Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 29, 1918.djvu/240

230 downfall that has prompted the revival of the legend at this moment.

The pamphlet is said to be "Compiled from original documents by an eminent Divine of the Catholic Church." It was printed anonymously and without date by G. P. Warren, Thomas St., Dublin. It is styled "Prophecies of St. Columcille of the Remarkable Events that will happen to England and Ireland before and after the war," no doubt the Napoleonic Wars, when such prophecies were rife in both countries. St. Columcille is brought well up to date by such notices as: "The Remains of a noble warrior, who was once Emperor of France, but died in Exile, in a small African Island (a Prisoner of the English) will be honorably removed to Paris and a monument raised to his memory by the people of France," or again, by the allusion to the crusade of Rev. Father Mathew against intemperance in the South of Ireland in 1838, or the mention, among other evil deeds of England, that "newspapers will be prevented to be given publicity," or that "men and lads that are fit to carry arms will be forced away, and the old men turned three times in their beds to see if they are fit to serve." With these cheering views as to the probable acts of their Orange or Saxon neighbours and the equally firm conviction of the Protestants that Catholic Ireland is eagerly awaiting a chance to fall upon them, it is little wonder that the two sections of the people do not "understand" one another.

Nicholas O'Kearney (Prophecies of St. Columbkille, 1856) tells us that the tradition of the massacre is nowhere so vivid or so firmly believed as in the Barony of Farney, Co. Monaghan. The children of Farney used to mark out for themselves the places in which they would take refuge on the night of the terrible massacre, and the belief that some parts of Connaught and above the Boyne were safe has given rise to the saying, "Better a peck of meal above Boyne, than a bushel of gold in Dundalk." At Roosky