The Rath on The Mullet

At the far western end of County Mayo, between Blacksod Bay and the thundering combers of the Atlantic, lies Mullet Peninsula. Here, where Gaelic is spoken from infancy and not learned painfully in the schools, the scanty human population is kept busy propitiating fairies, changelings, merrows, leprechauns, banshees, pookas, cluricaunes, far darrigs, fear-gortas and headless dallahans, who all like to amuse themselves by turning milk sour, making cows break their legs, laming horses, or defying the machine age by overturning tractors and hurling rocks bigger than themselves into machinery.

Twenty workmen on The Mullet last week were busily employed by the Irish Land Commission dividing a large estate into small farms when they discovered, to their horror, that the government surveyor intended that a fence should be driven straight through a rath, or fairy fort. They promptly downed picks and shovels and folded their arms. Their foreman sent for a government inspector, a citified cynic who believed the rath was nothing more than an ancient burial mound. He suggested that the fence wire be strung over the rath instead of cutting through it.

"Bedad, we'll not," the workmen replied. He offered free pints for willing workers, but the men answered that they valued their lives more than a pint of beer. Next, he turned to the oldest greybeards in the parish (one 95, the other 97), and offered them the job on the theory that they did not have enough years left to fear the vengeance of the fairies. They declined.

The baffled inspector passed on his problem to Dublin, and at week's end a representative from the Dail Eireann was hurrying westward. "It's serious enough," he told newsmen, "for there isn't a man on the peninsula who doesn't believe in the little people. But I think if we build the fence around the rath, it might satisfy everyone." A second civil servant was not so sure. "It's bad enough giving the fairies official recognition," he grumbled. "The next thing, they'll be coming in here looking for pensions."

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