As the Crow Squeals - Frank McNally on a mysterious Irish rhetorical device

Irish Times

04-06-2025

It being Bloomsday season again, the subject of 'Skin-the-Goat Fitzharris' came up in conversation yesterday and I was reminded of the colourful expression he used to explain why he didn't turn Queen's Evidence in the Phoenix Park Murders trial of 1883.
He would have earned £10,000 and a new life abroad had he done so. Instead, he served 16 years' penal servitude for his alleged involvement in the plot of the previous May, which included driving the decoy getaway cab.
In an ironic twist, the man who cracked the case, Detective Superintendent John Mallon – a regular customer of Skin-the-Goat's – is said to have hired his cab again one day months after the murders and asked to be taken to the police station, where he promptly arrested the driver.
Two decades spent mostly in jail later, Fitzharris (1833–1910) makes a shadowy, fictional appearance in James Joyce's Ulysses, as supposed 'keeper' of a cabmen's shelter. Six years after that, back in real life, he died in poverty at the South Dublin Union workhouse.
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So why was he not tempted to take the money and save himself a generation earlier, as James Carey did, fatally for others (and for Carey himself soon afterwards)? Because, as the cabman boasted, invoking the Wexford townland of his birth: 'I came from Sliabh Buidhe, where a crow never flew over the head of an informer.'
There must be a name for that figure of speech. And yet, despite trawling through the rhetorical alphabet from
antithesis
to
zeugma
, I can't find one that precisely covers Fitzharris's phrase.
There are elements of hyperbole, circumlocution, and litotes involved in it. But none of those seeks to prove a truth by employing a random detail that purports to be conclusive while having no apparent relevance. If the question of Skin-the-Goat's likelihood to inform were being decided by a court of law, after all, evidence about the flying patterns of crows in North Wexford would surely be ruled inadmissible.
I presume the expression, and similar ones, derives from Irish, although maybe readers will point me to examples from Shakespeare that escape me for the moment.
As it is, I can think of only one other phrase, also Hiberno-English, that uses the same technique (and which featured here before in my History of Ireland in 100 Insults), namely: 'A bigger bollocks never put his arm through a coat.'
Again, coat-wearing habits would seem extraneous to the issue of whether and to what extent a man (and it
is
always a man) can be a bollocks. The implication is that every man wears a coat, just as Skin-the-Goat's phrase implies that every inch of Sliabh Buidhe has been overflown by crows.
But neither of those is demonstrably true - certainly not today. As has been pointed out on our letters page before, men's coats have gone mysteriously out of fashion in recent years. Most males under 60 now tend to prefer jackets, even in winter.
As for corvid flight patterns, I doubt any Irish townland could ever have proved complete coverage. So both these phrases introduce an element of doubt even as they portend certainty. Be that as it may, if readers can put a name on the rhetorical device, or indeed provide other samples of its usage, my incident room is now open.
***
Speaking of which, Detective Inspector Senan Molony of the Joyce Forensics Division has been in touch again with an apparent breakthrough in the case of the 'U.P. Up' postcard. A running theme in Ulysses, that first appears when Leopold Bloom meets an old flame of his, Mrs Breen, and inquires how her husband is.
She intimates that the unfortunate man is highly agitated about an anonymous postcard he has received. This she shows to Bloom who, puzzled, reads the letters 'U.P.' on it. 'U.P.: up,' Mrs Breen explains: 'Someone taking a rise out of him.'
Denis Breen is sufficiently outraged as to seek legal advice on a £10,000 libel case. But why? Well, Joycean PhDs have been written about what the message on the card means. The obvious answer was an established slang term of that time referring to people who were finished, physically or financially.
It was all 'U.P.: up' with them, something that could be said of Breen, whose mental fragility is referenced on several occasions. But nothing is simple in Joyce studies. Other 'U.P.' theories include a urinary connotation, a reference to male sexual function (or lack of it), and even a sub-plot involving a group called the United Presbyterians.
Detective Molony, however, draws our attention to the fact that the postcard is said to be 'folded'. As a recovering classicist, he then refers us to a mythological Greek character named Bellerophon, from Homer's other ('and superior') epic, Iliad.
A handsome young man, Bellerophon is lusted after by a king's wife who, spurned, urges her husband to kill him. Unwilling to do this himself, the king instead dispatches the adonis somewhere with a 'folded tablet' that, unknown to the bearer, contains orders for his death (a plot twist later also used in Hamlet).
The folded postcard of Ulysses is therefore a Homeric portent of death, explains D.S. Molony. For further details, see the forthcoming issue of the Bloomsday Journal 2025, which contains this and other breaking news from Joyce's now 103-year-old masterpiece.