Stories
“This sacred and hallowed ground.”
Bob Geldof is standing at Reen Farm in West Cork. It is the home of John Kelly, the sculptor and his wife Christina Todesco Kelly. Their garden, Geldof says, has become a “work of art and that art is also a place of remembrance”.
It is why Geldof is here, standing in the sky garden recalling what took place on this land in 1846.
On this headland, in 1846, a Justice of the Peace Nicholas Cummins visited the village of South Reen where approximately 200 people lived. The famine was worsening, a famine, which Geldof notes, had an “oddness” because people all around were aware of what was happening.
“One of the people who couldn’t turn away was one of the worthies of the town,” Geldof says. That was NM Cummins.
What Cummins saw was recorded in a letter he wrote to the Duke of Wellington and which appeared in The Times of London on Christmas Eve, 1846.
Geldof is here to read this letter as part of the West Cork History Festival, but it is more than a reading, it is a creative act, in a sky garden on a farm that has merged the creative with the horror in a hauntingly beautiful way.
Before Geldof reads the letter (and that reading will be broadcast online during the West Cork History Festival on Aug 6) he talks to the invited audience about what it meant and what it means.
It is a stunning scene, atmospheric and profound as he recalls the famine in this place where some of the worst horrors took place and which have been transformed into a memorial by John and Christina Kelly
Before the reading, Geldof and the audience, among them the Bishop of Cork, Cloyne and Ross, Paul Colton, walk through the commemorative garden and along the headland where John Kelly’s sculptures are scattered. There is a model of the Tate Modern in London and inside it a stone engraved with the letter from NM Cummins. There is also a soup pot Kelly found on his land that fed those starving on this townland.
It is impossible not to feel a presence even for those who aren’t easily vulnerable to it. “I’m not one for the karmic ragtag and bobtail,” Geldof says, “maybe there are no ghosts knocking at John’s brain or on the farmhouse door and saying ‘This is where we died in utter degradation and horror’.” But Geldof feels something too.
Cummins felt compelled to tell the world and the Duke of Wellington of the horror he saw. The parallels between that action and Geldof’s own history with Band Aid are clear and, with a little embarrassment, Geldof notes the similarities with his own action in turning the world to the famines in Africa, “which lasted more or less the same period and which wasn’t as devastating as what happened to the Irish in terms of numbers or cultural meaning”.
Cummins’ letter appeared on Christmas Eve, Band Aid used Christmas as a way of calling on people to notice what was happening in the world at a time when it seemed appropriate. The language both men used was similar and designed to hold people in a “moral armlock”.
The reading will be a central piece of the West Cork History Festival which takes place in person and online on the weekend of Aug 5 to 7.
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Geldof had visited Reen Farm before when he appeared at the Coming Home Festival in Skibbereen in 2018 and it was on that visit that he came to John Kelly’s home which contains so much of his work as well as the monument to the people who lived and died here once.
The famine will be one of the talking points at the festival.
“This year, because it is the 175th anniversary of Black 47, we wanted to touch on that,” says Simon Kingston, who founded the festival with his wife Victoria, a practising historian, in 2017. The festival in pre covid times took place within the grounds of the Liss Ard estate, a place which has its own history and which has turned out to be an inspired setting for the festival. This year the festival will merge the local with the global and the events that took place on the headland a few minutes away had to be part of that.
“Knowing that we were just a few miles from Reen which played such a pivotal role, it was natural that we would turn to Reen,” Kingston says.
And knowing Geldof’s interest from when he took part in the Coming Home festival in 2018, they got in touch via the president of the festival’s committee, Roy Foster.
“He was very willing to engage and very interested in John’s work and although he wasn’t able to join us for the dates of the festival he very generously offered to come and pre-record something,” Kingston says. “John and Christina were very open to that and so the idea grew and, as you witnessed, Bob’s thinking about this was very clear. It was the product of a lot of reflection and very compelling I thought.”
Geldof’s reading of the letter will open the discussion on Black ‘47, a discussion that will range from Professor Breandán Mac Suibhne on the experience of Black ’47 in Skibbereen and the social impact of the Famine to Professor Melissa Fegan on how writers have approached the Famine to John Kelly talking about the artistic response “to discovering”, as Kingston puts it, “he lived in a place where such horrors took place”.
It is one of the two main subjects of this year’s festival – the other is the Bandon Valley massacre in 1922 – which is playing to a small in person audience and a more substantial one online.
The festival has grown since its first in 2017 until interrupted by covid and it is run by the Kingstons themselves, as they split their time between life in London and summers in West Cork.
They will hope to be back for a full in-person event in 2023. The topics they choose lend themselves to disagreement. “We would worry if we stuck to one view,” Kingston says. “All our speakers believe in discussion as a way of getting closer to the truth, sadly there are some people for whom that’s not their mode.”
On the festival website, they quote approvingly a line from the government’s advisory group on centenary commemorations that the aim of commemoration should be “to broaden sympathies without having to abandon loyalties”.
“We want plurality in at least two forms,” Kingston says. “One, we are interested in people who have different perspectives on often contentious subjects, provided those perspectives are advanced on the basis of evidence and assessment rather than prejudice. We also want plurality in the sense that, alongside academics, we also want people bringing people from other walks of life, we’ve had writers, journalists, diplomats. Our audience is an audience comprised largely of interested lay people.”
The Kingstons want the festival to grow and to “internationalise” the speakers and also to develop the music element where they have concerts on the Friday and Saturday night.
“We hope it will grow without losing the intimate character where significant historians come to Skibbereen and they engage formally and informally with the audience,” Kingston says.
“We don’t have major sponsorship and that is something we would hope to change. There is a lot we could do to extend this. The significance of the historical experience is an important part of our cultural capital. The seriousness with which we take our history is something I would hope a major sponsor would recognise.”
The festival was created out of the idea that while West Cork had a very rich musical and literary offerings, the history festival would be an addition in an area that “is very rich in its own history and has an outward looking tendency”. West Cork, Kingston says, “is on the edge but isn’t marginalised.”
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On the edge of this land, where South Reen once was before it was wiped away, Geldof speaks about the site of great physical beauty but also great past horror.
Geldof spoke about how the art in the farm itself, the model of the Tate in London and the dolmens in the sky garden were uniting in “a common purpose”, creating something “In memory of the small houses that dotted this farm, of the hundreds of people who died here”.
“It seems to me that I’m getting the same sensation as when I visit those more studied pieces of art that are the memorials to the holocaust.”
Geldof explained that he did not see this as an equivalent to the holocaust, “quite rightly Jews feel a sense of ownership of that word”.
But this work of art that is John Kelly’s home with his own art all around the sculpture garden and out into the headland deepens a sense of connection.
Geldof doesn’t go for the “karmic rag tag and bobtail” but on Reen Farm where the townland of South Reen once stood there is something happening that is profound and true.
“Where there is sorrow, there is holy ground,” Oscar Wilde wrote in De Profundis. This is holy ground.
“John and Christina are trying to find the names of the people here, remember them, etch them in stone,” Geldof says.
Their presence could be felt.
“They are absent,” Geldof says of those that died. “They were absent within their own lifetimes. But they’re coming back. They are not forgotten, their presence becomes more and more real. That is not only something wholly desirable, it is something classically historical,” Geldof says before pausing and adding a line which, in this place, seems profoundly true.
“And – I hope people aren’t offended by this, it is a great work of art, because it is what art does, it enables humanity because humans at their ultimate are creatives.”
And with that, Geldof begins to read the letter NM Cummins sent to the Duke of Wellington. A letter which meant the world could no longer ignore the horror taking place on this land and which resonates with his own experience of the time he too was compelled to hold the world in a moral armlock.
The West Cork History Festival runs from August 5 – 7 online and in person.
