Posted on by Vincent Hanley

The Poetry of Seamus Heaney

Digging

by Mary Hanley

(Note:  Leaving Cert Poetry questions have in recent years become more sophisticated and focused on particular aspects of the poet’s work.  The first ever question on Heaney simply expected the candidate to give their personal reaction to his poems – today the focus is given in the question and these are the major aspects which you must address in your answer.  This is then policed firmly by the Examiner’s by their application of the PCLM marking criteria.)

Sample Answer:  Would you agree that Seamus Heaney is an essentially backward looking poet, finding answers only in the past?

Soundbites are dangerous and the thesis stated above does not do Heaney or his poetry justice.  I agree that Seamus Heaney is “an essentially backward looking poet”.  However, I remain steadfastly reserved about Heaney “finding answers only in the past”.  This statement does not give the whole scope of his poetry true justice.  It only skims the surface, and using Heaney’s own analogy, if we are to truly understand his work we must go “down and down for the good turf” before we can get a true estimation of his worth.

Irishness, tradition and identity remain the cornerstones of Heaney’s poetry.  He celebrates local craftsmanship – the diviner, the digger, the blacksmith and the breadmaker.  He hankers back to his childhood and the community of that childhood for several reasons.  Indeed, part of the excitement of reading his poetry is the way in which he leads you from the parish of Anahorish in County Derry outwards in space and time, making connections with kindred spirits, both living and dead, so that he verifies for us Patrick Kavanagh’s belief that the local is universal.  For example in ‘The Forge’ he appears at first glance to be looking back with fond nostalgia at the work of the local village blacksmith.  However, the real subject of the poem is the mystery of the creative process.  The work of the forge serves as an extended metaphor for the work and craftsmanship of poetry.  Even the uncouth and uncommunicative blacksmith of his childhood can create!

Heaney has been branded a nostalgic romantic, a poet whose head remains steadfastly stuck in the sand, and a man when confronted with political violence and trauma regresses back in time to the womb-like warmth of his aunt’s kitchen in Mossbawn.  “Sunlight” is seen as a prime example of Heaney’s romanticism and escapism.  This poem was, after all, written at the height of the ‘Troubles’.  Yet, seemingly in denial of such violence, he hankers back to the security of his childhood.  Can it therefore be said that he is essentially a backward looking poet, finding answers only in the past?  Undoubtedly, Heaney travels back in time but it is to find answers for the present day realities.  On another level, this poem is a search for alternative human values, values no longer to be found in present day society.  Heaney can draw strength from his picture of childhood Eden – ‘the helmeted pump’, ‘scones rising to the tick of two clocks’ and ‘love, like a tinsmith’s scoop sunk past its gleam’.

Heaney is a poet, like Kavanagh and Hartnett, who has remained attached to his home place and the values and traditions of his parents.  ‘All I know is a door into the dark’.  Poets, too, have to force themselves to go into the dark, the unknown.  Their craft is multi-faceted.  They are pioneers, working at the frontier of language.  They are translators, translating for us events that we cannot grasp.  He translates the atrocities of Northern Ireland by excavating and exploring the past.  Heaney can travel through ‘the door into the dark’ only by drawing strength from the past.

The bog plays a major role in the poetry of Heaney.  This soft, malleable ground is ‘kind black butter.  Melting and opening underfoot’.  The bog is the memory of the landscape.  It draws us inwards, downwards and backwards through history.  Our bogs are as deep as the American prairies are wide.  Heaney talks about the ‘Great Irish Elk’ and ‘butter sunk under’.  In offering the poet an opportunity to consider its hoard from the past it affords him some deeper understanding of the present.

It is obvious from his poetry that Heaney needs to distance himself from the immediate face of danger.  Unlike Longley, Heaney is not eager to touch it, to write about it, to feel its flank and guess the shape of an elephant.  He needs space.  He uses the rich tapestry of history to give him perspective and a parallel to confront ‘the Troubles’.  In ‘The Tollund Man’ the discovery of a book gives Heaney a new perspective to explore the past and examine the present.  Make no mistake about it, Heaney here is talking about Northern Ireland.  It is difficult to interpret but this poem is a direct response to the continuing murders and violence of the 70’s and 80’s.  Heaney’s style may not be as direct as Longley’s, but I believe it is still very effective.  I believe he is saying here these atrocities, albeit sometimes more brutal, are just modern day versions of an age old custom.  In every society, people are sacrificed to a political or religious goddess, whether it is the goddess Nerthus or Kathleen Ni Houlihan.  One common motif linking the three parts of the poem is that of a journey.  The sacrificial journey of the Tollund Man, the journey of the brothers ‘flecked for miles along the lines’ and the pilgrimage of Heaney in the final part.  I believe there is one more journey to be made and this Heaney skilfully passes on to the reader.  We, the readers, have to make the final journey ourselves to discover and interpret, to read between the lines and around the happenings of the time the poem was written, to get at the true meaning of the poem.  This analogy can be transferred to all of Heaney’s poems.  He doesn’t do all the work for us but the meaning is more valued when we get to the essence of the poem ourselves.

                   ‘Out there in Jutland in the Old Man killing parishes,

I will feel lost, unhappy and at home.’

No one can deny that Heaney is “essentially a backward looking poet”.  Yet he makes no apologies for it.  The influence of Kavanagh and his writings on Monaghan gave him a strength to continue writing about the traditions and customs of his local community.  The cynic may see it as escapism but Heaney finds inspiration about the present in his wealth of memory.  He finds a metaphor for the finely crafted work of the poet in such poems as “The Forge”.  The bog offers Heaney a perspective.  In “Bogland” and “Tollund Man” Heaney finally turns to the security of his youth to find an answer to the shocking realities of violence and death.  It stands as an antidote to the brutal reality of the wider society.  Heaney’s poetry also stands as an antidote, dealing with harsh issues in a gentle retrospective yet effective way.

                   ‘Then grunts and goes in with a slam and flick

To beat real iron out, to work the bellows.’

Therefore, I would be in agreement with The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing when it says of Heaney’s poetry that it is, ‘excavating in every sense, reaching down into the ground and back into the past’.

Digging by Seamus Heaney copy

Posted on by Vincent Hanley

Happy Memories of St. Ita’s Secondary School!

St. Ita's Secondary School Staff 1986. Missing from the photograph is the then Deputy Principal, Donncha Ó Murchú. The appearance of this staff photo, taken in 1986, in Facebook earlier this year provoked a virtual avalanche of nostalgia and all the memories and nicknames resurfaced once again like recurring cold sores!
St. Ita’s Secondary School Staff 1986. Missing from the photograph is the then Deputy Principal, Donncha Ó Murchú. The appearance of this staff photo, taken in 1986, in Facebook earlier this year provoked a virtual avalanche of nostalgia and all the memories and nicknames resurfaced once again like recurring cold sores!

There is a stark universal truth that I have discovered and it is true today more than ever before: a school is only as good as its teachers.   For fifteen years of my teaching career I taught in a school that would have been condemned as unfit for purpose or human habitation in Dickens’ time.  Indeed, there are those who think that Dickens modelled Mr. Gradgrind’s school in Hard Times on St. Ita’s in Newcastle West!  However, all who ever entered its hallowed halls would probably admit that it was a great school and is proof positive that modern facilities are not the only requirement for a good education.

 I was also reminded of ‘the good old days’ recently on reading an article by Dr. Pat O’Connor, an illustrious past pupil of the school, which appeared in a commemorative booklet produced to celebrate the Fiftieth Anniversary of the school’s opening in 1986.  He attended St. Ita’s from 1959 until he sat his Leaving Cert in 1964.  He says that, “these were happy, constructive, creative times, and the school provided the milieu for a learning odyssey which continued throughout the palmy decade of the 60’s”.

 The official name for the school was St. Ita’s Secondary School, in deference, I think, to the fact that Jim Breen and Dave Hayes both hailed from Killeedy, the one remaining St. Ita’s stronghold. However, the school was variously called ‘The Library’ (the building had originally been a Carnegie Library) and later ‘Jim Breen’s School’ as a local compliment and mark of respect to the man who became Manager and Principal of the school for nearly fifty years – the school becoming synonymous with his name.

 Pat O’Connor is lavish in his praise for Jim Breen and he says that he, ‘made a distinctively personal contribution during the lean years that saw a blossoming of second level education in this country.’  He goes on to say that he, ‘asserted a strong presence and, being a big man physically, he rarely had to repeat anything.  He was a strict disciplinarian, meticulous in attention to detail, but never petty or vindictive.  He led by example in the sense that his own work bore the stamp of discipline and commitment.’  The sight of his green Volkswagen Beetle, registration number AIU 524, was enough to elicit an instant quickening in the step of many a tardy pupil.

 In those early years he gathered around him a small band of doughty men who came armed with a rich diversity of teaching skills.  Tim Murphy was one of those early arrivals.  Pat O’Connor remembers him as, ‘a quiet spoken, amiable mentor, thoughtful, and on occasion, thought provoking.’  He remembers with affection the prayer which Tim introduced to the Leaving Cert class of 1964.  Given a sufficiency of faith, it had, he said, never been known to fail!

 Another of that small band of teachers, Dave Hayes, brought style and panache to bear on the teaching of Latin.  According to Pat O’Connor he was, ‘unquestionably a classical scholar of stature.’  This assessment was reinforced later during Dr. O’Connor’s first year in UCD, when a well-known lecturer and future Minister for Education, John Wilson  no less, could, in his view, ‘do no better than stand in the long shadow of Dave Hayes’.

 Willie O’Donnell taught English at senior cycle level and employed strategies supremely well suited to cope with the rigours of the examination system.  A man well acquainted with the technicalities of language, he had a particular fondness for the double entendre, and one of his most favoured concerned the numbers of students from the school who would, ‘go down in history’!

 Donncha Ó Murchú arrived on the scene as a very young man in September 1959.  No sooner had he arrived than he was subjected to the kind of initiation rites that pupils like to try out on young inexperienced teachers.  However, Pat O’Connor remembers that Donncha proved to be a doughty survivor who had a marvellous feel for history.

 Pat remembers the arrival of Noel Ruddle to the school in 1963 and considered him to be the consummate teacher who introduced the new age of science to the school.  He was enthusiastic, bright, analytical and able.  Noel went on to become Principal of the school in 1977, although his time at the helm was cut tragically short through illness.

 In the 80’s numbers burgeoned, thanks in no small part to Donagh O’Malley and his introduction of ‘Free Education’ in 1967. After Noel Ruddle’s untimely passing in 1981 the baton was passed to Des Healy who became Principal and later Manager after the death of Jim  Breen in the summer of 1984.  He was supported in its final years before amalgamation by Paddy Geary, Dave McEnery, Paul Edmonds, Donncha Ó Murchú, Pat Hayes, Mike Kennedy, James Egan, Andrew Ryan, Barry O’Brien, Tommy Devine, Sean Flanagan, Mary O’Shaughnessy  along with the author of this tribute.  However, by then the  need for proper, modern educational facilities became a clamour which could no longer be ignored and plans for an amalgamation of schools in the town was proposed and acted upon by a vibrant committee during the 80’s, culminating in the opening of the new Scoil Mhuire agus Íde in September 1992. For many the traumatic move to Boherbuí was lessened in its severity by the knowledge that Paddy Geary, St. Ita’s to his core, was to become the Principal of the new educational adventure in Newcastle West.

 A word of caution to all as we remember those days:  in invoking and trying to preserve the past we can’t allow ourselves to be too maudlin and sentimental.  As Michael Hartnett, Newcastle’s Poet Laureate, (himself a past pupil of the school) points out:  ‘too many of our songs gloss over the hardships of the “good old days” and omit the facts of hunger, bad sanitation and child neglect’.

 Most of us who experienced and survived the building, the poor sanitation, the lack of proper toilets, know that all this only added to its mystique; the telephone was not installed until 1986!  All who entered under its portals were rendered immune forever from all contagious diseases following their exposure to the culture of the place!

 In conclusion there is another stark universal truth that I discovered while teaching in St. Ita’s:  a school is only as good as the students who pass through its doors.  In this respect, as with its teaching staff down the years, St. Ita’s was truly blessed.

Last Day in St. Ita's - Friday 29th. May, 1992
Last Day in St. Ita’s – Friday 29th. May, 1992
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The Homesick Garden by Kate Cruise O’Brien

The Homesick Garden

Reviewed by Mary Hanley

The Homesick Garden is a very unusual masterpiece. Antonia’s voice carries us through the novel and her unpretentiously clear way of looking at things evokes a complex mixture of admiration, despair and delight! The novel is a chronicle of life, charting Aunt Grace’s unexpected pregnancy and the way various members of Antonia’s family cope with this bombshell. At times Antonia’s view on life can be agonised but overall her no-nonsense approach is uplifting, “I liked the house silent and calm and bare without the angry little noises made by two people disliking each other.” This is Antonia’s critical view on her parent’s relationship!

 The significance of the title in this novel is not by any means extremely relevant. The Homesick Garden is mentioned in the third chapter, “The second rule is ….. the second rule is my homesick garden.”  More importantly however is the  “homesick-garden-time” when Antonia’s  “Mum went off for a week. She’d been doing a lot of crying around that time. ‘I can’t cope!’ she would shriek.” This time obviously affected Antonia greatly and the homesick garden was never used again ‘after that summer’.

 We meet various zany characters during the course of the novel. Antonia is the watchful young narrator. The novel is literally smattered with theories on life. These theories are brought to the reader through Antonia. I felt that when I reached the end of the novel the trivial pieces of information faded into oblivion while Antonia’s ‘theories’ will certainly stay etched in my memory. This, I feel, is the legacy Antonia leaves us with.

 “Schools do label people because they’re brisk, convenient places and labels are brisk, convenient things. Once you’ve got a label, it sticks. So I was Clever Antonia and Stephen was Odd. If I had won Miss Ireland and Stephen had been declared All-Rounder of the Year, I don’t suppose it would have made much difference at school.”

 Antonia grows during the course of the novel. An example of this is her contrasting views on relationships at both the start and end of the novel, “At my worst, well at my worst I know that I can’t go out with boys”. While, in the concluding paragraph of the novel, Antonia woefully declares that, “As for Stephen, I think I’ll be an old, old woman before he does more than hold my hand in public and he’ll be an older man before I reach out and touch him”!!!   I enjoyed Antonia as a character throughout the novel and even though she didn’t add as she said herself “oomph” to the novel, I believe, she added a whole lot more.

 Elizabeth and Grace are the other main characters and they add an extra dimension to The Homesick Garden. They are interesting in the different methods they use in coping with the same situation. Elizabeth is the classic victim, “Mum has a pretty good figure when she sits up straight but something about Grandma’s biscuity voice makes her round her shoulders and cringe her arms over her front, defending herself again, poor Mum.” She also has a tendency to brush things under the carpet. Firstly, she treats Grace as if “her pregnancy had never been”.  She deals with her problems through the therapeutic method of cleaning with the dastardly Mini Maids and frail window cleaners in tow!  “Cleaning is”, after all, ”better than any other exercise.”

 Grace, on the other hand, aired everything out in the open and when she caused as much uproar in everyone’s life as she possibly could, she just vanished and hibernated for nine months. Grace is a very frank and earthy person and “she just loses her shape in her draperies” and, of course, “She was passionate about privacy”.  She literally let everything go to hell and buried her head in the sand while Elizabeth had to be there to pick up the pieces.

 The major themes running through this novel include the issue of maturation, the problem of abuse is also highlighted, while cleanliness is, yet another theme. The theme of relationships is intricately woven throughout the novel.  At the end of the novel we discover the reason for Elizabeth’s lack of self-confidence in relation to Grandma and the poor relationship she has with Antonia’s father. She had been physically abused by Quentin- a pompous young teenager whose family, the Thompson’s “hob-nobbed” with Grandma. Through Elizabeth, we receive a heart-rending and unsettling account of something that happened over thirty years ago but was still affecting her everyday life, “I was so frightened of it that I kept on forgetting about it. Until the next time.” “Did you get over it? ”, Antonia asked.  ” Maybe I’d have got over it, if I hadn’t trivialised it, made some sort of wrong sense of it, if I’d tried to remember it more often. But I sliced it off, put it in a separate compartment in my mind.” This voice of experience is coming from the Elizabeth who used to “shake and tremble whenever anyone is cross with her”. Ironically, this is a ‘coming to terms with’ novel for Elizabeth, while it is a ‘coming of age’ novel for Antonia.

 Cleanliness, is a strange but relevant theme throughout the novel. Antonia’s father plays an important role in this area. Unfortunately, this poor individual is not given a name! ”Dad is always pompous when he’s nervous”.  He is a very prim and proper man who, “doesn’t even answer the door in an emergency unless he’s shaved and has his socks on, armed to meet the world”!  Well, we all have our problems in life!!! Cleaning can have very peculiar effects on people’s personalities. For Antonia’s father, he just could not stand the Mini Maids working for him, even though he is,  “never very clear about why he can’t put up with them”. For Antonia, ”the kitchen transformed me from Florence Nightingale into Pioneering Woman”!

 I liked this novel. Even though it appeared to be ‘a light read’ it dealt with some important issues. Although The Homesick Garden is Kate’s first novel she already has a renowned track record as the author of many collections of short stories. Kate, I believe, has a natural story telling ability and a knack of engaging the reader with the issues she chooses to explore, “I wish I could say that everything changed, changed utterly, after Mum’s revelation’s and that a terrible beauty was born”. Nothing mind shattering occurred during the course of this novel, yet it was a pleasure to get to know Antonia and her family. I came across a definition for reading today- ‘the intimate act of opening a book and getting lost within the covers’. I feel I accomplished that while reading this enchanting novel.

 

 About the author….

 Kate Cruise O'BrienKate Cruise O’Brien was born in Dublin in 1948.   She was the youngest daughter of the politician, historian and diplomat Conor Cruise O’Brien and his first wife, Derry born Christine Foster.

Kate studied English in Trinity.  Her first short story, Henry Died, was published in New Irish Writing and won the Hennessy Award in 1971 when she was only 22.  The same year she married Joseph Kearney and they had one son, Alexander.

Her first book, A Gift Horse and Other Stories was published in 1979.  It won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature.  She worked as a columnist with The Irish Independent during the ’80’s and her second book, The Homesick Garden was published in 1991.

Kate Cruise O’Brien died suddenly in March 1998 and she is buried in Glasnevin Cemetery.

 

 

 

 

 

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2014 in Review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2014 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 450 times in 2014. If it were a cable car, it would take about 8 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

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Delivering The Post on Christmas Day – in Newcastle West long ago!

Michael Healy served as postman in Newcastle West for 45 years from the early Thirties until the Seventies.  In this article, which he wrote for the Newcastle West Historical Society Journal, The Annual Observer, published in July 1979,  he recounts the vicissitudes of the job and why he wasn’t sorry to see the Christmas Day deliveries come to an end.

 

THE POST ON CHRISTMAS DAY

By M.J. Healy

Micky Healy with his handcart in Maiden Street in 1936
Micky Healy with his handcart in Maiden Street in 1936

One of the Post Office services no longer available is the delivery of mail on Christmas Day.  We haven’t had it for many years.  To the older generation this is something to be regretted; a nostalgic yearning for the passing of a custom that lent a Dickensian flavour to the Festival, akin to the star on the Festive Tree, Christmas carols and robins pecking crumbs in the snow.  But, to the unfortunate postman, Christmas Day was the most arduous of the whole year; consequently, the abolition of the Christmas Day deliveries was greeted by all and sundry in the postal service with considerable relief.

Our working day in the early 1930’s began around 7a.m.  It was part of my duty to meet the 7.15 morning train from Limerick and transport the Newcastle mails in a handcart to the Post Office in Bishop Street.  This meant being at the railway station at 7.15 on the dot, summer and winter, as the train halted in Newcastle for a mere ten or twelve minutes and a Post Office Official (the grandiose title for a thirty shilling a week postman) had to be on hand at this ungodly hour for reception of the mails from the carriers, the Great Southern and Western Railway, else he might find himself forced, at his own expense, to follow the train to Listowel to collect the mailbags.  The mail, in the 1930’s, was comparably small; a mere eight or ten sacks.  In those halcyon days, it never entered your head that you might be molested and robbed by a bandit in the dark of a winter’s morning, so the duty was easy for an early riser.

The Christmas Mail was something different.  Before the intrusion of high-pressure brain-washing, there were no appeals for early posting at Christmas, so why post a week earlier?  This meant mail descending in shoals on every Post Office in quantities that would seem impossible for delivery in one day.  Often the increase in numbers could be as high as ten or fifteen times an ordinary Mail.

There being no 7.15 Limerick Train on Christmas morning the Mail was sent to Newcastle in a huge lorry.  Instead of 7.15, the lorry was usually an hour later.  The chaos began trying to take the Mail out of the vehicle.  The volume (comparably) was enormous, sixty or seventy huge bags.  These had to be disentangled from the Abbeyfeale and Listowel Mail, as the lorry driver, on a once-a-year job, hadn’t a notion of making it easier.  The primary aim was to divide the mail for the adjoining sub-offices, which had to be ready around 9.30 or 10 a.m., when the late Dinny McAuliffe R.I.P., or one of the other local hackney drivers, took the mail to Tournafulla, Kilmeedy or Knockaderry etc.

The completion of this task depended on the American Mail.  By some devilish twist of fate the White Star and Cunard Lines seemed to arrive in Cobh just before Christmas to scatter thousands of tons of Christmas Cards all over Munster.  Most people looked forward to hearing from relations in America and in the hungry Thirties the United States’ dollars were doubly welcome.  The American Mail on Christmas Morning was often equal to what you’d normally deliver in a week.

When the Mail was divided, each man had to put his letters and parcels in order for house to house delivery.  As an instance of what this could mean I had one house in my delivery with fourteen children, some grown up some toddlers, they all seemed to get cards and the total for this house on Christmas Day was never less than 70 or 80 items.  And I had almost 200 houses on my delivery.  With this amount of preparation, the day was usually half over before you were ready for the road, and the three or four hours overtime allowed was already squandered leaving only the normal six hours.  If you got going at noon this meant only four or five hours daylight for delivery.

Christmas Day, for Christians, was obviously one of the holiest days of the year, everybody went to Church.  But if you were a Postman – you didn’t – you couldn’t, you had to work.  Knowing the brief period of daylight one started off with little delay.  Even though you probably had nothing to eat since an early 7 o’clock breakfast the temptations of offers of roasted goose or ham or even cups of tea had to be ignored.  Eventually, hunger compelled you to accept some householders hospitality, meanwhile keeping an eye on your watch to waste as little time as possible.  To rural dwellers, the Postman was (and probably still is) treated like a distant cousin or a lifetime friend.  Then it was the custom to show this friendship with hearty Christmas hospitality.  There was a limit to the amount of turkey, ham, goose or fruitcake you could take.  But the bane of this form of conviviality was the man who took your arm in an iron grip and insisted you must have a little drop of something.

The arrival of the Postman with Christmas Mail always aroused intense excitement, especially in households with young people.  Letters were handed around, the children’s toys had to be admired, and somebody always remembered the Postman’s Christmas Box.  Being almost one of the family, nobody minded asking the Postman to do a favour during the year; bring a message from town, call with a message to the Vet or to a neighbour.  These favours were not forgotten at Yuletide and the Christmas Box seemed to give even more pleasure to the donor than the recipient.  But then there was always the few who felt your Christmas Box should be a drop of the hard stuff or a few bottles of stout.  These worthies always seemed to have the kitchen and parlour littered with cases of liquor and if you were unfortunate enough to have had one drink earlier and they smelt it, then it was a personal insult if you didn’t share their generosity.  I have often been told, ‘so-and-so, when he was delivering before the war (the 1914 one), would always have a bit of the goose at Christmas and three or four bottles of stout’.  One of these robust Postmen was reputed to partake of a hearty meal whenever offered and of course three or four or more bottles of Guinness.  Thus fortified, if there was a gramophone or a melodeon player available would often organise a half-set, or waltz the housewife around for a spell before setting off on his rounds again.  With 200 or more houses to deliver one might expect he’d hardly return before the New Year.  Yet he was always home stone sober with all his Mail delivered as early as seven or eight o’clock.  They were giants in those days!

The weather on Christmas Day was always most important, especially on the Post, endeavouring to race with the few hours of daylight one needed a dry road, and dry hands; nothing more messy than handling letters in the rain.  Nature seemed always kind; in 45 years I can hardly recollect 5 wet Christmas Days.

Wet or dry you suddenly realised with horror that darkness was coming.  Usually by then, around five o’clock, one might still have another 40 houses scattered over 7 or 8 miles to deliver.  Then was no time for accepting hospitality, nor indeed for being very genial, when in the dim light of an acetylene lamp you negotiated rough passages, struggled with immovable gates and quarrelled with snarling sheepdogs, who insisted you couldn’t be the Postman at this hour of evening.  Sometimes you might have to knock three or four times before somebody came to a doorway; people were beginning to lose hope of any Christmas Mail after darkness.  One occasion, after waiting impatiently for an answer to repeated knocking, I pushed open the kitchen door to find the whole family on their knees reciting the evening Rosary.  What could I do? At Christmas?  I dropped to my knees and joined in, hoping in my heart they had reached the fourth or fifth decade (actually it was the second)!

Coming home, your path might cross a Postman from a neighbouring route.  Then you thought your day was terrible, listen to his, etc. etc.  Most of the men were back between seven and 8 o’clock and without expecting much sympathy, stories of their various misfortunes were bandied about before finishing work.  One had been bitten by a dog.  Another fell off his bike.  Then there was the man who crossed a footbridge over a stream and coming back walked into the river up to his knees.  He showed you the ends of his pants still wet.  And the punctures – every year somebody got a Christmas Day puncture.  Then there was the man who got home always early on Christmas Night.  He never accepted hospitality and hence didn’t delay on the road.  One particular year we found out why.  He could never eat with his dentures in and of course, had no trouble taking them out at home.  He had the misfortune one Christmas Day of getting so hungry at five o’clock that he accepted an offer of a sandwich and a cup of tea.  Taking out his teeth and putting them aside he hurried the meal and hastened away to finish his route.  What was his horror to discover when he returned to the Post Office that he had forgotten his dentures and horror of horrors he couldn’t remember where he had the meal and where they were left.  He told me it was well into the New Year before he found them.  As he said, ‘You’d be ashamed to inquire from anyone if you left your teeth at their house on Christmas Day’.

I sigh when I hear old people say, ‘Ah sure, it isn’t like Christmas any more without the Christmas Day post’.  And round-eyed youngsters enquire, ‘Did you really have a delivery on Christmas Day?’

We did indeed child!  We did indeed!

FullSizeRender - Post Office NCW
Postmen outside Post Office circa 1935 L to R: Denis Moylan (Postmaster), Dinny Hunt, Pat Keating, Tommy Sheehy, Danny Roche, Charlie Haynes, Jackie Sullivan and Jackie Hunt. Information gleaned from ‘Newcastle West in Close Up – Snapshots of an Irish Provincial Town’ published by Newcastle West Historical Society (2017).

 

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Christmas in Maiden Street – ‘in the good old days’!

Vincent Hanley's avatarReviews Rants and Rambles

 This piece of incisive and insightful social commentary, describing life in Newcastle West in the 1950’s, first appeared in Magill magazine in December 1977 and later in the Journal of the Newcastle West Historical Society, The Annual Observer, in July 1979. Hartnett,the poet, was back in town and the dam burst of memory and nostalgia was beginning, culminating with the bitter sweet Maiden Street Ballad, written as a Christmas present for his father, Denis Hartnett, in December 1980.

Christmas in Maiden Street
By Michael Hartnett

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A shouting farmer with a shotgun, a few patch-trousered urchins, soaked, snotty and unrepentant, running across wet fields, arms full of holly. The long walk on the railway tracks, the sleepers treacherous and slimy, the dark station, the lamp posts with their glittering circular rainbows. We stopped at the shops’ red windows to admire toys we could never have. A few drunks waltzed by, happy…

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Bishop Brendan Leahy launches Diocesan #Synod2016

Homily  of Bishop Brendan Leahy

St. John’s Cathedral

December 7th, 2014

 

Bishop Leahy

Today we are launching the Limerick Diocesan Synod and commissioning Delegates to it.  It is a significant day in the life of the Diocese.  Our liturgy seems just tailor-made for the occasion.

The Gospel presents the figure of John the Baptist.  At the time of John the Baptist, Jesus’ cousin, there was a sense of spiritual wilderness creeping into the people of Israel.  It was something they had experienced before and were now witnessing again.  Precisely at that time, John the Baptist was chosen to be the instrument in the hands of God to prepare the way of Jesus.  We can see that God made himself ‘need’ John the Baptist to prepare for his coming.  God is indeed the shepherd who feeds his flock and leads them but he makes himself dependent on us; he makes himself need our help.  Indeed, we can say that God is the expert of doing things not on his own but ‘together’ with others.

Just as in the case of John the Baptist, God counts on the contribution of each one of us too to prepare the way for his Son Jesus Christ to be seen, heard and encountered again in our world, in our country, and in our diocese.  We too are living in a spiritual wilderness of sorts – we’ve been through difficult and confusing times in the Church; there have been many cultural and social changes in recent years; the shape of our Church’s structures are in transition; we’ve seen internal divisions among us and we know that young people often don’t find what they are looking for in the Church as we present it today.

Our Diocesan Synod is to be a time when we clearly commit ourselves again to do our part to prepare the way for Jesus to come again in a new way among us at all levels of Church and indeed in society.  With the Synod, all of us together, clergy and lay, are being offered this opportunity to regenerate and build up the Church of the future in our diocese.  Let’s not miss this appointment with history.*

It’s undeniable that our Church has been rocked.  It has stumbled badly but it has not fallen.  While the Church reeled, faith remained precious.  Yet the Church is in need of repair.  It’s what the Lord told St. Francis in his time and tells us again now in our time.   We need to look at it again, reimagine and re-arrange, not to the way it was before but to something new.  Something that fits the present day.  We need to rebuild and repair, listening to what the Spirit is saying to the Church today.*

But that rebuild and repair, with Pope Francis as a guiding architect and his hand directed by the Holy Spirit, is not something fort the clergy alone to carry out.  Far from it.  The Church of tomorrow must be inclusive, regenerated by us all together, clergy and laity; those of great faith and those of challenged faith, working hand in hand to create a refreshed space where the windows are open and new air breathes in.  I ask everyone in the Diocese to get involved in this.*

The 2016 Synod will effectively be the moment to draw up new plans for our diocese so that it is ready for what I believe can be a new dawn breaking for the Church, a dawn we will all greet together.

Sisters and brothers gathered here in St. John’s Cathedral today, especially those of you who are being commissioned as Delegates to the Synod, let’s learn from the figure of John the Baptist.  He didn’t focus on himself; he was humble; he was full of hope in Jesus’ gift of the Holy Spirit and looked forward to the new dawn.

He didn’t focus on himself.  He wanted to help others turn around, turn away from sin and put god in the first place in their lives.  You too will now go out to help one another and others to prepare the way of Our Lord Jesus Christ.  There will be many paths to be made straight – paths of wounded hearts; paths of confused minds; paths of disappointed spirits; paths of rejected outreach.  Through listening with your hearts full of mercy and patience, you can transform crooked pathways into opportunities to show something new is happening; Jesus is coming in a new way to heal wounds, bring light and clarity, sow seeds of hope and mercy.

John the Baptist was humble.  In his day, undoing the straps of someone’s sandals was considered the most menial of jobs fit only for slaves.  John the Baptist didn’t even see himself fit to undo the strap of Jesus’ sandals.  This reveals something of the humility of his soul.  To be humble is to consider others as greater than ourselves, as St. Paul tells us.  John the Baptist lived this out in his relationship with Jesus.  But each of us can consider others greater than ourselves in the sense that in each neighbour we meet we are encountering Jesus in that neighbour.  It will be important for us to be humble and approach our Synod in a spirit of serving |Jesus in our neighbour.

John the Baptist was a man of hope,  believing in a better future and in the work of the Holy Spirit.  He pointed out that Jesus would baptise us with the Holy Spirit.  For us too, we can say that the Jesus who wants to come in a new way among us brings the Holy Spirit in abundance.  So there’s no need to be afraid or downhearted about the future.  As Pope Francis puts it, let’s not say our times are harder than previous times; they are just different.  Mary, the mother of Jesus, the ‘undoer of knots’ was always full of hope.  As the Second Reading reminds us, with the Lord ‘a day’ can mean a thousand years, and a thousand years is like a day.  he can act much faster than we might think if we let him.

In a moment, we will be commissioning the Delegates to the Synod.  As we set off on our Synodal journey, the Delegates will declare publically before us all, their intention to live their Baptismal vocation with renewed faith, hope and love.  Above all, they will promise to love one another as Our Lord has taught us in giving us the New Commandment: “A new commandment I give you: love one another”.  Let’s all join with them as they make this commitment, promising to share each other’s joys and sufferings, giving our lives out of love for one another.  We can take it as a form of pact that binds us together in a new way preparing the way of the Lord who is coming to dwell among us anew.

* my emphasis

Posted on by Vincent Hanley

Christmas in Maiden Street – ‘in the good old days’!

 

 This piece of incisive and insightful social commentary, describing life in Newcastle West in the 1950’s, first appeared in Magill magazine in December 1977 and later in the Journal of the Newcastle West Historical Society, The Annual Observer, in July 1979. Hartnett,the poet, was back in town and the dam burst of memory and nostalgia was beginning, culminating with the bitter sweet Maiden Street Ballad, written as a Christmas present for his father, Denis Hartnett, in December 1980.

Christmas in Maiden Street
By Michael Hartnett

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A shouting farmer with a shotgun, a few patch-trousered urchins, soaked, snotty and unrepentant, running across wet fields, arms full of holly. The long walk on the railway tracks, the sleepers treacherous and slimy, the dark station, the lamp posts with their glittering circular rainbows. We stopped at the shops’ red windows to admire toys we could never have. A few drunks waltzed by, happy and moronic. An open lorry went by to jeers and obscenities; the pluckers, shawled and snuff-nosed, on their way to a flea-filled poultry store to pluck turkeys at nine pence a head.

Candles and paraffin-lamps did not brighten the darkness in kitchens in Maiden Street – they only made the gloom amber. The purloined holly hung on holy pictures. There were no balloons, no paper chains, no Christmas trees. Coal was bought by the half-stone, butter by the quarter-pound, and tea by the half-ounce. The country people trotted by on donkey and cart or pony and trap with ‘The Christmas’ stones of sugar, pounds of tea. Women in shawls and second-hand coats from America stood at half-doors, their credit exhausted, while the spectre of Santa Claus loomed malevolently over the slates and thatch.

Members of Charitable Institutions distributed turf and boots, God Blessing the meagre kitchens, as hated as the rent-man. They stood well-dressed on the stone floors, were sirred and doffed at. They paid their workers slave wages. They looked without pity at the nailed together chairs, the worn oilcloth-topped tables, the dead fires.

Outside, the rain fell and blew along the street. The tinkers fought. Bonfires died out in the drizzle. We were washed and put to bed, happy and under-nourished. The oldest went to Midnight Mass. The Latin was magic, the organ, the big choir. It always seemed like a romantic time to die.

It was a Christmas of tin soldiers, tin aeroplanes and cardboard gimcracks. We were Cisco, Batman, Johnny McBrown all that day. Our presents – ‘purties’ we called them – seldom lasted longer than that day. It never snowed. There was no turkey, no plum-pudding, no mince-pies. The Victorian Christmas was not yet compulsory. The very poor managed roast meat, usually mutton. We often rose to two cocks. The goose was common. There was a fruit-cake, 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, we were to be found on the footpath or in the puddles, knuckles blue.

The Wren’s Day always brought frost. Small warm heads came from under rough blankets to the sound of flutes and banjos and bodhrans far up the street. We donned boot polish and lipstick and old dresses and went out to follow the Wren, tuneless chancers. We sang and giggled our way to a few bob and a glass of lemonade. The back kitchens of the pubs filled up with musicians, the musicians filled up with porter and their wives filled up with apprehension. In a few hours, winter took over again.

There will never be Christmasses like those again, I hope to God.

 

MichaelHartnett

Posted on by Vincent Hanley

OUT OF THE MOUTHS OF BABES…..

Out of the mouths of babes comes wisdom – of a sort!  For thirty years I spent my summers correcting Leaving Cert English scripts and it never failed to amaze me the chances chancers will take when rote learning hits the cold reality of the North face of The Eiger!  I began my work with the Department in June 1978 and I corrected Junior Cert Geography that year.  I learnt that  the name of the shipyard in Belfast was called Harland and Wolf Tone and that along with cheese and butter and yoghurt (which had just arrived on the shop shelves) milk of magnesia was also a dairy product!

English, however, was the gift that kept on giving!  Shakespeare usually threw up numerous gems of lucidity and erudition.  I learnt, for the first time, that  Othello, ‘although his exterior may be black he is pure and good on the inside’.  Desdemona is very forgiving also, to the point where ‘she shows great love for Othello even after he has suffocated her’.  King Lear suffered because, ‘he wanted to keep his revenue and all his followers’.   Also, ‘in those days you didn’t divide your kingdom – you left a will’.  In a moment of weakness Lear is overheard talking to The Fool on the Heath: ‘Go in man you’ll catch your death out here’.  Whereas Hamlet, ‘is the victim of exaggerated procrastination complex’ and as well as that he suffered from ‘an anti disposition’ and then later ‘an antique disposition’.  I can visualise vividly  in my mind’s eye harried teachers on cold winter’s mornings explaining what an arras was only for that information to be completely corrupted by June: ‘He killed Polonius through the arse’ and in another script sponsored by Toyota, ‘Hamlet stabbed Polonius behind the Yaris’.  Also Hamlet was only mad North North West so therefore according to the mathematicians, he ‘was only one sixteenth mad’.

Yeats always yielded up a great variety of hoary old chestnuts.  Indeed I was reliably informed that in that great poem Among School Children, ‘the chestnut tree may not be called the bole, blossom or the branch – it is all three.’  Everybody also seemed to know that, ‘he stalked Maud Gonne, proposing to her many times’.  Elsewhere in a rather revealing Freudian (or Faustian) slip Maud Gonne is referred to as, ‘Mad Gun McBride’.   The poem Sailing to Byzantium can apparently, ‘be summed up in four words: ‘perne in a gyre’.  The poem The Fisherman is about, ‘a man in Connemara clothes living in a shed on the top of a hill’.  In this great poem Yeats apparently is struggling to reconcile the opposing images, trying to describe, ‘the ideal man versus the reel man’.  One candidate suggested that Yeats was a sad case because, ‘he was plagued with immortality and involved in politics.’

O’Casey’s plays also provided rich seams of unintended humour, double entendres and other heaven sent certainties. One candidate mentioned the fact that, ‘Johnny is no longer able to work because of an accident where he lost an arm and now he walks with a limp’ and continued to dig a deep hole by saying, ‘a job on a building site wouldn’t strain his arms because it’s not his legs he’s mixing it with.’  Captain Boyle was not understood at all, ‘there is nothing attractive or endearing about Captain Boyle, he is literally a boyle on the butt of humanity’.  It is also suggested that, ‘he attends drinking seminars in a local pub’.   Summing up Juno and the Paycock one candidate suggests that, ‘Joxer is the parasite and Boyle is the dope (sic)’.  Bessy Burgess in The Plough and the Stars is described as, ‘a pearl containing oyster of a woman’!   She has a sharp tongue in her head and she says, ‘that Mrs. Gogan’s wedding vowels are not valid’.  Christy Mahon in The Playboy of the Western World is beautifully described as having. ‘small feet which is a sign of great breathing’.  These candidates may not have gone down in English – most of them anyway! – but they will definitely go down in history!

Lord of the Flies by William Golding always gave rise to unexpected surprises.  The boys, ‘find they are on an island inhabited by pigs and bugs’  and, ‘they have to defend for themselves’ and then we discover that, ‘any pigment of control is lost when Piggy dies’.

Personal essays also provided an amazing array of views on the vagaries of teenage life: the following are some of the many gems which brought a smile to my face.

  • Summer holidays from school are great – your only worry is have you put enough sun screen on your nose.
  • Life is like meeting the man of your dreams and then meeting his beautiful wife!
  • It was a buzzing party so there were no straight people there…..
  • In Second Year there were thirty-one of us in our class – I was the one!!
  • Waiting for the school bus is a mating ritual…..
  • The mood is electrical…..
  • There was a climatic moment as the aria was played……..
  • Dreaming is actually one of the things I’m good at…..
  • The internet is a gateway to child pornography and a perverse culture used by losers and sad cases….

I could go on and on but suffice it to say that all these slips of the pen brightened up my hazy July days and needless to say they were all – well nearly all! – rewarded accordingly!  I will give the final word to one young statistician who summed up our national predicament quite succinctly: ‘We are a 100 per cent white, 95 per cent Catholic and 110 per cent naïve country’.  Out of the mouths of babes…….

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