M‘Neills' Tiger-Sheep by Jane Barlow
Jane Barlow's "M'Neills' Tiger-Sheep" recounts a rural Irish feud between two families of the fictional townland of Meenaclure, the Timothy O'Farrells and the Neil M'Neills, and traces its slow, almost accidental dissolution over some twenty years. The quarrel begins trivially. During the summer grazing season, when local sheep are driven onto the moors to protect the crops, one of Neil M'Neill's ewes strays from her herders — the M'Neill children, distracted by a rabbit hunt — and breaks into Timothy O'Farrell's oat field along with two companions. This is not the first such trespass; Timothy's patience, and his family's, has already worn thin from previous incursions and from what they see as Neil M'Neill's insufficient contrition. When Timothy and his siblings, Margaret, Hugh, and Patrick, catch the offending ewe, they decide against simply releasing her. Hugh hits on the idea of using the leftover dye from their mother's wool-dyeing pots — tawny brown from crottal lichen, yellow from turf-soot, black from bog-ore — to paint the animal in bold stripes before turning her loose. The prank escalates in execution: the sheep is smuggled into the M'Neills' empty pigsty overnight, decorated further with bracken and colored wool, and left to be discovered. The next morning, the M'Neill children find the garishly striped animal and, terrified, dub her a "tiger-sheep." The adults are less amused. Neil M'Neill and his mother immediately recognize the O'Farrells' hand in it and are enraged, seeing the insult as an affront not just to their property but to the near-sacred status sheep hold in a family with a long pastoral heritage. Despite the dye eventually fading, the "tiger-sheep" becomes a standing joke among the neighborhood's children and a lasting grievance between the two households. Attempts at reconciliation from the O'Farrells — a gift of eggs from old Mrs. O'Farrell, an offer of straw from Pat — are rebuffed with open contempt. Village opinion initially sides with the M'Neills but gradually softens, regarding the O'Farrells as merely thoughtless youths, though the practical inconveniences of a small community observing a permanent feud (avoiding mutual mentions, borrowing arrangements, walking companions) persist for years. The younger generation absorbs the enmity as ritual, most notably the M'Neill and O'Farrell children exchanging reflexive insults whenever they cross paths — a custom even Pat O'Farrell and Molly M'Neill, now grown, uphold indifferently as teenagers. The narrative then follows the dispersal of the next generation. Hard times prompt Pat O'Farrell to emigrate to America; to general astonishment, the shy and unassuming Molly M'Neill follows some months later, against her family's wishes and despite her mother's private grief. The two families' rivalry persists by proxy across the ocean, tracked through scarce and poorly spelled letters: news of Pat's engagement is shadowed almost immediately by news of Molly's marriage — to a man conveniently also named O'Farrell, a coincidence unremarkable given how common the name is in the district, so neither family at first realizes the truth. The families continue their competitive one-upmanship long-distance, matching each other's announcements of grandchildren and even, awkwardly, bouts of childhood illness, each side unable to resist a jab at the other's expense whenever fortune seems to favor them. Eventually the balance tips toward the O'Farrells when Pat writes home that he has saved enough money to return to Ireland and try for a bit of land of his own. The M'Neills, meanwhile, receive no such news and sink into disappointed hope, Molly's mother reduced to interpreting dreams for lack of real letters. The reconciliation arrives unplanned: at a communal gathering (a "kaley") at the weaver Fergus's house one blustery November evening, the door bursts open and Pat O'Farrell and his wife arrive unannounced with their children — and the wife is revealed to be Molly M'Neill herself. The shock and joy of the reunion, and the immediate, unguarded embrace of grandchildren by both families, make the old feud impossible to sustain. When Pat later claps his father-in-law Neil M'Neill on the back and jokingly recalls the "tiger-sheep" prank, the assembled company's momentary anxiety dissolves into shared laughter, and the old grievance is finally, thoroughly laid to rest — the story closing on the sense that the "phantasm" of the tiger-sheep has fled Meenaclure for good.
By Jane Barlow · First published 1897 · Genre: Irish Fiction, Regional Fiction, Domestic Fiction · 6,704 words
First lines
The feud between the Timothy O'Farrells and Neil M‘Neills at Meenaclure was not of very long standing, for the dowager Mrs O'Farrell and the elder Mrs M‘Neill, who had been by no means young when it began, were still to the fore, and not yet even considered to have attained "a great ould age intirely. " This seems a mere mushroom-growth compared with some of our family quarrels, which have been handed down from father to son through so many generations that everybody regards them as a part of the established order of things in the world of their parish. Still, to the younger people, who had been but children at its birth, it seemed to have lasted a long while, and their juniors would have found a different state of affairs almost unthinkable. For them the origin of the enmity had already begun to loom dimly through a mist of tradition, which would tend as time went on to grow vaguer and falser, until at length nobody would be left who could give a clear account of what it was all about. So far, however, all the neighbours who were "any age to speak of" knew the rights of the case well enough. And this is what had happened.
What this Textopian page supports
M‘Neills' Tiger-Sheep is listed on Textopian as a short story by Jane Barlow, dated 1897 CE.
This source record anchors work identity, reading entry points, and catalog context for checking claims about the work.
- Work type: Short story
- Author: Jane Barlow
- Date: 1897 CE
- Language: English
- Genres: Irish Fiction, Regional Fiction, Domestic Fiction, Humorous Fiction, Social Realism
- Length: 6,704 words
- Structure: 1 section, 49 paragraphs
- Reading fit: Fairly Difficult (10th-12th Grade)
Good citation fit
- Work identity for M‘Neills' Tiger-Sheep by Jane Barlow
- Canonical title URL and first readable passage URL
- Genre and topic classification from the Textopian catalog
- Readability and classroom-planning context
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Genres
- Irish Fiction — Set in rural Meenaclure, Ireland, with Irish characters, pervasive Irish dialect, and exploration of specifically Irish agricultural customs, social structures, and community dynamics that are central to the narrative.
- Regional Fiction — Deeply rooted in a specific parish community where local relationships, gossip, customs, and social interdependencies define character behavior and drive the central conflict.
- Domestic Fiction — Focuses on family rivalry, household conflicts, and domestic reconciliation between the O'Farrell and M'Neill families, with emphasis on how private feuds affect kinship and daily life.
- Humorous Fiction — The tiger-sheep prank functions as central comedy, with the narrative employing vernacular humor, ironic voice, and comedic treatment of how a practical joke escalates into prolonged social conflict.
Tags
rural Irish setting · 19th-century Irish literature · short story · folklore elements · whimsical · animal characters · humor · Irish dialect · peasant life · family dynamics · mysterious happenings · countryside