Athenry News & Views Winter 2025

Winter 2025

The Man in the Whitewashed Cottage

By Gabriel Donohue

the algorithm fully learned that I’m a bleeding heart, dyed-in-the-wool, Moynihan-era liberal Democrat—and the crassness poured in unfiltered. “Hail Mary, full of grace,” I thought—but there is little grace in this new digital world. Our mothers once went to town wearing headscarves. Galway shawls draped the women of Oranmore, Turloughmore, and Claregalway. Modesty ruled in pre-1960s Ireland—not always enforced by men, I think, but certainly taught. A woman’s beauty could sentence her to a Magdalen laundry. Pregnancy could lead to exile in a mother-and-baby home and the sale of her child to America. My own mother visited me in New Jersey twenty years ago. She became friendly with a Muslim woman down my street. I saw how much they shared. My mother never drove until my father died—women simply didn’t. If there were errands to town, the men drove. Liberals moved the needle: for women, for Black people, for Catholics, for gays, for trans people, for workers, for children. And yet today, it is often Christian nationalism—not Islam—that most resembles the theocratic rule people claim to fear. I think again of that man in his whitewashed cottage. I lived on the edge of his world—just one wireless, one HMV phonograph, one Ford Popular, one slate roof, one flush toilet away from him. Now I live on the edge of a fully wired planet, where AI can generate a thousand hate memes before lunchtime and my phone pings its warnings. We are on the brink of another new world. What if the dream is now dreaming us? What if young people believe the information highway has no speed limit—and cause a pile up? What if your daughter falls in love with a bot who walks her down a virtual garden path? What if it is all too much information for the human mind to bear? Perhaps, someday, we’ll install a USB port straight into the amygdala. Women could hide it beneath a scarf, a shawl—or even a burka. Men under a Donegal tweed cap. I’m glad I was born the year Buddy Holly died— when the wireless still played, “That’ll Be the Day.”

I used to pass by an old man’s neat thatched cottage on my way home from school, if I chose to walk across the fields instead of waiting for a lift from the headmaster. He lived alone, quietly and contentedly, at least it seemed that way, in a life entirely off the grid. Nearby, in the town of Athenry, people lived their semi-detached lives. Some even had telephones. But I doubt that old man had so much as a wireless to keep up with Washington, Selma, the Suez Canal or even Derry, 170 Irish miles up the road. A turf fire warmed him in winter. The postman arrived daily on a bicycle, perhaps bringing letters marked par avion from far-flung places like Adelaide, Chicago, or Athlone. A three-piece woollen suit was his uniform. A collarless shirt gave him a grandfatherly air. His tweed cap—Donegal, I always assumed— sat firmly on his head. The cottage was whitewashed and spotless. The straw thatch formed a comely roof above it all. He seemed to have little interest in modernity, living as his grandparents had, relying on pedal power to reach the shop half a mile away for “the messages,” as my mother called them, lest we children sneak chocolates onto the list. I don’t remember if he attended Mass on Sundays. As an altar boy and later an organist, my own mind was occupied with not swinging the thurible at the wrong moment, not ringing the bell too early, not mixing up the cruets of water and wine—the sangreal of the Saviour’s blood. My ADD, Everly Brothers-addled brain made that a constant challenge. More than half a century later, the cottage is gone. His name is remembered by very few. His obituary is likely lost even in the vast data centres of the Information Age. Industrial farming swallowed his small holding. “Go big or go home” made lives like his unsustainable. And if he ever enjoyed a social pint in Mary Ward’s thatched pub two miles away in Kiltulla, that too would fall foul of the strictest drink-driving laws west of Riyadh. Now we gather instead on social media—the new global village square where gossip, ideas, great music, and comedy are shared alongside the vilest forms of hate. Islamophobia floods the feeds. A Muslim man wins the mayoralty in New York and suddenly the camel memes, burkas, hijabs, and Sharia fearmongering march across TikTok. I glanced at it today—before