ANNE DELANEY charts the association between the Protestant mill owner and the dynamic Catholic nun that resulted in Foxford Woollen Mills

 

“Madam, are you aware that you have written to a Protestant and an Orangeman?” was the forbidding response by John Charles Smith of Caledon Mills, Co Tyrone to an appeal for help from a Sister of Charity nun, Mother Agnes Morrogh.

Agnes had arrived in Foxford in 1891 at the age of 50, determined to alleviate some of the brutal distress in that small village in Mayo. She knew that she needed Smith’s expertise to achieve her goal of building a Woollen Mill in Foxford and she was determined to get it.

Agnes had first approached Michael Davitt, Mayoman and Land Leaguer, for advice on her ambitious plans. Davitt was a cousin of hers and he knew the world she wished to enter. He himself had worked in textile mills in Lancashire and had lost his right arm in an horrific mill accident, aged only 11. After due consideration, Davitt suggested that Smith would be the man to help her.

Undaunted by the initial rebuff, Mother Agnes travelled North to tackle Smith in person only to be told ‘go home, madam, and say your prayers.’ But Agnes was a resolute and persuasive woman and she eventually talked Smith into visiting Foxford in the belief that, seeing for himself, he would understand that his help was desperately needed and that Foxford, situated beside the mighty River Moy, and with sheep in the thin-soiled fields, had the potential to support a Mill.

Mother Agnes’ cunning plan worked. Smith arrived in Foxford on 6 June 1891. Behind his gruff exterior he was a compassionate man and he was moved by the suffering he witnessed. It is indeed hard now, in the Ireland of the 21st century, to envisage the distress of many people who lived in the West of Ireland some 130 years ago.

A colleague of Smith’s later described the lives of the people as follows: “Believe me, those hills…were studded with cairns of stones and heaps of earth, chimneyless, windowless, in which six or seven or nine or ten people lived in such poverty as can scarcely be imagined. They existed in squalor…”

Continue reading in this week’s Ireland’s Own