Novel on Aughrim – ‘a labour of love and guilt’

Lifestyle – Joe Joyce grew up in Aughrim, the site of a major battle in 1691 between two English kings, which had a massive impact on Ireland’s future. His schoolteacher father Martin was a fount of knowledge on the battle and set up a museum dedicated to it. Now Joe, a former journalist, has written a fictional account of Ireland’s bloodiest day and the events surrounding it. He tells JUDY MURPHY how it came about.

A labour of love. Or maybe of guilt,” says author and ex-journalist Joe Joyce with a rueful laugh about his latest novel, 1691, which deals with the bloody Battle of Aughrim and the events surrounding it. He’s half-joking but fully serious. Joe was reared in the village of Aughrim, between Ballinasloe and Loughrea, where his late father Martin taught in the local school for 40 years. Martin started by teaching infants and went on to become school principal.

From nearby Kilconnell, Martin was a passionate local historian and Aughrim was teeming with history.

On July 12, 1691, it was the site of the defining conflict in the War of the two Kings – a three-year battle fought in Ireland between two rival claimants for the throne of Britain.

They were James II of England, who had inherited the throne in 1685, and his son-in-law and nephew William of Orange, who had deposed him in 1688.

This was a struggle between the relatively new Protestant religion of William and his wife Mary, and the Catholicism of James. From 1689, Ireland became their battleground, with the Siege of Derry, the Battle of the Boyne, the Siege of Limerick and the 1691 Battle of Aughrim all forming part of the conflict.

Aughrim was the bloodiest battle of that war and of Irish history, with an estimated 7,000 men killed on the East Galway plains.

As well as teaching in Aughrim, Martin Joyce also created a museum in the school to display historic artefacts from the battlefield. It later broadened out to include other traditional rural items such as rush lamps and flails, Joe recalls, and was the foundation for the Aughrim Interpretative Centre, a popular visitor attraction in non-Covid times.

“The battle was the centre-piece of the museum and the centre of his interest and he was always ready to give people tours of the battlefield,” says Joe of his father.

The former journalist with the Irish Times who later went on to become Irish correspondent for the Guardian newspaper, recalls childhood Sundays when he’d be in the car with his two sisters and parents, ready to go for a Sunday drive.

“Then, people who had set off on their Sunday drive earlier than we had would arrive to see the museum,” he says with a smile.

Their mother, Meta, would “sit there quietly furious while we were all decanted from the car”.

It’s easy to understand why the battle wasn’t on Joe’s list of priorities in childhood

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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