When I was first married and went to live in Ireland, I had dismissed fairies as something entirely imaginative who lived at the bottom of the garden, as in some childish poem learnt at school.

          So I was intrigued to read in the local paper while on holiday in Co. Mayo that the Secretary of the local golf club had run into difficulties over the new and improved arrangements for the course. Right in the middle of the area where the fairway was to be newly constructed was an old and venerable hawthorn tree, and he was up against a strong lobby of local residents who demanded that it should never be cut down. Why? Because it had always been there ever since living memory and moreover it was known to be very, very unlucky to cut down a thorn tree. It was the natural habitat of the Little People and no good could possibly come from destroying their home.

          The Club Secretary, however, was a brave man and defied local opinion on the grounds that the newly improved course would bring far more tourists, more prosperity to the town and easy pickings for those offering B&B. And so the tree was cut down.

          Shortly after this, a workman on the site was struck rigid on the exact spot where the old tree had stood and could not take a step in any direction. He was finally prised off the spot by his fellow mates who all refused to work any more on the job.

          So the Secretary went off to Dublin, to consult one of the biggest suppliers of plants and seeds in the country, to ask their advice. They suggested that his best bet was to buy one of their newly grown thorns, which had deep pink flowers in the spring and hinted that this had been found acceptable to other Little People who had lost their habitat in similar circumstances. It was planted as near as possible to where the old tree had stood and the pink flowers were generally admired.

          The Little People, as opposed to the other fairies in Ireland, mainly the leprechauns and the banshees, were a small race of early man who were living in the country when it was overwhelmed by hordes of Welsh invaders. They were enslaved by their conquerors and made to carry bags of soil from the lowlands up the sides of the mountains so that the invaders could more readily farm the area. This gave rise to their Irish name of Firbolgs or bagmen. These fields are still visible on the slopes of the mountains of the west of Ireland and the Little People who put in all the work and lived amongst the thorn trees, still retain an ever diminishing power to alarm.

          The next evidence I received of the power of fairies was when Maggie, my ‘mothers help’ who came from Wexford, complained that there was a leprechaun in the roof over her bedroom ceiling and she could hear him hammering while he made shoes for other fairies. Leprechauns are known to be cobblers, and right enough, we could hear him as well. My husband agreed to go up into the roof space and ask him to leave and when he came down again Maggie enquired "Is he Goin?" "No," said Dick," he says he's quite happy where he is. But what we will do is let you sleep in the spare room as he intends to leave in June and then you can go back

          This satisfied Maggie and into the spare room she went. Then the last of Maggie's intimate knowledge of the fairy world came when my husband went down with a bad dose of flu and suddenly in the night we heard the most hideous noise wailing outside the house. Maggie was up like a flash. “Tis the Banshee. She's come up out of the sea to warn us that the master is on his way out”.

          It was just a vixen of course, or I suppose it was because Dick recovered from the ‘flu, and Maggie returned to her own room after the blackbird had finished hammering its fairy shoes in the loft and flown away from its empty nest.

 Mary Eaton.