Friday, September 30, 2022

Today it's eastern Ukraine, 84 years ago it was Sudetenland

On this day, September 30, 1938 Britain, France, Italy and Germany signed the Munich Agreement, whereby Germany annexed the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia.

That day in Europe the bully tactics of Hitler won out.

Vladimir Putin will sign treaties today on annexing territories in occupied Ukraine, the Kremlin has said, in a major escalation of Russia’s seven-month-old war.

84 years later, the West will be co-signing no treaty with the aggressor, this time Russia. The West is standing up to the bullying tactics of Putin.

The Russian president is expected to sign into law the annexations of the Ukrainian regions of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, where Russia held fake referendums over the last week in order to claim a mandate for the territorial claims.

We are living in the most dangerous of times.

Wednesday, September 28, 2022

The arrogant behaviour of a privileged person

Doesn’t this smack of arrogance? And to make matters worse his lawyer tried to ban the public from the hearing on grounds of national security.

The peer who organised the Queen’s funeral will argue he should not be banned from driving because he needs his licence to arrange the King’s coronation, a court has heard.

The Earl Marshal, the Duke of Norfolk, 65, pleaded guilty at Lavender Hill Magistrates’ Court on Monday to using his mobile phone while driving.

Edward Fitzalan-Howard was stopped by police on April 7 after officers spotted him using the device as his BMW cut across their vehicle after going through a red light in Battersea, south-westLondon.

He told magistrates the highest-ranking duke in England had already totted up nine penalty points on his driving licence from two previous speeding offences in 2019 and faces a compulsory endorsement of a further six points, which would lead to a ban.


Tuesday, September 27, 2022

The emotions, rituals and symbols at funerals

This week’s INM/Mediahuis Irish regonal newspapers’ column


Michael Commane
Queen Elizabeth is dead. Long live the king. The monarch of 70 years has been buried. It has been a long farewell. I am a regular listener to BBC Radio 4 and I watch UK news programmes. I dip in and out of the digital version of the Guardian newspaper. It’s been interesting keeping an eye on how Britain has mourned its monarch.

When Queen Elizabeth came to Ireland on her State visit I was certainly touched by the pictures relayed back to my house on the television screen.

And then that famous handshake and pleasant words between Queen Elizabeth and Martin McGuinness had to move the soul of the hardest and most cynical of people.
 
It might well be unwise, even inappropriate right now to say one negative word about the funeral of the late English monarch. And I never know the official title. Is Charles the King of England or the King of the United Kingdom? All titles confuse me, indeed, I have problems with all titles and top of the list are monsignor, right reverend etc.

But what I cannot understand is the idea that people would queue for 24 hours to pay their respects to a monarch and a good monarch at that. One moment people are in deep sorrow about the death of Queen Elizabeth, the next moment they are screaming in jubilation with their new King Charles.

British media was non-stop for many days reporting on the death of the queen and the days of mourning.
Two days before the actual burial I was talking to a wise man who argued that symbols are important in the lives of people and he saw all that was happening as steeped in our need for symbolic gestures.

It made me think about the seven Sacraments and how they are all couched in symbolic meaning. Have you ever asked yourself what the word symbol means?

It has to do with representation, pointing to something, standing for something. Symbols bring things together.

And then I went off thinking how easy it is to manipulate us human beings. Given the ‘correct’ situation, the right climate we can all be worked up into a frenzy. And most times it confuses me and also scares me. 

Observing Trump followers screaming and roaring at the man baffles me. But is that because I don’t like Trump? If I were a Trump fan how might I react? 

When I see any sort of over-the-top adulation or frenzy my mind goes back to those days in 1940 when Hitler returned from Paris and drove through Berlin. The crowds went berserk at their conquering master. 

Hero worship is dangerous. I know someone who cried at the funeral of Charlie Haughey. I don’t think she ever met him. There must be something in our soul that can drive us to behaviour way beyond our understanding. 

I’m beginning to think that pageantry has a powerful DNA in it that when it touches us it can do all sorts of strange things with us. 

Maybe once we start saying someone is special and different from the rest of people we are on the slippery slope creating our own idols. We are all special. 

Sunday, September 25, 2022

Hilary Mantell and her Irish connection

 What a lovely piece of writing, what a wonderful story.

Author Mantel dies aged 70

An outsider reared in poverty, she came to own, in prose, the central myth of Tudor England

Hilary Mantel, has died at the age of 70, her publisher announced yesterday. “We are heartbroken at the death of our beloved author, Dame Hilary Mantel, and our thoughts are with her friends and family, especially her husband, Gerald,” 4th Estate Books said.

Mantel won the Man Booker Prize twice, for Wolf Hall (2009) and its sequel, Bring Up the Bodies (2012), which also won the 2012 Costa Book of the Year. The conclusion to the trilogy, The Mirror & the Light (2020), won the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, which she first won for Wolf Hall.

In 1998 Hilary Mantel published a novel about The Giant O’Brien, an Irish man over eight foot tall, whose body is displayed, against his last wishes, in a London museum. In the course of writing it, she felt a strange nostalgia. “I felt a great sadness about the loss, for me, of the Irish language. I was aware my mouth was empty.”

The people of west Cork have lost of a new neighbour and a new friend, with the sudden passing of Hilary Mantel, who intended to move there in order to reclaim her European citizenship post-Brexit. Mantel’s Irish heritage was more and less important to her, over the years, but it was key to her relationship with the past. “As a small child, I grew up in what was essentially an Irish family, surrounded by Irish people who were old. By the time I was 10 almost all of them were dead. My consciousness of being Irish seemed to die with them.”

This family lived in Hadfield, a stony, windswept village in the north of England, in an odd pocket of Irish immigrants who had travelled there to work in the textile industry. Her mother and grandmother (who was illiterate) were both mill-girls. Despite a general sense of social isolation and decline, as a small girl Mantel felt an “effortless superiority” to all Protestants, in a town that still saw sectarian brawling in the streets.

The Britain she grew up in was “scared and insular” and Mantel never felt herself to be part of its establishment. Her social markers of “descent, religion, region, accent” were quickly decoded by those “who possess Englishness” she wrote, and used to exclude. “You are forced off centre. You are a provincial. You are a spectator.”

This sense of displacement was made fully uncanny by the fact that Mantel did not feel fully at home in the physical world or, indeed, in her own body. Her childhood was haunted by the figures of the dead, not just of her Irish forebears but also those her grandfather left behind when he returned from the first World War. Her grandmother saw her own dead husband in the street and Mantel felt presences from an early age.

When she was seven, her mother pinned up a picture of Elvis in the kitchen and “took up with a man called Jack”. Mantel experienced a nauseating “disturbance of the air” in the back garden that filled her with dread. She became poorly, a child so subject to illness, the local doctor called “little miss Neverwell.”


Saturday, September 24, 2022

‘Going forward looking back'

On BBC Radio 4’s flagship news programme ‘Today’ on Friday a British politician said: ‘Going forward, looking back’.

Difficult to beat that nonsense. And it complemented the general theme of what he was saying.

Friday, September 23, 2022

Thérèse Coffey is fixing it, one Oxford comma at a time

This is from last Friday’s Guardian.

It’s commenting on an email from the new British health secretary, Thérèse Coffey to her staff about the Oxford comma. The piece is a great read and good fun, with serious undertones of course. With a name like Coffey, the minister may have links to Ireland. And not a word about when to use the fada.


https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/sep/16/therese-coffey-oxford-comma-health-secretary-grammar?CMP=share_btn_link

 

Thursday, September 22, 2022

Clonskeagh pupils add a touch to our bruscars

You may have noticed new street

bins are appearing on the streets in greater Dublin. They compact and then send a signal to the local depot informing authorities that they are full.

In recent weeks pictures have been appearing on these new ‘bruscars’.

The art work below appears on the new bins in Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown Council.

It is the work of Lou Lou O’Brien, the 11-year-old daughter of Michelle Nevin, who is a radiographer in St Luke’s Hospital in Rathgar. 


Lou Lou is a pupil at Our Lady’s Grove school in Clonskeagh.


A great idea of DLRC and brilliant work by young Lou Lou.


Wednesday, September 21, 2022

Seeing the good in monarchy and the bad in democracy

LBC’s presenter James O’Brien on his programme yesterday said that after the last number of days of mourning the death of Queen Elizabeth and then her funeral on Monday he currently feels warmly towards the concept of monarchy, British monarchy than in any other point in his life. 

He thinks this may be happening him because of how Donald Trump has changed his mind about democracy.

Tuesday, September 20, 2022

Sea swimming manages to keep my head above water

This week’s INM/Mediahuis Irish weekly regional newspapers’ column.

Michael Commane

I had three appointments in Tralee earlier in the month. I drove from Dublin to West Kerry after work on Thursday. It’s a long drive and my first time to forsake the train for the gluaisteán in a long time. But on this occasion for logistical reasons I took the car. 

I arrived in Castlegregory close to 8pm. Within 30 minutes I was swimming in the Atlantic. Of course I prefer to call it the Atlantic. To be more exact it is Tralee Bay, maybe even Brandon Bay. Telling people you swim in the Atlantic gives it an extra touch, it sounds more adventurous and exciting. I’ve just checked it on a map, yes it is the Atlantic Ocean, the North Atlantic at that.

I swam Thursday, Friday, Saturday and twice on Sunday. My house is a three-minute cycle from the beach. And that’s interesting as no one calls it the beach. It is commonly known as ‘the Strand’. Across the water is Fenit and then Kerry Head. My father swam in these waters when he was 92. It was here two years before the 1916 Rising that he learned to swim.

So, you can understand they are sacred waters for me. 
I can never remember a summer when it was so easy to swim here. For my skin the water has never been as warm. And on this occasion, in September waters, the sea has held the heat of the summer. 

My father was forever telling me that the best time to swim in Castlegregory is in September and October. 

He knew what he was talking about. On Sunday standing outside my door I got talking to a local woman. I was telling her I had been swimming earlier. I noticed a flash of recognition in her eyes before she told me that she too is an avid swimmer and swims every day. 

She explained how September and October are the healthiest months to go swimming. The minerals in the water at this time of year, she said are good for the body. And I remember my father telling us how the iodine in the seaweed was extra good for us especially in the months of September and October.

Before the lady with whom I was talking went her way she handed me a bag of freshly picked mushrooms. What a magic moment. Where else would that happen? No, they were not magic mushrooms but delicious fresh food, good for body and soul.

When it comes to swimming I was ‘a late bloomer’. I’m hearing that expression a lot of late. I was 18 or 19 before I could swim. I think I’ve made up for lost time in the intervening years.

On a personal note I can’t stress strongly enough the good that sea swimming does me. Honestly, it keeps me half-sane. Every time I get into the water I feel a heavy weight lift off me. And the aftereffects are no less significant. There is something about the sea that is powerfully soothing and relaxing. It is therapeutic.

If you have never swum in the sea you are missing one of nature’s great gifts. And there’s so much of it about on this island of ours. I was talking to a German friend last week and she told me she lives 400 kilometres from the sea. Go sea swimming, yes in September and October.

On returning to Dublin by car I was more convinced than ever the train is the way to go.

Monday, September 19, 2022

The teacher who refused to obey the Russian aggressor

An interesting piece from the Guardian how the Russians are the changing the school curriculum in areas of Ukraine they have occupied.

Brutal occupiers always seem to do that. Isn’t that what the British did in Ireland.

The article tells a wonderful story of a young Ukrainian teacher, who simply against the odds says no to the Russian aggressor.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/sep/18/ukrainian-teachers-resist-russian-takeover-schools?CMP=share_btn_link 

Sunday, September 18, 2022

Fascinating interview with former MI6 Christopher Steele

Yesterday evening on BBC Radio 4’s Political Thinking Nick Robinson interviewed former MI6 operative Christopher Steel, who worked at the Russian desk from 1987 until 2009.

It was a fascinating interview, a powerful piece of radio.

Steele spoke openly and clearly how Russia invests large sums of money in attempting to influence Westerners. He said they spend as much money doing that as they are doing on the battlefield in Ukraine. They use London as a major laundering city for corrupt money and have been doing so for 20 years.

He asked: “Should we punch Putin in the face or slap him in the stomach?” He believes we do the former and we are slow about doing that.

Steele said that Britain was far too slow to react to the death of Alexander Litvinenko as it was to Russia’s meddling in Ukraine. 

He is concerned that the West does not know how to react to authoritarian nationalism. He is confident that the West is far more technologically advanced than both China and Russia but we are living in a new era where the West is no longer dominant.

A fascinating interview with a fascinating man.


Saturday, September 17, 2022

Whatever the cost and hardship Russia has to be stopped

Most Western TV news bulletins yesterday carried the story of what the Russian Army has done in Izium.

Earlier in the week the Ukrainian Army reclaimed territory that had been occupied by the Russian Army since the beginning of the war in February.

A young soldier, aren’t all soldiers young - was interviewed as bodies were being exhumed, some with their hands tied, others with ropes around their neck.

The soldier said all feeling had left him  as he discovered the results of the Russian brutality. All that was left for him to do was to fight on and stop the Russian invader.

Of course truth is the first casualty in all war but it is now clear that Russia is carrying out a shocking barbarity.

This war started under the pretence of ridding Ukraine of Nazism. Today the Russians and their collaborators are doing exactly what the Germans and their collaborators did in Ukraine in World War II.

Whatever the price, whatever the sacrifice that has to be made, this Russian aggression has to be stopped.

Are there hints appearing that the Russian Army is indisciplined and lacking in leadership?

The link below is from the Guardian.

 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/sep/16/ukraine-mass-grave-with-440-bodies-discovered-in-recaptured-izium-says-police-chief?CMP=share_btn_link

Thursday, September 15, 2022

The good and the bad news on insurance claims

Dublin City Council has paid out €49.9 million on claims from falls on roadways and footpaths since since 2017,

Dublin Bus has recorded a seismic reduction in insurance claims since its fleet has been fitted with cameras. The cameras cover the entire interior of the bus and also activity immediately external to the vehicle.

Wednesday, September 14, 2022

History being reenacted between the Dneiper and Volga

There  has been much talk and jubilation in the Western World at the success of the Ukrainian Army in recapturing eastern parts of their country and routing significant numbers of the Russian Army with the Russians abandoning tanks and ammunition.

Over the last months the Germans have moved from sending helmets to howitzers to Ukraine and the debate is now on of the possibility of Germany sending their world famous Leopard tank to Ukraine.

Who would have dreamt that German tanks would come face-to-face with Russian tanks on Ukrainian soil. It sounds close to unthinkable but it now seems most likely that again German  and Russian tanks will fight for the soil of Ukraine.

This time the tables are turned with Germany supporting democracy and the rule of law, whereas the Russian tanks represent oppression and dictatorship.

It’s also worth noting that at Stalingrad the much superior German Army was expected to defeat the weaker, less sophisticated, poorer equipped Red Army. It didn’t happen and it was on the Volga that the Russians routed the oppressor. The Germans expected to take Stalingrad in two weeks. Six months later they surrendered.

It might well turn out that the River Dneiper will be to the people of Ukraine what the River Volga means to the Russians. 

Tuesday, September 13, 2022

How might John Paul I have shaped the church?

This week’s INM/Mediahuis Irish regional newspapers’ column

Michael Commane
Albino Luciani was the pope of one month. He was elected pope on August 28, 1978 and was found dead in his bed on September 28. He took the name John Paul I. At the time of his death it was reported that Irish priest, later Bishop of Cloyne, John Magee, who was Pope John Paul I’s private secretary, was the first to find the body. 

That is not true. The person who discovered the dead pope was Sister Vincenza, who regularly brought him his morning coffee. Over the years there has been much discussion as to whether or not the good man was murdered. But it seems not.
 
On being elected pope he stopped taking medication for his heart problem and died from a heart attack.
 
Last Sunday week, September 4 Pope Francis beatified John Paul I, the last step before someone is made a saint.
 
There was something endearing about Albino Luciani. He was not called the smiling pope for nothing. He had a lovely easy and gentle touch about him.

Over the years I have often thought that Albino Luciani was the Catholic Church’s version of Mikhail Gorbachev.

In his short month as pope he attempted to break the practice of the pope being carried about on an ornate ceremonial throne. He failed to convince the Vatican civil service but he was the last pope to use it. 

He referred to himself as ‘I’ rather than using the royal ‘we'. He refused to be crowned, instead he received the papal pallium as the symbol of his position as Bishop of Rome. Luciani had mixed feelings regarding the church’s traditional stance on contraception. When Humani Vitae was published Luciani defended the encyclical but seemed to contradict that defence in a letter he wrote to his diocese just some days after the encyclical’s release.

At a meeting of bishops in Rome in 1971 he suggested that dioceses in developed countries should give one per cent of their income to the developing world, not as charity but as something owed. 

He had been Patriarch of Venice on being elected pope. And while he was in Venice he wrote a monthly column for a magazine. It took the form of letters addressed to real or fictional characters of the past. They included Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, Christopher Marlowe and many famous Italians. 

In a letter to Charles Dickens he wrote: ‘I am a bishop who has been given the odd task of writing a letter to some eminent person every month for the Messaggero di S Antonio. 

I was pushed for time, around Christmas, and didn’t know whom to choose. And then I saw an advertisement in a newspaper to your famous books and thought to myself, ‘I’ll write to him. I read his books as a boy, and really loved them; they were filled with love of the poor and a sense of the need for social reform, they were warm and imaginative and human’. So here I am, bothering you.’

Had Pope John Paul 1 not died that night in his bed is it possible we would have a different style of bishop around the world today? And of course those bishops would agree with their pope. Isn’t that how politics works.

Monday, September 12, 2022

The queen is dead long live the king

What is difficult to understand is how can so many people be at one moment grieving the death of Queen Elizabeth II and within less than 30 seconds in high spirits, cheering and smiling at King Charles III. 

The queen is dead long live the king.

Queen Elizabeth has rightly received high praise for the work of a lifetime and in the case of Ireland she will be forever respected for her official visit to the State.

Sunday, September 11, 2022

The three British leaders that make up the hat trick

“Truss is a very worthy successor of Boris Johnson. 

Johnson never believed the Brexit story either - he just realised that he could hitch a ride on a rocket ship fuelled by English nationalism and fantasies of liberation.

And this, then, makes it a hat trick.

Since the Brexit referendum of 2016, Britain has had three leaders; the remainer Theresa May, the cynical opportunist Johnson and now the zealous convert Truss.

None of them really, truly believed that Britain was being oppressed and held back by the EU. But each of them, in order to attain power, has had to enact that pretence.

- Fintan O’Toole in The Irish Times yesterday.

Saturday, September 10, 2022

My relief when the ‘urchins’ eventually turned up

The Thinking Anew column in The Irish Times today.

Michael Commane

After my parents got married, they moved to a small house which meant they had to part with their Alsatian dog. They gave it to a friend. Weeks later, sometime after midnight my father heard a noise outside the hall door. The dog had found her way back home having walked approximately eight kilometres through a built-up urban area.

We had two dogs at home when I was growing up. The first was a terrier and the second a Labrador, Perty and Denver respectively. I was very small when we had Perty but Denver was around when I was in secondary school and into adulthood.

After a gap of about 25 years Jessie came into my life and we were the best of friends. At the time I was working at The Kerryman and living in West Kerry. I got her from a friend when she was a young dog. We had great times together and the two of us walked all over Kerry, Kildare and Limerick. My most recent dog Tess, another Labrador, came into my possession when a couple I know broke up. Tess died about two years ago of old age. Since then I have been without a dog, and I have never owned a cat.

I have great childhood memories of how Perty and Denver were loved in our home. And I have the fondest of memories of Jessie and Tess. When  I see a family, especially a family with young children, with a dog of any shape, size or breed, I’m reminded of the dogs I have had. I remember my father saying that if a person is kind and nice to an animal, they will also be kind and nice to humans. 

Anyone who has had a dog as a pet will know the bonds of love and affection that develop between the person and the dog.

Over time all those dogs went missing, especially Tess. She had a knack of disappearing into the long grass and she could go missing – sometimes for well over an hour. I would be in a state of panic and consternation, thinking the worst, either she had been run over or had simply got lost. Without fail, she always turned up. And that look on her face, as bold as brass …  I would be angry with her, but the anger was quickly overtaken by relief and love to have her back. 

While I can’t speak for Tess and her predecessors, I can well imagine they were well pleased to be back home, whatever ‘divilment’ they had indulged in for the previous hour or so.
 
When I read tomorrow’s Gospel story about the lost sheep,  I was reminded of all the times my dogs went missing but how eventually they always found their way home. The Gospel (Luke 15: 1 - 10) contains the well-known stories of the lost sheep and the woman who finds the lost coin. 

Imagine, that sheep is just one of 100 and the coin one of 10, yet there is such joy in finding the sheep and the coin. Luke uses the parables to explain how “there is rejoicing among the angels of God over one repentant sinner”.
 
I have no trouble at this stage in my life of saying I have little understanding of God. Much of what I learned in theology has little meaning or relevance for me today. My faith is weak, I struggle with trying to put a shape on God. But I hope, and yes, I believe in God, a God who has mercy and love for all of us.

That God is ‘over the moon’ when the lost, the marginalised, the ‘non-believers’, the stragglers, those who have no time for authority, those who are tired and banjaxed, those who have been hurt by the establishment and all other forms of oppression, turn up at God’s door and smile.

It is near impossible for us to paint a picture of God. God’s love is beyond our understanding. When I recall the incredible relief I experienced when my ‘urchins’ turned up with their tails between their legs maybe I get the tiniest glimpse of what it might be like when I become aware of the presence of God. And that’s after God has welcomed me home.

Friday, September 9, 2022

Powerful words of Henry deBromhead at his son’s funeral

At the Funeral Mass of 13-year-old Jack de Bromhead on Wednesday his famous father in his eulogy said:

“Whosoever you love, make sure you tell them. Because if something like this happens to you, something so tragic as it is, happens to you, its’ a great comfort.

“I’d love you to take that away with you, we’d really appreciate it.”

Wonderful words.

Thursday, September 8, 2022

Insulting and inefficient service from Electric Ireland

Electric Ireland electronic bills are becoming more and more difficult to follow. 

If you are an Electric Ireland customer have you difficulty understanding your bill with specific reference to comparing your kilowatt usage over a 24-month period.

Smart meters are being installed across the country at present. How easy is it for a customer to check if the meter is correctly calibrated?

Many customers who called Electric Ireland yesterday were left waiting 40 minutes to speak to a customer service representative.

We are constantly being told technology speeds things up, makes life easier.

It was far easier and quicker to receive information from the ESB 50 years ago. That is a fact.


Wednesday, September 7, 2022

Letters to John McGahern throw a light on the man

This article appeared in The Irish Times of Thursday, September 1.

An interesting read.

A letter posted to John McGahern in October 1987 was more than an average fan letter. “Dear John,” it opened, “I have been meaning to write you this letter and tell you the following story for some time.” The letter’s author, Pat Feeley, a fellow teacher, had attended an Irish National Teachers’ Organisation (INTO) meeting in Abbeyfeale, Co Limerick, in 1965. Feeley recounted his memories of the meeting, which was held in the weeks that followed the banning of McGahern’s second novel, The Dark, and the subsequent loss of his job as a teacher in Dublin.

When “any other business” was called for at the crowded meeting, Feeley stood up and asked: “What does the INTO propose to do in the John McGahern case?” Total silence followed. The chair of the meeting responded by asking: “The John McGahern case? What case is that? I never heard of it.” Feeley, naively, told the story of the fate that had recently befallen McGahern, before the chair “spread out his hands with the palms upwards and, with his eyes on the ceiling, said, ‘It’s all news to me.’ ”


A new tranche of correspondence and other materials has recently been added to the McGahern Archive at the James Hardiman Library of NUI Galway.


Comprising more than 1,000 letters sent to the author from Irish and international literary figures, translators of his work, publishers, editors, as well as from family members and general readers of his work, this newly available archive represents an invaluable contribution to the study of McGahern’s writing as well as to the understanding of his many networks and circles of conversation.


Letters to McGahern gathered in this archive include those from Seamus Heaney, John Updike, Jennifer Johnston, Brian and Anne Friel, Eavan Boland, Richard Murphy, Melvyn Bragg, Mary Lavin, Hilary Mantel, Thomas Kilroy, Tom Murphy and Tom Paulin among hundreds of other correspondents.


The people who populate the voices recorded in the letters to an author, as well as of those relationships developed and often broken along the way, are hugely significant. Now, for the first time, hundreds of letters sent to McGahern, from his formative years as a young writer in the late 1950s, through to time of his death in 2006, are fully catalogued and accessible. This correspondence also adds to and contextualises the recently published The Letters of John McGahern edited by Prof Frank Shovlin.


New York renown

One of the earliest letters in the archive is from the famed editor of the New Yorker, William Maxwell to assistant editor (and later fiction writer) Elizabeth Cullinan. “The John McGahern story [Strandhill, the Sea] went through.” Maxwell adds that “if you see any more of this calibre floating around Dublin, start them on their way to me”. Letters from Cullinan to McGahern are also interesting in revealing how much she was influenced by his stories. She states that she has “... just read Nightlines and I think it’s a perfect book”. Cullinan adds she met Mary Lavin in New York recently, who had also recently read McGahern’s Nightlines, and was convinced a character in the book was named after her.


A file of more than 40 letters from poet Richard Murphy to the McGaherns begins in 1965 with Murphy writing following the death of his own father. Murphy writes that he visited McGahern’s father and his sister Dympna at their home in Grevisk, Co Roscommon. Murphy clarifies that The Dark was not mentioned “out of courtesy” to McGahern’s father and stepmother. He adds the prescient observation that “the banning of the book did more harm to the country than to the book itself”.


The letters also dovetail with social and political news of the day. In March 1972, Murphy recalled a recent visit to Belfast, where he also met the Heaneys, saying [the city] “reminded me of London in the air raids, to look at the streets, most of them like mouths with bad teeth”. 


McGahern sent Murphy a copy of his The Leavetaking, prompting Murphy to reply in January 1975, in praise of McGahern’s voice, imagery “and the triumph of words over pain ... the many passages that I read and re-read, rejoicing in the style that can cut stone, are pure lyric poetry without mesh of metre or rhyme’s peal of bells.” Murphy’s allusion to stone here is revealing. The presence, form and indeed excavation of stone was a common theme in his work, including his 1985 publication, The Price of Stone & Earlier Poems.


The letters sent to an author are less often anthologised, if at all. Yet, they offer a remarkable cross-section through the literary and personal networks, friendships and relationships that intersect with the literary and creative worlds. How do other writers approach and critique McGahern’s writing?


What of their own self do they bring to the reading of his works? So much in these letters ties to the world, both physical and imaginative, out of which McGahern wrote and crafted his stories and novels.


Ian McEwan, for instance, wrote to McGahern in 2006 stating that he “would dearly love to come and see the land that lies around your imagination”.


Similarly, the French writer Michel Déon (who lived primarily in Ireland since 1968) wrote to McGahern in 1996, discussing the selection of short stories in the French edition of McGahern’s Les Créatures de la Terres et Autres Nouvelles, translated by Alain Delahaye. (The file of letters from Delahaye, the long-time French translator of McGahern’s work, is the largest in the archive from any one person.) Déon lamented that stories My Love, My Umbrella and Bank Holiday were not included before adding The Country Funeral meant most to him from living in rural Ireland where “these gatherings [funerals] are so genuine, so opened [sic] that they are mostly an occasion to break the stillness of country life”.


Paddy Swift (a close friend of McGahern along with his brother Jimmy) was a co-editor, along with David Wright, of X magazine, based in London. The periodical was the first to publish an extract of McGahern’s first novel, The End or the Beginning of Love. Writing on X-headed paper, Swift advises McGahern of the interest surrounding his early work from various publishers. Titles and plans for the book are discussed (The Grindstone was one less-alluring title suggested by Swift.) The novel was not published in the end, withdrawn by McGahern, and its manuscript resides in the archive at NUI Galway.


Elisabeth Schnack was a translator of many important works from Ireland, Britain and the United States from the 1950s through to her death in 1992. As well as works by McGahern, Schnack translated books by Mary Lavin, Seán Ó Faoláin, George Moore and many other Irish writers, into German. During her work translating The Barracks, Schnack wrote to McGahern regularly in 1971, asking questions and clarifying the meaning of single words and phrases from McGahern’s book, including “to save the turf — to carry it away?”, “they jigacted”, and “They might get a hell of a land — nothing? Or bad land?” Schnack visualised and researched the spaces of the lives and places of McGahern’s characters to such detail that she ended the letter by saying: “Now I’ll go to my police station and ask for expressions, and then I’ll find a footballer. The Catholic expressions I got explained by a Catholic friend.”


Barracks map

The exchange also reveals that Schnack requested, and received, a hand-drawn map of the floor plan of the barracks in Cootehall from McGahern. “I cannot start typing before I understand fully!” she exclaimed. McGahern did draw such a map, a visual record recalling the spaces and rooms of the barracks in which he lived and his father ruled.


As many of McGahern’s novels and stories are discussed throughout the vast files of letters, so too is his play The Power of Darkness. A version of Leo Tolstoy’s play of the same name, it was directed by Garry Hynes and first produced at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin in October 1991. Critics accused the play of being melodramatic and sentimental of “old Abbey” rural dramas. The plot centres on a dying wealthy horse dealer, Paul King, and the jealousies and scheming at play by those who surround the dying embers of this rural Irish patriarch. McGahern later acknowledged the language in the play “had been too colourful and idiomatic that it skimmed over what was at the heart of the play”. McGahern talked of “the old fear of famine”, “the confusion and guilt and plain ignorance that surrounded sex”, “the sad lusting after respectability” and singled out the Kerry Babies case as an example of the prevailing social attitude and the suffocating weight of public ceremony and religious doctrine.


Tom Murphy wrote to McGahern in the wake of the play’s panning by critics in 1991, incredulous at the reception, slamming the “famine mentalities” of those who dismissed it. The poet Robert Greacen further added, in a letter to McGahern: “I think every society is unwilling to face its problems/prejudices/intolerances. Ibsen found that out in his native Norway.” One wonders how a new production of the play might fare today in a very different Ireland from the one that first saw it.


Various publishers’ files include letters, contracts and royalty statements. A letter from Barrie and Rockliff publishers in London enclosed a cheque for £40, being the fee for the extract from The End or the Beginning of Love, published in X magazine, one of the first such payments for writing McGahern received. Royalty statements from Faber and Faber for 1966 reveal The Dark outsold The Barracks by almost two to one that year.

Dr Barry Houlihan is an archivist at NUI Galway

 

Tuesday, September 6, 2022

Time is running out to care for our precious resources

This week’s INM/Mediahuis Irish regional newspapers’ column.

Michael Commane
There’s a lot of gloom and doom out there.
The war in Ukraine trundles on, where every day people are being killed and maimed while all the time there is the potential possibility of a catastrophe occurring at a Ukrainian nuclear power station.

Across the world the China Taiwan issue is becoming an evermore worrying concern. And then lurking not completely in the background is Covid, which we are told, come winter, could strike again.

The Ukraine war is the main cause for the quadrupling of our energy costs and if China decides to invade or close off  Taiwan, over 90 per cent of the world’s chips are no longer available.

And on top of all the above there is our ever-growing profligacy.

The world’s resources are finite. This year’s Water Week, which took place in Sweden from August 23 to September 1, made it clear that the world must take great care of its water resources.  Right now China is experiencing one of its worst ever droughts and is on the brink of a water catastrophe. The Rhine is at an all time low and Italy’s River Po is in a perilous state.

Every time I go out my hall door I walk over my relatively new water meter. Of course I’m reminded of the furore and hullabaloo there was when Government tried in a ham-fisted way to introduce water charges. I was baffled then and am still baffled why I should pay the same price for water as my neighbour irrespective of how much I or they use. Just like electricity or gas, treated water is a limited resource and it costs money to get it to our homes.

Thousands of kilometres of those pipes are well beyond their sell-by-date and need urgent repairs
I bring all my recyclables to a nearby bring bank every week. I am astounded with the amount of plastic I use. Cheese, fruit, meat, fish, milk, almost everything seems to be wrapped up in some form or other of plastic. Everything about it is toxic.

I’m old enough to remember my mother going to the local shop and buying cheese, which the shop assistant wrapped up in greaseproof paper. The milk was delivered in reusable bottles to our hall door.

Wars are usually fought over wealth, power and resources. Isn’t it interesting that right now Russia is pounding away at the Donbass. Guess what, that’s where Ukraine’s lithium is concentrated. It is also a most industrialised part of the country.

And China might well have its eye on those valuable chips made in Taiwan that keep our fridges, cars and computers ticking over.

With electricity, gas and oil prices soaring, we have no choice but to cut back on our usage. I often think we have lost the run of ourselves. I was in a building in early September, the heating was on and the windows open. That sounds profligate and so it is. In Ireland we waste one million tonnes of food every year in a world where one billion people have not enough to eat.

Yes, the news is grim right now but it is also a clarion wake up call for all of us. Let’s all stop the culture of waste and profligacy. And tell Putin we can use less of his coal, oil and gas.

Monday, September 5, 2022

John Paul I - a Mikhail Gorbachev of the Catholic Church?

Yesterday Pope Francis beatified

Pope John Paul I in Rome.

John Paul I was pope from August 26 to September 28, 1978. The pope of a month. He was 66 when he became pope. Before being elected, Albino Luciani was Patriarch of Venice.

He was known as the smiling pope and in his short time in the job he made some significant changes. 

He used 'I’ instead of the royal we.  He initially refused to use the sedia gestatoria  until others convinced him of its need to allow himself to be seen by crowds. He was the last pope to use it. He was the first pope to refuse to be crowned. Instead of a coronation, he inaugurated his papacy with a "papal inauguration" where he received the papal pallium as the symbol of his position as Bishop of Rome.

Luciani had mixed feelings regarding the traditional stance on contraception. In 1968, as Bishop of Vittorio Veneto, he submitted a report to his predecessor as the Patriarch of Venice, Giovanni Urbani, that argued that the contraceptive pill should be permitted. It was agreed on by fellow Veneto bishops and was later submitted to Pope Paul VI. 

When Humanae vitae was released, Luciani defended that document. Nevertheless, he seemed to contradict that defence in a letter he wrote to his diocese four days after the encyclical's release. 

In May 1978, Luciani was invited to speak at a  conference in Milan to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the encyclical. He refused to speak at the event or even attend it.

Might Albino Luciani have been the Catholic Church’s version of Mikhail Gorbachev? The Russians waited far longer to return to their old ways than did the Catholic Church.

Sadly and unfortunately he was not pope long enough to show his style and to carry out much needed reform in the church.

While in Venice he wrote a monthly column for Messaggero di S. Antonio.

Below is an introduction to his letter to Charles Dickens and like any good journalist he admits to having difficulties in coming up with an idea.

Dear Dickens,

I am a bishop who has been give the odd task of writing a letter to some eminent person every month for the Messaggero di S. Antonio. I was pushed for time, around Christmas, and didn’t know whom to choose. And then I saw an advertisement in a newspaper to your famous books and thought to myself, ‘I’ll write to him. I read his books as a boy, and really loved them; they were filled with love of rtht poor and a sense of the need for social reform, they were warm and imaginative and human’. So here I am, bothering you.

First of all I remember your love for the poor. You felt it and expressed it splendidly, because, as a child, you lived among the poor.

Illustrissimi - The Letters of Pope John Paul I is a collection of Luciani’s letters to famous people of the past. It was first published in 1978. 

Archbishop Basil Hume writes a preface to the English translation published in 1978.

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