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

Association To Its Last Days

[Section] Chapter Six
And so in our land called Leitrim,
The Xual folk met their fate.
No more will we see their kind
They burnt like frogs on a hot plate.
(~The ballad of Kilmatogh, 1984.)
Sometime during the day of August 3rd, 1982, a fire broke out at
Kilmatogh bog. At 3:28 AM the morning of August 4th, 1982, the
glow from the fire was said to have been seen on the horizon from as
far away as Blackross (2 miles away). Witnesses reported it to the
Gardai, who soon determined the epicentre of the fire to be at the site
of the experimental XUAL Community.
When Garda investigators arrived at the outskirts of the 83-strong
settlement, what they found was a smouldering, burning fissure,
measuring 1,000 yards in length and approximately 500 yards in
width. None of the residents at Kilmatogh bog survived. On August
30, the authorities closed the case. No findings were ever made
public about the events leading up to the fire which destroyed the
Community, not even to the families of the members who died.
In researching this matter, I employed a broad-spectrum approach by
interviewing locals, integrating their eye-witness testimony,
gathering corroborating evidence from the local Press, the Gardai and
town authorities in order to come up with a picture of what happened
that night and the events that led up to it. However, given the
fickleness of the press and the truth-shy attitude of local government
when it comes to revealing information that might affect public
opinion in unpredictable ways, as investigator I was put in a difficult
situation. How does one investigate a tragic event of enormous
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[Title of book] The XUAL Community: From Earliest Articles of

Association To Its Last Days
proportions like this without the support of either the media or the
government?
I could have relied on eye-witness testimony as the basis for
developing a general storyline of the tragic events. Who saw what,
when, and how become grist for speculation regarding an
interpretation of what might have actually happened that night. The
interpretation, of course, can go anywhere since eye-witness accounts
can be presented as factual or anecdotal, depending on the slant of
the person reporting the events. Thus, the question often boils down
to whether or not the eye-witnesses will be presented as either
truthful or unreliable.
Firstly, I've attempted to avoid this pitfall in the use of eye-witness
testimony: Nowhere in this book is there a narrator telling the reader
to consider the possibility that the eye-witnesses may be either
truthful or unreliable with their stories. Secondly, where I to obtain
corroborating testimony I'd have to interview a significantly large
number of individuals from the entire town of Blackross who had
been witness to the events that had took place many years ago.
The next question then becomes how much is known about what
actually occurred. Eye-witness testimony can only go so far. The
event of the fire occurred three decades ago, and memories are partial
at best. There is also the possibility that some of these eye-witnesses
may not be able to remember everything consciously due to either
trauma or the mental instinct to forget.
All this led to an insurmountable problem and what happened at
Kilmaotogh bog that night might have remained a mystery had not
this intrepid researcher been given a tip-off to look for 'an article'
printed in a retracted issue of the Leitrim Gazette, the only surviving
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[Title of book] The XUAL Community: From Earliest Articles of

Association To Its Last Days
copy of which was stored in the Local Studies section of the Leitrim
County Library. After finding the article titled: 'Weird Sights In The
Sky And How An Experimental Community Became A Violent Cult',
it finally gave me the details that led up to what happened that fateful
night:
On August 2nd, 1982, the evening before the XUAL
Community was said to have disappeared, a shoot-out ensued
between Gardai and armed members [of the XUAL
Community]. An explosive charge was dropped on the
community's hideout. The charge combusted a gasoline
container setting off a fire that burned downward into the
peaty ground and ignited a massive pocket of natural methane
gas which took out the entire complex of wooden dormitories,
claiming the lives of all its members, including the founder
Malcolm Cassin.
Blame for this travesty was immediately placed upon local
authorities for their heavy-handed approach. Gardai
responded with the claim that the community had boobytrapped the complex [i.e. the settlement] causing their own
deaths. Thus far, there has never been any investigation to
definitively settle the cause (and blame) of the community's
demise.
(Fiona Doyle, Leitrim Gazette, Saturday 18th of
September, 1982. Local Studies, Leitrim County Library.)
Finding this newspaper article was like finding the holy grail, but it
also raised more questions, questions like: How did this rural horrific
event come about? The members of the XUAL Community lived in a
harmony with the law, or at least they had a tentatively peaceful
coexistence for much of their existence. So, what made the
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[Title of book] The XUAL Community: From Earliest Articles of

Association To Its Last Days
authorities use a 'heavy-handed approach' when dealing with them?
The same article quoted above also furnishes us with some details
regarding this perplexing question:
From as early as 1980, members of the Kilmatogh community
began to voice anti-government sentiments and had numerous
brushes with the law. It wasn't until May 13th 1981, that a
confrontation finally arose between its members at their
barricaded compound and an armed Garda unit. No shots
were fired but relations continued to deteriorate between
[XUAL Community] members and the authorities.
(Fiona Doyle, Leitrim Gazette, Saturday 18th of
September, 1982. Local Studies, Leitrim County Library.)
Why was this particular newspaper edition retracted after printing?
Was it part of a conspiracy to cover up the involvement of the
authorities with the Community's destruction? We now know the
Community began exhibiting anti-government sentiments, but what
was the underlying factor that caused this mistrust of the local
authorities? Perhaps the answer lies with the values and scientific
ideals that once kept the members together being abandon leading to
social disintegration along the lines of smouldering prejudices.
Corruption usually precedes collapse, like rotting timber in a house;
so did a paranoid vision of something gone rancid at their core prove
to be too much for the small Community to withstand? Did the
communal residents find beneath the utopian life they once loved, a
heart of darkness? Perhaps it was Malcolm Cassin's special 'areas of
study', where it is claimed (by a former member) that he made
contact with the gods of the underworld: the Demons? Or perhaps it
was the locality of the settlement itself. One thing this researcher
knows is that there is something decidedly 'off' about Kilmatogh bog.
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[Title of book] The XUAL Community: From Earliest Articles of

Association To Its Last Days
Whether there is a malignant presence linked to ancient primal
forces, or an accumulation of psychic human trauma from ages past,
or simply because the bog is a 'thin place' (according to the
folklorists), one can definitely feel a disturbance in the atmosphere
when one walks around there.
This feeling of 'offness' invariably leads to further questions.
Questions like; did the founders know or care about how dangerous
engulfment or absorption by these malignant surroundings were to
the members of their Community? Did the rural menace come to
embody the hostility the insular members felt towards outsiders,
particularly towards authorities? And when the Gardai arrived and a
confrontation occurred, did this make the Community band together
more fanatically in an attempt to defeat this perceived external
threat?
Who knows? But the capstone to these 'brushes with the law' was the
final confrontation on August 2nd, 1982, that occurred between the
Gardai and armed members of the XUAL Community. As we've
already seen it ended badly for the Community members. It is a sad
story: one mans dream -Malcolm Cassin- of creating a new type of
society versed in the scientific method but falling foul to the law,
which have since worked hard to portray the communards as a
dangerous, depraved threat to civilization itself, a group that was
perhaps not quite human, an image designed to suggest that its brutal
repression was just, even necessary. Yet, after all this, the
Community at Kilmatogh keeps its mystic in the minds of local
people. Cassin's himself inspires the utopianists of today with the
promise of a new way of living.
This is a more fitting end to my book than I had originally planned.
But I shall take it as a gift of timing and fate. I've made every effort
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[Title of book] The XUAL Community: From Earliest Articles of

Association To Its Last Days
to present the primary sources exactly as they read on the pages from
which they were quoted. They are not of course all the evidence on
the XUAL Community; merely a selection that I've found to the best
of my research abilities.
Hopefully this book will form part of a larger, more exhaustive
biography of the XUAL Community conducted by some future
inexhaustible investigator. As it stands, my book is a basic
introductory history whose picture is a microscopic image of one
community at a local level. Any future piece would certainly benefit
by descriptions of some of the many other associations and
Societies contemporary with the XUAL Community both in
Ireland and abroad and of Malcolm Cassin himself, the
acknowledged leader and founder. But, only time will tell if such an
undertaking will ever happen.

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