Somewhere far away a lonely bell was ringing
Remarkably, the church bell remains silent for the rest of the year and on the one unique occasion when it is rung, very few people actually hear its lonely tones across the plains of Co Mayo.
A quote from one of the early classic English poets, John Donne, would be most appropriate regarding this event ... “and therefore send not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.”
Or to take a line from one of America’s most favoured country folk singers/songwriters, Kris Kristofferson, from his melancholic Sunday Morning Sidewalk: “Then I crossed the empty street and somewhere far away a lonely bell was ringing and it took me back to something that I lost somehow, somewhere along the way.”
The toll of a dead bell strikes a very sombre chord with even the most stoic individual.
The setting on a dark, quiet night in the shadow of Nephin is sufficiently evocative to send shivers down the spine.
For some years now the Lahardane- based Addergoole Titanic Society has carried out this unique commemoration in the dark and deserted St Patrick’s church grounds in Lahardane in the early hours of April 15 at the very time the Titanic sank beneath the waves of the black dark and almost freezing cold Atlantic at 2.20 am on that fateful night.
At that very moment, on that day, 1,500 people perished on their way to America.
Among them were 14 natives of Lahardane village in Addergoole parish, and of the 14, eleven were drowned.
When the Titanic berthed off Cobh in Cork Harbour, 123 people boarded for its maiden voyage to America, amid great hype at the time.
Within three days most of them had perished, their hopes drowned along with them.
Remarkably, Lahardane village is unique in the sense that it is the only location in these islands, and perhaps all of Europe, where the sinking of the Titanic is commemorated annually by the ringing of a lonely church bell in the dark of night.
In reality it commemorates all of those multitudes of impoverished, yet hopeful, Irish people who left the west of Ireland in their tens of thousands, all by sea, and were never heard of again — their fate unknown once they landed abroad, wherever their destination port lay.
Armies almost everywhere have their unknown soldier commemorations, but the west of Ireland should have its own version of the unknown emigrant. A great number of the people who left Ireland were never heard from again and their passing was never mourned.
The famine ship at Lecanvey, at the base of the reek on Clew Bay’s southern shore, is a ghostly visual tribute to those who fled poverty and persecution in the west over the last 200 years. Then, in another sense, the Titanic bells’ tolling the funeral march in the dark of a lonely night is Addergoole’s auditory contribution to the departed, unmourned dead.
‘I líonta Dé go gcastar sinn’ (In God’s nets may we be caught).
Dr Paul NolanToss Gibbons
Crossmolina
Co Mayo
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