Have you inherited an Irish superstition?

Céad Míle Fáilte, and you are very welcome to this week’s Letter from Ireland. Well, the rains have finally arrived after six dry weeks, and the farmers have a smile on their faces again. How are things in your part of the world?

The other people who have a smile on their faces are people from County Mayo—and I would like to tie the reason for their smiles into a little journey through Irish custom and lore this week. So, I have a cup of Lyons tea by my side as I write, and I hope you’ll join me with a cup of whatever you fancy yourself as we start into today’s letter.

A Letter from a Mayo Descendant in Virginia

I received a letter this week from a reader called Jim in Virginia, USA. His family had left County Mayo in the west of Ireland four generations ago, and he was writing about a football match. When I say “football”, I’m talking about Gaelic football.

If you don’t follow Gaelic games, here is what happened. Last Sunday, County Mayo won the All-Ireland football final. They beat County Kerry in Dublin, and there were tears of joy across Mayo that day, and in plenty of Irish homes abroad too. Mayo had not won that final since 1951—seventy-five years of getting very close and losing, until most people had more or less given up expecting a win.

Jim, in his letter, said what a lot of people said that night. “So,” he wrote, “does this mean the curse is finally broken?”

I’ll come back to “the curse” in a minute. But Jim’s letter first got me thinking about my mother and the sorts of stories she used to share with us about curses and superstitions.

My mother grew up in east Galway and she loved telling the old stories. On an evening, she’d share the story of a fairy fort in the field that no one would dig, or the whitethorn bush you would never cut, or the single magpie you’d salute so it wouldn’t bring you sorrow. She enjoyed telling them, and we enjoyed the shared fright they put on us.

There was one subject, though, that made her go quiet. Now and again, talk would turn to a family in the parish who had run into bad luck. It might involve cattle getting sick, or a crop failing when the neighbour’s field did fine. When we asked her to tell us more, she would lower her voice and say one word. “Piseog.”

A “piseog”, pronounced “pishogue”, is hard to explain if you didn’t grow up around it. It wasn’t quite a curse and it wasn’t quite a spell. It was the idea that a person could wish harm on a neighbour and would try to ensure that harm actually happened. That someone, and it was usually out of jealousy, might bury rotten eggs in your field or leave spoiled meat on your land, and by doing that take the luck out of your farm and into their own.

What my mother didn’t spell out, but I understood later, was that to take the piseog seriously, you first had to accept that a neighbour of yours, someone you saw at Mass and met on the road, might want your family to fail. It wasn’t the magic that bothered most people; it was what believing in it said about a few people in the parish.

Ireland was a superstitious country not that long ago. Before electricity reached most of the countryside in the 1950s or later, life was harder and less certain. A family’s survival could depend on one cow not getting sick or on one good week of weather to save the hay. With so much outside your control, you hold on to the things you can manage.

So people were careful and held to specific habits and superstitions. You didn’t bring whitethorn blossom into the house, you didn’t hand someone a knife directly, and you threw spilled salt back over your shoulder. Nobody thought much about it as they did these things, and people needed whatever luck they could get.

One of those old habits has lasted longer than the rest, and you’ll still see it on Irish roads today. You don’t overtake a funeral procession. In some parts of the country, if you met one coming towards you, the custom was to stop, turn, and walk a few steps in the same direction before going on, and to bless yourself as it passed. And you certainly don’t drive past a hearse in a hurry. To pass the dead without that bit of respect was thought to bring the worst luck of all.

Now, this is where the story of County Mayo and their recent win in the football final comes in.

When County Mayo last won the All-Ireland football final in 1951, the team travelled home from Dublin in celebration. Somewhere along the road, in Foxford village by most accounts, the open lorry carrying them passed a funeral procession. The players were caught up in their win and didn’t stop or show any respect.

A priest at the graveside was said to be so angry that he cursed them as follows: Mayo would not win another All-Ireland while any member of that 1951 team was still alive.

The players themselves always said it never happened. Indeed, there’s no record of it, no priest was ever named, and even the village name changes depending on who tells it. But you can see how it took hold. Every year after that, when Mayo would reach a final and lose, the old story was there to explain why.

Then, eventually, the last surviving member of the 1951 starting fifteen, Paddy Prendergast, died in the autumn of 2021. Last Sunday, County Mayo returned to the All-Ireland final and won for the first time in seventy-five years

So, was there really a curse in the first place? Probably not. But it crossed the minds of plenty of level-headed people in Mayo last Sunday night anyway. You don’t have to believe something to feel it.

I think our ancestors understood that better than we do. Their lives were harder and less secure, and they maintained a lot of small habits and superstitions because of it. Many of those habits emigrated with them and lasted for generations, long after the farms they came from were gone.

So, let me leave you with one question this week: Have you inherited an Irish superstition?

Something you do, or something you’d never do, a word you avoid or a small habit you can’t quite drop, passed on by a grandmother or a great-grandfather who maybe never explained why.

Do let me know below what it is, and who you got it from. 

That’s it for this week.

Thank you for reading and sharing this letter.

Slán for now,

Mike