Madam, - My congratulations on the excellent article by Tim Fanning about the boycott in Fethard, Co Wexford, 50 years ago ("Schism by the sea", Weekend Review, May 12th). My interest is twofold: although living in London at the time, I was born and reared not far from Fethard; and I am the product of a "mixed marriage" of the period, the cause of that particular problem.
Mr Fanning depicts very well the dreadful boycott of Protestant-owned shops and businesses because Mrs Cloney, who had married a Catholic, refused to send her daughter to the Catholic school. The hostility and intolerance in the remote village is difficult to imagine today but is well shown in the film A Love Divided, and can be imagined from an RTÉ interview with the late Sean Cloney.
It is indeed hard to visualize the trauma of a "mixed" marriage in the 1920s in rural Ireland. The "Ne Temere" decree caused such ill-feeling and had such an effect on the numbers of Protestants in rural Ireland of the 1920s and 1930s. In my parents' case, in order to enable the wedding to take place in Enniscorthy (Catholic) Cathedral, my mother "became a Catholic". She was, understandably, cut off from her family and was never reunited. I believe she was sincere in her new faith, but recall her amusement in old age at attending Mass, now a service in English, with the lesson read by a lay person: "This," she said, "was where I came in!"
For years I did not know half of my relations. Fortunately in recent decades I have met some wonderful people, cousins who did not know me, but with whom I am now happy to have a normal, friendly relationship.
There is a "punch line": the house (a rambling Georgian farmhouse) from which my mother was banished and which long since passed out of the family, is now occupied by a young couple in a "mixed" marriage. As far as I know the wife has retained her Church of Ireland membership and sends her daughter to a Church of Ireland school. Altre temps. I look forward to Mr Fanning's book. - Yours, etc,
W.J. MURPHY, Malahide, Co Dublin.