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Posted on November 2, 2025November 16, 2025 by Vincent Hanley

The Last Vision of Eoghan Rua Ó Súilleabháin by Michael Hartnett

An unknown Spailpín Fánach circa 1858. A colourised image by Matt Loughrey from a black and white photograph originally collected by Sean Sexton.

The Last Vision of Eoghan Rua Ó Súilleabháin

The cow of morning spurted Do thál bó na maidine
milk-mist on each glen ceo bainne ar gach gleann
and the noise of feet came is tháinig glór cos anall
from the hills’ white sides ó shleasa bána na mbeann.
I saw like phantoms Chonaic mé, mar scáileanna,
my fellow-workers mo spailpíní fánacha,
and instead of spades and shovels is in ionad sleán nó rámhainn acu
they had roses on their shoulders. bhí rós ar ghualainn chách.

Translated by Michael Hartnett from his original Irish poem.

Commentary

This gem of a poem was first published as part of Hartnett’s first collection in Irish, Adharca Broic, in 1978. The poem also appears in Hartnett’s 1987 collection, A Necklace of Wrens, with an English translation by the poet himself. Of the twenty-three poems in A Necklace of Wrens, thirteen are included from that first collection in Irish, Adharca Broic, with English translations by the poet. Peter Fallon, his publisher and editor, has stated that the poems included in A Necklace of Wrens were the only Irish poems that Hartnett wanted to be preserved after his ten-year sojourn in West Limerick. This collection was followed a year later by Poems to Younger Women, entirely in English. Theo Dorgan tells us that both these collections show ‘a startling return to the power and complexity we might have expected had the poet not turned aside from English in 1975’.

‘The Last Vision of Eoghan Rua Ó Súilleabháin’ offers a modern perspective on the traditional Aisling (vision) poem genre. The poem blends traditional imagery with contemporary twentieth-century realism, transforming the spectral ‘fellow-workers’, the ‘spailpíní fánacha’ of the original, into figures with ‘roses on their shoulders’ instead of spades, suggesting a hopeful, transformed vision of labour and society, rather than the lament for lost Gaelic order typical of historical Aisling poems.

Here, the focus shifts from the old political lament of older Aisling poems to a more modern, grounded, hopeful vision, using the image of the rose, the international symbol of the Labour Movement, of which Hartnett was a card-carrying member. While the original poems lamented historical events like the Flight of the Earls and the hoped-for return of Bonny Prince Charlie and the Stuarts to power, Hartnett’s poem shifts the focus to a contemporary sense of disillusionment and emotional turmoil. Hartnett does use the image of a new day dawning to reinforce the hopeful possibility of better days ahead, however, while Hartnett’s translation adapts the ancient Aisling form in a contemporary context, in my view, this Aisling is heavily laden with irony, if not cynicism, because of Labour’s perceived inability to improve the lot of the working class and its failure to gain long-term popular mainstream support, particularly in the post-World War II era.

The title and the poem itself reference the Aisling genre, a poetic form that developed in Gaelic poetry in the 17^th and 18^th centuries. Readers familiar with Irish poetry will also be aware that in these old Aisling poems, Ireland was often depicted as a woman: sometimes young and beautiful, sometimes old and haggard. In the final poem in his first collection in Irish, Adharca Broic, Hartnett reprints his iconic poem, Cúlú Íde, in which he portrays Íde (Ita Cagney in the English version) as a strong, formidable woman, and he endows her with many of the traditional characteristics of the spéirbhéan (the spirit woman) from the original Aisling poems. She is depicted as a modern Bean Dubh an Ghleanna, Gráinne Mhaol, Roisín Dubh or Caithleen Ní Houlihan – in effect, a symbolic representation of the new Ireland.

This modern Aisling, ‘The Last Vision of Eoghan Rua Ó Súilleabháin’ also features striking imagery, such as the ‘cow of morning’ that ‘spurted milk-mist on each glen’. The image of the cow, the Droimeann Donn Dílis, was also a stock reference to represent Ireland in Jacobite poetry and the hoped-for return of the Stuart dynasty, which, many at the time believed, would benefit Ireland. This initial image creates a surreal and elemental atmosphere, setting a new tone for the vision. The crucial shift occurs when these workers have ‘roses on their shoulders’ instead of ‘spades and shovels,’ symbolising a transformed, idealised vision of labour, where it is no longer depicted as hardship or indentured slavery but as something beautiful and dignified.

The rose, particularly the red rose, later became a symbol for the Labour Movement through the slogan ‘bread and roses,’ which represents the dual desire for both the means to live (bread) and a life of dignity and fulfilment (roses). This symbol is associated with the fight for social and economic justice and is used by many social democratic and labour parties, such as the Labour Party in Ireland and the UK.

The ‘phantoms’ seen by the speaker are described as ‘fellow-workers’, ‘comrades’ even, transforming traditional imagery of spectral figures into more tangible, relatable characters associated with Labour. The older, traditional variety are the sad spectral figures that accost Hartnett one summer’s evening as he heads from his home in Newcastle West to meet his uncle Dinny Halpin in Camas. The episode is recounted for us in the second section of his iconic poem, ‘A Farewell to English’,

These old men walked on the summer road

sugán belts and long black coats

with big ashplants and half-sacks

of rags and bacon on their backs.

These spectral figures were a pathetic vision, ‘hungry, snotnosed, half-drunk’. These ragged poets, Andrias Mac Craith, also known as An Mangaire Súgach, The Merry Peddlar, (along with his contemporary, Sean Ó Tuama an Ghrinn, who also hailed from Croom, the seat of one of the last ‘courts’ of Gaelic poetry), Aodhagán Ó Rathaille from Meentogues near Rathmore in the Sliabh Luachra area (also the birthplace of Eoghan Rua Ó Súilleabháin), and Dáithí Ó Bruadair, who was on his way from Springfield Castle, the seat of the Fitzgeralds, to Cahirmoyle, the seat of his other great patron, John Bourke), represented the sad remnants of a glorious past.

The ‘phantom’ figures leave Hartnett resting ‘on a gentle bench of grass’, leaving him to ponder his own future as their direct descendant:

They looked back once,

black moons of misery

sickling their eye-sockets,

a thousand years of history

in their pockets.

Eoghan Rua Ó Súilleabháin, the putative author of this Aisling and a real-life spailpín in his own right, lived a life which was the stuff of legend and lore, and, indeed, it has many similarities with Hartnett’s own rakish life. Many of the stories surrounding him may very well be apocryphal, to say the least. However, he and his fellow parishioner, Aodhagán Ó Rathaille, are most famous for their mastery of the Aisling genre.

Eoghan Rua was born in 1748 in Meentogues, in the mountainous Sliabh Luachra area, in southwestern Ireland. By the time of his birth, most of the native Irish in the southwest had been reduced to landless poverty. However, the area boasted of having one of the last ‘classical schools’ of Irish poetry, descended from the ancient, rigorous schools that had trained bards and poets for generations. In these last few remnants of the bardic schools, Irish poets competed for attention and rewards, and learned music, English, Latin and Greek.

Eoghan Rua (the Rua refers to his red hair) was witty and charming but had the misfortune to live at a time when an Irish Catholic had no professional future in his own country because of the anti-Catholic Penal Laws. He also had a reckless character and threw away the few opportunities he was given. For example, at the age of eighteen, he opened his own school; however, we are told that ‘an incident occurred, nothing to his credit, which led to the break-up of his establishment.’

Eoghan Rua then became a spailpín, an itinerant farm worker, until he was 31 years old. He was then conscripted into the British Navy under interesting circumstances. Ó Súilleabháin was then working for the Nagles, a wealthy Anglo-Irish family. They were Catholic and Irish-speaking, and had their seat in Kilavullen along the Blackwater valley near Fermoy, County Cork. (The Nagles were themselves an unusual family. The mother of the Anglo-Irish politician Edmund Burke was one of the Nagles, as was Nano Nagle, the founder of the charitable Presentation order of nuns. She was declared venerable in the Catholic Church on 31 October 2013 by Pope Francis).

Daniel Corkery relates that, ‘I have had it told to myself that one day in their farmyard Eoghan Rua heard a woman, another farm-hand, complain that she had need to write a letter to the master of the house, and had failed to find anyone able to do so. ‘I can do that for you’, Eoghan said, and though doubtful, she consented that he should. Pen and paper were brought to him, and he sat down and wrote the letter in four languages: in Greek, in Latin, in English, and in Irish. ‘Who wrote this letter?’ the master asked the woman in astonishment. The red-headed young labourer was brought before him, questioned, and thereupon set to teach the children of the house. However, again owing to Eoghan Rua’s bad behaviour, he had to flee the house, the master pursuing him with a gun’. Legend says he was forced to flee when he got a woman pregnant: some say that it was Mrs Nagle herself!

Ó Súilleabháin escaped to the British Army barracks in Fermoy, and he soon found himself aboard a Royal Navy ship in the West Indies, ‘one of those thousands of barbarously mistreated seamen’. He sailed under Admiral Sir George Rodney and took part in the famous 1782 sea Battle of the Saintes against French Admiral Comte de Grasse. The British won, and to ingratiate himself with the Admiral, Ó Súilleabháin wrote an English-language poem, Rodney’s Glory, lauding the Admiral’s prowess in battle and presented it to him. Ó Súilleabháin asked to be set free from service, but this request was denied him.

Much of Eoghan Rua’s life is unknown and clouded in mystery and intrigue. He returned after his wartime exploits to his native Sliabh Luachra and opened a school again. Soon afterwards, at 35, he died from a fever that set in after he was struck by a pair of fire tongs in an alehouse quarrel by the servant of a local Anglo-Irish family. ‘The story of how, after the fracas in Knocknagree in which he was killed, a young woman lay down with him and tempted him to make sure he was really dead, was passed on with relish’.

There is some confusion as to where he is buried. Some claim he was buried in midsummer 1784, in Nohoval Daly graveyard (or Nohoval Lower Graveyard), which is located on the Cork side of the River Blackwater on the R582 Knocknagree to Rathmore road. Others claim that he was buried in the cemetery of Muckross Abbey, Killarney, along with two other great Kerry poets, Séafradh Ua Donnchadha, who died in 1677, and Aodhagán Ó Rathaille, who died in 1728. There is a plaque on the wall of Muckross Abbey today that commemorates this event. The plaque also pays tribute to another great Kerry poet, Piaras Feiritéar, who was hanged ‘thall i gCill Áirne’, ‘over in Killarney’, in 1653. The plaque also has an inscription which is attributed to an tAthair Pádraig Ó Duinnín, the great lexicographer, most famous for compiling the Foclóir Gaeilge–Béarla (Irish-English Dictionary), first published in 1904. He, too, was from Meentogues, the birthplace of both Ó Suilleabhán and Ó Rathaille.

The plaque on the wall of Muckross Abbey in Killarney claims that Eoghan Rua is buried in the Abbey cemetery, along with Aodhagán Ó Rathaille and Séafradh Ua Donnchadha.

It was said of Eoghan Rua that,

Perhaps there never was a poet so entirely popular– never one of whom it could be more justly said volitar vivus per ora virum [He soars, alive in the mouths of the people]. His songs were sung everywhere…. Munster was spellbound for generations…. The present generation, to whom the Irish language is not vernacular, in reading these poems should bear in mind that they were all intended to be sung, and to airs then perfectly understood by the people, and that no adequate idea can be informed of their power over the Irish mind, unless they are heard sung by an Irish-speaking singer to whom they are familiar.

There is much to admire in this short poem. Indeed, I feel I am but scratching the surface. However, short and concise as it is, I feel it has relevance to a modern audience eager to bridge the gap to a harrowing era in Irish literary history. Indeed, the poem’s tone is one of elegy, lament, and perhaps a quiet resignation to loss, reflecting the disorienting experience of a changing world.

In his wide-ranging essay, which gives an overview of Hartnett’s work, ‘A Singular Life: The Poet Michael Hartnett’, Theo Dorgan points out that although he never translated the totem figures, Mac Craith and Ó Tuama,

‘he could and did think of himself as the favoured inheritor of a tradition, and also as one obliged to be loyal to that tradition. This sense of obligation would become the sign and signature of his work’.

That life’s work in both languages serves as a bridge between Ireland’s rich poetic past and its modern present. His poetry and translations from the Irish have given him firsthand knowledge of traditional Irish forms, such as the Aisling, and he uses these in very innovative ways in his contemporary poetry. By taking a traditional form such as the Aisling and imbuing it with modern themes, Hartnett allows a new generation to connect with a classical poetic tradition while grappling with the emotional and political undercurrents of their own time.

The startling achievement of this short eight-line poem is that Hartnett manages to crystallise all the tropes and traditions of the Aisling genre while at the same time staying relevant to a modern audience. This Aisling alone proves that he is a worthy successor to the ‘phantoms’, those spectral figures who confronted him at Doody’s Cross, ‘a thousand years of history in their pockets’.

References

Dorgan, Theo. ‘A Singular Life: The Poet Michael Hartnett’, from The Poets and Poetry of Munster: One Hundred Years of Poetry from South Western Ireland, ed. Clíona Ní Ríordáin and Stephanie Schwerter (December 2022/January 2023).

Hartnett, Michael. Adharca Broic, Loughcrew: Gallery Press, 1978.

Hartnett, Michael. A Necklace of Wrens: Poems in Irish and English, editor Peter Fallon, Loughcrew: Gallery Press, 1987.

Hartnett, Michael. Poems to Younger Women, Loughcrew: Gallery Press, 1988.

Michael Hartnett in pensive mood by the River Arra in Newcastle West in the 1970s. Photo credit to Limerick Leader Photo Archives

Posted on October 5, 2024 by Vincent Hanley

Michael Hartnett’s ‘Move to The Park’

Inset of New Houses just before occupancy, September 1951. (Courtesy of Dr Pat O’Connor, The New Houses: A Memoir, p.9)

In late 1980, Hartnett began work on his best ballad, which is most loved and recited to this day, the ‘Maiden Street Ballad’. The ballad stretches out for 47 verses and is a compendium of much of what he had written in prose about Newcastle West in articles for The Irish Times, for Magill magazine and for the local Annual Observer, the annual publication of the Newcastle West Historical Society during the 60s and early 70s. There are also echoes of other local poems such as ‘Maiden Street’ and ‘Epitaph for John Kelly, Blacksmith’ included among the verses of the ballad.

‘Maiden Street Ballad’ was published by local entrepreneur Davy Cahill’s The Observer Press ‘with the help of members of Newcastle West Historical Society’. Copies of the original are much sought after on eBay and elsewhere to this day. It carried a very eloquent dedication, ‘This ballad was composed by Michael Hartnett in Glendarragh, Templeglantine, County Limerick in December 1980 as a Christmas present for his father Denis Harnett (sic)’.

‘Maiden Street Ballad’ contains a number of autobiographical segments. The early stanzas tell us about his childhood days where they rented accommodation first in Connolly Terrace and then in nearby Church Street before making the move to Lower Maiden Street where they rented a room from Legsa Murphy.

We rented a mansion down in Lower Maiden Street,

Legsa Murphy our landlord, three shillings a week,

the walls were of mud and the roof it did leak

and our mice nearly died of starvation.

Probably one of the most notorious segments is the ten ribald verses from 27 to 37 which describe a virtual pub crawl of all of Newcastle West’s 26 public houses which were doing business in 1980. (Michael Hartnett’s 26 Pubs at Christmas!) In another significant segment from verses 16 to 23, he eloquently documents the move from Lower Maiden Street to the new housing scheme in Assumpta Park. These verses portray Hartnett at his best, they are witty, caustic, and often slanderous; his use of hyperbole pokes fun at his friends and those neighbours who were part of that mass exodus from the slums of Maiden Street and The Coole.

Hartnett says that the street finally ‘gave up the ghost’ in September 1951 when most of the inhabitants were rehoused in one of the 60 new houses in Assumpta Park. Hartnett describes the operation, likening it to the hazardous Exodus of the Israelites escaping from Egypt to the Promised Land! Unlike the ‘pub crawl’ sequence which describes in great detail the quirks and peccadillos of numerous characters, including many of his own family, there are only two people mentioned in the ‘move to The Park’ sequence – only passing reference is made to Dick Fitz and Mike Hart, two great stalwarts of the area. Rather this segment describes his people, his neighbours, the real old stock of the town in a richly comic and exaggerated way.

In the late 40s and early 50s, the local authority had built up to 60 social houses to relieve the squalor, poverty and slum-like conditions in Maiden Street and The Coole. They were built in an area of the town known as Hungry Hill, although the new development was officially called Assumpta Park. The Hartnett family were but one of the lucky families to be given a new house and they moved into Number 28 in 1951. Hartnett tells us that the ‘old street finally gave up the ghost’ and the mud-walled, galvanised cabins were abandoned down in The Coole and the people were tempted to move ‘to the Hill’s brand new houses’. The ‘New Houses’ stood on a hill high and exposed above the town at the outer edge of a terminal moraine. The original sixty houses were finally allocated on the 15^th of September, 1951. Dr Pat O’Connor, the author of ‘The New Houses: A Memoir’, whose family were allocated Number 24, remembers that ‘doors were still without numbers and entrances without gates’. There was no street lighting or footpaths so it must have been a very eerie place to move to.

The relocation is described in almost Biblical terms with a delicious mixed cocktail of the Exodus story and the story of Noah’s Ark:

and some of the ass-cars were like Noah’s Ark

with livestock and children and spouses.

As well as the Bible, Hartnett is also influenced here by the writings of John Steinbeck and his iconic descriptions of the Great Depression in The Grapes of Wrath as well as the writing of Sean O’Casey and Brendan Behan who wrote about the tenements in Dublin and the gradual movement of people from places like Henrietta Street to Crumlin and Cabra in the 1940s, and Ballyfermot and Artane in the 50.

The Park upon first occupancy, September 1951. (O’Connor, 12)

Hartnett is a very astute commentator on the social ills of his day and the Maiden Street Ballad, and this segment in particular, shows the level of poverty and deprivation experienced by the people in that part of the town in the early 50s. They brought with them their ‘flourbags’, ‘their ‘tea chests’ and ‘three-legged stools’ and their ‘jam-crocks in good working order’. At that time many of the households were so poor that they were unable to afford the bare necessities such as cups and saucers. Jam was sold in one-pound and two-pound glass jars and these were used as substitutes for tea cups and milk glasses in most households. Dr Pat O’Connor tells us that the new occupants had come from ‘the tattered tails of the town, where congestion and dereliction were rife, but (where) the sense of neighbourhood intimacy was well defined’. Hartnett describes the move in a very light-hearted way, and he follows up by saying that they also brought their fleas, bed bugs and mice with them because they felt they were almost part of the family. And now that they’ve moved up in the world the fleas also go to Ballybunion each year on holiday with their host families ‘though hundreds get drowned in the waves there’.

Many found it very difficult to make the necessary adjustments to their new surroundings and the poet pokes fun at their efforts to adapt to such new luxuries as piped water, electricity, toilets and bathtubs. The novelty of two-storey houses had also to be grappled with – three bedrooms upstairs and a hallway, kitchen, scullery and bathroom downstairs. Apocryphal stories circulated that one of the legendary early occupants, Forker O’Brien, famously used the bannisters as kindling for the fire! Indeed, Hartnett would have us believe that many continued with the practices that had been commonplace in their former residences:

In nineteen fifty-one people weren’t too smart:

in spite of the toilets, they pissed out the back,

washed feet in the lavat’ry, put coal in the bath

and kept the odd pig in the garden.

They burnt the bannisters for to make fires

and pumped up the Primus for the kettle to boil,

turned on all the taps, left the lights on all night –

but these antics I’m sure you will pardon.

Hartnett continues in his light-hearted vein, and he lists the great improvements that have come about in peoples’ lives in the years following their relocation. They are respected now and indeed have earned the respect of their fellow townspeople, and they have made great strides to better their situation. Many can now boast of having regular employment, and motor cars and many even go on foreign holidays each year ‘in the Canaries’. The poet’s sense of pride in his own local place is very evident in this section of the ballad and he compares other places he has visited in his travels, but none can compare to his native Newcastle West.

I have seen some fine cities in my traveller’s quest.

put Boston and London and Rome to the test,

but I wouldn’t give one foot of Newcastle West

for all of their beauty and glamour.

In those early days access to The Park was very limited and usually meant a long walk down through the Market Yard or Scanlon’s Lane or down New Road (now Sheehan’s Road) if one wanted to visit friends in Maiden Street or go to Mass on a Sunday. Eventually, representations were made to local Councillors and with the second phase of houses being built in 1955 a Mass Path was constructed which gave residents easier access to the old haunts in Maiden Street and also easy access to the parish church, as the name suggests. The residents of Maiden Street and The Coole were accustomed to being looked down on by the more well-to-do residents of the town and even now, as Dr Pat O’Connor points out, even though the residents of Assumpta Park were in a more exalted and elevated location they found that ‘by a curious process of inversion the people of the town (still) looked down on us’!

Detail from the map by Dr Pat O’Connor showing Assumpta Park and the Mass Path in relation to Maiden Street and the church. Note also the three sandpits still in use at the time – Musgraves (now Whelan’s), O’Gorman’s, and Ahern’s.

Stanzas 22 and 23 paint a moving, nostalgic picture with the poet’s rose-tinted lens firmly in place. We are invited to picture an idyllic scene almost straight out of Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard. It is high summer in Assumpta Park and the visibility is so good you can see Rooska to the north and the Galtees forty miles away to the east straddling the Limerick, Tipperary and Cork borders. All is peaceful and neat and tidy and quiet ‘and the dogs lie asleep in the roadway’. The stanza ends with a beautiful echo of a line from Act 3, Scene 2 of Macbeth – “Light thickens, and the crow/ Makes wing to th’ rooky wood.” (I once heard Noel O’Connor, that great unsung hero and fount of wisdom, say that there’s a quote in Macbeth to solve every problem and cover every possible situation and permutation). Hartnett, in a more benign and domesticated mood, gives us his variation on Macbeth’s more bloody intent:

and the crows to the tree tops fly home in black rows

and the women wheel out their new go-cars.

Dr Pat O’Connor believed that making a new home in The Park was hardest on the women. Yet, as usual, they were the quintessential homemakers. In 1951 scarcely any worked outside the home, often supplementing family income by keeping lodgers or by fostering children, many of whom grew up seamlessly within the various families.

Hartnett’s love for this place is nourished by innocent childhood memories. After all, the poem is meant as a Christmas present for his now ailing father and so he paints a picture which we are invited to contrast with the poverty and squalor of earlier childhood. Hartnett is now forty years of age and remembering life as a ten-year-old in his favourite place, his home in 28 Assumpta Park:

when the smell of black pudding it sweetens the air

and the scent of back rashers it spreads everywhere

and the smoke from the chimneys goes fragrant and straight

to the sky in the Park in the evening.

The residents of Assumpta Park, then and now, are indeed lucky to have as their chroniclers Dr Pat J. O’Connor, one of the most pre-eminent human geographers of his generation, and Michael Hartnett one of Ireland’s great twentieth-century poets. Both have left us their differing yet unique perspectives of an era of great change and of a wonderful social engineering project that worked. Hartnett would definitely point to it as an example that the present government should try to emulate!

A group of workers photographed on-site during the building of the second phase of the houses in 1955. Photo courtesy of Newcastle West Olden Times Facebook Page. These houses were built by Edmond Power. Included above: Jack Power (back left), alongside Jackie Brouder, Edmond Power (back right), Mike Harte (front left), Mossy Hurley with child (front right), with Jer Hough and Tommy Fox in line alongside.

Works Cited:

O’Connor, Patrick J. The New Houses: A Memoir. Oidhreacht na Mumhan Books, 2009

Postscript

I came across this little-known poem of Hartnett’s recently which further details the trauma that was involved in the ‘Move to The Park’. There is an Irish version as well.

Off to the New Houses

I was there when the street expired.

When the cabins were put under lock and key;

Gloom and delight were left imprisoned,

The birth-room, the death-room;

And under the floor and on the wall

The mouse and the spider were lonely.

Donkey and trap, wheel-barrow, hand-cart

Safely transporting our ancestral bedding,

My father’s mug, my mother’s sugar-bowl:

We shifted all under cover of night.

And under the floor and on the wall

The mouse and the spider were lonely.

We shifted all that mattered

Except the heart of the old tortured street:

After a pause for porter, my father and his friends went

To move it to us at once.

It was bigger than ten cows’ hearts,

Weals and wounds and scabs all over it.

But its history and grief notwithstanding

There was a living pulse of blood there still.

Late in the night it was put on a cart

And they pulled it across a field

But the heart expired before journey’s end

And we still can’t wash out the bloodstains.

And still under the floor and on the wall

The mouse and the spider are lonely.

Michael Hartnett

Posted on February 2, 2024 by Vincent Hanley

Translations by Brian Friel

Translations is a three-act play by Irish playwright Brian Friel, written in 1980. It is set in Baile Beag (Ballybeg), in County Donegal which is probably loosely based on his beloved village of Glenties in West Donegal where Friel was a frequent visitor and where he is buried. It is the fictional village, created by Friel as a setting for several of his plays, including Dancing at Lughnasa, although there are many real places called Ballybeg throughout Ireland. Towns like Stradbally and Littleton were other variations and ‘translations’ of the very common original ‘Baile Beag’. In effect, in Friel’s plays, Ballybeg is Everytown.

The original staging of the play, in Derry in 1980, was the inaugural production by the newly formed Field Day Theatre Company, which Brian Friel had founded with the actor Stephen Rea. “It was a poignant play for us because the Troubles in the north of Ireland were still raging,” Rea says. “All the issues were local, but Friel was writing about the bigger picture.”

That inaugural production was at the Guildhall, often seen as a symbol of British authority in the city. “It was pretty different for us to do a play there,” Rea says. “It had a huge impact. That was radical because we didn’t premiere it in Dublin, we didn’t premiere it in Belfast. We did it in Derry, which was very severely affected by the Troubles… When we first did the play, many anti-nationalist people said it was whingeing and moaning about the same old problems. However, because of the continuing war in Ukraine, people can see that the play has a considerable influence and relevance to colonialism worldwide”.

“Translations is one of the greatest plays about identity, language, landscape, history – about how we communicate across those divides or fail to – and how a community or nation can navigate times of profound change and dislocation,” said Tánaiste and Minister for Foreign Affairs Micheál Martin when speaking at the grand opening of the Lesya Ukrainka National Academic Drama Theatre production at The Abbey Theatre in July 2023. “Friel wrote it for the Field Day company during one of the darkest periods of the conflict in Northern Ireland – it’s very significant that the national theatre ensemble in Kyiv, and their audiences, have felt that this Irish text resonates with their personal and collective experience as they live through this appalling, illegal war”.

Friel has said that Translations is ‘a play about language and only about language’, but it deals with a wide range of issues, stretching from language and communication to Irish history and cultural imperialism and the effects of colonialism. Friel said that his play ‘should have been written in Irish’ but, despite this fact, he carefully crafted the verbal action in English, which help bring the political questions of the play into focus.

The play traces the impact of an actual historical event, the 1824 – 1846 project to produce a British government-sanctioned ordnance survey map of Ireland. The English Parliament ordered Major Thomas Colby to Ireland in 1824 to undertake a comprehensive survey of the country. His teams of surveyors would produce detailed maps on a six-inch = one-mile scale that would be used to determine land valuations for tax purposes. The maps were finally published in 1846. They cover almost the entire country and include details of even the smallest civil division of the time: the townland.

Translations shows the effect this operation has upon a typical Irish village (Baile Beag), an impact which causes unemployment, theft, flight, threatened evictions, and violence. Here in Ballybeg, Captain Lancey has been tasked with creating an accurate map of Ireland, with English placenames, so that Ireland can be more easily navigated by the British Army, and that land taxes can be more easily charged. These objectives are connected to the British agenda to colonise and modernise the comparatively ancient civilisation of Ireland. Lancey, who has been sent by commanders in London to carry out this project, is described by Yolland in Act Two, Scene One as ‘the perfect colonial Servant’. Yolland marvels at this hard-working, industrious attitude: ‘Not only must the job be done — it must be done with excellence’.

At face value, this development seemed to be progressive yet in reality it is being used as a weapon of subjugation by a colonial invader. I am reminded of those Pathè News clips from the 40s seen in cinemas at the time and often lampooned by many commentators since of local Home Guard volunteers taking down all road signs in the English countryside so that any of Hitler’s spies who might happen to parachute in would be totally lost. Tragically the huge and ambitious translating project being carried out by the British army sappers which replace all the Irish placenames with new, standardised English ones has the effect of surgically cutting off the natives from their culture – their living geography, history, mythology, and literature – and leaves them stranded and apprehensive in a strange, new world with unfamiliar language labels. This is all the more relevant today because this very tactic is being re-enacted and repeated by Russia in trying to illegally invade and reclaim territory belonging to one of its neighbours.

Translations is set at the time in the nineteenth century when English was becoming the dominant language of Ireland. Using historical metaphor, Friel at once writes an elegant epitaph for Irish as a cultural medium and reflects on the emerging new reality; what it means to be Irish while speaking English. This context is appropriate because it marks the beginning of a more active intervention in Ireland by Britain. The early decades of the 19th century saw the tide turn against the Irish language in Ireland. Already English was spoken in major cities such as Dublin, and the potato blight and mass emigration would combine to reduce the proportion of Irish speakers to about a quarter of Ireland’s population by the end of the century. The decline of Irish was further spurred on by the introduction of the National Schools system in the 1830s, whose origins are hinted at in the play. Maire expresses succinctly the reasons for learning English in Act One: “I don’t want Greek. I don’t want Latin. I want English… I want to be able to speak English because I’m going to America as soon as the harvest’s all saved”. It is hard to argue with the desire of the 19th-century Irish peasant to learn English, as it was the only way for basic economic advancement, and in many cases, survival. The tension between the need to learn the language of the coloniser and the desire to preserve one’s heritage is the central dilemma of Translations.

The play is, appropriately enough, set in a school. While some historians have accused Friel of mythologizing and lionising the Irish Hedge School, his use of it in the play allows him to embrace the full range of Irish education of the early 19th century, giving the audience a limited idea of what it meant to be Irish then. The Hedge School is the place where all education is conducted, from the simplest things, such as Manus teaching the dumb Sarah Johnny Sally to say her name, to Jimmy Jack’s constant poring over Homer in the original Greek. In the town of Baile Beag, students learn in Irish, and they learn the languages and cultures of classical antiquity. Those who do know English only use it, to quote Hugh, the master of the school, “outside the parish… and then usually for the purposes of commerce, a use to which [English] is particularly suited”. We are reminded here of Michael Hartnett’s cutting riposte in his Farewell to English when he too notes the advantages of having English:

… finding English a necessary sin

the perfect language to sell pigs in.

Hugh explains the significance of the Irish language and literature to the inhabitants of Baile Beag to the British surveyor, Lieutenant Yolland, in this half-joking way:

A rich language. A rich literature… full of the mythologies of fantasy and hope and self-deception – a syntax opulent with tomorrows. It is our response to mud cabins and a diet of potatoes; our only method of replying to… inevitabilities.

A major theme of Translations is the replacement of the Ancient with the Modern. This can be seen in the Royal Engineers project to replace the Irish place names with standard English ones. While Irish is the traditional language of the country, it is being replaced by English: a language spoken internationally, one of commerce and progress.

The Irish language represents Ireland’s ancient past, while English represents the replacement of this in favour of something more modern and pragmatic. Maire speaks to this in Act One, when arguing they should all learn English. She quotes Daniel O’Connell, The Liberator, who had only recently (1829) achieved a huge victory for Ireland in Westminster with the passing of the Catholic Emancipation Act which finally gave Catholics freedom to practice their religion in public. In his view, Maire tells us, ‘The old language is a barrier to modern progress’. However, not all the residents of Baile Beag, are as keen to adapt to these modern ways.

Thus, the colonial encounter between the English and Irish is illustrated for us in the play within the cultural realm. From the point of view of the English surveyors, the cultural space of the Irish seems to be inaccessible. Yolland tells his Irish assistant, Owen, for instance, “Even if I did speak Irish, I’d always be an outsider here… I may learn the password but the language of the tribe will always elude me”. Similarly, to the inhabitants of Baile Beag, the English seem strange and distant. Hugh reflects that English succeeds in making Latin verse sound “plebian,” and remarks that the Irish are not familiar with English literature, feeling “closer to the warm Mediterranean”. Maire, for all her love of things English, also reflects that even the English placenames Yolland tells her about “don’t make no sense to me at all”.

The drama revolves around contact between the people of Baile Beag and colonising soldiers, who enter the town to conduct a survey that will “standardise” the place names, meaning, to Anglicize them, either by changing the sounds to approximate those of English – for example, Cnoc Ban to “Knockban,” or by translating them directly – in this case, Cnoc Ban would become “Fair Hill”. Although the villagers welcome the soldiers at first, most of the characters soon become aware of the sinister aspects of this task. As Manus, the son of Hugh and his assistant at the Hedge School, tells his brother Owen, “It’s a bloody military operation”. The task of giving new names to the places of Baile Beag stands in for the full colonisation of Irish life, covering over the previously existing Irish cultural map in order to make “a new England called Ireland,” to use Declan Kiberd’s phrase. Owen, who has been assisting in the colonisation of his own country, draws out the implications:

Lis na Muc, the Fort of the Pigs, has now become Swinefort… And to get to Swinefort you pass through Greencastle and Fair Head and Strandhill and Gort and Whiteplains. And the new school isn’t at Poll na gCaorach – it’s at Sheepsrock. Will you be able to find your way?

It seems that much has been ‘lost in translation’ and the loss of the Irish language reflected in this play is a huge loss for civilisation, none more so than for the Irish themselves. However, Friel’s play also carries an implicit critique of the modern-day use of Irish. If today the vast majority of Irish do not speak Irish, what significance does the quest to preserve or restore the language really have? In Translations, different characters engage in this discussion, with many points made on both sides. The most obvious is Jimmy Jack, who while marginal to the action for the most part is important, especially in this respect. Called “the infant prodigy” by the Hedge School students, Jimmy is anything but – he is in his sixties, does not wash himself, and spends most of his time reading the Greek and Latin classics. His fellow students regard his devotion to the literature of antiquity with bemusement, and he is treated as a buffoon. His infatuation with antiquity, which ends in a literal desire to marry Pallas Athene, serves in the play as a metaphor for a certain kind of cultural nationalist (or Gaelgóir) who continues to use Irish long after it has ceased to be relevant to the Irish themselves. By speaking Irish, and revelling in the glories of Ireland that was, they make themselves as irrelevant to modern Irish life as Jimmy Jack with his Greek, whose only response to the English army’s incursion into Baile Beag is to shout “Thermopylae! Thermopylae!”. The idea seems to be that trying to preserve Irish as a way to evoke the past before colonisation is a futile endeavour and is inadequate for the need of the Irish seeking a new cultural identity. Besides, one suspects that in any case, the glories of Celtic civilisation might never have existed quite in the form one reads about in books, much like life in ancient Greece and Rome could not be judged by reading the Odyssey or the Aeneid.

Close readers of Friel will know that there is this double dimension in all of his work. He purposely sets out to illustrate the same theme from different points of view. In his play ‘Philadelphia Here I Come!’, for example, we see immigration and ‘escape from the land’ from Gar’s viewpoint and from Lizzie’s point of view. Even here in Translations, Yolland wishes to be part of the more ancient Irish civilisation, and so tries to learn Irish; Maire, on the other hand, wants to become part of modern society, and so feels she must learn English.

The final question that the play poses is a simple one: can Irish civilisation and culture survive after colonisation, after the loss of Irish as a medium and the enforcement of English norms? Friel seems to believe that it does, and his answer is implied in a remark of Hugh from Act Two:

Remember that words are signals, counters. They are not immortal. And it can happen – to use an image you’ll understand – it can happen that a civilisation can be imprisoned in a linguistic contour that no longer matches the landscape of… fact.

One of the many tragedies perpetrated by the English colonisation of Ireland is that the words of Irish no longer match “the landscape of fact,” an act that the play shows us happening very literally. However, to use the words of Hugh once again, Friel is arguing precisely against allowing Irish civilisation to be imprisoned in the linguistic contour it once had. Hugh, drunk and distraught at the end of the play, sees the necessary step one must take to prevent this:

“We must learn these new names… We must learn where we live. We must learn to make them our own. We must make them our new home”.

For the Irish, to accept the new place names as their home and to “learn to make them their own” is to ask them to carry on their civilisation, in a language that was imposed on them by force, it is true – but Friel suggests it is either this, or nothing remains to be called Irish culture. The great irony of course is that modern Irish writers now writing in English have taken a stranglehold on most of the prestigious English literary awards including the Booker Prize in recent years!

In conclusion, the contexts and drama of Translations combine in a remarkable, sophisticated discussion of cultural decline and renewal. Brian Friel uses many characters and events that combine into a central argument: the loss of Irish as a cultural medium was a tragedy, enforced both by literal violence and the “soft power” of English cultural hegemony. However, it is equally a mistake to try and recreate the Irish past, as this would be to condemn Irish civilisation to death and complete the task the coloniser started. His play ends with the proposition that not only can English be used to express a uniquely Irish cultural identity, but that it must be used in this manner if it is to happen at all. That Friel wrote his play in English rather than Irish is more than for the sake of convenience or comprehensibility – it is his way of participating in the task he sets out for the Irish in the very same work.

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My own fascination with Translations stems from some research I did back in 2019 on the contentious etymology of the townland of Ahalin (Aughalin) in my own home place of Knockaderry (Cnoc an Doire, the hill of the oak). Dr John O’Donovan, noted historian and the translator of the Annals of the Four Masters, an Irish-speaking scholar and scribe, was the Ordnance Survey’s overall Names Expert used by the Ordnance Survey during their survey conducted between 1824 and 1846. Like Owen in the play, it was O’Donovan’s responsibility to enter all the Irish versions of names into the Names Books, in addition to the English spelling recommended for the published maps. For this reason, the Ordnance Survey of Ireland Names Books are sometimes referred to as O’Donovan’s Name Books.

O’Donovan spent July and August 1840 in Limerick and he signed off on his work on the parish of Clonelty and Clouncagh on 25 July 1840. He was assisted in his work in Limerick by Padraig Ó Caoimh and Antaine Ó Comhraí.

Evidence suggests that in the year 1824, there were three pay Hedge Schools recorded in Knockaderry by official report – two in the village of Knockaderry run by John Mulcahy and John O’Callaghan, and one in Clouncagh run by Edward Conway which was located in the corner of ‘Hartnett’s Field’ on the Begley farm. This was at a time when every field had a name not to mind every townland! John Croke, a relative of Archbishop Thomas Croke, first patron of the GAA and after whom Croke Park is named, set up a Hedge School in Clouncagh in 1850 in a building set aside for him by William McCann and his family.

The first official National School in the parish assisted by the Board of Commissioners of National Education was established in 1832. The school was located in the village of Knockaderry and John O’Callaghan was appointed headmaster of the Boys’ School and his daughter, Amelia O’Callaghan, was appointed as mistress of the Girls’ School. The first purpose-built National School in the parish opened its doors in 1867 in Ahalin (Áth na Linne, The Ford of the Pool).

You can read further about my own local investigations here:

Ahalin (Achadh Lín) The Field of the Flax

An Attempt at a Conclusive Etymology of the Placename Ahalin in Knockaderry, County Limerick

The Etymology of the Placename Clouncagh in County Limerick