Ireland's OWN: History

 

5 November 2003 A fire that reaped a terrible harvest —by Steve McGrail, The Irish Post Some 65 years ago this year a shocking  tragedy united the Gaelic communities of Scotland and Ireland in grief.   STEVE MCGRAIL looks back at events surrounding the deaths of 10 young men and boys at Kirkintilloch.   Nowadays, we too often hear of poor people, refugees and asylum seekers dying tragically in their efforts to find safety or simply a better future. Leaky boats capsize, ancient lorries crash, or there�s the hell of slow suffocation in some sealed container, the fate of the 58 Chinese in Dover a while ago. For the world's poor and harried, staying at home may spell death, but so too may fleeing it.  The Irish know this well. Often, they've not reached their promised land, or have done so only to face new hardships. They haven't had to cross continents to experience these, either. Sixty-five years ago in Kirkintilloch near Glasgow, something happened — accidentally? deliberately? — which carried off 10 young men and boys from Achill Sound. The oldest was 23, the youngest only 13, members of a squad of 11 men and 14 young women and girls who'd come to pick potatoes.  For impoverished Mayo, such work in Scotland was a lifeline. A third of Achill's population would regularly seek it, from Easter to Christmas, working 65 hours a week for 6p an hour. They�d be lodged in old bothies, barns, anything. These places were often awful but at least were free.  The Achill squad under gaffer Pat Doogan reached Kirkintilloch on September 16th 1937, and found the bothy provided for them. It hadn't accommodated workers before, but it had a stove and a toilet and the McLoughlins, Mangans, McNeelas, Kilbanes and Cattigans crowded noisily in. The women would sleep at one end, the men at another, whilst Doogan and his son had an adjoining cottage. Mackie, the farmer's factor padlocked the door from outside to deter theft, he said, and also suggested bolting the door within. This was done, and all were in bed and asleep by 11.30. At around 1am, a fire began. The alarm was raised and the girls managed to escape, as Doogan frantically sought Mackie and the padlock key. Flames were shooting forty feet in the air. But even when the padlock was off, the inner bolt couldn't be moved: the men inside were quite simply trapped. It took three hours to quench the blaze and when the police eventually found the ten, they were all huddled together in a corner. Only one body was recognizable, John McLoughlin's. The distraught girls were kept from the sight of their brothers and cousins, and led away to be comforted by local people. Doogan just wandered around in a daze. The ten bodies were quickly put into coffins and brought into St Ninian's church overnight. Next day, they were put aboard ship for their last journey home. Immediately, the questions began. Why the 154lb of coal found in the stove, ten times the normal amount? Why the double-locking — who'd ever bother robbing poor tatie-hokers? How did the fire start? How exactly did the ten die? Answers to these conundrums were few, the rather perfunctory police enquiries revealing little. Mackie was hardly questioned, it seems. The Fatal Accident Enquiry on October 18th held that carbon monoxide had caused the deaths, a result of blocked flues. But there was no answer as to the fire's origins. A dropped cigarette? Yet who'd be awake smoking, with a hard day�s toil only three hours away? Truthfully, an accident was possible; after all, nine Mayo workers had similarly been burned to death in Ayrshire in September 1924. But could Kirkintilloch have been deliberate? Possibly. Anti-Irish feeling was rife in lowland Scotland at the time. Irishmen had been used to break industrial strikes, many Scots considered the Rising and the Tan War pure treachery, and certain ministers of the Church of Scotland were whipping up anti-Catholic sentiment also. In 1926, for instance, the Reverend Cameron called Irish immigration "a menace far more insidious, far more formidable than that of the Germans". So, did the ten die because of bigotry like that? Many Achill folk suspected so, although Ireland's Establishment played down the theory. It briefly re-surfaced in 1952, though, when a woman told Scottish police that her husband had mentioned being involved in a fire in Kirkintilloch in 1937. Unfortunately, the trail went cold. Respected Scottish historian Tom Devine doubts the racism/arson line, however, as being just too extreme. The bodies finally reached Achill on September 19th, for burial together in Kildownet cemetery. But he awful story had one more strange twist. An 18th century seer had prophesied that the first and last journeys of a "fire-breathing pig" (identified later as a locomotive) would bring death to Achill. The first train there in 1894 indeed brought death, the bodies of the 20 drowned victims of the "Achill Disaster". And the very last train was the one that brought the 10 men and boys of Kirkintilloch: the prophecy had proved horribly true...  Page updated 30 Mar 2008 Ireland's OWN Logo by Eamann Website Design and Celtic Background by Míchealín Daugherty Copyright © 2008 Ireland's OWN All Rights Reserved.