[Title of book] The XUAL Community: From Earliest Articles of

Association To Its Last Days

[Section] Chapter One
In the land called Leitrim,
There lived a funny race.
Never more will we see their like
A fire took away their place.
(~The ballad of Kilmatogh, 1984.)
The early stages of the story of the XUAL Community are the most
well documented stages. Evidence of the nature of Malcolm Cassin's
plan was printed in various magazines of the time, newspaper
advertisements, and legal submissions to the local planning authority
and Garda station. They even had a prospectus and application form
for people who wished to join the Community. Even though its
official registered name in 1969 was the XUAL Community, many
locals had called it simply the Kilmatogh Community after the
place where they had settled.
The initiative which brought the Community to Kilmatogh was
clearly Malcolm Cassin's. He gives the reason why he chose
Kilmatogh in a development file sent to the planning authority
section of Leitrim County Council, some time in 1974:
What made us settle in Kilmatogh bog is a unique story: I'd
previously heard about an Irish folklorist and archaeologist by
the name of Dr. Raymond Broadbent, who with a couple of
European archaeologists that were interested in old legends of
the Beast of the Bog, excavated Kilmatogh [bog] over a
decade previously and discovered a prehistoric temple several
metres below the surface.
Amazing though this find was, what most interested me was
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[Title of book] The XUAL Community: From Earliest Articles of

Association To Its Last Days
that Dr. Broadbent began having strange dreams shortly after
his discovery. Dreams in which he experienced the past life of
a worshipper at the temple and could describe every facet of
the building [. He knew] what the functions of every room
was, what happened to the temple worshippers, and who was
their principal god, without actually having fully excavated it.
Dr. Broadbent's dreams convinced me that he was psychically
tapping into some sort of atavistic 'energy pool' and that
Kilmatogh was the focal point of it a genius locale or 'thin
place' as folklorists call it. I believe settling our Community
here will allow us to tap into this wealth of energy and unlock
all the hidden mysteries of the human mind and discover facts
about the past otherwise unobtainable.
(Excerpt from XUAL Community Planning Document,
filed in 1974 and printed with permission from Leitrim
County Council Planning Authority.)
With a minimum of theoretical talk, Cassin, at the outset enjoyed the
interest, if not the wholehearted support, of a remarkable number of
men and women. They followed him to County Leitrim from all parts
of Ireland to set up the XUAL Community. Among the eighty plus
contingent, Sylvia Jennings, Dermot Bannion, Thomas A. Clarke,
and Noreen Shannon were signatories on the Community's official
Articles of Association submitted to Dublin Castle in 1969. We'll
discuss the Articles of Association in a later chapter, but of these
signatories, we have biographical information on only three of them.
The Chairman and founder, Malcolm James Cassin, was born in
Dungarvan on the 7th of March 1918, having dual citizenship of both
Britain and Ireland (which was common in Ireland prior to the
establishment of the Irish Free State). From the age of five, he was
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[Title of book] The XUAL Community: From Earliest Articles of

Association To Its Last Days
educated at Glenbeg N.S. and continued his education at a Methodist
post-primary school in Belfast city from 1929. Then in 1934 he
moved to Dublin where he pursued psychological science at Trinity
College, Dublin, graduating with a Bachelor of Science degree. He
travelled abroad to the continent, working odd jobs such as in
L'Hotel Mercury in Orleans, France.
Surprisingly, in 1940 he went back to education pursuing a Masters
in parapsychology at the University of Freiburg, graduating in 1943
in fascist Germany. Ireland remain neutral during the second world
war and it was probably this fact alone which allowed Cassin to
study unmolested during the height of the war. He took a job working
in the Institut fr Grenzgebiete der Psychologie und Psychohygiene
(IGPP) in Freiburg, as a counsellor which was to fundamentally
direct the course of the rest of his life.
In 1958 he returned to Ireland again and found a job in Dublin
working as a counsellor at the Psychotherapeutic Centre on Lower
Leeson Street. He stayed working there until he resigned in 1969 and
moved to Blackross town in Leitrim with the intention of
establishing his XUAL Community, just two miles south of the town,
in Kilmatogh bog.
The second most important person during the founding of the
Community in Kilmatogh was Sylvia Margot Jennings. She was its
secretary, though it is rumoured she was also Cassin's girlfriend when
both lived in Dublin. Jennings was born on the 9th of November
1943 and lived most of her life in Dublin. She went to Cabra Girl's
Primary School from 1947 to 1955, after which she attended
Alexandra College finishing her Leaving Certificate in 1961.
In 1962, Jennings moved to Cork to pursue a Bachelors degree in
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[Title of book] The XUAL Community: From Earliest Articles of

Association To Its Last Days
Pharmacology and Therapeutics, which she attained in 1966.
Difficulties in finding work as a lab assistant because of her gender
meant she ultimately had to change her profession from scientist to
office secretary. She moved back to Dublin in 1967 and it was
probably at this time she met Cassin. She soon enrolled at the
Business and Secretarial Training Centre to learn secretarial skills
and graduated with a Cert in Business Administration in 1969. It was
at this time she and Cassin moved to Blackross to found the XUAL
Community, he taking the role of Chairman, she the role of secretary.
The third most important person in the Community (and the last
person we have biographical material on) is the Treasurer, Dermot
Peter Bannion. He was born in Galway town on the 30th of January
1935. According to his bio-affidavit submitted to Blackross Garda
Station, before moving to Kilmatogh, he never lived anywhere else
other than Galway. He went to St. Killian's National School from
1940 to 1948, moving to Collaiste Enda finishing with a Leaving
Cert in 1954. He got an apprenticeship as a clerk for an accountants
from 1955 until 1959.
His first job was at Margaret's Confectionery in Salthill, where he did
the book-keeping for the busy shop by the sea. It was probably at this
time he met a girl, Irene Cassidy, and they married soon afterwards.
His next job, and one which he stayed at until 1969, was Smiths and
James Accounts firm in Tuam. It is unknown how exactly he met or
knew Malcolm Cassin, but it is clear from the evidence that he
moved from Galway to Leitrim and took up the position as Treasurer
of the XUAL Community where he kept the accounts for the group
in Kilmatogh.
These are the persons whose names are preserved on official
documents and Community experiment files. But what of the other
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[Title of book] The XUAL Community: From Earliest Articles of

Association To Its Last Days
members whose testimonies and biographical affidavits were never
recorded? Who were they and what did they expect, or hope, to
achieve from the Community at Kilmatogh? Why did they want to
live there? What did they want their lives to be? To answer this we
need look no further than the advertisements the Community used to
recruit them in the early 1970s, reprinted in popular magazines like
Fate, Torc, and Destiny Magazine:
Are You Looking For Meaning In Your Life?
Try the XUAL Community today!
An experimental society dedicated to removing our limited
perception of reality and embracing the wider experience of
who we are and why we are here.
We do this by expanding awareness through routine scientific
experiments, specially calibrated consumption of
psychotropic drugs to awaken our unified consciousness and
through artful chanting and meditation.
Our research approach is conducted at our special centre
where we employ best scientific practice and reference
esoteric, occult and mystical teachings to inform our technical
investigations.
We are dedicated to serving the community in alignment with
all polarities and beings, seen and unseen for the benefit of
the whole. If you want to find out more, you can write to us
at: The XUAL Community, Kilmatogh, [Blackross,] Co.
Leitrim, Rep. of Ireland, and we'll send you an information
pack.
(Advert taken from the January Issue of Destiny
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[Title of book] The XUAL Community: From Earliest Articles of

Association To Its Last Days
Magazine, 1972)
We know from the surviving application forms included in the
'information pack' sent out to prospective members the Community
was looking for science graduates and those with scientific
backgrounds. One wonders what did these recruits think of Cassin's
quasi-scientific society? How were each of them related to the
Community? How did they appraise what they witnessed? How did
they set about filling their ideals? By the time the XUAL Community
Planning Document was drafted, some degree of unanimity must
have been arrived at, at least by those who lived on the site.
History is the record of men and women. We may look at them
singly, and then again in groups. As our understanding grows, details
arrange themselves, individuals emerge, feature by feature, until
finally they stand clearly before us almost as in life. The sounds, the
movements of the Community gradually become familiar. We can
see into the past, and through it into the permanent nature of things.
But unlike nature, there is a 'final end' to the XUAL Community in
history.
Oddly enough, you wont find Kilmatogh on any modern map of
County Leitrim. That is because it has disappeared. Sometime during
the night of August 3rd, 1982, the small Community of Kilmatogh in
rural County Leitrim, ceased to exist. At 3:28 AM on August 4th,
1982, a massive fire was said to have been seen by witnesses who
lived near Kilmatogh. The fire itself was visible on the horizon from
as far away as Blackross town. The fire's epicentre was determined to
be directly under Kilmatogh bog.
When Garda investigators arrived at what should have been the
outskirts of the 83-strong community, they found a smouldering,
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[Title of book] The XUAL Community: From Earliest Articles of

Association To Its Last Days
burning fissure, measuring 1,000 yards in length and approximately
500 yards in width. All of Kilmatogh residents were missing,
presumed dead. On August 30, the authorities closed the case on the
Kilmatogh community and no further explanation was ever given for
its disappearance.
I do not hope to solve the mystery of where the members disappeared
to in this book, I only wish to present the history of the Community.
For that I'd recommend you look up the Kilmatogh Mystery forum at
http://kilmatogh.the-talk.net/. There is no single clue, no pat secret
in any of the evidence that remains. Each statement, note and record
must be studied, reflected upon, absorbed. At last, when we know
enough, the true history true so far as we can understand it takes
form and substance in our minds.