Superannuated Man - interests include education, literature, politics, religion, ICT. In thrall to the unlimited heartbreak associated with following Knockaderry and Limerick GAA!
English must be a nearly impossible language to learn – but then again, maybe this applies to all languages. We’ve all heard of the phrases, “It was all Greek to me” or even, “It was all double Dutch”. However, in my opinion, nowhere is this more apparent than in Ireland, where, as Bing Crosby used to croon, “They speak a language the strangers do not know”. I suppose there is a good reason we call language our “mother tongue”. My mother-in-law, Lord rest her, had hundreds of phrases and words I hear very rarely nowadays. I find myself explaining some of them with the words, “as my mother-in-law always used to say”.
These phrases were used over and over; so, I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that many of my wife’s sayings also defy explanation. For example, if I were getting notions above my station, she would tell me that I was “like the gander that got up on the ditch to die”! If you argued with this unfair assessment of your character, she’d say that I was ‘sailing very close to the wind’ and if it was Winter, she’d tell me that ‘I was skating on very thin ice’!
According to her mother, a harsh wind would “skin you,” while a critical person had “a tongue like a lash”. Someone inclined to give out was likely, “to ate you without salt’. If she said someone had “a lack in him”, in her lexicon it meant that he had no common sense or empathy – maybe he was, “a bit simple”. If there was a big crowd at the card game in the local hall she’d tell us “They were there from the lighthouse”.
Of someone who had changed beyond recognition, she would say she “wouldn’t know him, or the sky over him” because she hadn’t seen him in “donkey’s years”. If someone was cunning, he probably “knew more than his prayers”. She rarely, if ever, swore, but invoked “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph” regularly, on the grounds that it was a prayer. I believed that one for years! Reference to prayer also occurred when someone was annoying, “I said prayers for that fella, I can tell you.” It meant the opposite, naturally!
Someone who was mean, was “tight”, he would “mind mice at crossroads”. A mean person “wouldn’t give you the steam off his piss”. A disputatious person would be capable of “making trouble in heaven”, or if cranky of, “fighting with his fingernails” or being “as cross as a bag of cats” – in truth, “he’d bate the Maker” and anyway he was “a horrible disciple” and “he’d break your melt”. Skinny people were as “thin as a rake”, whereas a heavy person was “gone out of the way altogether”, sure he was “a big falbo” or a “big, awkward fostook of a fellow”.
When she made too much food, she would muse that she had made enough “to feed a thrashing”. I think that phrase came from the custom of neighbours getting together to help one another, to ‘comhar’ (from the Irish word cabhair, meaning to help) to save oats or barley, with the original expression being “threshing”. This gathering of close neighbours was also referred to by her as “a meitheal”. Indeed, many of her finest gems were left-overs from a bygone age where Gaelic was the spoken language – until that was beaten out of us and made to seem very vulgar and unfashionable in the nineteenth century. Sure, maybe that was all “pure baloney”!
Breda O’Brien, writing in The Irish Times some time ago, said her mother couldn’t put a sentence together in Irish, but something that was a mess was “trína chéile”, and a stupid man was “an amadán” or a “right bacach”, and a silly woman was still “an óinseach”, and of course, just as she always pointed out, delph invariably smashed into “smidiríní”. Ah, but she was in the ha’penny place compared to my mother-in-law, Breda from Monegea, who told me one Christmas that she was, “as full as a tick” – an old word for a mattress filled with duck feathers! No one could ever accuse her of being shy or introverted; she had a huge heart and fierce, unflinching loyalty to her family and friends. It is not just their wonderfully expressive words that I miss, and not just long-gone Christmas memories that make me want to shed a tear.
So, if by chance, in the near future, you visit Ireland, you can be assured that there are still strong women, “in the uplands digging praties, speaking a language the strangers do not know”!
October (also known as Saison d’Octobre or Potato Gatherers) by French naturalist artist Jules Bastien-Lepage.
The huge differences between Democrats and Republicans!
I was never that good at Maths, and I’m so old that my Maths education consisted mainly of Geometry, Algebra and Trigonometry! Some of my teachers may even have been Greek; at least it was all Greek to me! However, if I were to represent where I stand politically, I’d probably use the more modern Venn Diagram. One bubble would represent the constituency covered by Christian Democrats, while the other bubble would represent the area covered by Social Democratic thought and policy. The oval intersection in the centre of this diagram is where I have stood politically since the ‘70s.
Firstly, two stories from the past. The first one I heard from my mother and her sister, my Aunty Meg. One evening in the Spring of 1932, shortly after Fianna Fáil had come to power, and a mere nine years since the end of the bitter Civil War, they were both on their way home from their National School in Glenroe. As they were passing a local farmer on the road, they shouted out, ‘Up Dev!’ which was the great political slogan of the day, following Eamonn De Valera’s victory in the General Election which had just taken place on March 9th that year. However, the following morning, both were brought before the class, and Aunty Meg was beaten about the head by her teacher, so that she was rendered profoundly deaf for the rest of her life. When their father, my Grandad, found this out, he went immediately to the school, withdrew his two youngest daughters and transferred them both to the convent school in Kilfinnane, five miles away, where they completed their education.
I also have a clear memory of the General Election in 1957. I remember my Grandad waiting patiently outside our home in Rapala, in the March sunshine, to be collected by local members of the Fianna Fáil political party who would take him to the Polling Booth in nearby Glenroe so that he could cast his vote in the General Election. I, even as a five-year-old, could sense how important this was to him. He was dressed in his best Sunday outfit, his flat cap, waistcoat and jacket, his trusty pipe, and his walking stick, ready for road! This was a regular occurrence in the ‘50s, and even in the ‘60s, when there were few cars, and the local activists of all political hues, who had cars, did everything in their power to maximise the vote! De Valera and Grandad’s beloved Fianna Fáil won the election, and so Grandad was very happy with that result.
So, my family would always have been traditionally staunch Fianna Fáil supporters, a support that had its origins in the horrible Civil War from whose ashes arose our fledgling Republic in 1923, the year my mother was born in Glenroe. However, since I became politically aware, I have always been drawn to the policies of Fine Gael, especially having read, while at University, Declan Costello’s Just Society document, which he had produced in the mid-60s.
Later, Garret FitzGerald’s Constitutional Crusade received my full support, and even though he never did seem to be cut out for the rough and tumble of Irish politics, I agreed with his liberal views and philosophy and the need to accelerate the separation of Church and State for once and for all. Following decades of deep conservatism at the top echelons of Irish life, FitzGerald in the ‘80s embarked on a bold odyssey to modernise and liberalise not only his own party but the country at large. However, his often-futile efforts, despite his Economics background, to fix the economic depression of the ‘80s met with less success, and, I suppose, thereby lies the enigma of a political visionary. In more modern times, visionary leaders of all political hues in Irish politics are in short supply.
One of my go-to commentators on Irish life since I began reading The Irish Times in the ‘70s, Fintan O’Toole, has recently stated that he believes Irish society is now firmly socially democratic. The big cultural shift was the breaking of the hegemony that had dominated the State – the tight alliance of Fianna Fáil and the Catholic Church. Demographically, Ireland is experiencing a very rapid catch-up after the long depredations of famine and mass emigration. Socially, the population has become both urbanised and highly educated. Added to this, the huge growth of the private sector economy has created an undeniable imperative for a greatly expanded State to provide infrastructure, housing, healthcare and education.
What we have, then, is a very broad consensus on the need for classic social democratic policies. Most people want to see an active State that builds houses, creates equal access to health and education, works to eliminate poverty and supports both those who need care and those (mostly women) who provide it. For this reason, I believe, Fine Gael, the political party that I have given my support to, is under serious threat today both at home and in Europe. This can be seen better in the European context, where they are aligned with the main Christian Democrat alliance in the European Parliament, the European People’s Party. Herein lies the threat: most Christian Democratic parties in Europe, to counter the threat from the far right, are themselves moving to the right in their pronouncements and their policies, especially on issues like immigration. These parties are being outflanked by the far right, and so, the middle ground is shifting to the right. Fine Gael is still considered a conservative party in Ireland, but in Europe, their associates are coming to view them as more Social Democrat than Christian Democrat – the centre cannot hold!
Politics has become very confusing in my lifetime. If I had a vote in American elections, my gut instinct would always have been to vote Democrat – yet today Democrats espouse many policies I find objectionable, such as being pro-abortion. Republicans, on the other hand, are pro-life, and so, God forbid, should I vote for Trump? If I were a British voter, I would find it easy not to vote for the Conservatives because of their extreme right-wing self-serving tendencies, but then I can’t warm to Keir Starmer and his version of the modern Labour Party either. Maybe we should do what we do in Ireland and ignore Left and Right, Conservative and Liberal, Republican and Democrat and simply have a Civil War and for the next 100 years vote for those on our particular side of that conflict!
Ironically, in this day and age, Democrats of every hue pay mealy-mouthed lip service to democracy. In Europe, we have built an immovable, stubborn and unwieldy bureaucracy in Brussels, and there is a perceptible democratic deficit. Decisions are made by consensus and take forever. Parallel to this, we have a pipeline of edicts and policies and over-regulation being handed down and implemented unquestioningly by local ‘sovereign’ parliaments in 30 member states. The stark reality is that despite its great wealth, Europe as an entity is weak and irrelevant, paralysed by conflicting national interests, when compared to the big players, Trump, Putin and Xi Jinping. Even when it comes to its own security, the EU struggles to be a central player.
Westminster, the Mother of Parliaments, gave us the concept that those who sat to the right of the Speaker were the Government and those who sat to the left of the Speaker were in Opposition. Yet today, the idea of robust parliamentary debate has almost vanished in our Houses of Parliament. Consensus politics is everywhere. For example, it was almost impossible to find an opposition voice in our Dáil to any of the recently proposed amendments to our Constitution. And in the recent Presidential Election, a pro-life candidate seeking a nomination failed to find the required 20 Seanad members to ratify her nomination, while our main political party, after much skulduggery, chose a non-party candidate to disastrous effect, thus undermining the office of President. Is it that all political parties agree because of the obvious virtue of the various proposals, or is it that the quality of those seeking nomination is so poor? Is their silence because of fear of being ridiculed and mocked because they are out of step? The question I ask is, who represents me? How come the people whom I voted for refuse to represent my position? Who speaks up for those who oppose these proposed measures?
My greatest dystopian fear is that there is a kind of elite consensus at work in our world and that, in effect, the lauded ideal of democracy is, in fact, long dead. This ‘elite consensus’ is agreed upon in such shady places as the World Economic Summit in Davos and other elite gatherings where the agenda is agreed upon and handed down to governments to implement. In recent years, it has been quite unnerving and unsettling to see our Taoisigh and Finance Ministers strutting in these undemocratic assemblies, cheek to jowl with billionaires, oligarchs and moguls of one hue or another. In my opinion, our political leaders have no place at such gatherings.
Lately, our government has increasingly hidden behind the very undemocratic Citizens’ Assemblies. These assemblies are meant to inform the government about proposed new legislation or other controversial issues. Nobody knows how these Assemblies are put together, or how their numbers are decided, yet our government continues to give them huge prominence in the determination of policy and legislation. If controversial decisions are arrived at, the government can wring their hands in phoney despair and claim that this, after all, must be what the people want and, thereby, distance themselves from any culpability.
The NGO Merry-go-round
Government-funded NGOs distort lobbying. In recent times in this country, we have had the ludicrous situation where the government have relied on, and paid, the National Women’s Council of Ireland to campaign for the removal of wording which refers to ‘women’, ‘mothers’, ‘marriage’, and ‘home’ from our Constitution – these terms are now considered old fashioned, gender-specific, and possibly offensive to some! These amendments were, in the main, poorly drafted and poorly thought through in terms of their future legal consequences and broader implications. Yet, this is how cosy consensus works: proposals are put to the people, who are generally disinterested and uninformed, and the government hopes that a low turnout will see the amendments carried. This surely is a travesty of democracy. I say this mainly because, in recent years, I find myself on the losing side in all these battles, similar to my unlimited heartbreak while following the Limerick hurlers until they began winning All-Irelands again in 2018!
The old concept of majority rule is now defunct. We are everywhere surrounded by vocal minorities, and the silent majority is being manipulated furtively, dangerously and relentlessly by social media and mainstream media, which has lost all vestiges of independence and objectivity. Newspapers and television stations have almost all been bought up by billionaire moguls and oligarchs for their nefarious ends. We are surrounded by a multiplicity of influencers whose sole objective is self-interest and self-promotion.
I remember back in 1984, the year our daughter Mary was born, thinking to myself that things weren’t that bad after all. Orwell’s chilling novel, 1984, had come and gone, and his dystopian predictions had been well off the mark. Of course, I was wrong. I remember again waking on November 8th 2016, to the news that Donald Trump was almost certainly going to be elected the 45th President of the United States of America. I had followed the seemingly interminable election campaign and had been amazed by his distortions, lies, deliberate misinformation and fake news, and now this buffoon, this bankrupt, had his finger on the levers of power in the most powerful country in our world. For me, the insanity, the instability began that day and has since spread like a pandemic to infect politics worldwide.
There is unfinished business here in Ireland, also. In the coming years, the country will have to face up to the challenge of reunification and try, in a peaceful way, to right the wrongs of the past. Seeking consensus won’t cut the mustard, and wise and strong leadership will be needed to bridge the gap to a new and better future for all on our beloved island. In truth, we have come a long way since the days of ‘Ourselves Alone’. We are now an outward-looking nation, and, despite its many perceived shortcomings, Europe has been good for us. Yet, the very notion of a Border Poll has been kicked down the road by even the most rabid Republican parties for fear it will offend some group or other. If a week is a long time in politics, then one hundred years is an eternity.
It is very hard to have to say that our present government, and its political administration, are in deep paralysis and stasis since it came to power over a year ago. For years, on the global stage, we have resembled a recalcitrant college student who wants to experience the college atmosphere but prefers to spend his time in The Stables and The Scholars Club, even The Terrace, without ever going to a lecture or meeting the least onerous deadline. We haven’t met a deadline, set by ourselves or Europe, in years, and we are paralysed by regulations which we have agreed to when we try to respond to any crisis, notably housing for our young people or the climate emergency. Added to this, the cosy consensus of ‘a rotating Taoiseach’ is not working, and my favoured political party has not chosen its leaders well in recent years. Too many talented politicians are simply biding their time until lucrative opportunities arise at some global think tank, bank or other.
For most of my lifetime, I have admired from afar the United States of America and the United Kingdom. I have long been assured and comforted by their perceived role as leaders and policemen of the free world and their reliance on ‘a rules-based world order’ of multilateral organisations, such as the UN and the International Criminal Court. It saddens me to have to admit that their stature in my eyes has been diminished and shattered by their actions and inactions in this 21st century. Being complicit in genocide is the least of their crimes.
The bottom line is that a whole range of sacrosanct core principles are being tampered with – even decimated: our democracy, our sovereignty, and our neutrality. America has gone rogue, and the checks and balances have been cast aside. Where is Congress? Where are the lawmakers and law upholders of the great American Senate? And what of the Stock Markets, that supposedly great regulator and our ultimate wind vane of economic insanity? Why are they not freaking out at developing events? What has their reaction been to all this upheaval and instability? There is a feeding frenzy ongoing, and all are gorging themselves at Trump’s Trough.
How easily all these safeguards have been cast aside by those who are putting personal aggrandisement before the common good. Government-backed armed militias roam the streets of American cities, shooting dead American housewives collecting their kids from kindergarten. To quote W.B Yeats, in The Second Coming, a prescient poem for our time also,
…. Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned ….
Social anarchy and massive destruction are made worse by the collapse of moral values among the leaders of nations: ‘The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity’. Back in 1919, Yeats predicted that evil would triumph in the public sphere because those political leaders who might be expected to defend humane values (and basic human rights) lack the determination to resist those who preach violence and intolerance.
It is undisputed that all wars and all politics are, in fact, local. Sometimes our political leaders forget this universal truth to their cost. Like Patrick Kavanagh in his beautiful sonnet, Epic, ‘Gods make their own importance’ and the boundary dispute between the Duffys and the McCabes and their ‘pitchfork-armed claims’ is as important as any other conflict making headlines in the morning papers. My advice to those who purport to represent me is to get out of their ivory towers and retrieve the better parts of what we used to call in Ireland ‘parish pump politics’, namely listening to the people who voted them into their positions of power in the first place and to forcibly represent those views on the floor of the Dáil.
Finally, despite my pessimism and present disillusionment with politics and politicians, it is a source of great pride to me that, down the years, at least three of the brave politicians, and one brave Minister, who have regularly called to my door seeking my vote have, at one time, sat before me in class!
I’ve always been fascinated by books, although I wouldn’t consider myself a good reader. I’m definitely not a consistent reader, and my iPad constantly berates me for not meeting my daily targets.
When Kate and I began to settle into our new home in Knockaderry, we gradually undertook a series of necessary improvements. The house was a mess, and we often said that there was so much wrong with it that it was no wonder no one else wanted to buy it! In time, we added two bedrooms and a new bathroom, and we converted what had been the second bedroom in the old house into a study. The study soon filled up with books; many were prescribed texts from school.
One of our early purchases was Encyclopaedia Britannica, and we used it as a piece of furniture and a kind of 1980s status symbol for the sitting room rather than as a reference library. It’s still there on the top shelf, out of reach and neglected! This was later added to with the acquisition of World Book Encyclopaedia and Childcraft. When the kids were young, one of Kate’s many jobs outside the home was as an agent for World Book. In my hazy recollection, both sets were very rarely referred to and have remained for years untouched by human hand. They were nearly as neglected as the copy of The Jerusalem Bible, which I purchased in 1982!
My study is my favourite room in our home – book-lined and snug with its one window looking out upon wind-ravaged, leggy Lawson Cypress. One of my secret joys was seeing Don begin to assemble an alternative library and reading list of epic proportions. And, today, pride of place goes to the remnants of Don’s library, who is a far more serious reader than I am. His adolescent infatuation with Hemingway is still well represented, as are other examples of his voracious and enquiring mind.
I had earlier figured out when I came to stay with my Aunty Meg in September 1977 that the way to find out what was best to read was to locate a great reader and follow in his or her footsteps and Meg fulfilled that role for me and, of course I quickly realised that there are surprisingly very few great readers – they are in fact as rare as giant pandas!
I think I have mentioned earlier that my love of books began in earnest in Fifth Class in Primary school in Glenroe. It was a great honour for me to have been appointed school librarian, and the school library, even though it consisted of a single pine press in the corner of the room, was magical. What mattered was that the press was new and the books were new and had that glorious, magical new-book smell. I felt I had to lead by example, so my first two books borrowed – and read – were Old Celtic Romances by P.W. Joyce and Ben-Hur by Lew Wallace (first published in 1880!). In that pre-television age, I was also fascinated by comics that recounted the exploits of Roy of the Rovers and other daredevil heroes. Looking back now, there was much racist content in those black-and-white comics. The anti-German content in the war stories was criminal, and I began to put a rudimentary German vocabulary together. Words like Achtung! Achtung!, Himmel, etc., were common as the Germans were always defeated and butchered from machine gun nests in the hills. American comics were no less racist, and the indigenous Red Indian population were depicted as savage, uneducated, and primitive in their treatment of the swashbuckling cowboys and their women and children. Those comics were like gold dust, and we swapped them continuously with our friends.
Shortly after this, I graduated to novels, and I remember reading hundreds of Biggles books, novels written by Capt. W. E. Johns, who told of the wartime exploits of Biggles flying mission after mission with his beloved Royal Air Force. Biggles had an unusually lengthy career, flying a number of aircraft representative of the history of British military aviation, from Sopwith Camels during the First World War, Hawker Hurricanes and Supermarine Spitfires in the Second World War, right up to the Hawker Hunter jet fighter in a post-World War II adventure. Enid Blyton was also very popular, and I didn’t consider it beneath me to read her Famous Five books or her Secret Seven stories of adventure and mystery in merry old middle-class England of the ‘50s.
My reading in secondary school was largely determined by prescribed texts, and generally those were dreadful, musty, and dusty, and they relied almost totally on the ancient English classics. Most of the poets were dead, and all the prose writers were long gone to their stuffy library in the sky. University wasn’t much better: in UCC it was Beowulf, Sir Gawain, Chaucer, Spencer, Shakespeare, Donne. Yeats and Kavanagh were mentioned in passing, and we were lucky in the 70s to have a few rebels like John Montague to counterbalance the primness and the staidness of Professor Seán Lucy and Sr. Una Nelly. As far as I could see, UCC and its English Department were firmly rooted in the past. The notion was prevalent then that all good literature was in the past, so we had to find Hemingway, Steinbeck, Salinger, McGahern, Daniel Corkery, Séan Ó Faoláin, Liam O’Flaherty, and Joyce for ourselves! I believe the twentieth century began in UCC around 1980!
Ironically, when I got my first teaching job at St. Ita’s Secondary School in Newcastle West, the school was located in an old Carnegie Library – one of the myriad such libraries dotted throughout West Limerick. So, I taught in ‘The Library’ for 15 years and enjoyed every single minute of it. Needless to say, there wasn’t much spare time for reading, but I tried valiantly to keep up with my main mentor at the time, my Aunty Meg. I stayed with Meg, Jack, Mary and Pat for the two years 1977 and ‘78. She treated me like her fifth son, much to my own mother’s chagrin! She gave me four precious gifts. She instructed me in the intricacies of 45, that distinctly Irish card game; she challenged me regularly to improve my Scrabble skills; she introduced me to the delights of 16-ounce bags of Cherry Brandy flavoured pipe tobacco from America; and she provided me with an endless supply of American blockbuster novels which she picked up on her frequent visits to New York where she went to visit her son, Michael.
Under her mentorship, I read Leon Uris when no one else had heard of him. I was the second person in Knockaderry to read all those bestselling novels, like Exodus, Mila 18, Battle Cry, Topaz, and Armageddon. We also took great interest when he ventured into Irish politics with his novel Trinity (1976) and its sequel Redemption (1995). As a wedding present in 1979, she presented me with Robert Ludlum’s The Matarese Circle, and during the ‘80s, each time she visited Mike, she brought me back the latest of the Bourne trilogy: The Bourne Identity (1980), The Bourne Supremacy (1986) and The Bourne Ultimatum (1990). Twenty years later, Matt Damon made Jason Bourne famous on the big screen, and I was able to say that Meg and I knew every twist and turn of those convoluted plots. She also introduced me to Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, Fools Die and The Sicilian. She also loved the novels of former Champion Jockey, Dick Francis, whose novels were set in the murky underworld that was horse racing, which was centred in and around Newmarket.
I must say that the greatest development in my career as an English teacher was the introduction of the new Leaving Cert English syllabus around 2000. It breathed new life into a language subject that, up to then, was nearly as dead and moribund as Latin. Suddenly, the subject came to life. Now students were studying modern, living writers, and because of the emergence of Irish writing, many of the novels and plays were by Irish writers like Donal Ryan, Sebastian Barry, Joseph O’Connor, Claire Keegan, Emma Donoghue, Brian Friel and John B. Keane. It was a pleasure to teach poetry, which was relevant and vibrant and Irish: poets like Heaney, Mahon, Longley, Kavanagh, Yeats, Boland, Paula Meehan, and Montague were studied avidly.
Here, I have to mention my own favourite book of all time. That accolade goes to Reading in the Dark by Seamus Deane – definitely the best book never to win The Booker! This incredibly well-crafted novel is set in Derry over 16 years, from 1945 to 1961. The book presents a child’s view of the tensions in the city during that time. Throughout the book, we are reminded of the conflict that surrounds the narrator. As a teacher, I got great satisfaction in revealing and solving the mystery and compiling the jigsaw with my many Leaving Cert students when it made its way onto the Higher Level English syllabus in the early 2000s. Deane parallels the personal story at the heart of the novel with the political developments that are taking place in his native Derry. The secrets and mistaken beliefs that divide a family are symbolic of the secrets and divisions that divide a whole people. The author is not a detached observer: the gap between Seamus Deane and the narrator is so narrow as to be almost indistinguishable. The reader is invited to sympathise with the boy in the unique position he finds himself in. I would encourage you, if you can find a copy, to put it on your reading list – you will then be expected to do your fair share of ‘reading in the dark’ also!
Today, when I travel to Glenroe or Sandymount or beyond, I always have with me in my Roy Cropper black bag my myriad pills and potions and an ever-changing selection of my favourite writers and poets. In the black bag at present, I have Seamus Heaney’s 100 Poems, which was a treasured gift from my daughter Mary, Hartnett’s Collected Poems, and his beautiful 1987 collection, A Necklace ofWrens, along with Michael Dooley’s In Spring We Turned to Water, and Dean Browne’s amazing first collection, After Party.
Reading allows you to borrow someone else’s brain and have a conversation with the most consequential minds in history. However, it’s a learned skill and requires discipline, and you have to set aside time for it. Keep your phone in another room. Always carry a book with you and steal 5-10 minute intervals when you can and avoid audiobooks like the plague! Nothing beats having an actual book in your hands – Kindle, the iPad and other virtual books don’t really count – except in emergencies. Keep as many physical copies (trophies) surrounding you as possible, especially if they are as beautifully produced as Faber and Faber and Picador books. (Faber has done much to make Claire Keegan’s novellas collector’s items; they are so exquisitely produced). The aim is to gradually amass a treasured library over time. These aren’t just books, but tangible links to the very best of literature, history and culture, offering the reader authentic sources beyond the internet’s scattered AI-flawed information.
Bridge Street, Croom, taken in 1901. Image source: askaboutireland.ie
Abstract: Where did Michael Hartnett get the inspiration for the title of his collection, A Farewell to English? We believe that Aindrias Mac Craith’s most iconic song, Slán le Máighe (Farewell to the Maigue), was an influence and reference point for Hartnett’s ‘Farewell’, as well as being the inspiration for both the naming of the title poem of Hartnett’s collection, A Farewell to English, and, indeed, the naming of the collection itself.
A Christmas Collaboration: Vincent Hanley and Don Hanley
Michael Hartnett’s A Farewell to English caused quite a stir in literary circles back in 1975. It was seen by some as a bold change of direction for Hartnett, by then an established poet in the Irish literary scene and equally it was seen by others as a self-inflicted literary act of seppuku or self-immolation. Famously (infamously!) on June 4th, 1974, Hartnett had walked onto the stage of the Peacock Theatre in Dublin, at an event organised by the Goldsmith Press, and made one of the most intriguing, quixotic statements ever made by an established Irish poet. At that event, Michael Hartnett informed the audience of his resolution to cease writing and publishing in English and, from then on, to write and publish solely in Irish. He said his ‘road towards Gaelic’ had ‘been long and haphazard’ and until then ‘a road travelled without purpose’ but reassured his audience that he had realised and come to terms with his identity while acknowledging that his ‘going into Gaelic simplified things’ for him and provided answers which some considered to be naive but at least gave him ‘somewhere to stand’ (Walsh, 7). The statement was received largely negatively by critics and contemporaries, at best a bizarre misstep soon to be forgotten, at worst an ideologically motivated rebuke to the Irish poets writing in English at the time.
This dramatic ‘Farewell’ has always been somewhat problematic. Many of his detractors at the time expected him, once he had made this momentous decision, to stick rigidly to his promise as if it had been set in stone. Inevitably, they criticised him and chided him when his ambitious project seemed to peter out in the mid-80s. Perhaps this reaction can be seen as an effort by his critics to finally ‘pigeonhole’ the poet and hold him accountable. However, Michael Hartnett’s variety as a poet – balladeer, satirist, love poet, translator, poet in Irish as well as English, and his complicated bibliography, with numerous compilations, collections and selections, as well as individual volumes from several different publishers, always had the effect of obscuring his achievement or hiding its core elements.
An artist moves from obsession to obsession, from one project to another, and nothing is ever set in stone; ‘Farewells’ are never ‘Adieu’, more ‘Au Revoir’; new beginnings are inevitable. Hartnett was no different; he shifted from English to Irish and back again, he moved from city to country and back again; from the hillside in Glendarragh to Emmett Road in Inchicore, where, for good measure, he composed an extended haiku sequence in English. As Peter Sirr points out, this is the ‘kind of creative restlessness that fed Hartnett as a poet but that sometimes made critics scratch their heads’ (Sirr, 294). That said, when assessing Hartnett’s ‘Farewell’, we think it is fair to say it is best realised by the poems and ballads themselves (both in English and Irish), which more fully express the motivating poetic philosophy which led to the theatrical stunt on the Peacock stage, rather than the stunt itself!
To appraise the decision to bid a farewell to English, therefore, we must look to the collection and the title poem of the collection. If the concluding poem for which the collection is named is to be read as explanation, as well as a statement of intent, it is not a disillusionment with language, but rather with the use of that language in Ireland, and the cultural significance which that use carries. Hartnett’s decision, and the poem itself, are loaded with inferences within a political and postcolonial context. The poem’s significance, however, lies in the fact that it is not a poem against a language, but the political and dogmatic meanings which we have attached to that language.
His poem, ‘A Visit to Croom, 1745’, appears in that 1975 edition of A Farewell to English and is placed immediately before the title poem in the collection. The poem consists of strikingly vivid imagery and there are a myriad of great historical undertones present; echoes of Séan Ó Tuama’s inn, with its bardic school of poetry is conveyed in bold, flamboyant brush strokes; echoes too of great battles, the Boyne, Athlone, Aughrim, the Siege of Limerick, the ill-fated Treaty of Limerick, Sarsfield and The Wild Geese. In the poem Hartnett, the travelling spailpín, places himself back in Croom, probably in Ó Tuama’s hostelry, on his lonely journey back into the Gaelic tradition. He has trudged fourteen miles, in the shoes of those phantoms he visualises at Doody’s Cross, ‘in straw-roped overcoat’ to get here and all for nothing. ‘Five Gaelic faces’ greet him, and all he can hear is ‘a Gaelic court talk broken English of an English king’. His anger and disappointment are palpable,
It was a long way
to come for nothing.
Then the opening scene in ‘A Farewell to English’ takes place in yet another hostelry, Windle’s Pub in Glensharrold, Carrickerry, a few miles outside Newcastle West, where he introduces us to the raven-haired barmaid, Mary Donovan, who spurs him to verse, ‘her mountainy body tripped the gentle / mechanism of verse’ (Collected Poems, 141). This imagined segment of the poem is used as a device through which Hartnett comments upon his poetic inspiration and process, as well as his relationship with the Irish language: ‘the minute interlock / of word and word began, the rhythm formed’ (Collected Poems, 141). The weight which the poet gives to ideas of tradition within his creative process is clear here, suggesting the importance which ideas of authenticity play. Such shibboleths are never treated as unassailable, however, but rather made tangible through tactile imagery of sinking into, and sifting through, the morass of tradition: ‘I sunk my hands into tradition / sifting the centuries for words’ (Collected Poems, 141). However, because of his somewhat faltering Irish, he is forced to resort to age-old cliches to describe the barmaid using well-worn semi-classical phrases, ‘mánla, séimh, dubhfholtach, álainn, caoin’. Harnett then rebukes himself for doing so – ‘What was I doing with these foreign words?’ (Collected Poems, 141). His project, his new direction, is to find a new poetic voice in Irish, not to rehash old clichés, and by doing so, come to Irish not as a ‘foreigner’ but as a fellow of Aindrias Mac Craith and the Maigue poets and in doing so, make his own contribution to the bardic tradition that has inspired him.
Then in the second section, he describes an encounter on the road which hovers somewhere between reality and dream, aisling (the Irish word for a vision) or epiphany. The incident takes place at Doody’s Cross as the poet walks out one summer Sunday evening from Newcastle West to the cottage in Camas. He is on his way to meet up with his uncle, Dinny Halpin. He sits down ‘on a gentle bench of grass’ to rest his weary feet after his exertions when he sees approaching him three spectral figures from the Bardic Gaelic past – Andrias Mac Craith, Aodhagán Ó Rathaille, and Daíbhí Ó Bruadair. These ‘old men’ walked on ‘the summer road’ with
sugán belts and long black coats
with big ashplants and half-sacks
of rags and bacon on their backs.
They pose as a rather pathetic group, ‘hungry, snot-nosed, half-drunk’ and they give him a withering glance before they take their separate ways to Croom, Meentogues and Cahirmoyle, the locations of their patronage, ‘a thousand years of history / in their pockets’. Here, Hartnett is situating himself as their direct descendant and the inheritor of their craft. The enormity of this epiphany occurs at Doody’s Cross in Camas; the enormity of the task that lies ahead also terrifies and haunts him.
One of that pathetic trio at Doody’s Cross in Camas was Aindrias MacCraith (c. 1710 – 1795). He was well known by his nickname, An Mangaire Súgach (The Merry Pedlar), which had been given to him by his mentor and great friend, Séan Ó Tuama an Ghrinn (c. 1708 – 1775). MacCraith was a roving Hedge School master, setting up school wherever he could find a few pupils, then moving on when numbers fell. From the accounts that have come down to us, we learn that the Mangaire was a quintessential Limerick Rake; fond of sport, good company and deep drinking, and getting into more than one scrape with the clergy on account of his various indiscretions.
Mannix Joyce, that great local historian and chronicler of The Poets of the Maigue, recalls that,
‘For all his waywardness, he was a gifted singer. That poor wretch of a man, so often seen reeling from the tavern to the miserable hovel he called home, was one of the sweetest poets an age of song was to produce, a man whose poems will endure as long as the Irish language lives. He was a real lyricist, not unlike Burns and in his songs, he gives us an insight into his wild and vagrant life. He had a profound knowledge of the Irish language, and his poetry is full of magic and melody. He belonged to that strange Hidden Ireland of the 18th century, that Ireland that flowered with such profusion of poetry under the blasting winter winds of oppression. If he was careless and intemperate, much of it was due to a hellish code of laws then being enacted for the utter degradation of the old race’ (Limerick Leader, 13th October 1945).
Rake that he was, he could often be found in the company of Séan Clárach Mac Domhnaill, convenor of the Maigue School of Poetry and composer of Mo Ghile Mear, originally from Charleville, who has been described as the ‘chief Jacobite Poet in Ireland’. Séan Ó Tuama, Fr. Nicholas O’Donnell, and those other poets of the Maigue were often to be found in his company, declaiming the hero-tales of Greece and Rome and discussing current European politics. Again, Joyce acknowledges the great contribution of those Maigue Poets during the harshest of Penal times:
‘Those remarkable men arose in an age when learning of every kind was banned in Ireland and sprang from a people dubbed as ignorant and illiterate by their oppressors. They were the last guardians of the thousand-year-old ure of the Gael, and with their passing the Irish language, the repository of that ancient ure, faded and died in the rich plains of Limerick’ (ibid).
One of Aindrias McCraith’s best-known songs begins with the line: ‘Slán is céad ón taobh so uaim’. The song is usually referred to by the title: ‘Slán le Máighe’ (‘Farewell to the Maigue’), or ‘Slán Chois Mháighe’ (‘Farewell to Coshma)’, the name of the local Barony. As mentioned already, Aindrias had a predilection for that dangerous combination of wine, women and song, and after one of many such indiscretions, he was exiled by the parish priest of Croom to Ballyneety, the place where Patrick Sarsfield destroyed the Williamite siege train in 1690. His sad, poignant lament from there is addressed to his great friend Seán Ó Tuama, who, along with MacCraith, was one of the leading lights of the Court of Poetry which assembled in the village of Croom (‘Cromadh an tSuaicheas’, ‘Croom of the Merriment’), with its headquarters in the inn which was run by Ó Tuama and his wife, Muireann. (The song is one of the great Irish slow airs and can be sung to the air of ‘The Bells of Shandon’).
Slán is céad ón daobh seo uaim
Cois Máighe na gaor na graobh na gcruach …
(A hundred and one farewells from this place from me / To Coshma of the berries, the trees, the ricks).
Then there was the pathetic refrain:
Och ochón, is breoite mise,
Can chuid gan chóir gan choip gan chiste.
Gan sult gan seod gan sport gan spionnadh,
O seoladh mé chun uaighnis.
(Alas, alas, sick am I / Without portion, without justice, without company, without money / Without enjoyment, without treasure, without sport, without vigour / Since I was sent away to loneliness).
John O’ Shea and Anna Jane Ryan play Slán le Máighe (Farewell to the Maigue) live at Nun’s Island theatre in Galway.
Only ten miles separate Croom from Ballyneety in County Limerick, yet an important boundary line lies between them. Croom, in County Limerick, is located in the barony of Cois Máighe (Coshma), whereas Ballyneety is located in the barony of Uí Chonaill Gabhra (Connello). So, the journey from one village to the other involved moving from one Barony to another; the equivalent in those days of moving from one jurisdiction to another. The title of the song (and its associated tune) is usually given in English as ‘Farewell to the Maigue’, as if the poet were saying goodbye to the river itself, which flowed majestically through his beloved place.
MacCraith’s ‘Farewell’, despite its sublime lyrics and haunting slow-air melody, is not meant to be taken at face value; it is meant as a ‘Slán go fóill’, as inconsequential a ‘Farewell’ as a French ‘Au Revoir’. He is, undoubtedly, showing off his great skill as a poet, but the reality is that he is being asked to take a temporary leave-of-absence from Croom until the current controversy abates. By its language and use of form, it is at once intentionally self-serious, theatrical and iconoclastic. Hartnett echoes this tone and mirrors this pose in his ‘Farewell’ – at times theatrical, self-serious, bombastic – but also, in a flash, heartfelt, exposed, human.
Unfortunately, Aindrias MacCraith did eventually have to bid a sad final farewell to his good friend and mentor, Séan Ó Tuama. It is doubtful if the Mangaire Súgach would ever have written a verse of poetry were it not for the encouragement and friendship of Séan Ó Tuama. He had written nothing before he came to Croom, and after the death of Ó Tuama, he lapsed into silence again. He left Croom and sang no more. He had outlived Séan Clárach (d. 1754) by almost 40 years and his friend, Séan Ó Tuama, by nearly 20. He had seen the last of the great Maigue School of Poetry, and his declining years were saddened by the decay of the old language in the district where once it flourished.
Of the three phantoms that accost Hartnett at Doody’s Cross in those early magical sections of ‘A Farewell to English’, Hartnett translated the work of Ó Rathaille and Ó Bruadair but not MacCraith, one of his great influences from the old dispensation, the Gaelic bardic past. However, we believe that MacCraith does play an important role in the naming of Hartnett’s poem, ‘A Farewell to English’. We know that Hartnett was obsessed with Croom, as the last bastion of the old Gaelic Schools of poetry. He took great pride in the fact that he was the only modern Irish poet to have been born in Croom – he spent his first few days in St. Stephen’s Maternity Hospital, located in the village! This near obsession with Croom and the Filí na Máighe (The Maigue Poets) may, therefore, have had some influence on Hartnett’s choice of title for ‘A Farewell to English’. Our theory is that Hartnett borrowed the title of Aindrias MacCraith’s most iconic and poignant poem, ‘Slán le Máighe’, for his own ‘farewell’ and self-imposed exile in West Limerick, where he had come to ‘court the language of my people’. MacCraith had been forced to move to nearby Ballyneety for a time because of his indiscretions, and in 1974, Hartnett decamped from the Dublin literary scene and set up home in rural West Limerick, ‘in exile out foreign in Glantine’.
Those ten years spent in Glendarragh were among the most productive of his career – it may not have been a permanent ‘Farewell’, but it was a productive one. It is obvious that this decision to ‘go into the Gaelic’ had been simmering for some time. Indeed, 1975 saw a flourish of publications, including A Farewell to English but also the iconic Cúlú Íde / The Retreat of Ita Cagney. Then, probably his most accomplished collection in Irish, Adharca Broic, was published in 1978, followed by An Phurgóid in 1983, Do Nuala: Foighne Crainn in 1984 and his fourth collection in Irish, An Lia Nocht, appeared in 1985. In parallel to this ‘serious’ output, he was writing and entertaining the locals with ballads, some serious or semi-serious like ‘A Ballad on the State of the Nation’, which was distributed as a one-page pamphlet like the ballads of old and even included original linocuttings by local artist Cliodhna Cussen. Other ballads were more contentious and even semi-libellous (or fully slanderous!), such as ‘The Balad (sic) of Salad Sunday’ and ‘The Duck Lovers Dance’. These latter creations were written under the very appropriate nom de plume, ‘The Wasp’! As time passed, Hartnett’s ‘farewell’, similar to MacCraith’s, was seen for what it was, a ‘Slán go fóill’.
During this period, he also undertook the translation of Daibhi Ó Brudair’s poems, which were published in 1985, and his obsession with these seventeenth-century precursors continued with his later translations of Aodhagán Ó Rathaille (1993) and Pádraigín Haicéad (1999). Finally, following his departure from Glendarragh, the collection A Necklace of Wrens (a collection of poems in Irish with translations in English by the poet himself) was published in 1987.
The inability of critics to pigeonhole Hartnett has been one of the major problems in sustaining his immense legacy. In turn, Hartnett’s continual search for a spiritual and cultural home has not made it easy. And his restlessness did not end. Once back in Dublin, there were more new beginnings, more farewells. Hartnett seemed to make yet another new beginning with Poems to Younger Women (1988). Then again, in Selected and New Poems (1994), those long poems such as ‘Sibelius in Silence’ or ‘The Man who Wrote Yeats, the Man who Wrote Mozart’, and ‘He’ll to the Moor’ mark still new accomplishments in his overall oeuvre. The truth, of course, is as Peter Sirr asserts, Michael Hartnett, ‘is the sum of all of these identity shifts, and to consider any one of these aspects in isolation is to miss the overall picture of a complex, restless and rewarding poet’ (Sirr, 294).
A half-century of hindsight allows us to have a clearer perspective. His very theatrical ‘Farewell’ from the stage of The Peacock Theatre needs to be understood, as he and Aindrias MacCraith meant it to be – merely a ‘Slán go Fóill’ – as inconsequential and as temporary as a French ‘Au Revoir’.
Postscript
Hartnett’s draft of his ‘curse’ on the Féile na Máighe committee. Note these are from 1973, and it is clear that he is already working on a draft of Cúlú Íde / The Retreat of Ita Cagney.
In the late 60s and 70s, there was a very successful festival held annually in Croom, celebrating the work of the Maigue Poets. I came across this little gem while doing a bit of research in NLI back in February 2025. Hartnett was mightily peeved that he had not been invited as often as he felt he should. His papers contain a draft of a curse he put on the organising committee, written in Irish in the old Gaelic script. It transpired that he hadn’t been invited to the 1973 Féile, nor indeed to the 1972 or 1971 iterations either. He was not pleased, and so, in true bardic fashion, he placed a poetic curse on the organisers. Translated, it reads:
Whereas, I was born in Áth Cromadh an tSúbhacais thirty-two years ago, and as I am a poet who is famous the length and breadth of all of Ireland, even in British Ulster, and that I have received invitations to numerous poetry festivals in England and America and since I did not receive an invitation from my own people to the festival in the place of my birth this year or last year or the year before last, I hereby curse that festival – cuirim mo mhallacht orthu agus mallacht mo mhallachta,
Is mise,
Míchéal Ó hAirtnéada
(arna nglaoghtar Michael Hartnett sa Sacsbhearla, Priomhfíle Múmhan)
References:
Hartnett, Michael. A Farewell to English, Oldcastle County Meath, Gallery Press, 1975.
Hartnett, Michael. Cúlú Íde / The Retreat of Ita Cagney, Goldsmith Press, 1975
Hartnett, Michael. Adharca Broic, Oldcastle, County Meath. Gallery Press, 1978
Hartnett, Michael. An Phurgóid, Coiscéim, 1983.
Hartnett, Michael. Do Nuala, Foidhne Chuainn, Coiscéim, 1984.
Hartnett, Michael. An Lia Nocht, Coiscéim, 1985.
Hartnett, Michael. Ó Bruadair, Oldcastle: Gallery Press, 1985.
Hartnett, Michael. A Necklace of Wrens: Poems in Irish and English, Oldcastle County Meath, Gallery Press, 1987.
Hartnett, Michael. Poems to Younger Women, Oldcastle, County Meath, Gallery Press, 1988.
Hartnett, Michael. Ó Rathaille: The Poems of Aodhaghán Ó Rathaille, Oldcastle: Gallery Press, 1999.
Hartnett, Michael. Selected and New Poems, Oldcastle, County Meath, Gallery Press, 1994.
Hartnett, Michael. Collected Poems, Oldcastle: The Gallery Press, 2001.
Michael Hartnett Papers, National Library of Ireland, 35,879/1, 35,879/2 (1)
Mannix Joyce / Mainchín Seoighe, folklorist and local historian from Tankardstown, Kilmallock, taken from his weekly column in The Limerick Leader called Odds and Ends, 13th October, 1945.
Sirr, Peter. Michael Hartnett, in Dawe G, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Irish Poets. Cambridge Companions to Literature. Cambridge University Press; 2017, (Chapter 22: p. 294 – 306).
Walsh, Pat. A Rebel Act: Michael Hartnett’s Farewell to English, Mercier Press, Cork, 2012.
Winter scene looking out from our front door in Kiltanna.
Childhood memories are mostly of sunny days, but maudlin memories of those Christmases from the late 50s and early 60s still linger. It was so innocent and naïve, in a way, it was as if Christmas hadn’t been invented yet! It was a Christmas of cowboy ‘cap’ guns and other useless ‘purties’ – they seldom lasted longer than a day. We always had a turkey, our own free- range turkey, before it became trendy. We even had a surplus, and I remember my mother sending turkeys by post to her sisters in England! We usually had a Christmas cake from Upton’s in Ballylanders. There was trifle, plum pudding, jelly and custard, the dinner of the year. I never remember drink being in the house. There were never visitors, nor were we encouraged to visit anyone. If the day had been anyway fine, Michael and I were to be found on the road with our hurleys, knuckles blue.
Christmas back then was more about the crib than about Santa. The church was central to the festivities, and the midnight Mass and the Latin were magical. There were no decorations, no Christmas tree and holly hung from the holy pictures. Later, Michael and I usually liberated a Sitka Spruce sapling from a nearby forestry. One year, we brought one from Ballintubber through the fields for fear of detection, having cut it down with a bread knife! Before electricity came to Rapala in 1958, the gloom was amber with the glow from paraffin lamps. We were exceedingly lucky to have had exceptional parents, and so, despite their own strapped circumstances, we were always at the centre of Christmas Day as children. Mam and Dad worked far harder than we then realised to create an experience that modelled what it meant to care for others: with kindness, generosity, consideration and love. Even still, to this day, that tradition continues, and children don’t notice the carefully oiled machine that shudders into life to create the magic of a good Christmas, and hopefully that will never change.
Maeve and Anna visit the crib in Our Lady of Ransom Church in Glenroe.
I remember one Christmas in particular – the winter of ‘62 – ‘63 was long and memorable – it snowed and forgot to stop. It began snowing at Christmas time, and the snow and ice remained on the ground for months. If my memory serves me, we didn’t return to school that year until late March! In the meantime, the snow lay on the ground, and people coped as best they could.
Looking back on it now, we were lucky that, as a family, we were nearly entirely self-sufficient and had no use or need whatsoever for convenience stores or supermarkets! I was a Mass server, and each morning I would get up and walk through the drifted snow to serve Mass in our local Church, nearly two miles away in Glenroe. Mass was in Latin at that time, and both Fr. Carroll, who was the Parish Priest, and the Mass servers faced the altar with their backs to the congregation, and the ten-year-old Mass servers made the responses in Latin. The congregation were silent throughout. The Vatican Council, Vatican II, had been convened at the time by the saintly Pope John XXIII, and great changes were around the corner – but not yet! You know what I always say about change: the only people who welcome it are babies with wet nappies!
I remember those mornings being joined on my trek to the Church by Hanny O’Dwyer, who was an extremely devout and holy woman who had already walked nearly two miles to get to my house. At least two of her brothers were priests in England or Scotland, and she attended Mass daily. That year, she was accompanied some mornings by her sister-in-law, who had recently married her brother, James, who was a farmer in nearby Ballintubber.
I have uncomfortable memories of being embarrassed by a new pair of shoes which had arrived in a parcel full of all kinds of ‘goodies’ from Aunty Mary just before Christmas that year. My mother forced me to wear them on Sundays and when serving Mass. Now in 1963, the problem was that these were a pair of slip-on shoes, and the only people I had ever seen wear slip-on shoes were women. I felt that everyone in the church was looking at my new shiny black shoes. Little did I know that they were the coming fashion and that, for once, I was years ahead of my time!
The most shocking memory I have of that winter was the funeral of a local man. His name was Hayes, and for all I knew, he may have been a relation. He died, and I remember my Dad telling me that the snow drifts were up to the gable end of the farmhouse where he lived in Ballintubber. The neighbours had to shovel the snow away to make a pathway for people to enter the house. I have a vivid memory of the funeral cortege passing our house, and the coffin was being carried on the buckrake at the back of a red tractor. I was shocked at this sight, and I thought it was very disrespectful to the old man who had died. In hindsight, however, it was probably the only practical way that he could have been taken to the Church.
In January 1963, I can still see in my mind’s eye, Mam and Dad and all six of their children looking out the front window as that funeral passed. Later that year, in November, the seventh member of our family, Noreen, arrived hale and hearty, and the world has been a better place since!
John Montague, one of my favourite poets, has a haunting poem called ‘Like Dolmens Round My Childhood’. The poem describes the old people, his neighbours, who lived in a land where ancient beliefs and superstitions still survived. We get the sense that during his childhood, these vulnerable people still believed in myths and magic, curses, and the fierceness of local feuds. Ghosts still roamed the land, in the dark countryside just beyond the reach of the farmhouse lights.
Looking back now, I realise that this was also true of my native place, and I am amazed at the number of old people that I knew and who knew me. These, often vulnerable, saintly people regularly passed my door, or I met them on my journey to and from school each day. People like Josie McGrath, Hanny Kelly and her brother Mick, Hanny O’Dwyer on her way to Mass, Jack Connell, ‘The Cuckoo’, who brought the post, Lew Walsh and his chestnut horse and trap, or his wife who, like Miss Havisham in Great Expectations, scared the life out of us on our way home from school in the evening, as she glared out at us from behind the hedge.
I remember stopping and talking to Syke Meade and his neighbour Bill English, on our way from school, as they leaned against the ditch looking up towards Bawnard. For as long as I knew him, Syke wore a long black overcoat and Wellington boots, whether it was Sunday or Monday, Summer or Winter. He was gifted at hooping hurleys, and Dad always brought him supplies of metal hoops from the discarded packaging from the cheese factory in Mitchelstown. Bill English was a gentle giant of a man, although he had a pronounced limp from an accident in his youth. Dad loved to have him in the yard when the hay was being brought home because of his great strength and height. There are other names too: Tom Lee and his son Mick and daughter Alice, Mick Quane and his daughter Anne, ‘John George’, Joe and Babe Hennessy, Tom and Mick Howard, Josie Tobin and the fierce Mrs McGrath.
I also have fond memories of Joseph Meade, who lived under the road down near The Battery bridge and also of his sister Betty. At that time Joseph worked as a farm labourer with the O’Dwyers, and we would often meet each morning on our way to the creamery in Darrragh. Joseph’s father had one or two cows, and he grazed them each day along the sides of the road, ‘the long acre’ we called it, between his own house and Lew Walshes. No greater example is needed to illustrate the differences that existed between those times and today.
Montague, the great poet of emotion and of place, sums up those long-gone times. I, too, am fascinated by those faded memories and the love of my native place, which has resurfaced as I reminisce. Just like Montague, I too bow to those ‘Gaunt figures of fear and friendliness’, because ‘For years they (have) trespassed on my dreams’.
That myriad cast of characters was part and parcel of the ‘village’ that raised me. And it is only fitting that today a new generation should develop their own customs and new family Christmas traditions for this new age: poring over Smyth’s Catalogues and coping with (multiple) Elves on the Shelf, even trips to Lapland to visit Santa. But budgeting for Santa and tomorrow, and next year, at the kitchen table, is strictly for adults. All children should just feel cared for, excited, and part of the beloved traditions that make up their family’s festive season, being swept along by the ambience and anticipation that only Christmas can bring.
Photo taken looking out from Johnny Hennessy’s memorial on the way up to Castlegale through the old Gabhairín Rua pathway. Beautiful view of Glenroe, Ballintubber and Slievereagh.
I became a serious walker in 2009! For several years before that, I had been severely hampered by arthritis in my left hip. After years of being told that I was too young for a hip replacement, I had the operation in Croom in November 2008. The operation was a complete ‘textbook’ success, according to my very favourite orthopaedic surgeon, Eric Masterson.
The operation gave me a new lease of life and, whereas up to that time walking was a painful chore, now I felt energised and ready to explore. Since then, I have loved to walk – in Summer especially or when the scales tip 215 lbs! I head off, and a trek of twenty kilometres is not unusual. I have visited all my local villages on foot, in their turn, Rathkeale, Ballingarry, Castlemahon, and Kilmeedy. In recent years, since Mary moved to Glenroe, I have gloried in rediscovering the Ballyhouras, and whether it is a trek over Sheehy’s Hill or climbing up to Castlegale or the more arduous Darragh Loop, the trails and loops have brought me great joy.
Castlegale is a great parish reference point. Looking south, it dominates the landscape. I remember my mother telling me that in the landlord days of rents and rackrents, the Gascoignes of Castle Oliver placed a flag on the cairn at the summit of Castlegale to let tenants know their rents were due. Today, Castlegale is central to some of the many amazing trekking loops which have been developed in recent years by the Ballyhoura Bears and by Ballyhoura Development. The walk to the summit from Darragh takes you through the beautiful ancient pathway, the Gabhairín Rua.
The Ballyhoura Region itself is a truly mythical landscape – Seefin, Glenosheen, Glenanaar, the Black Dyke, Ardpatrick – these high places carry evidence of cairns or old monastic ruins, a strange mixture of the ancient battles between the old dispensation and the new. And up in these hills, you come across strange sights as you ramble. I’ve come across Army Rangers perfecting their orienteering skills, in full combat gear, traversing this God-forsaken wilderness on their way to rendezvous with other members of their regiment.
The name Seefin (Suí Finn) translates as the ‘Seat of Fionn (Mac Cumhaill)’. It is so named because, according to tradition, Fionn and his Fianna rested here on their hunting excursions to the other sacred places, like Knockainey (Cnoc Áine), and our other sacred Limerick hill, Knockfierna (Cnoc Fírinne). Down below Seefin, the highest point in the Ballyhouras, is the quaint Palatine village of Glenosheen, named in honour of Óisin, the son of Fionn. The village is famous as one of the settlements established by a colony of Irish Palatines, German Protestant refugees, who settled there in the early 18th century. Some of their historic houses and family names, like Switzer, Teskey, Ruttle, Young, Sparling, Wolf, Baker, Weekes and the Steepes, are still evident today. Their main settlement in Limerick was Rathkeale, where they used their expertise to bolster the emerging linen and flax industry in the area. Today, in Rathkeale, there is a fabulous Palatine Museum at the trailhead for the West Limerick Greenway dedicated to their memory.
Glenosheen is also remembered as the home of the famous Joyce Brothers, Patrick Weston Joyce and Robert Weston Joyce. Both were born in Keale in the parish of Glenroe, Ballyorgan, and the family later moved to Glenosheen. Both brothers taught in the old National School in Glenroe. Patrick would you believe it, began his teaching career there at the age of eighteen in 1845, during the height of the Famine. He had been educated in numerous well-known and well-endowed Hedge Schools in Kilfinane, Kilmallock and Mitchelstown by the very best travelling scholars. He taught in a number of schools, including the High School Clonmel, before eventually going on to have a distinguished career at Trinity College, Dublin. Here, he made a name for himself as a historian, a linguist, and a significant collector of Irish folk music and traditional airs. He held influential positions in the Irish education system and authored numerous works on Irish history, place names, and the Irish language. His efforts helped preserve a vast amount of Irish cultural heritage. Indeed, the first book I ever read when I was in Fifth Class in Primary School, having recently graduated from comics, was his fabulous collection of old legends, Old Celtic Romances, telling the almost forgotten tales of Fionn and Óisín, Cúchulainn and Diarmuid agus Gráinne.
His brother, Robert Dwyer Joyce (1830 – 1883), was no less famous and distinguished. He was a medical doctor who achieved renown as a writer, poet, and song lyricist. He was associated with the Fenian movement (1867) and wrote popular ballads, including ‘The Wind that Shakes the Barley’ and ‘The Boys of Wexford’. His literary contributions often centred on Irish themes and history. He also spent time in the United States, where he was well-regarded.
Further west, and nearer to home, I love trekking on the slopes of Knockfierna, near Ballingarry in County Limerick. This place is famous for its poignant Famine Village history, where, during Famine times, over a thousand people lived in makeshift homes on the side of the hill. It is a unique experience to walk among the ruins of the semi-restored cottages, shebeens, and Rambling House. Today, thanks to the work of Pat O’Donovan and his restoration group, the Knockfierna Famine Trail leads visitors past these preserved cottage ruins, garden plots, and other memorials, offering a moving, reflective experience amidst stunning views of the Golden Vale. The whole experience showcases both Irish resilience and the devastating impact of the famine.
Another one of my favourite rambles is in The Castle Demesne in Newcastle West, Co. Limerick, especially when rain threatens. This beautiful 100+ acre sylvan parkland with walking trails, playgrounds, and picnic spots, surrounding the historic Desmond Castle and its Banqueting Hall in the town square, is heavily wooded, and there is great shade from wind and blustery showers. It is an amazing family-friendly amenity right by the town centre, and it is easily connected to the scenic Limerick Greenway. This historic site, once home to the powerful Earls of Desmond, including the famous third Earl of Desmond, Gearóid Íarla, features centuries of history with stunning parklands for leisurely strolls, rich flora and fauna, and is a central part of Newcastle West’s heritage. Legend has it that Gearóid disappeared in mysterious circumstances in 1398 while walking in the Demesne grounds, and today he is fabled to live beneath the waters of Lough Gur, near Bruff, over whose waters he is said to appear once every seven years, riding his white steed.
I am also very lucky to have the fabulous Limerick Greenway within striking distance. I have to say it is becoming more and more dangerous walking on minor country roads; such is the total absence of courtesy, and speed limits are totally ignored. Thankfully, I now have The Greenway, which was built along the former Limerick to Tralee railway line, and after many years of development, is now a state-of-the-art off-road cycling and walking route that can be accessed through numerous entry points. The Greenway weaves its way through West Limerick’s traditional agricultural landscape, starting in Rathkeale, on through Ardagh, Newcastle West, Barnagh, Templeglantine and finishing in Abbeyfeale, passing through Tullig Wood, with its mature, serene woodland and native trees, providing a restful calm and balm for all travellers.
Walking by the sea offers therapeutic benefits, combining gentle exercise with stunning views. There are other benefits, such as stress relief and connecting with nature. Whether one sets out on a relaxing stroll on sandy beaches or undertakes the more vigorous coastal path hikes, one can be enriched by the bracing fresh air, the sound of waves, the prospect of some whale spotting and the occasional sea wreck. It’s a popular way to enjoy leisure time, explore scenic routes, and find peace, like the beautiful hike out past the Diamond Rocks in Kilkee and up Dunlicky or George’s Head.
One of our favourites is the Ballycotton Cliff Walk, definitely a podcast-free ramble, with majestic sea vistas looking out over the final resting place of the doomed Lusitania. No trip to Ballycotton is complete without a rewarding visit to nearby Ballymaloe for a coffee and delicacies! Or when in Ardmore, head out past the Cliff House Hotel and the ruins of St. Declan’s Hermitage and Well and enjoy the stunning sea views and ramble back towards the quaint little seaside town via the majestic Round Tower. It is a stunning looped coastal trail offering beautiful sea views, historical sites, and the chance to spot the Samson crane barge wreck in its lonely final resting place.
Since retirement, we have been making frequent visits to the Canary Islands and especially, Puerto Rico in Gran Canaria. This place, as opposed to Puerto del Carmen, is challenging enough and rambles in the early morning or after four in the evening are recommended. Kate and I have been coming here now for the past twenty years, and each visit uncovers new delights, and improved pathways, steps and roadways. Our favourite walk is the Cliff Walk between Puerto Rico Beach and the man-made Amadores Playa. This is an easy ramble and often a preamble to more strenuous excursions.
We invariably book accommodation on the lower level. Corona Cedral would be our favourite place of all, but we have also stayed in Monte Verde, Letitia del Mar, Maracaibo, and Rio Piedras, with its terracotta terraces overlooking the beach. All these are very central – near the two main Shopping Centres and the beach and its many restaurants.
The only drawback I find with Puerto Rico is its distance from the airport – approximately 40 kilometres. However, Gran Canaria has a first-class public transport system and once free of arrivals and the terminal building, you can go to the bus terminal and get the 91 bus to Puerto Rico for €5.45 – as opposed to €70 for a taxi. Alternatively, Ryanair and others provide reasonably priced shuttle services to and from the airport.
Casting a long shadow before descending those 756 steps!
As one becomes familiar with the area, one becomes more confident in foraging out new trails, loops and challenging treks. The one thing to notice is that there are steps everywhere linking the various levels. The local authority has done fabulous work in the past five years, building a series of steps from the beach to the high point near Puerto Azul apartments. In all, there are 756 steps in this series – individually counted! Depending on your exertions, you can decide to descend the 756 or take on the more daunting challenge and ascend – or even decide to work both into your evening ramble!
Evening walks usually involve thoughts of home and the girls, Maeve, Anna, Muireann and, of course, Mary, Mike and Don. There is a tree on one of the summits which I always associate with them. It grows in the centre of a roundabout down the road from the Europa Centre, and very near the Balcon de Amadores apartment complex, and invariably, when I get this far, I usually give them a ring to check how things are, and to check on Knockaderry’s, Clanna Gael Fontenoy’s, or Limerick’s progress in the Championship.
Selfie with a tree!
On Lanzarote, ‘El Varadero de la Tinosa’, is the original village of what is now the thriving Old Town centre of Puerto del Carmen. Today, it is still a centre for fishing, and there is a very strong seafaring tradition in the area. The beautiful little church sits just feet from the water’s edge, facing the little fishing port. Today, it is a centre for tourist trips, and there is a regular hourly ferry plying between the port and Puerto Calero – the destination for one of my favourite rambles. Leaving Casa Roja restaurant, we walk to the end of the boardwalk and to the newly paved area at the top. There are lovely views out to sea and many viewing areas along this stretch of the walk.
We walk south-east along the coast. The distance is 2.2 kms. approx and the walk, taken at a nice brisk pace, will take you about thirty minutes. The path now changes to a dirt track, and there is evidence of the remnants of an ancient stone road which runs above a small cliff that permits a glimpse from above of the intertidal area, its coves and small inlets.
We arrive at ‘The Barranco (ravine) del Quiquere’, of interest because its volcanic sides contain engravings from the indigenous world of the island of Lanzarote. We can get a close look at them by taking the track just 50 metres to the north on the right side of the ravine as you walk from Puerto del Carmen.
The views of the sea and islands of Lobos Island and Fuerteventura to the south enhance the beauty of the landscape in this area, and eventually we arrive at the newly man-made marina of Puerto Calero. This beautiful port and marina are a fitting ending after our cliff walk, and a ramble around the upmarket shops and outlet stores is highly recommended. There are also numerous high-quality restaurants and at least two hotels nearby. Puerto Calero is renowned as a headquarters for some round-the-world yacht crews, and after a brief look around, you will see why.
Ralph Waldo Emerson has laid down my walking ground rules: “Few people know how to take a walk. The qualifications are endurance, plain clothes, old shoes, an eye for nature, good humour, vast curiosity, good speech, good silence, and nothing too much.” I am also reminded that numerous other poets, philosophers and novelists have also wandered and wondered. Kierkegaard did so in the countryside near Copenhagen and suggested that it might be good for his niece, Jette, to do likewise. Prompting her in 1847, he came up with a notion I repeat on my own travels: “Above all, do not lose your desire to walk. I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness. I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it” (A Letter to Henrietta Lund from Søren Kierkegaard, 1847, trans. Henrik Rosenmeier, 1978).
I haven’t read many of HG Wells’ novels, but there’s another mantra from one of the non-fiction works, Modern Utopia, that I’ll happily take to my grave: “There will be many footpaths in Utopia.” And whether I’m rambling in the Ballyhouras or Ballycotton or above Ashford on the Cob Road or the hills above Bormes les Mimosa, in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur Region, southeastern France, or in Puerto Rico, my favourite nugget of wisdom is, of course, T.S. Eliot’s evocative words from The Waste Land (1922), surely one of the most beautiful poetic lines ever written, “In the mountains, there you feel free.”
In conclusion, I am often reminded of the lovely Latin phrase, Solvitur ambulando – ‘it is solved by walking’ – sometimes attributed to St. Jerome or Diogenes, or St. Augustine, maybe even Thoreau or Chatwin, inter alios…..
So, put your best foot forward!
Looking towards the Galtees from the sandstone cairn on the summit of Castlegale.
I like to spend my lazy days in the garden. When Kate and I set up home in Knockaderry in 1979, we inherited a garden and a red setter called Kelly. Then there was the recently acquired three-quarters of an acre, which was a very overgrown, forbidding blank canvas. The previous owners had made some effort and had put in a new bed of floribunda roses – the variety was Peace. There were other older roses there also, from previous owners, right back to Miss Airey, the original owner of the house. Miss Airey was a teacher in the old national school in Ahalin, and she built the house in 1935 and lived there with her companion, Mrs Sheehy. There were two or three Queen Elizabeth roses holding pride of place, which had been planted in 1952 to commemorate Queen Elizabeth’s coronation that year. They were still hale and hearty when we arrived in September 1979, and they are still going strong today!
Kelly helped us settle in. He was a beautiful Red Setter who had come all the way from Scarborough with the previous owners, the O’ Rourkes. He slept in the back bedroom, and he ruled the roost. Each afternoon, he escorted the school kids to the bend in the road on their way home from school, at a time when school kids still walked to school. One evening, Frank Moore called to fix our phone, and he rang the doorbell to discover that both Kate and I were still at work. Kelly soon discovered the intruder, and he came and sat in his sitting position, strategically blocking Frank’s escape. He emitted the odd low growl until we arrived home at five o’clock, and Frank was glad to be released from his captivity. Until recently, and especially when Mary and Don were young and still at home, we always had a dog. We had numerous red setters, Susie the Old English Sheepdog, a Lassie-type collie, a Cocker Spaniel named Robbie (Fowler), and a Golden Retriever from hell called Oatie!
However, to be brutally honest, when we took up residence, the garden, like the house, was somewhat of a shambles! I remember distinctly going into the Bank of Ireland branch in Newcastle West in April 1979 to cash my monthly pay cheque, which you had to do in those days. The assistant manager of the bank, Eamonn Mellett, called me over for a chat, and during the conversation, he casually asked me if I was still interested in buying ‘that house out in Knockaderry’! I told him that I was, and he said that if that was the case, the bank would be willing to provide a mortgage for the property. Believe me, that’s how business was done in those days!
Huge amounts of time, effort and study went into planning and developing our garden. I knew that I needed to study up on shrubs, especially roses, or they would surely die! Fair to say I researched the topic to Master’s degree level! I had many favourite textbooks, but my favourites were: The Wisely Book of Gardening published by The Royal Horticultural Society, Be Your Own Rose Expert by Dr D.G. Hessayon, The Gardener’s Book of Hardy Herbaceous Plants by Wendy Carlile, and A Garden for All Seasons published by The Reader’s Digest. Having done all this research, however, long before Google took hold, I finally realised that, unlike many other less finicky shrubs and plants, it’s almost impossible to kill a rose!
There are two great advantages of having gardening as a hobby – it is great therapy and a very humbling experience. Despite the optimistic messages in the glossy magazines, not everything grows, and one always has to take into account that fourth dimension, the fact that some shrubs and trees grow too big, too fast. Today, I look back in wonder at the improvements made over the years and the huge changes that have occurred on our once overgrown and neglected piece of land over the past forty-five years. I have a photo somewhere of a tiny birch sapling that my daughter Mary brought home from school when she was in First Class, and today that birch proudly dominates our driveway in Kiltanna. This is one of the advantages of gardening: we plant seeds and shrubs and trees knowing that another generation will shelter under their magnificent branches in years to come.
Mary’s sapling birch has grown to dominate the driveway in Kiltanna
The second therapeutic value of gardening is especially useful for those who like to be in control of things. Work and relationships may seem at times to be hopelessly beyond our control, but our garden can give us a semblance of control over this small patch of the universe. We can mow and clip and prune and spray and fertilise to our heart’s content and imagine that we are at least the masters of all we survey if we so wish. All is right with the world within the neat borders of our own Eden. This thought has largely been responsible for me maintaining my sanity over the years!
During the COVID pandemic in 2020, I undertook a fairly big project, and between the 9th of May and the 9th of August that year, I constructed a fire pit in the already existing scree garden up the back. I had great help because Don was working from home at the time.
May is my favourite month in the garden. For others, May is a month spoiled by exams and the crippling anxieties associated with school and college, but for me, retired like Charles Lamb of old, I stroll leisurely about – not to and from – admiring my newly budded beech trees, the grasses, the weeds, the purple Aubretia, and marvel, as Thomas Hardy does in his poem, Afterwards:
When the Present has latched its postern behind my tremulous stay,
And the May month flaps its glad green leaves like wings,
Delicate-filmed as new-spun silk, will the neighbours say,
“He was a man who used to notice such things”?
I think it was George Bernard Shaw who wisely said that ‘the best place to find God is in a garden. You can dig for him there’. Indeed, working in a garden brings us close to creation itself – it is an instrument of grace. Earlier, I mentioned that a man has made at least a start on discovering the meaning of human life when he plants shade trees under which he knows full well he will never sit. I consider myself blessed to have sat in the shade of many such trees, including the few surviving Knockaderry oaks on Quilty’s Hill, because someone planted those trees a long, long time ago.
Finally, time spent in the garden is never wasted. Wisdom is given to those who meditate in the garden; the wisdom to realise that no two gardens are the same, and thankfully, no two days are the same in any garden. Like Robert Louis Stevenson, we quickly realise that we shouldn’t judge each day by the harvest we reap but by the seeds that we sow.
The house and garden in Kiltanna, resplendent with the red Dublin Bay climbers. ‘You can’t kill a rose’!
This is a detail from the 1840 historic map showing the sculpted and structured gardens surrounding Knockaderry House, the birthplace of Sophie Peirce, and the nearby Chesterfield House. It was unusual that two ‘Great Houses’ like these would be in such close proximity to each other.
Glenroe, my native place, sits on the border between Limerick and Cork and hurling and athletics were always very strong in the area. In Canon Sheehan’s famous novel, Glenanaar, there is a fabulous account of a hurling match between neighbouring border rivals which took place in or around 1840. The game, which attracted a huge crowd, was played between the Cork side, known as The Shandons, and the Limerick side, known as The Skirmishers. The game is being fiercely contested until the captain of The Skirmishers is taken ill, and he can play no further part in the battle. There is a famous intervention by a local, known as The Yank, who has recently returned to his native place after spending many years in the USA. The Yank agrees to replace the injured captain of The Skirmishers, and he saves the day and a hard-fought victory is won. After the heroics of The Yank, an onlooker is heard to say that ‘there was nothing seen like that since Terence Casey single-handedly bate the parishes of Ardpatrick and Glenroe’.
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Knockaderry, too, has flirted with fiction. Séan Ó Faoláin was one of the most influential figures in 20th-century Irish culture. A short-story writer of international repute, he was also a leading commentator, critic and novelist. He was the son of Bridget Murphy from Loughill East and Denis Whelan, an RIC constable who had been stationed in the RIC barracks in the village of Knockaderry in the 1890s. Every summer until he was 17, the young Ó Faoláin came to Rathkeale, to Knockaderry and to Loughill East on his holidays. He wrote with great passion about these local places in his autobiography, Vive Moi – and his first novel, in 1933, A Nest of Simple Folk, was based on that disputed territory over the hill betweenà Knockaderry village and Rathkeale, encompassing the landmarks and characters of Loughill East, Balliallinan Kilcolman, Duxtown and as far as Wilton Hill. Ó Faoláin called his home in Killiney, Co. Dublin, Knockaderry.
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Glenroe and Knockaderry have long been central to my life. When I left Glenroe to go to boarding school in 1965, I really didn’t intend ever to return there unless I had a very good reason. Yet, fate played a hand, and my daughter Mary met and married Mike O’Brien, and they set up a home which nestles halfway between the parish church and the school. So, in recent years, I have come to cherish the second chance that I have been given. Likewise, I quickly fell in love with Knockaderry when I arrived there in 1977 to take up my first real teaching job in nearby Newcastle West. Both places hold a special place in my heart. Both places would be perfect settings for a good novel!
I love reading, and as a teacher of English literature, I have been doubly blessed in having the honour of introducing my students to some of the great fictional works written. Being a Harper Lee fan, I remember waiting for the much-anticipated publication of Go Set a Watchman in 2015. Written before her only other published novel, the Pulitzer Prize-winning To Kill aMockingbird (1960), Go Set a Watchman was initially promoted as a sequel by its publishers. It is now accepted that it was a first draft of To Kill a Mockingbird, with many passages in that book being used again. The title alludes to Jean Louise Finch’s view of her father, Atticus Finch, as the moral compass (“watchman”) of Maycomb, Alabama, and has a theme of disillusionment, as she discovers the extent of the bigotry in her home community. Go Set a Watchman tackles the racial tensions brewing in the South in the 1950s and delves into the complex relationship between father and daughter. It includes treatments of many of the characters who appear in To Kill a Mockingbird.
I had already formed a mustard seed theory in my brain that the real-life Monroeville, Alabama, of her youth became the fictional Maycomb, Alabama, of her novels. To me, Maycomb didn’t seem too different to my own special places. Lee had set her novels here for a reason: she deliberately selected her setting, and in effect, the fictional Maycomb becomes another Narnia or Middle Earth – a microcosm of all that is good and bad in 1930s America. She tells us that one went to Maycomb, ‘to have his teeth pulled, his wagon fixed, his heart listened to, his money deposited, his soul saved, his mules vetted’. She describes it as an isolated place; in effect, it is an Everyplace – the place, ‘had remained the same for a hundred years, an island in a patchwork sea of cotton fields and timber land’. It is, in effect, a remote backwater bypassed by progress, the perfect playground of her youth, the perfect setting for a novel and the perfect cauldron for change.
In Go Set a Watchman, she says that Maycomb County is ‘a wilderness dotted with tiny settlements’; it is, ‘so cut off from the rest of the nation that some of its citizens, unaware of the South’s political predilection over the past ninety years, still voted Republican.’ It is so remote, ‘no trains went there’. In actual fact, Maycomb Junction, ‘a courtesy title’, was located in Abbott County, twenty miles away! However, she tells us that the ‘bus service was erratic and seemed to go nowhere, but the Federal Government had forced a highway or two through the swamps, thus giving the citizens an opportunity for free egress.’ However, Lee tells us that few took advantage of this opportunity! Then, in one of those Harper Lee epiphany moments, one of those lightning bolts she releases now and then, she perceptively describes her hometown, and, indeed, my own home place, whether it be Glenroe or Knockaderry, as a place where, ‘If you did not want much, there was plenty.’
In To Kill a Mockingbird, she continues in the same rich vein. Maycomb is a ‘tired old town’. People moved slowly, ‘they ambled across the square, shuffled in and out of the stores around it, took their time about everything’. She tells us that, ‘There was no hurry, for there was nowhere to go, nothing to buy and no money to buy it with, nothing to see outside the boundaries of Maycomb County’, a scenario somewhat reminiscent of modern-day Knockaderry or Glenroe!
Similar to Maycomb, the setting of George Eliot’s novel, SilasMarner, has many similar echoes. The Raveloe described by Eliot is reminiscent of my beloved Knockaderry! She tells us that it ‘was a village where many of the old echoes lingered, undrowned by new voices.’ She further describes it as being, ‘Not …. one of those barren parishes lying on the outskirts of civilisation —inhabited by meagre sheep and thinly-scattered shepherds: on the contrary, it lay in the rich central plain of what we are pleased to call Merry England’. However, like Maycomb and Knockaderry and Glenroe, it was off the beaten track, ‘it was nestled in a snug well-wooded hollow, quite an hour’s journey on horseback from any turnpike, where it was never reached by the vibrations of the coach-horn, or of public opinion’. In Chapter One, Eliot declared it to be a place where bad farmers are rewarded for bad farming!
This description of Raveloe also holds great echoes with The Village as depicted in Jim Crace’s (supposedly last?!) novel, Harvest. The narrator, Walter Thirsk, tells us that, ‘these fields are far from anywhere, two days by post-horse, three days by chariot before you find a market square.’ Harvest dramatises one of the great under-told narratives of English history: the forced enclosure of open fields and common land from the late medieval era on, whereby subsistence agriculture was replaced by profitable wool production, and the peasant farmers were gradually dispossessed and displaced. ‘The sheaf is giving way to sheep’, as Crace puts it here, and an immemorial connection between people and their local environment is being broken – their world is crumbling around them. Great changes are coming and, as everyone knows by now, the only people who welcome change are babies with wet nappies!
Brian Friel’s use of Ballybeg (small town) as the setting for many of his plays and short stories is also similar in vein to these others. In ‘Philadelphia Here I Come!’, Gar Public tells us that Ballybeg is, ‘a bloody quagmire, a backwater, a dead-end’. Friel, like Lee, Eliot, and Crace, is deceptive because he is dealing with familiar things and familiar characters – shopkeepers, housekeepers, and parish priests – a very familiar rural Ireland fixed in its own time. Friel’s use of Public Gar’s alter ego – Private Gar – allows us the opportunity to see behind the superficiality of so much of this world of small-town life.
In many ways, Friel’s major theme is the failure of people to communicate with each other on an intimate level. In his play, ‘Philadelphia, Here I Come!’, we are introduced to the typically Irish practice of verbal non-communication! He, like Harper Lee, George Eliot, and Jim Crace, forces us to examine the nature of society. In Ireland, our society in the 40’s and 50’s was dominated by the church, the politician, and the schoolmaster. Ultimately, the world that Gar is leaving has failed him and his generation. But Friel is too subtle to allow us to imagine that the world Gar is about to enter in Philadelphia will be any better.
These meandering rambles are an attempt to place myself at the beginning of a work of fiction, to stand for a moment in the author’s shoes, so to speak, and see the world from their point of view. From my limited reading, it seems to me that many authors deliberately choose a world untrodden, less travelled as the setting for their novels and plays. I have mentioned some here in this piece, but I’m sure this is just the tip of the iceberg, and you will be able to reference many examples from your own reading.
Ideally, the setting for all these classics is always remote, secluded, off the map, and cut off from change and advancement. This microcosm is then filled with characters and fictional dilemmas, action and inaction. I have always been truly fascinated and awed by each author’s unique ability and ingenuity in creating and imagining these hidden worlds in their heads, and thus allowing us to enter the world of their texts. Knockaderry and Glenroe, apart from their initial flirtations with Séan Ó Faoláin and Canon Sheehan in past centuries, patiently await their twenty-first-century novelist to arrive!
Believe me, the characters are there!
… and it seems that a twenty-first-century novelist has arrived to put Knockaderry on the map! June O Sullivan’s second novel tells the amazing tale of Knockaderry woman, Sophie Peirce, the first true female trailblazer in aviation. The novel, soon to be published, recounts Sophie’s epic solo flight from Cape Town to London in 1928.
One of the greatest GAA photos of all time. Goalmouth ‘shemozzle’ from that Munster semi-final in Thurles in 1962. Waterford’s Ned Power saves despite the close attention of Christy Ring. Also in the picture are Tom Cunningham (W), Austin Flynn (W), and Liam Dowling (C). The scene is brilliantly captured by photographer Louis MacMonagle. Photo courtesy of the Irish Examiner archive.
Some like Anfield, some prefer Wembley or the Camp Nou or Santiago Bernabéu; some prefer Thomond Park or Cardiff Arms, but my favourite ‘field of dreams’ is Semple Stadium in Thurles, County Tipperary, where the GAA was founded over 140 years ago. It has been at the heart of hurling since its opening in 1910. Tipperary people, harking back to long-gone glory days in the 60s, refer to it as the Field of Legends, but I’d say Limerick people would have something to say about that after our recent run of success since 2018!
Close your eyes …. Think of summer. What do you see? I see midges swooping and dancing through a languid sunset. I see heat-drenched Limerick jerseys shuffling through the streets of Thurles, where bellows of banter waft along with the whiff of cider that floats from the open doors of packed pubs in Liberty Square. Inside D D Corbett’s, a bitter alcoholic draws tears from the crowd with a soft, sweet rendition of ‘Slievenamon’.
Anyway, I have been travelling to this Mecca since I was ten years of age. My first visit was on a beautiful Sunday, the 8th of July in 1962. My mother and father, along with most of my brothers and sisters at the time, were walking home from second Mass in Glenroe when Tom and Mick Howard stopped in their black Morris Minor and asked Dad and me if we’d like to go to Thurles with them to see Ringy and the Rebels take on the might of Tom Cheasty, Ned Power and Frankie Walsh’s Waterford. It was Ring’s last hurrah, and it was appropriate that his last Championship game in the ‘blood and bandages’ of his native Cork should have been in Thurles. It was here that, for two decades previously, he had adorned the ancient game with his unique and exceptional talent. I count myself lucky that I was able to sit there with my Dad, a loyal Cork man, and my hurling mad neighbours, the Howard brothers, on the recently creosoted railway sleepers on the embankment that is now the Old Stand. However, it was Waterford’s day, and they won by 4 – 10 to 1 – 16.
On astreet corner, a humming chip van mumbles its invitation to giddy children as the June sun beats down. The Pecker Dunne sits, perched on a flat stone wall, plucking and strumming, twanging banjo chords as he winks at those who pass. A smile broadens his foggy beard as coins glint and twinkle from the bottom of his banjo case.
I have witnessed other great games there down the years, and I have seen great hurlers adorn the venue. Let’s be blunt – Thurles is the best place to go to see a hurling match, and hurling people also know that if you can’t hurl in Thurles, you won’t hurl anywhere. I remember listening to Michéal O’Hehir commentate on the 1960 Munster Final in Thurles between an ageing Cork team and Tipperary, who were emerging as a force to be reckoned with. There’s a story told by John Harrington about the speech Christy Ring gave in the dressing room before the game that day. He delivered a rousing speech that brought the blood of his teammates to boiling point. However, his words did not find favour with Fr Carthach McCarthy, who was also in the dressing room at the time. “You didn’t find those words in the Bible, Christy”, said Fr. McCarthy, in as disapproving a tone as he could muster. Ring cast a jaundiced eye at the man of the cloth and replied, “No, Father. But the men who wrote the Bible never had to play Tipperary.” Despite his exhortations, Cork lost on the day, 4 -13 to 4 -11.
Hoarse tinkers flog melted chocolate and paper hats on the brow of a humpbacked bridge as we move closer to the field of legends. The drone of kettledrums and bagpipes rises from the Sean Treacy Pipe Band as they parade sweat-soaked warriors around the green, hallowed sod.
John D Hickey, one of the great sports writers of the 50s and 60s, coined the phrase ‘Hell’s Kitchen’ to describe the general vicinity of the Tipperary goalmouth, which Michéal O Hehir, the greatest GAA commentator of all time, referred to as ‘the parallelogram’, or what we today refer to as ‘the square’! This area of the pitch was patrolled in the mid-60s by the Tipperary full-back line at the time, Michael Maher at full-back, flanked by John Doyle and Kieran Carey – probably the greatest full-back line in the history of the game. As the name suggests, they usually generated the sort of heat that suffocated most full-forward lines, who generally struggled to cope with their unique blend of physicality, hurling skill and a generous helping of the dark arts. Their dominance continued until the emergence of the youthful Eamonn ‘Blondy’ Cregan and Eamonn Grimes and company, who in 1966 destroyed that Tipp team that were All-Ireland winners in ’61, ’62, ’64, and ‘65. Suffice it to say that Limerick put a stop to Tipperary’s gallop that sunny Sunday, and the young ‘Blondy’ Cregan scored 3 goals and 5 points in a 4 – 12 to 2 – 9 defeat of Tipperary. That day still stands as one of my all-time treasured sporting memories.
A whistlerings on high, ash smacks on ash and the sliothar arrows between the uprights. A crash of thunder and colour erupts from the terraces at the Killinan End and the Town End (the Limerick end!)…… I see the Munster Championship!!
I’ve been in Thurles as a Limerick supporter, as an uninvolved spectator, and I’ve also been there with skin in the game as Don played Minor, Under 21, and Intermediate hurling for Limerick. Limerick have been lucky in this place. A few Munster Senior titles, including 1973, five Under 21 titles in this Millennium alone, and a Centenary Minor title after a replay at the same venue against Kilkenny. Paddy Downey, writing in The Irish Times, said of the replayed minor final that, ‘it is probably true to say that there never has been a better minor All-Ireland final’.
The 1973 Munster Final was special, and of course, it ended in controversy. As the final seconds ticked down and the teams were level, Eamonn Grimes won a disputed seventy for Limerick. The referee, Mick Slattery from Clare, told Richie Bennis that he had to score direct, as the time was up. Richie held his nerve, the sliothar headed goalwards, the umpire raised the white flag, and the rest is history. Every Tipperary man there that day swears that the ball was wide, but it mattered little; the game was up. In my view, it was Ned Rea who broke Tipperary hearts that day with his three goals and not Ritchie Bennis with his last gasp point. Sadly, it was the final swansong for that great Tipperary team. They stole an All-Ireland in ’71 when they beat Limerick in the rain in Killarney, but they didn’t emerge again as a hurling force until 1989. That day also marked the legendary Jimmy Doyle’s last appearance in a Tipperary jersey.
The Championship is more precious than life for many. I’ve seen grey-haired men gazing into half-empty pints, reeling off the names of the great ones, like prayers. I’m afraid I too follow suit. Ask me who the Minister for Finance is, and your question will be greeted with indifference. I simply couldn’t care less. But ask me where Carlow senior hurlers play and instantly I say, ‘Dr. Cullen Park … to the left at Church Street, up Clarke Street and half a mile out on Tower Road’. Monaghan? ‘Pairc Ui Tieghernan .. on the slope of George’s Hill, overlooking the County town’. Where do Sligo play? ‘Markievicz Park in the heart of Sligo town’. ‘Bless me, father, for I’m a fanatic!’
The major hurling powers took a bit of a break in the mid-90s and allowed the minnows, like Limerick, Clare and Offaly and Wexford, to have their fling. Don and I were in the New Stand – Árdán Ó Riain – for the ’95 Munster Final on the 9th of July. It was one of those glorious Thurles days – despite the outcome. In the end, Clare claimed their first Munster championship since 1932, and only their fourth ever. I remember Davy Fitz scoring a penalty before half-time, crashing the sliothar high into the town net, before sprinting back to his own goal line. Despite our disappointment, especially after the humiliating defeat in the All-Ireland Final the previous year to Wexford, you had to give credit to this Clare team. One could sense the ghosts of 63 years and the curse of Biddy Early evaporating before our eyes. The release of emotion when Anthony Daly received the cup had to be seen to be believed. I remember the ‘Shout’ ringing out from the Killinan End and then Tony Considine taking the microphone for his rendition of ‘My Lovely Rose of Clare’.
What else draws the likes of Mike Quilty and Mike Wall, setting them down among roaring, red-faced lunatics in the shadow of the crowded Old Stand? What else exists that plucks the cranky farmer from the milking parlour and flings him into a concrete cauldron eighty miles across the province? Some swear the Apocalypse would not have the same effect….
We waited nearly a full year to gain our revenge – on June 16th, in Limerick this time. We had been away for a holiday in Carnac in Brittany and came back the day before the game. All of Limerick had been convulsed by the recent killing of Detective Garda Jerry McCabe, who had been shot and killed in the village of Adare by members of the Provisional IRA on June 7th, during an attempted robbery of a post office van. His colleague, Ben O’Sullivan, had also been seriously injured in the incident. Being away when tragedy strikes so close is unnerving and surreal. I spent most of that Saturday hunting for tickets for the fanatics in my household and eventually secured terrace tickets at the City End of Pairc na nGael from Charley Hanley in Croagh, who was Liaison Officer with the Limerick team at the time. The following day, in glorious sunshine, we took our sunburnt revenge. Hurling legend Ciarán Carey of Patrickswell scored one of the greatest ever winning points in the history of Gaelic Games, in front of an attendance of 43,534. Result: Limerick 1-13, Clare 0-15.
May and the chirp of the sparrow, you can be guaranteed we’d be stuck in that long snake of traffic, as it slithered its way to Cork, Limerick, Thurles and other far-flung fields.
The modern Munster championship has changed many an inherited dynamic. The regularity with which Limerick now go to Semple Stadium to play Tipperary is a very modern phenomenon. There was a time when if you played two Munster rivals, you would be through to an All-Ireland semi-final – not anymore. Now you must beat all the Munster counties at least once in the Munster Round Robin Pool of Death. Limerick have won five All-Irelands in this way since 2018. Two Munster counties in an All-Ireland Final is no longer a rarity.
.… But oh to be a hurler… If the truth be known, I couldn’t hurl spuds to ducks. The boss of my hurley has seen the arse of a Friesian cow more often than it has the crisp leather stitching of an O’Neill’s sliothar! Okay, I’ve had my own All-Irelands up against the gable end and in and around the mother’s flower beds, but that’s as far as it went for me.
What is most amazing about Thurles is that no matter who is playing, they all seem to troop back into the town and mingle in the Square in the shade of Hayes’s Hotel for hours afterwards. As Kevin Cashman, that Prince of Sportswriters from my generation, remarked, ‘the pubs of Thurles on a big match day have something that no other pubs can give. It has been called ‘atmosphere’, ‘bond’, ‘fraternity’, and much more – it’s magic in the air’. The ghosts of Mackey, Clohessy, the Doyles, John Keane, Jimmy Smyth, and Ring become as real as what you have just witnessed. And now we have new heroes like Nickie Quaid, Declan Hannon, Cian Lynch, Barry Nash, Kyle Hayes, Patrick Horgan, Tony Kelly, Shane O’Donnell, the Mahers, and Austin Gleeson to keep the flame alight for future generations. As Kevin Cashman puts it, ‘This is their Elysian field and the turf, and the grass and even the steel and the concrete of this place are the keepers of their youth and the youth of all of us, who shaped them’.
The terrace is where the real nectar of hurling comes to a head – when every Joe Soap in the country stands together on the same patch of cement with their eyes fixed on the same lush, green carpet…..
References
Harrington, John, Doyle: The Greatest Hurling Story Ever Told (2011).
Highly Recommended
O’Donnchú, Liam. Semple Stadium: Field of Legends, Dublin: O’Brien Press, 2021
A pensive Hartnett ‘among (his) nameless weeds’. Photographer unknown.
As I have mentioned already in another post here, the decade from 1975 to 1985 in Glendarragh, Templeglantine, was arguably the most productive of Hartnett’s career. Indeed, the output from that little cottage in the shade of ‘Tom White’s green hill’ in Glendarragh was prodigious. The first poems to be published were his collection A Farewell to English, which was published in 1975, and thus began his long-lasting association with Peter Fallon and The Gallery Press. The same year saw the publication of The Retreat of Ita Cagney / Cúlú Íde. Adharca Broic was published in 1978, followed by An Phurgóid in 1983, Do Nuala: Foighne Crainn in 1984 and his fourth collection in Irish, An Lia Nocht, appeared in 1985. During this period, he also undertook the translation of Daibhí Ó Brudair’s poems, which were published in 1985. Many of his better Glendarragh poems are contained in the 1987 collection, A Necklace of Wrens. This collection, following his return to Dublin, contains all poems in Irish with their English translation that Hartnett wanted preserved for posterity, and it was edited by Peter Fallon.
During this decade, 1975 to 1985, in parallel to this ‘serious’ output, he was writing and entertaining the locals with ballads, some serious or semi-serious like ‘A Ballad on the State of the Nation’, which was distributed as a one-page pamphlet like the ballads of old and even included original linocuttings by local artist Cliodhna Cussen. Other ballads were more contentious and even semi-libellous (or fully slanderous!), such as ‘The Balad (sic) of Salad Sunday’ and ‘The Duck Lovers Dance’. These latter creations were written under the very appropriate nom de plume, ‘The Wasp’! His most memorable local work was, of course, ‘Maiden Street Ballad’, a poem he composed for his father as a Christmas present in 1980.
These three intimate family poems were written in Glendarragh, Templeglantine and first appeared in his collection, Adharca Broic, in 1978. Two of the poems are written for his children: Lara, who was born in 1968 and Niall, who was born in 1971. These two poems with English translations also appear in his 1987 collection A Necklace of Wrens. The third poem, Dán do Rosemary, was not included in this collection, and the reason for its exclusion is obvious. As early as 1978, the tensions and stresses which eventually led to their separation in 1985 were beginning to show. They were both navigating the inevitable separation, which eventually led to his departure for Dublin and Inchicore that year. His gift for love poetry is again in evidence, as it had been back in 1968 with the publication of Anatomy of a Cliché. Unfortunately, the clock had come full circle, and his final poem to Rosemary is one of abject apology and regret and wistful hopes for their post-separation lives.
The poem reads as a sad indictment of the way artists were treated in this country in the 70s and 80s. They lead a ‘miserable life’, ‘for our lack of money / scrimping and scraping’. He apologises profusely and admits that their marriage is ‘pitiless, loveless’, which has affected ‘your soft fragile (English) heart’. Their small rural cottage is ‘run-down’, with ‘walls of clay, tear-stained’, ‘the place is falling apart’. He takes full responsibility for their sorry plight and admits that he is ‘blundering, tactless, clueless’. I have said elsewhere that at this time, Newcastle West was booming during the construction phase of the Aughenish Alumina Plant near Askeaton in County Limerick. Newcastle’s twenty-six pubs were doing a roaring trade, and he apologises to his wife because he is ‘always acting the yob in the pub’. If anything, this poem in the original Irish is far more confessional and personal than most of his poetry up to this time.
The poem concludes on a far more positive and hopeful note. He tells Rosemary that he has ‘abandoned English, but I never turned my back on you’. This is a time for reappraisal, and he hopes to ‘relearn my craft from fresh woodland’ – he was living at the time in a townland called Glendarragh – the glen of the oak. He ends on a hopeful note: he hopes that the future will bring Rosemary happiness and that her ‘worth will be appreciated’. The final line is so sad and poignant – he hopes that ‘we both reach our America’. The sadness of this final line arises from the fact that some seven years later, they both parted and went their separate ways.
Cliodhna Cussen, a fellow native of Newcastle West, has an interesting point to make about this poem:
‘Nuair a dhirigh Michéal ar an nGaeilge níor cuireadh aon rófháilte roimhe. Bhí ceisteanna á n-ardú i dtaobh chaighdeán a chuid Gaeilge, ceisteanna a árdaíodh i dtaobh an Riordánaigh 30 bliain níos túisce. Ach léiríonn Michéal a anam, a chuspóir, agus a ghrá sa tseoid sin de dhán, ‘Dán do Rosemary’, ina bhfuil a chumas agus a chroí nochtaithe aige’.
When Michael began writing in Irish, he didn’t receive great encouragement from Gaelgóirí. There were questions about the standard of his Irish, just as there had been about Sean Ó Riordán some thirty years earlier. But in this gem of a poem, ‘Poem for Rosemary’, Hartnett reveals his soul, his motive, his love – indeed, his supreme craft and heart are laid bare.’ (My own translation).
His poem for his son Niall, Dán do Niall, 7 (‘Poem for Niall, 7’), again shows his honesty and courage, although it does tend to descend into cliché at times. Like King Canute and his futile attempts to hold back the tide, he wishes that his son wouldn’t have to leave this safe place in ‘Bird Nest country’, their home in Glendarragh. He tries to warn his son about the many dangers that exist in the outside world and does so by making reference to nature. This advice is somewhat reminiscent of the advice spoken by Polonius to his son Laertes in Shakespeare’s Hamlet: ‘This above all: to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man’. This suggests that integrity begins with honesty to oneself, and Hartnett gives us a modern take on this when he advises, ‘Be happy but be tough. ’
There is great poignancy in the final stanza when he states that he will be there for his son ‘in spite of death’. Niall was 28 when his father died in 1999 at the age of 58, and the second line of this stanza adorns the poet’s headstone in Calvary Cemetery in Newcastle West: ‘mar labhraíonn dúch is labhraíonn pár’, ‘for ink speaks and paper speaks’. The poet is saying that he will be present and live on in his body of work even after his death. The reality is that he wasn’t there for many of the landmark celebrations in his son’s life, his graduations, his wedding, the birth of his grandchildren and so the promise he makes, ‘and some day I’ll buy you porter!’ sounds very hollow indeed to a young man who must now take on the onerous mantle of preserving and promoting his father’s rich and varied legacy at such a young age.
Hartnett’s grave in Calvary Cemetery, Churchtown, Newcastle West. The inscription reads: ‘Beadsa ann d’anneoin an bháis, mar labhraíonn dúch is labhraíonn pár’, (‘I will be there in spite of death, for ink speaks and paper speaks.’
His Dán do Lara, 10, (‘Poem for Lara, 10’), is a masterpiece. The sunshine and nature in this poem are at odds with the penury and hardship of the poet’s existence in 1978, nestling below ‘Tom White’s green hill’ in Glendarragh, Templeglantine. Flame-haired Lara is compared to a rowan tree in autumn, her voice disturbing the larks, ‘in the green grass’. She is surrounded by nature in all its glory, ‘a crowd of daisies playing with you, a crowd of rabbits dancing with you’. The blackbird and the goldfinch are there for her amusement and playtime. Then the master of metaphor compares his daughter: ‘You are perfume, you are honey, a wild strawberry.’ The poem ends with the poet’s wish for his young daughter:
Little queen of the land of books
may you be always thus
may you ever be free
from sorrow-chains.
Interestingly, the poet compares his daughter to a queen in ‘the land of books’; this seems to set the seal on Lara’s perfection. Obviously, a poet would value literature and reading, and his choice of this image is significant as it tells us that Lara has another, deeper side to her – she is not just interested in the outdoors and a lover of nature.
His final wish for Lara is that she will grow up to be as beautiful and graceful as her mother, Rosemary. He hopes that she will inherit her mother’s beautiful soul as well as ‘the beauty of her face.’
It is fitting that these three poems, written in that little rural cottage in Glendarragh, feature family and the travails of being a husband and a parent. I have examined many of his papers in the National Library of Ireland on Kildare Street, and it is undeniable that hand-in-hand with arranging his poems and latest projects, there is ample evidence of the presence of young people, Lara and Niall, in the many doodles and scribbles on the margins of those frayed notebooks.
Doodles with Dad – the joys of being a poet with young children!
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