A thatched cottage on Tawin Island on the southern shore of Galway Bay hosted at different times in the last century an Irish revolutionary leader who became head of state and a senior member of the British royal family.
Éamon de Valera, a 1916 Rising leader and later President and Taoiseach, stayed in the house between 1911 and 1913 when he was director of an Irish-language summer school on the island and he returned there in secret while on the run during the War of Independence. Britain’s Princess Margaret, younger sister of Queen Elizabeth, was entertained in the same room of the same house during a visit to Ireland in 1961.
The summer school was established in a single-room schoolhouse built in 1905 to replace the previous national school that had become derelict after parents withdrew their children because the schoolmistress could not teach them through Irish. Parents on the island, which is 14 miles south of Galway city and linked to the mainland via a stone bridge built under a Famine relief scheme, had also refused to pay their Christmas church dues until their names were recorded and read from the altar in Irish.
The 1905 school was built following a fund-raising campaign led by Douglas Hyde, Ireland’s future first president, and by two of the men who would be executed after the 1916 Rising, Padraic Pearse and Roger Casement, who became school patron.
Casement had visited Tawin after noticing “its desolate promontory and handful of houses stretched out into the bay” while sailing to the Aran Islands in summer 1904 when he was recuperating from ill-health that had caused him to take a career-break from his job as British consul in Lisbon, Portugal.
“I have not anywhere seen or heard of such a brave true spirit as beats in that handful of poverty-stricken Irishmen and women”, he wrote to Douglas Hyde, the then president of Conradh na Gaeilge. “They are Irish to the heart, and it did me more good than all else I have seen in Ireland to find them so fiercely trying, in the face of the utmost difficulty, to keep their own language. They are setting a splendid example to all of the rest of the country round, where, although the Irish language lives on the lips of the old, it is not being given by them to their children”.
“If Tawin goes under in this fight for its own tongue, for my part I see clearly that the days of Irish-speaking in that bit of Galway are numbered”, he added. “I think every effort should be made to help Tawin – as an object-lesson for the surrounding district. If it gets its school started again the people all around will know that it is due to ‘the Irish’, and to that alone and Tawin’s brave stand for it, that it has succeeded.”
Casement sent de Valera £5 for prizes for the Tawin Feis and Sportsday in August 1912, telling him: “I know of no one who could so well superintend matters”. He added that all competitions must be in Irish, not English, and that all prizes must be Irish-made if possible. Dev walked the seven miles to Oranmore village every day to post letters and buy a newspaper. Locals said he read the newspaper from cover to cover while returning to Tawin on foot.
Scoil Náisiúnta Tamhaine closed in 1992 and is now a private residence. Its sole teacher during the middle decades of the last century was Eileen Fennessy, from Ahascragh, near Ballinasloe. When first appointed she used to cycle from Ahascragh to Tawin every Monday morning and cycle home again on Friday evenings – a journey of almost 50 miles each way before motorways or bypasses.
Dev returned to Tawin in the 1950s before the last of his sixth terms as Taoiseach. He was in his first term as President when Princess Margaret went to Tawin. She wanted to see Ireland “in the raw” after becoming “slightly bored” while staying with the Countess of Rosse at Birr Castle in Co Offaly, according to Tarka King, the son of her Galway hostess, Anita Leslie of Oranmore Castle. He recalled that when the princess and Lord Snowden entered the “peasant dwelling” where de Valera had once lodged “they found two kitchen chairs placed in the centre of a swept flagstone floor” and the homeowner, Tom Cunniffe, sitting before an open fire. “By the cut of you, you’re a lady”, Cunniffe said. “Will you take a drink?”
