fell to her knees, the cold went through her bare feet and seeped up through her bones. Her strength now gone, she collapsed with despair, her cries echoing through the untamed mountains of Dhoire Bheatha.
The men were done, her home now forsaken and lifeless. She lay motionless on the loose scree, until the rain collected a puddle beneath her which forced her to move. She had to make choices, the workhouse waited in the town, a place of disease and shame where fevers went round and round, and flies hovered thick in summer. People went in and did not come out, or came out changed, broken in ways worse than hunger. The thought of going there turned her stomach with fear.
Shadows coiled around her thoughts, leaving her ensnared in a fog of terror. The only other choice was the open ground. She pulled herself up and stumbled uphill, away from where she was born, towards the thicket on the north side of the mountains where the eyes of the crown did not follow. Here she slept under a cluster of sally trees, crafting heather and bog-moss together to create a meagre bed for a trace of comfort.
When trying to sleep she curled tightly into a ball, her back turned to the sky, as if in prayer to all that’s holy. It was not sleep but a longing for the warmth of the sun and food to fill the ache in her belly. As time slipped from her, her legs were trembling, her vision tunnelling, she saw a hare break from cover ahead of her. It ran light as smoke over the bog, brown coat flashing, ears laid back. Driven by hunger, she chased the hare, stumbling over rough stone, she became more aware of how much her sodden clothing dragged her down.
The hare led her down toward the loch, into deeper bog land, where she began to lose all sense of time. Weak and out of breath she stopped and saw the hare ahead slipping into a hollow by the side of the loch. Kitty fell against a bank of heather, breath rasping, she made her way towards the hollow, then crawled along the dark earth inside. She knew hares don’t go deep into a burrow, so she would be sure to get the better of the creature.
Within the narrow confines of this space beneath the surface of the ground, the hare turned, sat on its haunches in the dim, eyes bright, then spoke. “Tá ocras ort,” they said gently. You are hungry. Kitty froze in her tracks. She now found herself unable to turn around to crawl back out. Her thoughts went to something a Peeler once said to her, that the Irish were merely animals in the form of humans, and now here she was crawling on all fours in a burrow communicating with a hare.
The earth seemed much warmer and almost seemed to breathe. “Ná eagla,” they said. Do not fear. Their voice was low and sure. “You called on old names. Old names answer.”
The hare offered her not gold nor bread, but an end to the pain she carried in her bones. A way to live without the landlord’s shadow. A way to run free in the lowlands and hills, to slip through hedges and walls, to hear the earth speak back. She took it. They found no body, only her tracks leading nowhere.
In the lowlands, hares multiplied. They ran at night, bold and many-eyed, crossing fields and roads, sitting up to watch houses with an intelligence that unsettled those who noticed.
The landlord, Captain Adair, noticed.
Adair had heard of the woman on the hill, of her hair over her face and her harsh words. He laughed when it was told to him, but uneasily. He knew well enough the fear of curses among the poorest class. He had heard other stories, too. One of a peasant about to be evicted, who gathered friends at midnight to turn a millstone against a landlord, calling his name as it ground. The shouts of the landlord in his death agony were said to have been heard miles away, and the man found dead under his own bed come morning.
Adair dismissed such tales as barbarism. As he believed, the people here, their clothes, their speech, and their mindset were all primitive. Whatever he did not know of them, he made up, and he delighted in telling it to his staff, sowing idle gossip to keep them divided. He frisked and fooled with his staff, played them against one another, as the small tyrannies of wit and power kept him content.
The evictions were necessary, as his castle-style house retreat would surpass Queen Victoria’s castle estate in Scotland. The view of the land from the castle must please the eye, uninterrupted by miserable hovels. If people could not pay rent, then others would. He saw no contradiction in taking cattle, potatoes, turnips, and still demanding more, as he believed the peasants lacked the necessary knowledge and skills to manage agricultural work.
That morning Adair rode out with the hunt across land newly emptied of people. Over two hundred and fifty driven from their ancestral holdings, their hearthstones cold, their fields left to bruise back into bog. The hounds and horses were restless, and Adair was in high spirits, feeling like he was the alpha of the pack, flushed with command and ready to kill for sport.
As they left Loch Bheatha, the fog rolled in thick, swallowing trees, hills, and the landed gentry. The cries of the gentry grew muffled, then the sound became stretched thin as if pulled through wool. In order to show prowess, Adair forced his horse forward, where they came to a narrow stream, which was a thick brown due to the iron-rich soil.
Moments later he found himself before the same stream again. A chill tightened behind his eyes. He turned his horse, cursed under his breath, rode on, and there it was a third time. The land had folded in on itself. He knew then they had been riding in circles.
The fog thickened, to where the shapes of members of the hunt dissolved. Then agonised cries came from the distance that were drawn out and hollow, and a wail of a hunting horn, blown badly. His horse had enough of this, reared suddenly, and then bolted, flinging Adair into the stream, cold waters soaking his fine clothes and the peat sucking greedily at his boots, forcing one of them off. He struggled up, his chest tightening and heart pounding. The fog drew closer again, damp and heavy, where for the first time in his life he knew he was not in command. The land had never answered to him.
Unbidden, old stories surfaced of tales he had mocked and dismissed. Chieftains bound and given to the water for the sake of harvests. Rulers judged unfit and swallowed by the land they ruled.
As he felt himself devoid of strength, he noticed a hare sitting by the bank of the stream. The hare was perfectly still, watching him with unmistakably human eyes. His rage enough to cut through his fear, “blasted witch” he shouted, his voice breaking in the fog. “I know your kind. I’ll be rid of you yet.” With shaking hands, he drew his gun, roaring that he would wear a cap of their skin once he gutted them.
When he began blasting his gun, the hare ran circles impossibly fast, to where they became only a whisper of movement in the mist. Adair fired wildly. The first shot vanished into fog. The second threw him off balance. When trying to regain his stature, he fell backwards into the stream, the cold water knocking the breath from him. Then the land woke.
Movement surrounded him, close and intimate. A sense of vast presence pressed down, ancient and elemental. The land moved like someone taking a breath. The stream now was like a vein of something much bigger. His body began to tremble violently, teeth chattering, his limbs useless, and an unsettling warmth trickled down his leg. A shrill cry sounded overhead, as swirling dark figures circled him in the fog. He could not see their faces, only the suggestion of anger and fury. Then they stopped.
The hare sat before him once more. Adair screamed, a raw, animal sound. A woman stepped into the stream and stood over him. He did not know her name. Her hair hung loose and grey like the large stones in the bog. Blood ran down her arm, staining the water. She looked at him without hatred, without mercy.
He wept, begged, and promised everything he had. She told him he would be remembered. Always remembered, as the most detested man in the county. A man who exploited and broke hundreds of families. She spoke of captains and lords who crave power and control, and how that hunger condemns them. He would not die in his beloved hunting estate, she said, not in the highlands built on the blood and bones of the people.
“May this curse alight on you and your family through the generations,” she said quietly in his tongue, to be sure he understood. “May thunder and lightning fall heavy on you for the rest of your days.”
The fog closed in. After that, Adair was never the same. He left Ireland soon after, shaken, diminished, fleeing west to America, where he died not long afterward. In 1885, the Derry Journal newspaper announced the death of John George Adair and noted, with rare candour, that who speaks but good of the dead need never name him. And still, in the lowlands of Donegal, the hares run and dance at night.
Postscript
The story above is based on the stories of the Derryveagh evictions in 1861. John Adair was part of the landed gentry and made his fortune in Ireland buying up estates bankrupt after the Irish genocide, known as the an Gorta Mór (the Great Hunger). Adair is still hated, cursed, and infamous for the evictions of 244 people, who were left to wander the roads seeking shelter, so that he could improve the aesthetic view from the castle-style hunting lodge. He cleared 11,600 acres of mountainous land for this lodge known as Glenveagh Castle. Here became ornamental gardens and a working estate based on deer and sheep and not the needs of the native tenant farmers. The people in this area placed a curse on the castle so that none of the owners had heirs to the family names.
The inclusion of the witch hare is based on the Irish folklore and their association with shape-shifting and magical powers which can bring misfortune.
About the Author
Seán Fitzgerald (they/he) ran an anarchist zine in Ireland In the late 1980s before turning to ancestral skills in 1993 in order to reclaim these practices for inner city communities. Fitzgerald continues this cultural regeneration work with ‘Dúchas na nDaoine,’ a volunteer-led community garden for recovery, fostering well being through story, heritage, and Irish language. Their previous work includes two highly illustrated books on Irish myths, Irish folk magic, and Ulster folklore.