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 .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 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” . 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.
