Free Stones of Aran by Tim Robinson Page B

his moiety to Edmond, who thus became effectively the landlord. Edmond died in about 1717, leaving a son, another Rickard or Richard. Edmond’s widow soon married the historian Roderic O’Flaherty’s son Michael. This must have been a troubled alliance , for her father Nimble Dick Martin had swindled Roderic out of five hundred acres, the only portion of the former O’Flaherty lands remaining to him after the post-Cromwellian settlement, and Michael was pursuing the matter through the courts at the time. In the event, her husband won his case against her father, and in 1736 assigned the estate to his stepson, Rickard Fitzpatrick.
    This Rickard (or Richard, again) became sheriff of Galway in 1730, so he was probably the first of the family to become, at least in form, a Protestant. The trade of the city had been savagely curtailed by penal legislation against its Catholic merchants, and by the Wool Acts passed by the English Parliament in 1689 and1698, prohibiting the exportation of woollen goods from Ireland. While Rickard was sheriff an attempt was made by the Galway council to persuade Parliament to designate the city as a port for the exportation of wool; this failed, but no doubt the council, which included several people sympathetic to the oppressed Catholic interest, turned a blind eye to certain moonlight activities, and in 1737 an informer reported to the authorities as follows:
    Richard Fitzpatrick of Aran Esq. has so much a year from the King and he sees all this wool transported and he gives the runners no hindrance, for he has done well by the runners; he gets good bribes from them.
    The accusation of corruption did him no harm, it seems, for in 1738 he was elected Mayor and later became one of Galway’s two representatives in the Irish Parliament. In 1744 he sold his moiety of the islands to the Digbys, and died in 1767 without issue.
    According to Hardiman, Edmond Fitzpatrick, sheriff of Galway in 1769 and 1797, was the nephew of Rickard, but this conflicts with accounts implying that Rickard was an only son; perhaps this Edmond was a son of Rickard’s cousin Patrick (of the monument). Edmond himself had one son, James, who died without issue, and since Hardiman (who was born in 1790 and was the librarian of Queen’s College, Galway) did not know of the existence of any of the family in his own times, it must, as he says, have sunk into obscurity.
    But it seems that it was not extinct. There are Fitzpatricks in Aran today—one family in Gort na gCapall and another in Cill Rónáin—and the evidence for a link between the former, at least, and the old “Fitzpatricks of Aran” is tenuous, but somehow convincing . I quote from an unpublished history of Aran written by the Parish Priest, Fr. Thomas Killeen, at the behest of his Archbishop in 1948:
    There is an Aran tradition that the Fitzpatricks lived in Aran till 1798 in the house later occupied by Martin O’Malley…. Páidín Ó Confhaola of Inishmaan ,now nearly 80, told me that one day he was in Clare with his father a fuireacht caladh [storm-bound]. They met a very old man, who asked if any of the Fitzpatricks were still there. Páidín said there was a family of that name in Gort na gCapall. “Yes,” said the old man, “the family had to fly in the year of the Fleet Franncach, and one of them went to Gort na gCapall.” This meeting must have been in 1880—90 and the old man’s birth 1800—10…. What they did in 1798 is unknown.
    One might guess that what they did in that “Year of the French” was to harbour rebels, for after the French fleet landed at Killala in Mayo and unleashed an unsuccessful Irish rebellion, many of the “United Irishmen” fled into the mountains of Connemara from the yeomanry’s revenge on Mayo, and some even crossed to Aran. It is said that a French officer was hidden by the O’Flahertys of Cill Mhuirbhigh, and if the Fitzpatricks were implicated in something of that sort they may well have had to leave the