Fr Murtagh

The war to end all wars

2008-11-16T10:54:00.001-08:00

The war to end all wars

One of my regular chores at home in the family pub was to leave some customers home each night. One of our regulars whom I befriended was a veteran of World War I. He was one of the two hundred thousand Irishmen who were said to have fought in the ‘Great War’. He was an amputee who got around on two under-arm crutches on which he swung with great dexterity. Our area was not a place where people easily spoke of their time in the British Army despite the reality that many men from the area had fought with British regiments in both World Wars or in the Crimean and Boer Wars of the mid and late nineteenth century. The postmen in the area were almost always ex-servicemen, usually having served in World War Two.

My friend occasionally spoke to me of the circumstances in which he lost his leg. It happened at Armatiers, as in the risqué song of that time; ‘Mademoiselle of Armatiers’. The proper name of this Northern French town is Armentiéres. It was held by the British and was a popular rest-centre for troops. The war was almost over and he was confident that he had survived the worst of it. In October 1919, a month before the armistice was signed, he was shot and badly wounded in the knee. The conditions were such that an amputation of his leg from the knee down was immediately essential. It was carried out in the field, using the equivalent of a tenon saw, without anaesthetic, and with only a daub of tar as an antiseptic. When he reached a hospital that could treat him properly, the amputation was carried out again. His leg was amputated so high this time that he could never wear an artificial limb. He suffered from phantom pains in the stump of his leg for the rest of his long life.

He spoke to me briefly about life in the trenches. One of the images that remained with me was his description of sanitary conditions for the troops. He told me that they would light a fire occasionally, when it was safe or possible. The fire served many purposes by warming chilled and fatigued bodies and heating food. It also functioned as a de-louser. The soldiers would remove their shirts and shake them over the heat of the fire or immerse them in clouds of smoke, in an attempt to remove the parasites that clung so easily to their huddled bodies.

Despite his harrowing experiences, my friend went on to marry and raise a family. He even played football with the lads when he was younger. He was allocated the role of ‘goalie’ and given the concession of being allowed to save with his outstretched crutches in place of diving. Swinging on his underarm sticks, he could serve a mighty kick to the ball on the ground and for this long kick-out he earned the nickname ‘poc’ or ‘pocan’. He was a strong man, made stronger by the constant use of his upper body as he pivoted on the crutches which helped him to adapt to the loss of his leg.

My friend was a very moral person. He set high standards for himself and carried himself with great dignity and character. He confessed to me though, that he once had told a lie and had never been found out. Like many others who headed for the recruitment centres of the time, he had lied about his true age. The recruiting people may have turned a blind eye to this deceit in their hunger for volunteers. It may also have been hard to tell the true age of a teenager who was tall and strong. Whatever the circumstances, it had a happy ending when my friend got his old-age pension at the age of sixty-three, two years earlier than he was entitled to. He did not protest!

Another resident of the town who used to work occasionally in the fields with my father spoke of the father whom he had never seen. He told us that his father was a sniper in the Great War. His story was told in a distant, unconnected manner as he recounted to his fascinated audience of children how his father had been shot in the branches of a tree from where he had been sniping. The story-teller seemed to think that it was somehow amusing that his soldier-father had climbed a tree, only to be shot dead for his trouble. ‘Imagine climbing a tree to be shot…’

There was also the troubling story of the local who had taken the “King’s Shilling” and enlisted. By accepting the shilling he had agreed by law to join up. He went off to spend his ‘earnest’ money and got drunk. In his inebriated state he began to regret what he had earlier done and promised. He fell to hatching a plan to extricate himself from his legal contract and decided on a brutal escape. He went home and fetched the small axe that was commonly used to chop sticks for the fire. He then placed his right index finger on the half-door and with one deadly swing he removed his trigger-finger and left himself useless as a combat-soldier.

The ‘No’ days of November

2008-11-11T12:08:00.000-08:00

The ‘No’ days of November

I have never heard anyone refer to November as their favourite time of year. It is not a month that has obvious appeal. There is something transitional about this penultimate month. Maybe that is why we mark it primarily with rituals that remind us of the transience of life. It is too early to be thinking of Christmas and too late to attend to the tasks that are proper to autumn. There is little to do outside in the garden or in the fields other than wait for longer days in the New Year and dream of the joys of holiday-time. November is an in-between time; a ‘liminal’ or threshold time. This was expressed by the ancients in their belief that the membrane between this world and that of the spirits was especially thin around the seasonal marker that was known as Samhain.

The atmosphere evoked by a November landscape is one of melancholy. The fall of darkness in mid-afternoon presages the premature end that often blights the bright promises of daylight or of life itself. The greyness of November clouds as they hurry wind-blown across the sky suggests little in the way of silver lining. The thin, rising mists of morning and the dense fogs that refuse, for some time, to go away, throw blankets on our vision, turning our thoughts ever more inward, dampening our spirits and smothering our joy.

The landscape of November is one of rapid change. The stage-hands of nature busy themselves removing the props of autumn. A night of high wind and the back-drop of autumn leaf-art is swept into sheltered corners and piled up in compost heaps, leaving skeletal branches to face the winter unprotected. Those leaves that survive longest, fall like the last illusions of youth, inevitably, softly and for ever. Apple trees, burdened by their crop, brooding and bending like a woman in the last stages of pregnancy, give up their harvest to the fall and stand erect again as their wind-fallen fruit carpets the ground around to await the scavengers of winter.

The acoustics of November are muffled sounds on the ground and clear parting songs in the skies. The crunch of dry leaves underfoot or the snap of fallen twigs soon gives way to the squelch of mulched debris and dulled, mud-logged footsteps. If you are lucky or observant, you may see one of the defining images and hear one of the distinctive sounds of November; a formation of wild geese, honking their carefully choreographed way southward in perfect ‘V’ shape. As children we were told that if the geese happened to fly over a household, it forecast bad news. One member of the family would die that winter; the released spirit joining the migrating geese on the long journey to promised lands. Whatever about the folk-belief, the crisp sound of fallen leaves and the traffic of hurrying geese are warnings of cold days and nights ahead; of top-coat weather and of impending winter.

The sights and sounds of November combine as the bird-world congregates, on wires or in trees, in preparation for migration, or in bird-talk session, as they discuss season past and season present. The collective names given to these avian gatherings reflect the observations of centuries. A ‘parliament’ of rooks competes with a ‘murder’ of crows to caw and croak their complaints about bird-life and the ‘unkindness’ of raucous ravens that has gathered nearby.

The smell of rich autumn woodland in November carries within it the pregnant promise of continuity. Autumn-conceived mammals means spring-born cubs and calves with an optimum chance of survival as they face into next winter having grown strong through the summer. The rutting season has its own logic; the unchanging ways of life and of continuity. The smell of dampness is a November smell too. A freshly-flooded meadow gives off its cloying perfume in trapped droplets carried home on the back of unhurried cows as they head methodically to their parlour-stalls. In school cloakrooms, the rising steam from absorbent overcoats and caps seeps into the corridors and up the nostrils of vigilant teachers.

The thirty days of November are ‘no’ days. There is no warmth; no comfort; no sunshine or shade. There is no cheerfulness; no long days of abandon; no relaxation in the garden. There are no flowers; no delicate butterflies or buzzing, busy bees. There is no swelling fruit; no leaves unfolding; no messy births or hatching eggs. There is no shine – just sleety rain and flitting cloud and mushy snow. It is truly No-vember.

The reign of 'Good Pope John'

2008-11-03T01:46:00.000-08:00

Fifty years ago on 28th October 1958, on the twelfth count, the Conclave to elect a Pope chose the man who has since come to be known throughout the Christian world as ‘good Pope John’ or ‘Il Papa Buona’. He took the name ‘John’, he explained because his father was called John and most Pope Johns in the history of the church had not had long pontificates. The name was a little controversial because the last pope called John XXIII had been an Anti-Pope. The new Pope was aware of all this for he had been a trained historian and a history teacher as a young priest.

He was born Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli in Sotto il Monte, near Bergamo, in rural Italy in 1881. He was the fourth child in a family of fourteen. The domestic structure was that of an extended farming family. They made their meagre living by share-cropping. The future Pope was said to have remarked that their family was so poor that, ‘the children had no wine’. ‘There are three ways of ruining oneself’ he observed, ‘women, gambling and farming. My father chose the most boring’.

In his early days as a priest he had served as a Bishop’s secretary and as a teacher in the local seminary. During World War I he had been drafted into the Royal Italian Army as a sergeant, serving in the Medical Corps as a stretcher-bearer and as a chaplain. He put on the army uniform and, in what he later described as, ‘a moment of weakness on my part’, grew a fat, bristly moustache. After the war, in 1921, he was recalled to Rome, to work in a Curial Office. In 1925 he was consecrated Bishop and sent to Bulgaria as Apostolic Delegate. He took as his motto ‘Obedience and Peace’.

He later served in Turkey and Greece and in 1944 he was sent to Paris as a diplomat. 1953 saw him return home to Italy as Patriarch of Venice. A glimpse of the future Pope’s approach can be ascertained in an address he gave around that time. He said, ‘Authoritarianism suffocates truth, reducing everything to a rigid and empty formalism that is dependent on outside discipline. It curbs wholesome initiative, mistakes hardness for firmness, inflexibility for dignity. Paternalism is a caricature of true fatherliness. It is often accompanied by an unjustifiable proprietary attitude to one’s victim, a habit of intruding, a lack of proper respect for the rights of subordinates’.

Pope John XXIII was almost diametrically opposite in style, appearance and approach to his predecessor, the distant, ascetic Pope Pius XII who had appointed all but eleven of the cardinals who voted in his successor. Many people believed that John had been elected as a ‘papa di passagio’, a transitional pope. He was seventy-seven years old.

John XXIII’s personal warmth, his good humour and personal kindness captured the affection of countless people in a way his predecessor had failed to do. Once again he joked about his election to the papacy at such an advanced age. He was aware of the potential for cynical comment and exposure especially in the left-wing Italian press. He was a short man, overweight and heavy-featured, with a prominent, hooked Roman nose. He thought out loud saying that God surely knew from the beginning of time that he, John, would one day be Pope. Surely, he mused, ‘he could have made me a little more photogenic’. Despite these apparent physical drawbacks he became a media favourite because of his charism, his sense of humour and his exciting vision for the Church and for the world.

His sense of humour once led him to utter a famous reply when he was asked, ‘How many people work in the Vatican?’ ‘About half of them,’ he replied. He visited prisoners in a Roman gaol, telling them, ‘You could not come to me, so I came to you’. Another story told of how reporters descended on his bemused family following his election as Pope. One of his bachelor brothers looked unimpressed and a reporter asked him why he was so unexcited at his brother having been elected Pope. He replied that, in their part of the country, so many young men had become priests that it was, ‘bound to have happened sometime’. Good Pope John could also be emotional and tender in his dealings with crowds or with individual guests. Many recall his extraordinary capacity to establish an intimate relationship with tens of thousands without being mawkish. Once he asked the crowd in St. Peter's Square beneath his apartment window to take his caress home to their sleeping children.

Good Pope John could hardly have imagined the tide of change that has swept Europe and elsewhere since his election. He was part of that change but he was an unlikely liberal. His episcopal motto, ‘Obedience and Peace,’ does not suggest a radical outlook on life. What endeared him to people was his ability to receive them with grace and courtesy. Visitors often left his presence feeling that they were the important person rather than the Pope. He often greeted visitors saying, 'I am your brother Joseph' (Guiseppe was his second name). He was an eternal optimist too. His opening speech to the Second Vatican Council on October 11th 1962 contained the following pertinent words: ‘In the daily exercise of our pastoral office, we sometimes have to listen, much to our regret, to voices of persons who, though burning with zeal, are not endowed with too much sense of discretion or measure. In these modern times they can see nothing but prevarication and ruin. They say that our era, in comparison with past eras, is getting worse, and they behave as though they had learned nothing from history, which is, nonetheless, the teacher of life. We feel we must disagree with those prophets of gloom, who are always forecasting disaster, as though the end of the world were at hand.’

The Van Gogh experience

2008-10-26T13:06:00.000-07:00

When the infant child of Theodorus Van Gogh was born in the Netherlands in 1853, he was given the name Vincent. It was a name that had been used in the family for several generations. His grandfather was called Vincent and he had an uncle called Vincent. As was traditional in Irish society at the time, the first-born son was called after his paternal grandfather. The name Vincent had, however, been given to a child that had been still-born, exactly a year before. It was not uncommon then, in Ireland, or apparently in the Netherlands, to re-use the names of children who had died as infants. Vincent’s family had a long tradition of artists and clergymen. His father was a Minister in the Dutch Reformed Church and he himself was to spend a period as a Church Minister in a poor mining district.

It has been told that Vincent’s still-born older brother was buried near to his father’s church and given a memorial stone. It read simply that here had been laid the body of Vincent Van Gogh. The story relates how Vincent used to pass by and read the stone with these or similar words carved on it every time he attended his father’s church. It apparently had a profoundly unsettling effect on the youthful Vincent. He inwardly shuddered as he read the stone-carved words that appeared to announce his fate. The experience of seeing one’s own name in such a context is sometimes called the ‘Van Gogh experience’.

I inherited my now late uncle’s name and I have only to go to Kilcurry graveyard to have my own Van Gogh experience and see my name on a gravestone. Recently, however, I had the pleasant experience of blessing a new extension to one of our local Primary Schools and part of the celebrations included the unveiling of a marble stone into which my name had been carved as having blessed the building. It was not an unsettling experience but I found it thought-provoking to think that someone had carved my name in such a permanent manner, and that I would see, each time I pass by it in the future.

These broody thoughts were perhaps provoked by the themes of the season. My priestly preoccupations this time of year revolve around the celebration of All Saints and All Souls Days and the celebration of Hallow-E’en that precedes them. November is remembrance time in the rhythm of the Church Year. Our festivals and rituals are not a morbid remembering but rather a wholesome way of dealing with the realities of transient life so that we can return to life with greater depth and intensity.

The turning back of the clock to ‘winter-time’ and the resulting darker evenings provide their own cue to such thoughts of transience. Outside, the first sting of frost and the drift of fallen leaves into sheltered corners are nature’s way of reminding us of the perennial cycle of life and death. The decay of another year is signalled by the dropping of nature-polished chestnuts, the frenetic acorn gathering of shy squirrels and the artistry of a leaf canopy painted from nature’s palette in shades of yellow, rust and ginger. At night, the spirits of Hallow E’en are chased away by the whistle and the sharp explosive sounds of fireworks.

Back inside the school building there were few such thoughts. The students went through their well-practiced paces with the exuberant joy of the very young. The most junior pupils looked on with a mixture of puzzlement and joy, even as they joined wholeheartedly in the singing, stopping occasionally to yawn or to throw themselves into some gesture of uninhibited participation. They were burdened neither with the weight of years nor with heavy thoughts as to what the future might hold for them. An invited guest confided in me that she found the scene deeply moving, making her want to cry both for joy in the present moment and in tearful anticipation of the realities of life that lay ahead of the children.

As we congregated around the tea and sticky-buns afterwards, the talk was of Recession and of re-structuring our expectations, individually and collectively. In the world of economics it seems that nothing is written in stone but rather in sand. A high tide can erase the carefully-constructed castles that we built in our summer days. A storm can wipe the slate clean of all traces of our plans and projections. It seemed as if we were imaginatively walking by a representation of our future prominently placed before our eyes in a manner that we could not avoid. We had our collective ‘Van Gogh experience’ and we too shuddered inwardly.

A question of riches

2008-10-18T12:56:00.001-07:00

A question of riches

It was my first Halloween break from college. I had survived the first six weeks of term and now I was homebound. I fell into my previous routine and spent some of my time helping out in the family bar. It was a nervous time. The regulars did not know quite what to make of me. Could they curse in front of me like they used to do in such an unthinking way? Would I be the same person that they had known for the past six years as I served them drinks at all hours of the day and night? There was a lot of mutual sussing out to do.

At the end of a busy night my parents and I cleaned up the ‘shop’ as my late father insisted on calling it and we sat back to relax and discuss the day’s happenings. Eventually we got around to the subject of my new life as a seminarian in Maynooth. ‘So what are you learning’, I was asked. ‘Well’, I replied, “it’s a bit hard to explain”.

I told them that we were studying philosophy and by way of immediate explanation I said that one part of the course was called metaphysics. That required further explanation. ‘It’s the science of being as being’, I answered, repeating the stock, text-book definition. ‘What else do you study’, my father asked, hoping to move me off what was clearly incomprehensible to him. ‘We do history of philosophy as well,’ I added. On being questioned further as to the content of that, I told my parents that we were currently studying communism. ‘And I thought you went to Maynooth to learn how to say Mass,’ my father said, clearly confused by the strange ‘ologies’ that I was trying to explain to him and their relevance to my prospective life as a priest.

I had a bit of adjusting to do myself during that first term in Maynooth. Though I was clearly enjoying the experience of being at college and living away from home again, it had all been something of a surprise to me as it unfolded. I was astounded at first by the opportunities and the privileges that attending college brought. The amount of free time available to me as a student seemed outrageously generous at first. I had been used to working all hours and all seasons. In student life as I knew it then, I had a mere eighteen forty-minute lectures each week to attend and about six month’s holiday time throughout the year. I could not believe that people lived such charmed lives.

The philosophy that we studied as a prelude to the more religion-oriented theology of later years was certainly abstract at times but we had a very gifted teacher whose stated aim in life was to get us to think. He opened up our minds to questions and to possibilities that we had never entertained before. We were taught to ask questions and to think deeply about life as it manifested itself in the detail of our daily lives. After a few years of philosophy we graduated to theology. We began to study the scriptures and the laws of the church and the history of from where it had all emanated. It could be interesting, depending greatly on the particular teacher or lecturer, but it did not have the explosive power of the initial encounter with people and with theories that questioned everything to the point of absurdity and stripped life back to its bare meaning.

One of the effects of the current upheaval in the economic world is a return to questioning among the most affected. If securities can be so insecure and if banks, once considered solid and safe, are crashing like dominoes, then fundamental questions arise. Even religious ideas like the seven deadly sins get a mention occasionally as the effects of greed, corporate and individual, kick in. The uncertainty of life and of the material world has been highlighted by the sudden change from high economic growth to virtual stagnation. We appear to have gone from boom to bust in record time. The insecurity of it all has sent some people looking for answers to their questions and seeking security elsewhere.

The English poet Philip Larkin wrote a poem called ‘Church-going’. It tells of a visit he makes to a country church. He asks the question, ‘What remains when disbelief has gone?’ He speaks of a hunger within, for meaning and for purpose, that sometimes surfaces in times of crisis like this. The church, he says, is a serious place for serious subjects. It may even be considered, once again, as an alternative source of riches, not of the material kind. Meantime, Larkin writes, ‘It pleases me to stand in silence here; A serious house on serious earth it is,/ In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,/ Are recognised, and robed as destinies./ And that much never can be obsolete,/ Since someone will forever be surprising/ A hunger in himself to be more serious,/ And gravitating with it to this ground,/ Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,/
If only that so many dead lie round’.

A County Louth Harvest morning

2008-10-12T09:51:00.001-07:00

A County Louth Harvest morning

Driving across the harvest-shaved plains of Louth early one morning recently, my memories re-wound to another place and time when impressions of Autumn were first burnt on to the uncluttered tablet of my mind. The early-day mists were slowly lifting their veil, leaving beaded traces of their presence behind. A shock of whin-bushes on an uncultivated ditch wore white mantillas of finely-weaved cobwebs threaded with dew-drops. I was told at school by my fellow students that these morning dews were very powerful. One of their effects was that they could wash away freckles. I cupped my hands and caught a web-full of magic and smeared it all over my spotted face. The only thing that was washed away was my innocence. The morning vista, seen from the security of my car, appeared as an apparition of October past, a lost play-ground through which I once walked in rapt wonder.

Patrick Kavanagh was born in October 1904 and the month featured in some of his most finely-wrought images. In the epic poem called ‘The Great Hunger’, he spoke of October winds, ‘playing a symphony on a slack wire paling’. He associated the month with his father. What he wonderfully called ‘October-coloured weather’ seemed to remind him of the autumn of life as he had seen it unfold in the life of his late father. He wrote, ‘Every old man I see/ Reminds me of my father/ When he had fallen in love with death/ One time when sheaves were gathered./ That man I saw in Gardiner Street/ Stumble on the kerb was one,/ He stared at me half-eyed,/ I might have been his son./ And I remember the musician/ Faltering over his fiddle/ In Bayswater, London./ He too set me the riddle./ Every old man I see/ In October-coloured weather/ Seems to say to me/ I was once your father’.

As late as 1883, Pope Leo XIII started the practice of devoting the month of October to the Rosary. ‘The October Devotions’ became a fixture in the spiritual calendar especially for the rural Irish. For a few years, while we were still young and while my father was concentrating on farming rather than on life behind the bar, we used to say the Rosary in the evening time. We knelt on the oil-cloth covered floor with our elbows propped on about-turned, hard wooden chair-seats while our rosaries dangled underneath, teasing the kittens and amusing ourselves between ‘decades’. My father called the prayers with great speed, leaving no interval between the two stanzas of the Hail Mary/Holy Mary. It was the audio equivalent of a dog chasing its tail.

The prayer-baton was passed on from one to another with seamless contact as we took our turn, hoping that we would not forget the name of the ‘Mystery’; the number of prayers said and the text of the prayer. The beginning of the end was signalled by the recitation of the Litany of Loreto. This is a list of finely-crafted, poetic praise-names, titles and invocations to Our Lady. My father knew it off by heart. I was puzzled by the meaning of two of these invocations that happened to come one after the other. In my father’s verbal haste, ‘Mother most chaste’ sounded like ‘mother was chased’ and my childish, enquiring and shocked mind wondered why. ‘Mother inviolate’, the following invocation, was interpreted in the concrete imagery of childhood as ‘mother in violet’. Maybe, I thought, that’s why she was chased! Then there was the tail-end prayers or ‘trimmings’ as they were affectionately known. These were a set of ‘One Our Father and Three Hail Marys’, mostly for deceased relatives or for the contemporary concerns of the household. The ‘Hail Holy Queen’ wrapped up the prayer-package for the night.

What we lose in flowers during autumn, we gain in fruits and harvest. H. W. Beecher wrote, ‘October is nature’s funeral month. Nature glories in death more than in life. The month of departure is more beautiful than the month of coming – October more than May. Every green thing loves to die in bright colours’. It was a month of conkers and sycamore seeds as I remember it. There was a belt of sycamore trees sheltering our farmhouse from the wind that blew in over the lake. We threw the winged seeds into the air and watched them fall, whirring like a helicopter with only one blade. Chestnut trees were uncommon so we valued them greatly and travelled to collect their polished fruit. With boyish bravado we notched up conquests until a beloved conker finally split and fell from its knotted cord. Nature’s spray of berries and seeds, fruits and nuts could afford to be generous.

All seeds cannot fall on fertile ground. Mellow autumn allows us to stock-take and to prepare. This is what autumn teaches as its flaming trees light up our way into darkness and winter cold.

When a bank goes burst

2008-10-09T09:52:00.000-07:00

When a bank goes burst

On a cold Sunday morning, 16^th February, 1856, people passing along Hampstead Heath in London noticed a ‘well-dressed gentleman’ lying on a mound, as if asleep. This unusual sight in such a cold month excited curiosity in some of those passing by. Some people who moved closer noticed a small silver tankard that had fallen from his hand and lay nearby. A crowd soon gathered and the police were called as it became obvious that the ‘gentleman’ was quite dead. The police soon ascertained that he was an Irish Banker, John Sadlier. He had committed suicide. This was to prove not only a personal tragedy for the forty-something banker and his family but also for many thousands of Irish people as well.

John Sadlier was born near Tipperary Town in 1814. His family were wealthy by the standards of the time and place. He was apprenticed to a solicitor as a youth. He qualified and moved on to work in Dublin. Later, he moved to London and began a career as a parliamentary agent. Soon he began to try his luck in financial speculation. His initial success led him away from his chosen profession and he became a full-time banker. He returned to Tipperary and with his brother, he ran their highly successful ‘Joint-Stock Bank’. He appeared to have the Midas touch so farmers and smallholders from all over the area left their savings and dowries in the keeping of the trustworthy Sadlier’s Bank.

Banks make profits from taking in money and then lending it out at a greater interest than it pays out. Sadlier’s Bank took in lots of money but instead of lending it out to customers to finance the development of the farming industry, the bank found more exotic outlets for its loans. It invested in Italian, Swiss, Spanish and American railways and in many other ventures. On the reputation of the family bank and through his English contacts, John Sadlier was appointed Chairman of the London and County Joint-Stock Bank. Like many successful business and legal people, he set his eye on politics and was elected M.P. for Carlow in 1847. He later served as M.P. for Sligo. In 1852 he was one of more than fifty Irish Members who had been elected to the British Parliament, pledged to independent opposition, on a platform of support for the Tenant League. He also established a newspaper, ‘The Telegraph’, in Dublin in 1851 to put across his views to the public.

John Sadlier was a speculator and opportunist and when the prospect of a prestigious job as Junior Lord of the Treasury was offered to him, he defected to his political enemies along with a colleague called William Keogh and promptly made enemies of his erstwhile friends. In 1853 he lost a Court action taken against him by a Carlow elector who claimed that Sadlier had prevented him from recording his vote. Sadlier denied the charge but the jury gave the verdict to his accuser. He was forced to resign his post as Junior Lord of the Treasury. This was to be the turning point of his career.

He spent the next two years covering up from his former colleagues and acquaintances the trauma he was experiencing. It was during this time that he lost everything as his financial speculations went wrong and his political career hit the dust. Sadlier had been educated by the Jesuits at Clongowes Wood College. He was a solicitor, a politician, a newspaper proprietor and a defender of the Catholic Faith but above all he became a speculator in votes, land, railways and banks. He was, it seemed, a man of all talents. Ambition outweighed ability however, and Sadlier's disgrace as a politician and his failure as a speculator brought misery and shame to a great number of innocent people.

He tried to cover his tracks by forging shares in a Swedish Railway Company. He forged deeds of land that he was supposed to have acquired in Ireland. He forged cheques and other financial documents so successfully that no suspicion arose, yet, as to his true financial state. The end-game began when one wise investor checked out the deed of a supposed Irish property that had been given as security for a loan of ten thousand pounds. The house of cards began to collapse. Drafts from the Tipperary Joint-Stock Bank were initially not honoured in London but later they were again accepted. A troubled Sadlier brother, running the Bank back in Tipperary, telegrammed, ‘All right at all the branches. Only a few small things refused there. If from twenty to thirty thousand over here on Monday morning, all is safe.’ John Sadlier visited a Mr. Wilkinson in the City asking for help in his predicament. His financial friend had helped him before but this time the answer was in the negative. Sadlier’s reaction was to stride up and down the office pondering out loud on how, if the Tipperary Bank should fall, it would be his fault and it would be the ruination of thousands of people.

That night a distressed John Sadlier left his London home at midnight, telling his butler not to wait up for him. He took with him the small tankard that was found beside him the next morning, some knives and a phial of Prussic Acid. On Monday the news of his death reached Ireland. Country people stormed in to the towns, some armed with crowbars, picks and spades, thinking that if they could get in to the Branch Offices, they could recover their investments and hard-earned savings. Elderly people were confused and distressed. Some wept hysterically or prayed. The rich lost out too as Sadlier’s debts were revealed to be of the order of one and a quarter million pounds Sterling.

Though Sadlier had left intensely remorseful suicide notes reproaching himself for the ruin of others, he became notorious as the ‘prince of swindlers’. In his book, Manias, Panics and Crashes – a History of Financial Crises, Charles Kindleberger refers to John Sadlier as, ‘one of the greatest, if not the greatest, and at the same time the most successful swindler that any country has produced’. Sadlier’s story was to provide inspiration for Charles Dickens’ character, Mr Merdle in the novel called Little Dorrit.

This extraordinary story of the rise and fall of John Sadlier has its parallels in our own time of course. Its lessons on the fickleness of finance and of reputation and its commentary on the consequences and prevalence of corruption, greed and betrayal are remarkably contemporary, though it all came to head in Victorian Britain one hundred and fifty two years ago.

The power of example

2008-09-30T07:13:00.002-07:00

The power of example

Ciaran was a good man. He was a very good man. In fact, he was so possessed of the ideal of goodness that, in the latter years of his teen-hood, he decided to become a priest. His goodness unsullied by the world, he made his unremarkable way through the priest-making factory until he eventually lost his name and became, to all but the initiated few, simply ‘Father’. He was protected from emotional upheaval by a gruff exterior; a shell from under which the soft-belly of his sensitive personality seldom emerged. He clothed himself in the spirit of the age and in the sartorial conventions of the time; black suit, black shoes; clerical stock or waistcoat and white, or in later years yellowing collar, around his bullish neck. It was as if he had been poured into his priestly outfit. He seldom emerged into public gaze without this protective scaffold. It was as if it kept him together. Even when he attended football matches, he kept protocol from under the sweaty, sometimes displaced, dog-collar that, in times of high excitement, swivelled under his swarthy chin and out of line with his Adam’s apple.

He was a good priest. An obedient priest. The people whom he served did not rave about how lovable he was but they recognised integrity and high standards. His manner was forthright and occasionally blunt. This was marked up to his credit when he confronted the British Army during his long tenancy in one of the North’s many cauldrons of conflict during the drawn-out and under-named ‘Troubles’.

Ciaran was never burdened with the clichéd label of ‘popular local curate’. He lived in the shadow of another who enjoyed such enthronement in the hearts of the people. He endured the domestic chaos and confusion that often accompany such a gift or charism and kept the parochial ship afloat at local level; balancing the deficiencies of a chaotic junior curate and an increasingly senile parish priest. His life became the living proof of the old adage that all professions are a conspiracy against the laity. If only they knew the human limitations with which he lived. His inner life and the domestic realities of his own existence often grated, but he allowed the friction to polish rather than to corrode.

Ciaran was a stiff character, after the mould of the age in which he was set. He did not allow alcohol to dissolve his reserve, but he mellowed in the warm glow of friendship. His holidays were taken with annual regularity among his class-fellows but the occasional lay-person was taken into his confidence, only if they had signed up, inadvertently or otherwise, to a set of Northern Catholic, middle-class values. He was self-deprecatory in humour but none the less insightful.

His clerical progress was snail-like but there was some evidence of a luminous trail. He endured the financial strain with the help of his ever-supporting family in the far North, while he hacked his way through the thickets of a more Southerly Ulster terrain.

He was a model of priestly life for me in my most impressionable years. The ‘youth priest’ or the ‘Father Trendies’ of those turbulent times meant little to me. I had skipped the usual teenage experience; going from junior seminary or boarding-school straight into the frenetic and multi-tasking world of commerce. Later as a student-priest I used to visit him in his new parish. He had acquired the requisite number of years of service and had been appointed, in late middle-age, to a part of the locality in which he had long worked and to which history had bequeathed the term ‘Lower’ during a division of parishes in the political past.

Ciaran was never of robust health, though he looked and sounded solid. He was given to a persistent chest complaint that shook him like an erupting volcano at times. He died as a relatively young man. The Bishop visited and preached at his funeral, referring to him as ‘Father Ciaran’ throughout. This struck me as somewhat false. He was not a first-name priest. Parishioners knew him and respected him as ‘Father Surname’ rather than by the first-name conventions of a later, more intimate age, into which he would not have fitted.

Before he died, he attended my ordination, little appreciating, and sadly less informed of the impact he had had on my slowly-emerging sense of self. He was invited to the post-ordination hooley and to the top-table, from which he gave a short and characteristically blunt, humorous and piercing speech. He told me simply, in the full gaze and hearing of an expectedly adoring public at an ordination that, if I lived long enough and behaved myself, that one day, like him, I might be considered worthy enough to be Parish Priest of that part of the once-united parish now known as ‘Lower’.

The pursuit of happiness

2008-09-30T07:13:00.001-07:00

The pursuit of happiness

Money does not buy happiness, we are told, but as someone once added, ‘it helps finance the illusion’. Saint Paul reminded us in one of the most misquoted phrases of all time, that ‘love of money is the root of all evil’. The ‘pursuit of happiness’ as it has been phrased in the American constitution has always exercised the minds of humanity and lack of money and all that money can make available to us has commonly been seen as the chief barrier to happiness of life. The illusion is persistent. Money is equated with happiness. The message is that life is a lottery in which it ‘could be you’ and money could make you happy. People glibly speak of having, ‘a right to happiness’ often to cover up their own selfishness and the pain they cause to so many others in pursuing this bogus ‘right’. “As long as you’re happy” has become the mantra of justification for questionable behaviour of all kinds, even when that happiness is bought at the expense of so many others, especially fragile little ones.

We all know stories of individuals and families for whom money did not bring happiness. We have heard the stories of the ‘nouveau riche’, the recently wealthy, who make fools of themselves and bring only ridicule on themselves by their flashiness, shallowness and vulgarity. We have seen the effects of the ‘loads of money’ culture in the night-time faces of local lager louts and in the grainy footage of the security cameras that now necessarily sweep our streets for evidence of crime. The question of how we have been changed as a society by affluence or relative wealth remains to be properly investigated and adequately answered.

The Ireland of the middle decades of the last century has long been held up to ridicule. These social conditions from which we have so recently emerged have provided much fuel for critics, novelists, poets and playwrights. The society of that time has been held up to cruel scrutiny by a generation high on the righteousness that comes with hindsight. There is another side to the story of those times as a look at the crime statistics then and now reveals. Among other things, there existed a richness in the quality of community life back then which is conspicuously missing now. I wonder what judgement will history pass on our time of affluence, our biblical ‘seven years of plenty’ when it is held up to the light of judgement. These times of relative affluence, even as they appear to wane, are certainly preferable to times of poverty. As well as material benefits, many people now have a rich choice of work and career options. Nobody wants to go back to times of restriction and scarcity yet affluence often exacts a price and brings a poverty of a different kind in its wake.

Robert Service in his well known monologue, ‘Dangerous Dan Mc Grew’ has the hero speak of, ‘hunger not of the belly kind that’s banished by bacon and beans,/ but the gnawing hunger of lonely men for a home and all that it means’. The homeless of our own time and place are less likely to be those who do not have houses to live in but rather those who have lost a sense of what ‘home’ once meant. They are people whose lives have disintegrated because they have lost their families or whose families have lost them to the imprisonment of addictions of many kinds. Indeed, they may have the largest of houses or even a choice of houses and locations but no real sense of home.

We have been building and buying houses and neglecting to build homes. We are in pursuit of a happiness that remains elusive as a butterfly and find that we have captured a net full of stresses, anxieties and depression. Children often feel neglected by their busy parents, abandoned by their absent fathers, caught in the emotional crossfire of warring parents. ‘Big Brother’ and ‘Neighbours’ are more likely to be encountered on the television screen than at home or on the street. The luxury of innocence is missing from their upbringing. The symbolic and emotional richness of religious traditions that have been abandoned has not been substituted by anything meaningful, leaving a poverty of meaning and hope, a lack of direction or common purpose that sometimes leads to self-annihilation in suicide, a pollution by pornography and a crisis of identity which leads to fads and aberrations of many kinds.

Any society needs common beliefs, images and stories so as to hold together. Where each person insists on doing his or her own thing; claims everything as their right and nothing as their duty and blames everyone else for their failures, then society suffers. If the sickness which affects communities and society were diagnosed and tackled with the same vigour as the epidemic of Hospital bugs, for example, the results and the causes of the sick society might startle us. We can not continue to shift the responsibility for all that goes wrong in society on to government agencies, to teachers, social workers, nurses or others whose function it has become to pick up the pieces of our often crumbling communities. If we want the right to choose, then we ought to pay for our choices by taking personal responsibility for the effects of bad behaviour and for the fall-out from a consumer culture that ironically may result in eating us up.

Richness and poverty are not only measured in Euro or Dollars. Oscar Wilde defined the cynic as one who knew the price of everything and the value of nothing. Nothing grows forever and as the economic growth of our time comes to a slow-down we may have only our cultural, community and spiritual resources to fall back on. Like business, we need to diversify to survive; to cultivate wealth that is not of a monetary kind if we are to find an approximation of happiness; a society that holds together and an affluence that is truly sustainable. We often say that our health is our wealth. A healthy community is a not inconsiderable form of wealth too.

It’s a funny old world

2008-09-25T09:52:00.001-07:00

It’s a funny old world

The English writer G. K. Chesterton is often credited with the insight that people who stop believing in God do not cease to believe. Take away the supernatural and what you get is the unnatural. He wrote to the effect that those who no longer believe in something usually end up believing in anything and tolerating just about everything. He was speaking from experience as he had dabbled in the occult as a young man before settling into orthodox Christianity. Tolerance, he claimed, is the virtue of those who do not believe anything.

On browsing the bookshelves marked Self-Help in local bookstores, any observer can get a sample of the latest, most faddish therapies or the most popular gurus of the moment. It is curious that as some people have abandoned regular church-going and the practice of pious devotions, sales of candles have increased. As churches abandoned real wax candles for the fake, push-button, electrical variety, many people have turned their window-sills and shelves into veritable candle-racks. The use of candles, incense sticks and aromatic oils has made some homes look and smell like the local chapel following Sunday evening Benediction.

A glance through the columns of a local newspaper will assure you that superstitions of all kinds and magic incantations that are to be said ritually, are still alive, thriving in the spiritual vacuum. Some gullible people put their trust in lucky numbers to win the Lotto for them, just as others pay out good money to fortune tellers in a bid to put shape on their uncertain future. Even the ghosts of darker days have not quite gone away. Priests are regularly called to ‘bless the house for me sometime’ because the occupants are experiencing some kind of uncomfortable presence. It reminds me of the Connemara woman who replied to an anthropologist interviewer that she did not believe in fairies. She went on to add that just because she did not believe in them did not mean that ‘they aren’t there’.

Though heaven and hell have largely disappeared from the public consciousness, beginning way back in the 1960s, according to another English writer, David Lodge, the convicted criminals that tabloid newspapers love to parade are often consigned to ‘rot in hell’ by irate and presumably largely unbelieving readers. We have ‘neighbours from hell’ to remind us that hell can begin on earth and ‘holidays from hell’ to remind us that expectations of ‘paradise’ do not always live up to their glossy-brochured promises. The inheritance of Paradise as a reward for a life well lived has been replaced by the prospect of an expensive fortnight in Paradise Hotel or on Paradise Island in the present, as soon as the holidays can be lined up. The all-knowing Internet offers no less than twenty million ‘hits’ or pages of information that link the words paradise and holiday in their promotional material. The really virtuous, the supremely talented or the super-rich can perhaps look forward to a holiday home there or to retirement in such an earthly Eden. The reality seldom lives up to the promotional hype and the nearest we get to an earthly paradise is often found nearer home.

The drama of final judgement or saving one’s soul no longer troubles even the most sensitive of minds yet our society has never been more condemnatory or judgemental. We have high-cost tribunals that run for decades and investigative journalists shining the glaring light of judgement on every aspect of an offender’s life. We are encouraged to be non-judgemental in our approach to the trials and difficulties of life, even as so many people slump in front of ‘Reality Television’ and use their mobile telephones to pass sentence and judgement on the self-worshipping participants. The thumb signal that once determined the fate of Roman gladiators now determines the fate of those who take to the public stage, not with a traditional thumbs-down sign but with the button-depressing mechanics of text messaging.

Relics of the saints have been replaced by show business or football memorabilia as contact is sought with the alternative gods of celebrity culture. There is no shortage of adoring followers who are willing to paint, pierce or parade themselves in the team colours or with the logo of the sect. If you get tired of offering adulation to others, then you will be counselled to believe in yourself and all things will become possible. As Margaret, Lady Thatcher said wistfully on her unwilling way out of Downing Street and high office, “It’s a funny old world”.

The pursuit of happiness

2008-09-25T09:50:00.000-07:00

The pursuit of happiness

Content to be solitary

2008-09-09T13:38:00.000-07:00

Sir Thomas More, now a canonised Saint, spent the last months of his life imprisoned in the Tower of London. His adult life had been spent immersed in the affairs of the world. It was an affair of a different kind that led him to famously clash with his master, King Henry VIII, on a matter of conscience. As a prisoner, he made good use of his time preparing for the inevitable, for he was other-worldly too. In a ‘Godly Meditation’ written while he was a prisoner in the Tower in 1534, he wrote, ‘Give me the grace, good God, to set the world at naught; to set my mind fast upon thee and not to hang upon the blast of men’s mouths; to be content to be solitary; not to long for worldly company; little and little utterly to cast off the world and rid my mind of all the business thereof; not to hear of any worldly things but that the hearing of worldly phantasies may be to me displeasant’.

With these sentiments in mind I took off recently for my annual retreat from the ‘business’ and ‘phantasies’ of the world. I am generally content to be solitary but it is much easier to enjoy the solitary life when the surroundings are different, pleasant and stimulating. For that reason, I took myself out from under the ever-present blanket of cloud that is the Irish sky this summer and I holed-up on the side of a mountain in Austria. The ‘Sound of Music’ scenery, the long walks and the opportunities for exercise made the likelihood of getting ‘cabin-fever’ a little less. The prospect of even a little sunshine lifted the veil from my heart.

I took a room with a small balcony within which I could try to escape “the blast of men’s mouths”. These quarters became my ‘cell’ for the week. As wise old Abba Moses told his monks, ‘when you remain alone and in quiet, your cell will teach you everything’. My balcony, about two metres by one metre, was carpeted with artificial ‘graveyard’ grass; an unintentional reminder of mortality.

The grass on the slopes of the needle-sharp mountains is the ‘real thing’ and this time of year, it is being harvested as hay for winter fodder. This harvest-time is marked by community celebrations in which even the tractors go in procession, decked out and decorated with garlands and ribbons. The mountains dominate everything in the valley, including, it seems, the architecture and even everyday artefacts. The houses are tall and steep-roofed, and make good use of the wood from the pointed, tall pine trees in the local forests. The church steeple is one of the tallest, finest, thinnest steeples I have ever seen; Even the beer-glasses are tall and fine. The valley is a little like an outdoor Gothic cathedral, drawing the eye ever upward and skyward, if you can take your gaze off the window-boxes and overhanging profusions of flowers.

At ten to nine in the morning, the sun has climbed a mountain-side and makes its triumphant appearance over the summit on the Eastern skyline. The psalm that I am reading from my Breviary describes the sun, in a most memorable image, as, ‘coming forth like a bridegroom coming from his tent’. The clouds give way eventually and the mist patches dissolve. Looking out from the side of the valley, it is possible for a while to see clouds above and below; to live with one’s head in the clouds; to shake hands with a passing cotton-wool cumulus. The bells of the local Catholic Church ring out a rhythm to the day and from its ancient tower, they call attention to its timeless, tabernacled, tenant. In my cell I have established a pattern to the day; a routine that helps one day roll into another. This is a neat and ordered environment, conducive to putting shape on the dis-ordered interior life. Mornings are for matters of the mind; afternoons for exercise and exploration and evenings are for rest and absorption. I have managed to make my usual world ‘go away’ and I remain ‘content to be solitary’ in a strange place.

It is a different world and a long time to that of London Tower in 1534 and the circumstances in which More found himself. The only constant is the struggle of the human heart to replace the phantasies of fallen human nature with something better, something more redeemed. In another meditation, written around the same time called ‘A Devout Prayer’, Sir Thomas used an image that had become ever too familiar to him. He prayed that his ‘lukewarm fashion or rather key-cold manner of meditation’ might be replaced by ‘warmth, delight and quickness’ of spirit. His involuntary retreat from the world and the wisdom of his cell had clarified for him the inner dispositions or ‘minds’ that were most to be desired; ‘more’, he said, ‘to be treasured’ than all ‘the treasure of princes and kings’… ‘were it gathered and laid together all upon one heap’.

Getting to know you

2008-09-07T04:38:00.001-07:00

In 1992 I began a course of study in Dublin that lasted three years. As with many life-events I did not expect the path of my existence to be changed by it. The course was a challenging one that involved staying and studying in Dublin for three summers and travelling to seminars twice a week there for the three-year duration. It has been said that friendships formed in adversity are strengthened by common experience and struggle. Time takes its toll on all friendships but I have remained in close contact with one of my friends from those days. Out of the dozen or so participants in the course, I became close to one of the group who was introduced to me as Hyacinth.

Hyacinth turned out to be male and African. In the course of our friendship we have discussed many differences and some similarities in our cultures and experiences. As the years went by and we resumed our usual duties as priests in our respective settings, I came to know some of his colleagues and more recently, his family. About ten years ago we began an arrangement that allowed a priest from his group to study in Dublin for a two-year spell and work alongside Irish priests including myself. Over the intervening years, six priests have spent time living and working in an Irish parish setting. We have shared a house; cooperated in pastoral assignments; discussed the ways of the world over many meals and began to see the same world through each other’s eyes.

There were periods of adjustment for both of us. The African ‘brothers’ had to adjust to the Irish weather and to the seasonal and erratic nature of our climate. The ‘rainy season’ in Ireland lasts rather longer than in Africa. Our ways of communicating can often differ considerably. The Nigerians, in this case, are given to up-front, direct statement. The Irish are known historically for giftedness with language, to the point where it is hard to pin down what exactly we are saying - or omitting. There is also the occasional problem of local usage, slang and accent. Hiberno-English is a very different language from the English of the text-book. ‘No bother’ needs translation just as much as the African, ‘no, please, thank-you’. I have had to learn the difference between ‘lettuce’ and ‘letters’ in African pronunciation and to cut out colloquial expressions that could be potentially misleading, like saying ‘this weather’ when I mean ‘now’.

The liturgy and pastoral practice of the Irish are foreign to our visitors despite the genesis of their faith in the work of Irish missionaries. The contemporary Western disdain for religion and embarrassment in its practice is in sharp contrast with the unashamedly religious outlook of other generations of our own and of the present populations of other parts and religions of our world. Gaelic sports need some explanation to nations that have been reared on soccer as does our Irish preoccupation with English League Football and our simultaneous disdain for the English National team. The central place of alcohol in our diet and in our social life is not shared by most Africans. Our villages are often centred on pubs while their social life revolves around the ties of family and community and the mutual obligations that bind them. Mobile telephones could have been invented for Nigerians. The constant need for connectedness and networking leaves them vulnerable to the charms of telecommunications companies.

‘The white man has the watch and the African has time’. Time is elastic for many of the Nigerians that I have worked with. It’s not an unusual trait to find that time and precision are mutual opposites in some people’s minds. It is only noteworthy when it affects everybody in an ethnic group. Our own more senior country relatives thought not in hours or days but in seasons. Contemporary western living has taught us the value of efficiency and productivity and we have collectively become time-conscious to a degree that can be unsettling. There is something of a parting of the ways between the Western mindset and that of the African, or those of developing continents, when it comes to how we use our time. The modern mindset of constant self-critical analysis; the search for excellence and best practice that we associate with the West are often lost on other cultures.

The foreign priests I have worked with see and deplore our waste and extravagance. They decry the growing coarseness of our culture and the neglect of community and family responsibilities. At worst, immigrants from other cultures treat the West as a giant honey-pot from which they can draw at will. This can have the effect of inciting resentment when a people’s hospitality is thought to be abused or when their generosity or credulity is stretched. Overall, however, I found that the non-nationals I met and worked with have been honourable and responsible. As we shared the experiences of growing up in our respective cultures it became apparent to me that many of the same social dynamics occur in all traditional societies. There is obviously much more that unites us than divides us. Issues around immigration, development aid and political malpractice will always be problematic for societies that are affected. The way forward is not one of insult or exclusion but of carefully and respectfully regulated mutual relations.

Getting to know you

2008-09-07T04:36:00.000-07:00

Getting to know you

Overall, however, I found that the non-nationals I met and worked with have been honourable and responsible. As we shared the experiences of growing up in our respective cultures it became apparent to me that many of the same social dynamics occur in all traditional societies. There is obviously much more that unites us than divides us. Issues around immigration, development aid and political malpractice will always be problematic for societies that are affected. The way forward is not one of insult or exclusion but of carefully and respectfully regulated mutual relations.

Good-Bye good men and women

2008-08-24T09:39:00.000-07:00

Good-Bye good men and women

Many Irish people grew up with ‘Africa’ magazine as the only glossy publication in the house. It used to be said that the spittle-wetted cover of ‘The Sacred Heart Messenger’ was used in times of scarcity as a source of alternative lipstick but it was no competitor to ‘Africa’ or to ‘The Far East’ for coverage of exotic places and happenings. The latter magazine is the publication of the Columban Fathers. Africa did not seem quite as far off as the ‘Far’ east and though we were not familiar with fellow Africans or with their various cultures, we felt allied to them somehow through the work and stories of our missionaries and through our regular penny-drops into the mite-box at school. ‘Darkest’ Africa was a whole new world and we were to the forefront in developing it.

Legions of Irish sisters, priests and brothers offered their lives in the service of the ‘missions’ up to and during the middle decades of the last century. It was an option for every educated and serious young Catholic at the time. Little Ireland was taking on the world, determined to share its faith and its enthusiasm for spreading that faith. We even took on the conversion of colossal China, through the early work of the Columban Fathers, while they were still known as ‘The Maynooth Mission to China’.

I took a walk today through the demesne of the Saint Patrick’s Missionary Society, as the Kiltegan priests are formally known. Its Irish headquarters or mother-house is located in a very beautiful, secluded rural setting in County Wicklow, near the eponymous village of Kiltegan. My guide told me that it was once the home of a very rich Member of Parliament. It later passed into the hands of a wealthy tea-merchant from Newry, John Hughes, who donated it to the fledgling Society. It is currently a busy complex of buildings from which the Society is administered and to which some elderly missionaries return.

My mission to Kiltegan was to bring some visitors from Africa; two Nigerian priests who had trained or worked alongside the now ailing Missionary Father whom we proposed to visit. His illness has made him obviously weak yet he was strong enough to engage us in a long discussion on the state of the church and the world, to listen to the latest news from Nigeria and to guide us around the complex.

We began in the dining area where a table had been thoughtfully marked ‘Reserved’ for us. The buildings in this area are light-filled, airy and spacious but the apparatus of institutional life somehow invades. We drank soup from metal soup-dishes and scraped butter from our individually wrapped butter-pieces onto our spuds. Memories of past institutions and of washed-up canteen-food flooded in.

Afterwards we took a walk to the community graveyard. It is a simple area with rows of military-style, small crosses marking the graves of fallen comrades. I joked about graveyards being full of ‘indispensable’ people but I could not dispel the chill that pervades cemeteries, even on a summer afternoon. My guide wanted to introduce me to each of the characters interred in their same-size plots and to the life-stories that brought their paths to cross in far-flung places. Silently I wondered what it must be like to walk a graveyard that awaits you or to be living on borrowed time. It used to be said that an unexpected shiver was the result of someone walking on your prospective grave. I shivered for my friend as we passed the next available plot.

Along the way we met other people whom we knew or with whom we had mutual acquaintances. Ireland is a land of connectedness and it is that inter-relationship of peoples that is most comforting to return to. My friend knew that he would not be returning to the active life that he once knew or to the culture in which he had immersed himself in Africa. Even parting with him after a short stay became poignant. There was an inevitable air of finality about our leave-taking. How do you say goodbye to a man who is slowly saying goodbye to the world?

There is the added sadness for these men in the student-empty seminary buildings that once buzzed with activity and idealistic young life. The centre of activity has moved continent now and the Society has taken the decision to admit African students. A few have been ordained already and there are many in the training process. The spirit has blown ‘where it wills’ and the Irish valleys bear no vocational fruit these days. The harvest is elsewhere and the labourers are no longer overwhelmingly European. Irish missionaries, with the influence and goodwill that they generated for us across the globe are a disappearing brand. The loss is our

Wee Hughie

2008-08-17T12:05:00.000-07:00

He's gone to school, Wee Hughie,/An' him not four./Sure I saw the fright was in him/When he left the door./But he took a hand o 'Denny/An' a hand o' Dan,/Wi' Joe's owld coat upon him -/Och, the poor wee man!/He cut the quarest figure,/More stout nor thin;/An' trottin' right an' steady/Wi his toes turned in./I watched him to the corner/0' the big turf stack,/An' the more his feet went forrit,/Still his head turned back./He was lookin',/would I call him -/Och me heart was woe-/Sure it's lost I am without him,/But he be to go./I followed to the turnin'/When they passed it by,/God help him, he was cryin',/An', maybe, so was I.

That sentimental old poem by Elizabeth Shane summed up the feelings of many parents and pupils as school began for the first time or resumed after the summer break. Forty-six years ago I made that first journey to school on the day of my fourth birthday. Primary School was a small, two-teacher school in the heart of the countryside, in a place called Anamar. It has since become well-known as the birth-place of the late Cardinal Tomás Ó Fiaich. There were only thirty or so pupils enrolled at any given time during those early years. The youngest of us were driven there in the morning while some of the older pupils cycled. Many of us walked home in the evening. The journey home could be just as instructive as the school lessons. We learned a lot about the natural world as we explored the hedgerows and streams and we learned something of human nature too as we interacted on our homeward journey. Life got progressively more challenging as we moved up the ranks from P1 to P7. The last few years, for the chosen few, were spent cramming for the ‘11 plus’ exam.

Having passed the ‘11 plus’, I arrived at boarding school in Saint Colman’s College, Newry armed with a sheaf of government grants, my passport to ‘Grammar School’. I got off to a bad start by taking a detour to Daisy Hill Hospital on the night of my first full day there, suffering from appendicitis. I owe my life to a priest who had been expelled from Nigeria, where the Biafran war was then raging, and who was now teaching in a temporary capacity in the college. He was the only one who believed that my pain was anything more than travel sickness or homesickness. It was 1969 and the North was in turmoil. I arrived in hospital having made a detour through Bessbrook to avoid the burning buildings in Newry City centre that night.

I still remember my feelings of despondency as I made my way back to school over the next five or six years. Being a boarder, I travelled home every six weeks or so. Returning to school after a weekend break could be traumatic. I can still visualise the lights of Newry in the hollow as we drove down the Camlough Road on a Sunday night in my father’s Austin Cambridge car. I can still smell the lockers that used to hoard our apples and cheese and the ‘Marvel’ dried milk for our illegally secreted cereals. We also brought eggs, jam, and sugar to sweeten our daily diet.

Soon we settled back into routine and began counting down the days of another term. People ask me sometimes whether I think it was a good or a bad experience for a young student. We entered at eleven years of age. It was certainly deficient in terms of what might now be termed the inner life of a child. Little emotional or pastoral care was evident. What was available was well disguised. The emotional landscape was more desert than oasis. The benefits it did offer were discipline in life and in study and an ability to care for and organise yourself. It was a television-free routine, with none of the distractions of home or of the outside world. We spoke of the college as the ‘house’ but there was little sign of the comforts of home. I left the ‘house’ during the first term of my ‘A’ Levels, abandoning my studies of English, Irish and Spanish. I believed that I had turned my back on school for the last time.

Six years later I went back to education. I entered Maynooth only to discover that ‘Colman’s’ had been merely a pale imitation of the master pattern in Kildare. I was twenty two years of age and I was going back to school. The language of the ‘house’ remained but the terms of our course of education had changed. We read philosophy. Instead of compositions we submitted assignments. We had professors instead of teachers. We prepared theses instead of essays and we had seminars in place of study groups. There was still solemn silence at night time, in theory at least, but study was no longer communal. In secondary school we had two study periods each evening, ‘first steed’ and ‘second steed,’ together lasting over three hours. Now we were expected to study alone. At first I thought this university business might be beyond me but I soon realised that like most ‘mature students’ I was highly motivated and I soon fell into the routine of ‘Third Level’. I left six years later thinking that this was definitely the end of going back to school. Six years later I went back to school yet again. This time I studied full time during the summer months and part-time during the rest of the year for a period of three years. I experienced the trauma of unfinished assignments and ‘comprehensive’ exams all over again. I also knew the joy of learning as an adult.

Back to school is no longer the prerogative of the young and staying at school for much longer than in the past has become the norm. Primary school children generally love their schools and teachers. The fear and the emotional distance of the old ways are largely gone, unmissed and unmourned. There is a spring in Wee Hughie’s step nowadays as he sets out to school.

We're all Green Fools now

2008-08-10T09:35:00.000-07:00

There has been a great and welcome revival of interest in Mother Nature during the last decade or so or in what we now call the environment. Motivated by fear of what we might be doing to destroy the creation that sustains us, people have reluctantly begun to examine their lifestyles. We have become aware of what is termed our ‘carbon foot-print’ or our individual contribution to the pollution of the atmosphere. Pollution at ground level continues to be a problem despite the best efforts of teachers and schools to persuade pupils to respect their surroundings and living area. The consumption of drugs or illegal substances is another unacknowledged form of pollution and disrespect for creation. As for acknowledging or dealing with the effects of the pollution that is to be found or in print or visual media, or the more general pollution of the human spirit; that day has not dawned yet.

Despite all this emphasis on the created world or environment, there is a radical disconnection with the cycle of the seasons and the rhythm of rural life. The flight from the land that comes with industrialisation has largely untied us from the seasonal markers by which our ancestors found their pilgrim way through life. It has also disconnected us from a profound sense of awe and mystery when faced with the natural world, as seen on a starry night, or during a summer thunderstorm, for example. The daily miracles of the soil, that turn rainwater into wine over the course of a harvest season, or that turn delicate-shelled eggs into powerful eagles in the span of a few months are seldom seen or reflected on by a generation that remains voluntarily chained to its favourite technology-toys.

One of the greatest markers of the season in this locality was what the Church calls the Feast of the Assumption or what was known commonly as ‘the fifteenth of August’. It may have had its origins in a Celtic harvest festival called Lúnasa which in turn was absorbed by the Christian tradition of Our Lady being the first to fully share in the harvest of redemption. It became a great marker of the natural cycle and of the social season and was celebrated with Patrúns and festivals all over the country. In the North, it took on the form of an alternative community celebration, being the Catholic counter-response to the Twelfth of July. Nationalist bands often paraded through Northern towns, indistinguishable from their Orange counterparts other than in their colour-code and Queen.

The village of Blackrock became as Mecca or Rome for the day for those who lived within striking distance. Many of its visitors would have fulfilled their sense of religious observance by attending Mass and by visiting the local shrine at Lady Well beforehand. They may even have attended the Patrún the night before when the water in the well was said to rise miraculously. Observing the Patrún was a fairly tame practice by then, though it had not tamed sufficiently to have the blessing of the local clergy that it once again enjoys.

Patrick Kavanagh wrote humourously and beautifully about the practice in his short story ‘Pilgrimage’, taken from ‘The Green Fool’. ‘Every year all the neighbours around me went there and carried home with them bottles of its sacred waters. These waters were used in times of sickness whether of human or beast. Some folk went barefoot and many went, wearing in their boots the traditional pea or pebble of self-torture…The horse-cart was filled with people, three seat-boards, which seated three fat women, the driver, two children and myself. One of the fat women suggested that there wasn’t sufficient room on the seat-board. Beside me was a pile of bottles of all sizes shapes and colours…The field of the Well belonged to the Protestant Rector and to get to the Well, there was no right of way. The Rector was a bit of a bigot, as was everybody else at the time for that matter. He locked the gate and to reach the Well, it was necessary to climb over a brambly hedge. Each briar wound inflicted on a woman’s face or leg meant a curse for the Rector’.

‘Like medieval pilgrims, some were going round on their bare knees making the Stations. Some others were doing a bit of courting under the pilgrim cloak. There was a rowdy element too, pegging clods at the prayers and shouting. A few knots of men were arguing politics. I overheard two fellows making a deal over a horse’. Kavanagh goes on to tell of “Bullah-Wullah’s” mother, who was a prominent character at the proceedings and of the feast that the nocturnal pilgrims enjoyed as the ceremonies ended as they proceeded home by moonlight. On return, he described the pilgrims as, ‘weary in body and mind but in soul, perhaps as fresh as rain-green grass. Our Lady was a real Lady and human. She was not displeased, I knew, because some who pilgrimed in Her name were doubters and some cynics and a lot of vulgar sightseers. She is kind and no doubt she enjoyed the comic twists in the pageant around Lady Well’.

Rain, rain, go to Spain

2008-08-04T08:26:00.000-07:00

‘Rain, rain, go to Spain. Never show your face again’. We all remember chanting the rhyme, with the magical hope of childhood, even if we edit out the remembrance of rainy days in summers past. The incessant, holiday-time rain of this summer is weighing down the spirit of even the hardiest home-bird here in Ireland. Even the trees are dropping leaves prematurely, unable to carry the weight of so much surface water. The branches of the leafiest trees are bent towards the ground like an old person carrying the burden of many seasons, showers and years. The waxy ivy leaves, by comparison, are shining and confident looking, sparkling in the occasional shaft of sunlight from their parasitical anchors in old masonry walls or wrapped around passing tree-trunks.

The crows line up on the chapel roof during a lull in the rain. Their heads are bent low as if in prayer to the God below. Their sodden plumage dreeps off the most recent shower as they meet in conclave on the ridge-tiles. They fly off, feathers unloaded, sheltering and roosting in at the premature fall of darkness. A resident wood-pigeon, plump and purple-necked, the bishop of the bird-world, scoops up drinking water and maybe some solid food as well, in its pale beak from the now semi-permanent puddles that are keeping guard along the avenue. The blackbirds and their mottled cousins, the thrushes, move in quickly between the showers to graze the mown lawn for an easy catch. What they lose in time out during the downpours, they gain in the ready supply of baby-food available nearby following the rain.

The parish cat has hardly moved for the past two days from her favourite cushioned chair in the enclosed porch. Only a passing blue-bottle tempts her into hunting mode or the patter of bird-feet on the Perspex sheets above. Cats famously do not like water, whether it comes falling from above or is accidentally fallen into. The only washing she gets is carefully administered as she performs her feline ablutions after eating, tongue-bathing her fur and paw-wiping her cat-face. She snoozes between meals, dreaming fitful cat-dreams, then stretching out and yawning conspicuously afterwards.

The potato-farmer seems happy enough. His dreams, as he props himself up on a grave-stone, are of high yields and tubers filling out as the rainwater easily penetrates the furrows of his carefully cultivated field. ‘Happy the corpse it rains on’ says a passing funeral-goer as the mourners negotiate narrow graveyard pathways, made slippy by the rainwater and the melancholy human traffic they carry. ‘Have ye no say at all with the man above?’ asks a teasing acquaintance. The skies darken and off-load their latest cargo in sheets of driven rain as we encircle the earth-wound that is the opened grave. A mushroom of umbrellas shoots into action; their kaleidoscope of colours and advertising logos defying the greyness of life lived under a blanket of rain-clouds and exile in this ‘valley of tears’.

The village has gone into premature hibernation. Rain has stopped play in the public parks and even the most-pampered dogs go unwalked. A sullen, sodden blanket has been thrown over the place, smothering all outdoor activities and all effervescence of spirit within. The traffic moves more slowly as visibility narrows and rivers of rainwater wash the cigarette butts from the pavements. Radio advertisements continue to tell us how precious water is and warn us not to waste it by watering our lawns - as if! Despite the high humidity and the general balminess of the weather, sitting-room fires are kindled and stalled heating systems are sparked into roaring action again as coats and clothes are dried out in time for the next ‘wettin’. ‘Rain rain, go to Spain…’

The full text of the rhyme apparently is, ‘Rain rain go away, / Come again another day. / Little Johnny wants to play; / Rain, rain, go to Spain, / Never show your face again!’ The origins of the words lie in the story of the Spanish Armada. During the reign of Queen Elizabeth I (1533-1603) the English and the Spanish were in constant rivalry. This came to a head with the launching of the Spanish Armada in 1588. The Spanish ships, about one hundred and thirty in number, set out to invade England. They were repelled by the English fleet under the command of Admiral Lord Howard and the Armada was defeated. Only about half of the original number of Spanish vessels returned to Spain. The attempt failed because of the less cumbersome English fleet and partly because of the rainy weather which helped to scatter the Spanish fleet. Thus the origins of our ‘rain rain, go to Spain’ lamenting and pleading as we pack the summer suitcases and the Irish Armada heads for sunny Spain.

Making a show of yourself

2008-07-28T11:58:00.000-07:00

To understand the Irish way of life it is necessary to know what ‘making a show of yourself’ means. I have been asked countless times why we Irish appear so reticent in the ‘chapel’ and so exuberant at a football match or in the pub following a few drinks. The fact that we do not ‘celebrate’ when we attend liturgies appears out of character to those who are looking on at us as cultural outsiders. Part of the explanation is our national horror of ‘making a show of ourselves’.

It has been said that the big sin of native Gaelic culture was to put your head over the social parapet. An immediate cry of ‘Who does he think he is?’ would inevitably go up. It is an attitude that has rooted itself in our way of life; that is hard-wired into each of us who is culturally assembled in Ireland. Instead of admiring the volunteer who agrees to be spokesperson for the group or encouraging shy individuals to take their place or have their say at the communal meeting, the cultural consensus is to round on them with mockery, satire and verbal fire. ‘Slagging the life out of them’ is the contemporary name of the sport and ‘having a hard neck’ is the only legitimate defence.

‘Would ye look at yer man? He’s in everything but the crib’. The foolhardy person who ventures into public view generally knows the social price that he or she may pay. Another generation used to say “He is in everything but the Women’s Sodality” and if the boot or shoe was on a feminine foot; “She is in everything but the Men’s Confraternity”. Even venturing a seat further up the chapel could leave someone open to this kind of ridicule. As the changes in the liturgy took hold following the Second Vatican Council and lay-people began to read the Lesson or to distribute Communion at Mass, the floodgates were opened for those who wished to take a shot at the brave souls who risked the history of their past generations being hung out to dry. The ‘back of the chapel’ attitude dies hard.

‘He is making a holy show of himself’ can mean many things, from indulging in mildly embarrassing behaviour to the downright scandalous. It is only a little less serious than ‘making a show of all of us’. This latter term, ‘all of us’ generally means the family, whose honour and public reputation is thought to be in danger from the public ‘show’ that is being exhibited. Any kind of behaviour that does not conform to the expectations of the family and the village can be construed as ‘making a show’. Making an ‘eejit’ of yourself moves the action up the scale of offensiveness and implies gross stupidity, whether of a permanent or passing kind.

In Italy, ‘making a show’ is the name of the social game. The Italian idea of ‘La Bella Figura’ involves drawing positive attention to oneself by ‘cutting a dash’ as an exact English person might say. The Nigerians whom we now encounter daily in Ireland generally have no problems with ‘making a show’ of themselves either. The manner and flamboyance of their Sunday dress calls unapologetic attention to themselves and they have no problem in taking the front seats at a public event; participating fully in the life of a group or giving full and vigorous expression to their emotions in public.

There is a deep fear in the Irish psyche of ‘losing the run of yourself’. This usually means getting over-emotional or losing control of oneself. It is a trait we share with our nearest neighbours to the East. There is often a certain stiffness to our physical expressions. Africans complain that we come to church and sit like un-moving statues. Even when our physical movements are expressed stylistically, in Irish dance for example, they retain a certain stiffness or rigidity. We are not given to extravagant physical gestures like kissing both cheeks of an acquaintance that we have unexpectedly but happily met in a public square. The Irish person who tries to introduce such Continental habits in the village will find that the recipients of his greetings will feel ‘mortified’; struck socially dead by the antics of someone who is, ‘making a total show of themselves’.

Is it any wonder that poor Brian Cowan tried to shield his face from public view when the tactile Monsieur Sarkozy held his hand tenderly in public recently and then kissed Ireland’s honour not once but twice, on both substantial cheeks, in full view of the media and of the whole mortified country?

The dream lives on

2008-07-19T08:00:00.000-07:00

As the World Youth Festival in Australia unfolded recently, the images of exuberant young people gathering around the aged but still dynamic Pope Benedict XVI inevitably reminded me of my own days of youth and the gathering that took place in Galway in 1979 during the visit to Ireland of the Pope’s immediate predecessor. The world has changed greatly in the intervening time and the once youthful participants in the Galway rally at Ballybrit Racecourse are now middle-aged or thereabouts. The adult organisers and leaders of the event are mostly dead by now and another generation has taken the place of those youth who sheltered under tarpaulins that misty, damp September morning as they waited for the famous red helicopter to arrive.

Something else has died in the meantime too. The idealism and the innocence that marks adolescence are often casualties of the process of growing up and learning the art of compromise. The discovery that parents and parent-figures are not perfect comes painfully but inevitably. We live with a God who, according to the poet Patrick Kavanagh, ‘delights in disillusionment’. Almost all of the institutions that we took for granted in our youth have taken a battering in the intervening years. Perhaps most painful of all has been the steady erosion of self-sacrificing idealism and the heroism of gesture that often went with it.

There was an increase in students coming forward to study for the priesthood immediately following the Pope’s visit. I was one of those who were said to have ‘followed the Pope into Maynooth’. When I entered there in September 1980, memories of the Galway Visit were especially fresh. ‘Young people of Ireland; I love you’ was regularly intoned, imitating the Pope’s Slavic accent. The Central European accent was then very foreign to our ears. Jokers imitated the Pope’s dramatic gesture of prostrating and kissing the soil as he entered a new country. My own journey into vocation and into Maynooth was only indirectly because of the visit, yet perhaps it was providential.

On my way home from Galway with my friend, we stopped to eat and rest a little. I bought a daily paper and discovered that the Parish Priest in my own parish had died. He was one of the old-style parish priests; gentle enough in presentation but infallible in pronouncement. I knew him through my aunt who kept house for him and he had challenged me a few times to consider priesthood. In the course of attending his funeral and thinking on his life, I arrived by a circuitous route back to my adolescent dream of becoming a priest. Following a few interviews and almost one year of secrecy and subterfuge later, I was packing my bags for the seminary.

Pádraig Pearse, in a poem called ‘The Fool,’ wrote movingly of his sense of destiny and of vocation. He did not use the word ‘vocation’ but he describes the high idealism and the challenge of the revolutionary or the vocationer who stakes his or her life on ‘impossible’ dreams. He wrote: ‘I have squandered the splendid years that the Lord God gave to my youth / In attempting impossible things, deeming them alone worth the toil… I have squandered the splendid years / Lord, if I had the years I would squander them over again, / Aye, fling them from me!’

Pearse foresaw the criticism that idealism attracts from cynics and from the compromised. He knew that a certain reckless foolishness is often part of the heroic gesture. The poem continues, “The lawyers have sat in council, the men with the keen, long faces, / And said, ‘This man is a fool,’ and others have said, ‘He blasphemeth;’ /

And the wise have pitied the fool that hath striven to give a life / In the world of time and space among the bulks of actual things, / To a dream that was dreamed in the heart, and that only the heart could hold… / O wise men, riddle me this: what if the dream come true? / What if the dream come true? and if millions unborn shall dwell / In the house that I shaped in my heart, the noble house of my thought?”

I watch the Australia-bound pilgrims and the youth of another century, another continent, being powerfully challenged by the words of one whose idealism survived the personal trauma of World War Two and the words of another idealist of the early last century come to mind. Tom Kettle’s particular form of foolishness and idealism led him to opt for participation in World War One. Just days after the birth of his daughter and days before his own death at the Battle of the Somme in 1916, he wrote a poem to his, as yet unseen, baby daughter. It includes these lines; ‘So here, while the mad guns curse overhead, /And tired men sigh, with mud for couch and floor, / Know that we fools, now with the foolish dead, / Died not for Flag, nor King, nor Emperor, / But for a dream, born in a herdsman’s shed, / And for the Secret Scripture of the poor’.

Days of wine and roses

2008-07-15T05:28:00.000-07:00

‘The price of a pint is going up again,’ one old codger would announce. ‘So long as it doesn’t get scarce,’ would be the inevitable reply, shot back in a manner suggesting that he was the first one to think up such a witty response. It seemed that people could live with a culture of scarcity so long as it did not involve essentials like alcohol. In recent weeks I find myself cutting out unnecessary trips by car and making the most of each journey. The old culture of scarcity has kicked in again in a conscious way. The motivation for this has been the rising price of a tank-full of petrol for my modest Volkswagen Golf. I’m thrifty by nature and as country people say, I “didn’t lick the pot for that”.

A generation has grown up in a culture of abundance and people are wondering how they might cope if the economic rug is pulled out from under our feet. There is a set of survival skills that have not necessarily been passed on because of the relative plenty of recent decades. There has been an absence of struggle to fulfil the basic aims of life and there is a subsequent lack of satisfaction and of ability to cope in difficult circumstances. One employer told me recently that he cannot find tradesmen who are problem-solvers. Difficulties are passed over to the next person or on to the next level of management rather than tackled and sorted out. This inability or unwillingness to solve problems in the work-place is replicated in the family life of those reared in the culture of abundance, he said. That is why, he reckoned, we have a high suicide rate, especially among young males and an increased rate of relationship and family breakdown. Those who struggle together develop bonds that are not as easily broken.

There is a set of skills and habits that has not been passed on to those reared on abundance. They have also been spared much of the humiliation that sometimes came with the saving and recycling ways of other times. There are very few children or young adults now who have worn hand-me-downs. The days of ‘first up – best dressed’ have long passed. I remember once wearing pre-worn trousers that had been patched at the knee. By the time the hand-down trousers reached me, the patch was somewhere between my knee and my ankle. I needed to eat ‘another bag of flour’ as people used to say, before I stretched enough to ‘let the trousers down’ and bring the patch back to its original position on the knee. The irony of pre-stressed jeans and torn designer trousers on sale in contemporary high-street shops at premium prices does not escape me.

Some of my own frugality was learned from a pair of unmarried aunts whom we often visited or stayed with. They had been ‘in service’ all of their lives and their housekeeping skills were as formidable as the parish priests that they ended up working for. Their meagre ‘carbon footprints’ were more than offset by their recycling skills and ‘green’ credentials. They were eco-warriors before their time. Both were naturally thin and tall and their spare-ness spilled over into diet and food-preparation. They would live ‘on the clippings of tin’ and they could make a filling meal out of meagre food resources. One of them used to knit woolly jumpers for her nephews and when we had ground holes in the elbows, unravelled the cuffs and used the back of the sleeves as handkerchiefs for runny noses, these pullovers would be taken back for washing and unwinding. The woollen thread would then be re-used for making multi-patterned rugs for the floor.

My father had inherited the thrift-gene as well. In our youth he used to make clothes for us on an old Singer sewing machine. Another of our aunts was resident in Donegal at the time and she used to wear heavy tweed coats. She was a cigarette smoker, rarely taking the ‘Gallagher’s untipped’ from her mouth while she worked. This gave her shock of white hair a yellow fringe and the falling ash from her cigarette used to occasionally burn holes in the lapels of her coat. My father would take the spoiled coat, cut out a new pattern and make a smaller school-going coat from it for us. He also cut our hair with hand-held clippers. This was something of an ordeal as no matter how well the clippers were oiled, they nipped the hair on the neck and pulled lumps out when they got clogged. Still, it saved going to the barber shop where more than the clippers were ‘well oiled’. I used this cost-cutting measure later in boarding school when, as students, we trimmed our own hair with razor-blades held firmly behind combs with our thumbs. This was immediately after asking our parents for extra pocket-money for haircuts.

Grandmother, on the other side of the family, was famously thrifty. Her bed-sheets were made from flour-bags and the bed-cover was patch-work quilt. Heavy coats were used as extra bed-covering on winter nights. Every scrap of fabric was used up and made to look beautiful in the process. At night she sewed lace-work to earn extra cash. Even her recreation was productive. Like my paternal aunts, she had no problems with obesity though she was familiar with concepts like ‘hot-dogs’ from her time in America during the ‘roaring twenties’. There was little problem with refuse. Anything edible was re-cycled using inventive ways of presenting old food in new guises. What became inedible for the family was passed on as food for the animals or fowl outside. ‘Wilful waste makes woeful want’ was the ‘mission statement’ in her kitchen.

How horrified they all would be to see people paying a small fortune for plastic bottles full of water or to hear that the price of a tank-full of petrol now costs the price of a small farm. The people of the developing world are similarly scandalised by our decadent lifestyles and aside from any economic shocks that we might be in for, there is the awesome possibility that they will rise up some day and judge us for our greed and for the extraordinary ‘wastefulness’ of our society, as the British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, described it recently.

Growing old is not for sissies

2008-07-06T09:56:00.000-07:00

‘Aye - There’s raisons for everything and currants for bread’. Another nugget of wisdom was fired after me as I edged out the narrow back-door, while making my rounds of the sick and housebound for the First Friday. I had been trying to reassure my monthly friend that the postponement of her medical appointment might be for good reason. Conversations with the elderly often veer on to medical matters and occasionally the roles and titles of ‘Father’ and ‘Doctor’ get confused. The last time I visited her she had asked me, with typically forthright humour, to say a ‘selfish Mass’ for her. I knew what she meant and I appreciated the spiritual insight that she showed as she knowingly tried to twist God’s arm to her medical advantage.

It was raining heavily and I sprinted from porch to car to porch again, sheltering with hunched shoulders under umbrella or porch-way as I waited for the mobile elderly to make their measured way to their front doors. ‘Old age is not for sissies’ said the late American actress Bette Davis. Her quip has been paraphrased as a best-selling book titled ‘Growing old is not for sissies’. The lady with the quick-fire wisdom whom I had just visited was certainly no ‘sissy’. In fact, I suspect that she thought I was a bit of a ‘sissy’ myself because of the lady’s umbrella that I was unwittingly carrying. ‘I know what to buy you for Christmas’, she had joked earlier. A man’s umbrella was what I lacked, she helpfully told me. There was no time to explain to her that umbrellas and myself part company easily so I recycle them by borrowing brollies that people leave behind in the chapel. I then leave them behind me somewhere else, perpetuating the cycle for as long as the umbrella lasts.

Americans, usually the most politically correct of peoples, have a medical term for those whom we call the housebound. They refer to those who are confined indoors by illness or age as ‘shut-ins’. Whatever about the terminology, the reality for many elderly is an existence that is largely confined to the four walls of their house or even their room. The priest who ministers to his parishioners monthly may be one of a small group of callers who visit them regularly. Being privileged to live at the heart of a parish, a pastoral priest often has the latest in local news, knowing who is ill or in hospital or what is happening locally and we can often help to keep people in touch with the community of which they were once an active part. The monthly chore of visitation is not something that is necessarily looked forward to, yet I always conclude it with a certain satisfaction and sometimes with an all-pervading sense of sadness. The stale odours and the stickiness of the sick-room and the physical flakiness that sometimes goes with neglect can permeate and linger for a while following the final house-call. The thought of what might lie ahead for any of us who are fortunate to reach old age can be disconcerting. More reassuring are their interjections in my favour when they observe me from the pillar of great age and tell me, ‘sure you’re only a gasan’!

There are characters whom I have met over the course of the years of First Friday visitation who remain vivid in my memory. The crotchety, complaining ones, contemptuous of all that is modernity, are generally easily forgotten. It is largely the quirky characters who have retained their sense of humour that live on in the memory. Others remain fixed in my recollection because of their long-suffering or their interesting life-stories. When I linger on the routine that often confines the elderly, it makes me acutely conscious of the freedom that is mine and the independence and opportunities that I enjoy. There is a freedom of an internal kind, though, that the still-active may not have mastered. The process of ageing sometimes frees up the elderly from the inhibitions and the neuroses of adult living. They occasionally reach the stage of ‘not-caring in the right not-caring way’ as Patrick Kavanagh once described it. I suppose it is the lure of attachment to status and success, so common in the generative years, that are shed and the detachment of childhood that is regained in the process of letting go. It is the honesty that comes with this shedding that can be most engaging.

‘And where are ye from?’ an elderly witch-like lady who was on my First Friday list once asked me. She had the sharp features, the long, lank hair, the gap-toothedness and the high-pitched, cracking voice of a broom-stick driver but she was most amusing, kind and informative. ‘Crossmaglen’, I proudly informed her, knowing that there was a certain negative prestige in being able to say that I came from ‘bandit country’. ‘Oh’, she exclaimed as she cackled long and shrill, ‘I suppose you never go home’. That put me in my box, as the saying goes.

Those lazy, hazy days of Summer

2008-07-02T04:15:00.000-07:00

Those lazy, hazy days of Summer

Who remembers rainy summers? It’s curious how the tedium of bad-weather summers is forgotten or glossed over as we reminisce on times past. In the Tír na nÓg of our youth the sun was always shining during the holidays. The days were long and warm and filled with all kinds of inventive good fun. What is there to remember about a day spent staring close up at the rain streaming down the misted, narrow windows of childhood? Only traumatic times or the bright fun-filled moments get caught in the fragile web of memory. The ordinary and the tedious; all that is now labelled ‘boring’ by a demanding generation, gets lost in recollection. It is as if it was not worth the space on the disc of our human Random Access Memory.

One of the summer chores of a country child was helping with the savin’ of the hay while the sun shone. All hands, even young hands, were welcome in any harvest-field. Hay-making, of necessity, took place during a period of good weather. It was a delicate and worrisome task for the concerned adults. The hay had to be cut at a carefully chosen time. Weather conditions needed to be warm and breezy with the promise of a few days more of good drying conditions. Turning hay by hand with a pitchfork was a tedious but skilled task. It required a deft and skilful turn of the wrist while wielding a fork-full of heavy, moisture-laden, hay-in-the-making. The narrow line of cut-grass had to be flicked over like a fringe so that the moist layer underneath could be exposed to the sun. In the turning over, a whole new under-world of frogs, worms and insects was exposed. If the hay had been cut mechanically, there was the possibility of finding animal or bird casualties. Corncrakes’ nests were often destroyed by the blades or wheels of reaping machines.

If weather conditions were favourable, the hay was turned a few times, manually or by machine. It was then combed into fluffed-up rows of bristling dry stalks to await the devouring mouth of the baler. In especially bad weather, a farmer might have to abandon his hay until the weather changed or even lose his crop altogether. Some farmers of the old school took up their pitch-forks and whisked the endangered hay into ‘laps’. These small whorls of hay looked like croissants and were deftly shaped so as to run off the rainwater that threatened the crop. Another emergency procedure was to pile the dried hay into small hay-cocks with the added protection of a covering of jute-bags.

The arrival of the baler signalled the beginning of the end of a farmer’s hay-worries. These dangerous gobblers of hay and straw were generally hired, with their driver, from local contractors and were paid by the number of bales excreted. These were ‘stooked’ or stood up in tripod-like formation until they could be loaded on to a flat trailer and transported to a hay-shed. They were fiendishly hard to manage. Bales of the traditional kind were small but dense and heavy. The bands of baling-twine that held them tightly together were taut and hard to grip. The cut-hay was sharp and occasionally prickly as well where a stray thistle had managed to become part of the harvest. The skin immediately below the harvester’s fingernails was inevitably peeled back by the end of a day ‘at the bales’ and the underside of the farmer’s famously sun-tanned arm looked like a pin-cushion, pierced by the spiky ends of the hay-stalks on the side of the bales.

The chance of a ride atop a trailer-load of bales was much prized by holiday-bound children. It was a potentially dangerous trip as bales were an unstable cargo and bale-builders were of mixed ability. Driving a tractor at funereal pace through an open field was often allowed to the young too as all adult hands took to lifting and building the bales on to the trailer. First lessons in driving were often received during hay-making. A feeling of inclusion and of belonging to the adult world was enhanced as all hands helped with the hay-harvest. There was, in the North, an unofficial deadline of having the hay in by ‘The Twelfth’. It was not as if we were going anywhere on the day but rather a parody of the concerns of our more Northern neighbours.

The era of hay-making is all but over. Our mechanised age has speeded up the process and largely beaten the weather-worries as tall, green-cabbed harvesters spit out their large spools of rolled-up hay and silage. It’s a common and ugly sight now to see black polythene balls of fodder, seemingly abandoned by all but the crows, in the corners of our fields. In removing the excess labour, the risk of crop-failure and the awkwardness of the oblong bale, we have also removed the camaraderie of the hay-field, the harvest-sense of satisfaction on the part of the successful farmer and the adventure-fest that often marked the start of the summer holidays for a country child.

The green green grass of home

2008-06-22T09:50:00.001-07:00

There are few sights as beautiful as the Irish countryside on a sunny Midsummer evening. Driving back home through Monaghan and Louth my eyes feast on the festival landscape that Midsummer serves. The gentle light of a sun that is staying up late allows the colours to emerge in the glad-rags of their best-dressed, seasonal plant-hosts. The sloping drumlins of Monaghan, like shop-window displays, present their goods to the seeing eye. The grazing livestock in the pasture lands provide polka-dot contrasts to the gentle greens of the swards and meadows. Here, jet-black Angus cattle, spread out over the grassland in well-spaced symmetry. There, cappuccino-coloured Charolais cattle lie on a hillside, soaking up the last rays of the sinking sun and chewing the cud over a day in the life of a beef-bred bullock.

A murder of crows opportunistically hunts in the stubble of a recently-shaved silage field. A few shy rabbits vigilantly graze on the headlands. A stream of vehicles weaves its impatient way home. People with problems in their faces grip their steering wheels tightly; their eyes trained on the left-hand side. Roadside grasses have reached seed-stage. The gentle lilac of a spread of full headed hay-seed defies the reaper on the verge of the motorway, nodding and swaying in the wake of the traffic-thread. The carefully cultivated verges of the recently constructed roadways are a credit to the planners and to the planters. A stray rape-seed plant reflects the yellow sun as it dims and sinks towards the receptive horizon. Other newer crops like maize plants, with their strong shining leaves and stalks have filled in the furrows and hidden the bio-degradable covering that protected them in their infancy.

As I moved into the plains of Louth, the sheets of grain in the generously-proportioned fields were taking on the first shades of ripeness. The trimmed-back sycamores in the hedgerows glowed purple in their tenderest shoots and the elderberry bushes splashed out their frothiest blossoms. The oak and the ash have filled out the winter gaps in their branches and the chestnut has shot up chandeliers of blossom, pointing to the buttermilk sky. Pig’s parsley or hogweed reminded me of childhood ‘loanins’ and of stories about its leaves and roots being fed to swine in poorer days. More prosperous times were suggested to me by the Dynasty-style, dormered mansions that dwarf their single-storied predecessors hidden further down the laneways. The industrialisation of agriculture was evident in the giant spools of cut sward rolled into a corner awaiting fork-lifted help.

I used to wonder what all the talk was of Ireland as an ‘Emerald Isle’. ‘Surely grass is green everywhere’ I generalised. I thought that talk of ‘forty shades of green’ was mere emigrant sentimentality. It was only when I touched down at Shannon in daylight, following my first trip abroad, that I realised just what it was that enthralled visitors and returnees. I had discovered that grass could be sunburnt-brown, wiry and sparse, like the combed-over hair of a balding man, or tall and dull-hued in a desert-drought. As our aeroplane tilted and hovered in its descent, the patchwork of fields below, that I saw through the dull surface of the cabin window, appeared vivid and bright, luscious and shining in the wake of an autumn shower. Now I knew and understood all that talk of Ireland green.

Sometimes I try to impress on people who live in the area of Mid-Louth that they have an environment and living conditions that are second to none. Those who are fortunate enough to live in the villages and in the countryside mostly enjoy a quality of life that many city-dwellers can only dream of. Emigration is no longer almost compulsory for many of our young. The climate is temperate and predictable in its unpredictable Irish way. Communities are largely homogenous with no serious ethnic or political tensions. Farms are generously proportioned and fertile. The environment is rich in its diversity and largely unspoiled. Family and community life is still strong despite the inroads of modernity and the confusion that social change inevitably brings. Maybe I’m being romantic or utopian in my reading of the countryside but then I was driving home from the wedding banquet of my niece!

It all reminds me of a poem by Alexander Pope. The poem is called ‘The Quiet Life’.

‘Happy the man whose wish and care / a few paternal acres bound, / content to breathe his native air / in his own ground. / Whose herds with milk, whose fields with bread, / whose flocks supply him with attire; / whose trees in summer yield him shade, / In winter, fire. / Blest who can unconcern'dly find / Hours, days, and years slide soft away / In health of body, peace of mind, / Quiet by day, / Sound sleep by night; study and ease / Together mixt, sweet recreation, / and innocence, which most does please / With meditation. / Thus let me live, unseen, unknown; / Thus unlamented let me die; / Steal from the world, and not a stone / Tell where I lie’.

School’s out for summer

2008-06-16T13:05:00.000-07:00

School’s out for summer

At gatherings of teachers I often try to impress on them that they have no idea of the depth of impression they are capable of. Teachers routinely underestimate the effect that they have on the young minds that they mould. Ours may be an information age, with access to answers at the touch of a fingertip on a button, but technology and the Internet do not have the capacity to influence us after the manner of a good teacher. The moulding of character is an essentially human privilege. As our students and teachers look forward to the summer break and release from the goldfish-bowl world of the classroom, it is good to remind ourselves of the pedagogues of past and present who left their stamp on us and on our communities.

There are very few people who take to studying easily or enthusiastically. Most adults express regret that they did not ‘stay at the books’ a little bit longer. I confess that I escaped from the books and from my ‘A’ Level studies prematurely. I was only sixteen when I decided, without benefit of advice from anybody, that I was through with school. I simply did not return following the Christmas break. Almost six years later, I went back to the books as a ‘mature student’. Some people say that the terms mature and student are mutually contradictory. Whatever about maturity, I sat behind the desk again following an interval filled with all kinds of experiences. Twenty years later, at the end of a three-year post-graduate course, I sat down to what I hope was my final examination this side of the day of judgement.

In the family bar I used to hear old men occasionally speak bitterly of their teachers. Most of their generation did not progress beyond Primary School and their experience of a tough or an inadequate schoolmaster often soured them. The sarky, sarcastic comment of a teacher is often remembered long after the physical punishments have been forgotten. The contrast with contemporary classroom experience is stark. Children routinely say that they love their Primary School teachers. Graduation ceremonies are generally sentimental, tearful farewells as students move from one level to another. The idea of a fear-filled, punishment-heavy routine is beyond their experience.

The layers of help available to contemporary students are a constant source of surprise to me. Learning difficulties are usually spotted early on in a student’s life and appropriate and sensitive help is offered. Children no longer leave school illiterate even if contemporary standards of spoken and written English leave a lot to be desired. The range of options open to them as they ponder their future is impossibly broad; the possibilities and choices from which they decide were unimaginable to past generations.

As in all professions, there are structural and personnel difficulties and a particular culture that goes with the job. Teaching has its share of jargon and fads, in-words and social experiments. Teachers are accustomed, like many of us, to getting lots of unwanted advice from people who have never stood in front of a class. The culture of complaint weighs heavy on them as they try to balance the rights and responsibilities of school, students, parents and staff. The solution to every social problem is dumped on them as more courses are recommended. People forget that we are all teachers, if only by example.

The recent success of the Irish economy and the foundation-stone of our prosperity have been credited to the high educational standards of Irish society. We have come a long way from the hedge-schools and the town Academies. The infrastructure of education owes a lot to Church bodies and almost every educational opportunity most of us got came from parish schools and diocesan or Religious colleges. This leads to accusations of over-control on the part of the churches yet ‘control’ is the one thing missing, in the view of many observers of modern character and culture.

My own experience of school was generally positive. I have had some truly inspirational teachers and have sat through some abysmal attempts to teach. Most of the latter were at third level. Over the years of priesthood I have got to know the profession from the inside and have made many friends from their ranks. Primary School business forms a significant part of a pastoral priest’s workload. I am still shocked, however, when teachers spell a word wrongly or use bad grammar. My child-like idealising of ‘teacher’ has never quite left me. It’s like hearing a priest swear!

‘Free at last, free at last, I thank God we’re free at last’ are the words of an old Negro spiritual song. They might well be adapted to describe the feelings of our students as they leave their cages in the classrooms of the country. I have no doubt that most teachers will be feeling a little of the same exhilaration as they turn the key in the school-door. Even the priest will breathe a sigh of relief as the school-year cycle goes into free-wheel until autumn. If the opening hymn next Sunday is, ‘Free at last, free at last, I thank God we’re free at last’, you’ll understand why.

When being young was very heaven

2008-06-08T10:32:00.000-07:00

When being young was very heaven

On a summer morning in 1968 the pupils of Anamar Primary School, which I attended, gathered to meet a C.I.E. bus at the border and headed off to Dublin, to the zoo; to the ice-cream factory and to visit a former class friend in a school in Drumcondra. The school was for the partially-sighted. When we arrived I saw, for the first time, young men with the pigment deficiency called Albinism. These young Albino men were gathered in huddles, listening intently to transistor radios which had their antennae extended. I had never seen a person with the pigment deficiency before. I was puzzled by these different looking people with white hair and pink eyes and even more puzzled by their intent listening to the new-fangled transistor radios for what was obviously breaking news.

It was an age when the technology available to us was scarce and cumbersome. Radios were hardly portable and listeners generally went to the family or communal radio and sat around it rather than carry around their own personal set. If anyone at the time had told me that these young people were an invading tribe from another planet, listening in to messages from their extra-terrestrial leader, I would have believed them. I later learnt that the news that was so preoccupying these teenagers was the assassination and death of Senator Robert, ‘Bobby’ Kennedy while he was on the election campaign trail. It was June 6th 1968.

Many people of a certain generation remember exactly where they were or what they were doing when President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was murdered in 1963. I was too young to remember or to register any memory then but I remember the assassination of his brother Robert. The fortieth anniversary of Robert Kennedy’s death; the illness of his brother Senator Edward Kennedy and the breakthrough of Senator Barack Obama as Democratic Nominee in the upcoming American elections have reminded many people of that period, a generation ago, when enthusiasm and hope was so high. The poet William Wordsworth is often quoted in his description of a period when idealism was similarly high. He was an early admirer of the reforms of the French Revolution, though he later repudiated his support for it. Two centuries ago, he wrote a poem on the Revolution that contains two lines which are particularly remembered. The larger extract reads:

‘Oh! Pleasant exercise of hope and joy!/ For mighty were the auxiliars which then stood/ Upon our side, we who were strong in love!/ Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,/ But to be young was very heaven!--Oh! Times,/ In which the meagre, stale, forbidding ways/ Of custom, law, and statute, took at once/ The attraction of a country in romance!’

Senator Obama’s rival in the election will be the older Senator John McCain. The parallel with Wordsworth’s ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity,’ which is how he described poetry, is further heightened in the following imagery from the same poem:

‘The budding rose above the rose full blown. / What temper at the prospect did not wake/ To happiness unthought of? The inert/ were roused, and lively natures rapt away!’

The early decades of recent centuries have been times of idealism and optimism. Each succeeding century offers a blank sheet on which humankind must write another chapter of our ‘his-story’ as we call it. In Northern Ireland we appear to have effected our own revolution in community relations. A certain realism has replaced the heady idealism of the 1960s and we are still living with the fall-out from the excesses that almost always follow periods of revolution and rapid change. It has been said that an elderly Chinese politician was once asked what he thought was the legacy of the French Revolution of the late eighteenth century. He replied that he could not adequately comment on it because, as he explained, ‘it is much too early to say’.

Wordsworth counselled us not to build castles in the sky; not to be overly optimistic. He wisely noted that our dreams and visions need to be rooted in the messy reality that is human nature and the natural world. Age brought perspective and the idealism of youth gave way to the mellowness of his more mature years. All idealists are, he wrote, ‘called upon to exercise their skill,/ Not in Utopia, subterranean fields,/ or some secreted island, Heaven knows where!/ But in the very world, which is the world/ of all of us - the place where in the end/ we find our happiness, or not at all!’

The end of the oil age

2008-06-01T09:24:00.000-07:00

Joseph was imprisoned. He had been betrayed and sold into exile by his own brothers. His salvation and his freedom lay in a dream. The story in the Book of Genesis tells of how Pharaoh had a troubled dream one night. In his visions he saw seven fat cattle as he stood by the river. The fat cattle, rising up out of the water, were joined by seven scraggy and mean looking cattle. They all stood on the river-bank. The dream ended with the lean cattle eating up the fine, well-fed ones. Pharaoh woke up. He later returned to sleep and the dream recurred with seven full ears of corn and seven thin ears as the central symbols. The dream-story ended the same way. Pharaoh was mighty troubled by these nightly visitations and found nobody among his staff who could competently explain them to him. Joseph made his name and his best career move by explaining to Pharaoh that seven years of good fortune were to be followed by seven years of ill-fortune and famine. Pharaoh elevated him, gave him a wife and followed his advice to stockpile food against the lean years. Egypt alone was prepared for the seven years of famine that followed, as foretold by Joseph.

It is unlikely that real famine will hit our end of the world but it looks as if the years of plenty are receding. The credit crunch has been followed by an oil squeeze. We are all feeling the effects as transport costs rise and food and heating bills spike. It may help to reduce our collective carbon footprint by making us reflect on our use of fossil fuels and on our dependence on oil. The crisis has not so much hit us in the pocket as mugged us at the pumps. It has forced us to reflect on our relationship with the energy sources of the past; those we now enjoy; the possibilities of an oil-free future and the end of the oil-age.

The last time I remember such a crisis was in 1973. The problem then was a scarcity of oil. I was in boarding school in Newry and we were asked by the College authorities to encourage our parents not to feel that they had to visit us. The head of the oil producing countries organisation, OPEC, was Sheik Zaki Yamani. We had a joke that he had told the countries of the West, ‘Ya Mani – or no oil!’ The Sheik made a prediction a few years ago that sounds startling coming from such a source. He said, “The Stone Age did not end for lack of stone, and the Oil Age will end long before the world runs out of oil”.

My earliest memory of a pre-oil age is of my grandmother gathering sticks or ‘brosna’ as she called it, using the Irish word. She collected small, brittle twigs from under the nearby ditches and stored them overnight in the plate-warming, bottom oven of her ironically named Modern Mistress Range. These sticks were used in the morning to kindle the fire that was the focus of the household. Gathering sticks was a common chore as was ‘splitting sticks’. Many people still say that they prefer the drama of a real fire in their sitting rooms over the push-button illusions that gas or electric fires present. As children we used to play outside in the summertime, often building fires of wood as we camped and cooked eggs or tinned beans for ourselves. Our mother knew when we had been sitting around the camp-fire for when we returned in the evening she would tell us that we smelled ‘like the tinkers’.

The fuel most commonly in circulation then was paraffin oil for the various lamps that were used inside or outside. Every household also had a supply of ‘methylated spirits’. This was used for lighting the Tilley Lamp; for cleaning the windows with dampened, crushed newspaper; for singeing the down off a freshly-plucked chicken or for removing stains. It was also abused by street-drinkers, sometimes with terrible results. With the coming of the mechanical age and the TVO Tractor, with its twin-fuel system, farmers needed small amounts of petrol to kick-start their tractors before turning over to Tractor Vaporising Oil when the engine got going. The widespread use of diesel came later. Switching over to TVO, following the high-octane, petrol-fuelled beginning, came to be used as a simile for those men whose drinking habits began with a couple of ‘half-ones’ before switching over to bottles of Guinness.

The largest fuel stock back then was probably the coal-pile. Some households bought coal by the ton and a ‘ton of coal’ was a common prize in raffles. Coal, slack and shingles were piled up outside, covered over with a few sheets of tin or galvanised iron and brought inside as needed. It was liberally burned in the ranges and fireplaces of the time with their huge, inefficient fire-boxes and roaring chimneys. Turf was not widely used, although older people had worked at ‘saving’ turf and families still had turbary rights in assigned strips of nearby bogs. Nobody worried about their carbon footprint or about global warming. The price of a barrel of oil on the international market was thought to be only of interest to sheiks. Ten shillings worth of petrol at the village pumps went a long way. The only ‘tiger’ around then was the ‘tiger in your tank’ of the popular petrol advertisements. As we Celtic Tiger cubs reel from the effects of price hikes, it’s good to remember that our dependence on the ‘black gold’ of the Arab world, like every dependence, had a beginning and may well have an end.

The ghost of 'Danny Boy'

2008-05-25T13:07:00.000-07:00

The ghost of ‘Danny Boy’

He was the only soldier that I remember feeling sorry for. Captain Nairac died in May 1977 but, like the ghost of Banquo in the story of Macbeth, he keeps reappearing to remind us of the terror of our collective past. It was only in disappearance and death that we knew his real name. To the people of Crossmaglen, he was known simply as ‘Danny Boy’. He had sung the Derry Air in one of the pubs in the village and he became known afterwards by its common title. He was no common soldier however.

Nairac was uncommon in his behaviour as a soldier, on the dangerous terrain of South Armagh, during the most violent period of the Troubles. The reason I felt sorry on hearing of his abduction and probable death was that he was the only British soldier who had struck up some kind of relationship with the people of the locality that was not based on mutual contempt. He smiled a lot and he was engaging in a charming, gentlemanly kind of way. He went out of his way to be noticed and to notice.

Every three months or so when the army regiments changed, Nairac would appear on patrol wearing the beret of the incoming regiment. He was a regular who had been patrolling the area in uniform for about a year before his death. Jokes might be made about new hats on old heads when he appeared with the distinctive beret of the several regiments that passed through the region. He wore his hair significantly longer than a regular soldier. He was a fine looking man with glossy, wavy black hair and the women of the area often openly admired his physique and bearing.

The last time I saw him was a few nights before he was abducted. I was working in our family bar when he came in with a colleague who was obviously a senior post-holder in the local regiment. There was a small crowd around the bar and lounge as it was early evening. It was the pattern of the military, at that period, to enter the village pubs occasionally, ask some people their personal details, observe who was present and then leave reasonably quickly. Nairac entered and asked those who were gathered around the television set in the lounge if they had heard the shooting that he claimed had just taken place on The Square. Nobody had heard anything and reluctantly told him so. He playfully observed that nobody ever heard or saw anything of significance in Crossmaglen. ‘You’re some boys! – You never hear or say anything around here!’

He told his small audience that he and his colleague had just been shot at. The story that he told was of how they had been discussing tactics together and had just decided to visit two other pubs separately. As they parted, a shower of bullets hit the wall between them. He described it as a near-miss for both of them. This led to a further, farcical conversation between Nairac and his potential audience. ‘What colour were the bullets?’ one man wanted to know. ‘Were they green white and orange?’ ‘Are you sure you weren’t hit? Did you check yourself for holes?’ Such was the largely good-natured tone of the teasing.

One relatively young man hit a jarring note just as Nairac was about to leave. The young man had an alcohol-abuse problem and he was in an uncharacteristically narky mood. ‘What you want is good slap in the jaw,’ he said to Nairac. If he had known of Nairac’s prowess in the boxing ring, while a student at Oxford, he might have thought twice about his suggestion. To my amazement, Nairac responded to his aggressor by sitting down next to him and adopting a counselling tone. It was not the usual military response. He spoke and listened to him for about forty minutes, disarming him with words rather than weapons. Behind the bar, my father was getting nervous. A British soldier entering your premises and not leaving for almost an hour could look mighty suspicious.

That was the last we saw of the man we later came to know as ‘Captain’ Nairac. It was already assumed that he was some kind of special operative in the British Army and it was rumoured that he had been involved in some of the more dramatic killings that had taken place in the North around that time. Only later did we learn of his background and personal history. His mysterious role in the underground, intelligence war that was being waged in Northern Ireland at the time is still the subject of speculation. His name is linked to some of the most notorious, unsolved atrocities of the period. He remains a complex character in a dirty, violent, war-world. He is still the only soldier among the North’s ‘disappeared’. Military Intelligence people are reluctant to talk of him and Republican sources are unwilling to divulge the truth about his final hours or resting place. The story reflects well on neither group.

Some see Nairac as a Walter Mitty character; an ineffectual dreamer whose fantasy life led him to an early death. Others see him as a brave but maverick, go-it-alone undercover soldier, taking on the conquest of South Armagh single-handedly. Still others see him as a reckless, out-of-control killer who stopped keeping the rules of his own organisation and paid the price for his foolishness. He may have been overly-influenced by a colleague who was his superior for a time. Julian ‘Tony’ Ball, who died a few years afterwards, is described by former colleagues as ‘nasty’, even ‘psychotic’. The pair were split up, by military orders, in 1975. Whatever the truth, his story is a mystifying and compelling drama of a middle-class English Catholic boy who excelled at Ampleforth Abbey Benedictine College and later at Oxford; only to become bogged down in the quagmire of evil that dogged Northern Ireland at that time. The past still haunts us, like Banquo’s ghost, demanding that decency be done and that the truth must out.

2008-05-19T01:25:00.001-07:00

They call it Puppy-Love

The recent spell of warm weather has brought more than the dandelions into bloom. Young lovers, in the first blush of infatuation, find that the warmth of their feelings is complemented by the long, bright and balmy evenings. You can see them, holding on to each other, as if the loved one might disappear prematurely, like the early summer. They stick to each other like limpets to a rock, lest their experience of puppy-love fizzle out or go flat, like the effervescence of tepid beer on a warm afternoon. They are taking their cue from nature of course. The warming of the earth provides us with the animal trigger that prompts procreation and long-term planning for strong offspring by the following winter.

Those couples whose puppy-love days are over and who have reached the serious stage of commitment to mortgage and marriage plan their nuptial ceremonies in a swell that begins this time of year and lasts all through the summer and into early autumn. The rituals are well-known and rarely deviated from. Even the most non-conformist of individuals becomes a stickler for protocol when a wedding carnation is pinned on them. It can take an age for the wedding party to simply sit down at the hotel table as nobody will risk sitting in the ‘wrong’ seat. Ladies’ hats may not be removed until the bride’s mother removes her crowning creation. Only then may the feathered-nest or the satellite-dish headdress be set aside.

The mortgage market has left many couples with strict budgets and little disposable income to spend on a day that can cost tens of thousands of Euro. This is encouraging a small section of the wedding market to go abroad. The traditional destination is Rome but more are now going to other European countries. Professional wedding planners are paid to sort out the paperwork, the religious ceremony, if chosen, and the translation problems. There is also a small but growing number of marriages between immigrants from central or Eastern Europe and Irish people.

The only time many adults may ever make a public speech is at the marriage of one of their children or as best-man for a friend or sibling. It is easy for a partly-public figure like me to forget how frightening it can be for most people to stand up in front of a crowd and deliver a speech. I have sat beside so many people at weddings who have not been able to eat; such was their state of nervous tension at the prospect of speechifying later on. The worst cases are the characters who have no problem with blarney when they are sitting down but whose power of speech appears to drain away to their nether regions when they stand vertically. Some of the more nervous try to drown the butterflies in their stomachs with frequent trips to the bar and to the toilet. Others just sit and allow the table to absorb the nervous energy from their trembling legs.

The church ceremony tends to be more relaxed and better prepared than it was in past times. There is still room for the occasional gaffe. One of these was a groom who misread the text as he offered his bride a ring, ‘as a sign of my faithful love’. That inspirational sentiment somehow became a declaration of manhood as he offered her the ring with the promise that it was a sign of his ‘fertile’ love. His fertility was already beyond doubt but we all knew what he meant. One of my own less glorious moments was when I lost the text and mis-remembered the words of a blessing. Faithful and unbroken love became a little confused and conflated as I blessed the rings to be worn, ‘as a sign of unfaithful love’. I could not have picked a worse congregation or couple as an audience for my lapse. The wedding party was made up mainly of amateur drama enthusiasts.

The person who is most likely to ruin the bride’s day, and that of everyone else, is the ironically-titled ‘best-man’. A common misunderstanding among these specially-chosen attendants is that they have to be stand-up comedians and satirists as well. Rather than drawing attention to the centrality of the bride and groom they often sink into embarrassing, self-centered, adolescent stories that are no longer funny, or they tell off-colour jokes that do not go down well with the top table or on the floor. Priests are often accused of speaking for too long at Mass but try getting the microphone back from many wedding-guest orators, especially still-doting fathers of the bride. I have never heard an audience call for an encore from such a top-table speaker.

Clichés become ever more grating with the passage of time. I often wonder if the epithet ‘new wife’ indicates that the groom is guilty of having an ‘old wife’ stashed away somewhere else. Is there such a thing as a ‘new future’? The most successful speakers are those who speak simply and briefly about the couple or about one of them, and who do so with feeling and insight. The spotlight properly belongs to the couple and not to the penguin charged with managing the post-prandial proceedings. The wedding circuit is a long way from puppy-love and it all attracts a certain cynicism in our times. One priest suggested that the first line of a funeral ritual has been mis-placed and should properly be used to begin the wedding ritual. ‘Before we go our separate ways…’

Going to work on an egg

2008-05-12T12:30:00.000-07:00

Going to work on an egg

Some short time before he died I asked my father what the family diet was like when he was growing up. His family was large; he was a twin and with his brother, the last of nine children, they were reared on a farm of nine acres. That was one acre per child, a stocking rate that would be unacceptably high, even for livestock, in those days. My father told me that he did not really remember well but he added, ‘there seemed to be a lot of eggs’. To this day, eggs are associated in the African mind, with the food needs of the white man because of the dietary preferences of the missionary priests who first went there from Ireland.

The diet of most people who lived in the countryside included a plentiful supply of eggs until recent health fads and food scares relegated the egg to one or two a week at most. The huge variety of foods that we now have at hand was simply not available to people until about twenty years ago. The unavailability of foods that we now take for granted was matched by their unaffordability in many cases. ‘Fast food’ came in the form of yet another egg, boiled for the mandatory three minutes or fried in an equally short period. An egg was recommended at breakfast-time with the toast and the evening meal or ‘tea’ often revolved around another egg and more bread. Rice was eaten only as a dessert, boiled in milk or milled into powder and given to children or invalids as ‘ground rice’. Spaghetti was a genre of Western films and wine was what the priest put in the chalice.

The principle of self-sufficiency meant that people ate what they produced or what was available locally. There were exceptions like tea-leaves and sugar that had to be imported but most of what ended up on the family table did not travel far from source. The diet was limited, especially in fruit, giving rise to the phenomenon of boils and styes and carbuncles on the face and head. What it lacked in variety of product, it made up for in the ingenuity with which the same foods were presented on the plate or pan.

Eggs could easily become pancakes or pastry. They could be poached, boiled, fried, scrambled or tossed into a mug of hot milk and whisked into an egg-nog as a treat. Our speciality at home was imprisoning a raw egg inside a dollop of steaming hot potato or ‘champ’ until it cooked and then whipping it all into what was commonly called a ‘right prawkas’. Eggs were considered to be ‘nourishing’, which is the quality that people looked for in their food. I once sat beside an old man at a wedding who looked disdainfully at the chunk of half-raw melon that he was presented with. He prodded it, tasted it, seasoned it with some pepper and salt, moved it around the plate and eventually abandoned it. He asked me what it was called and I told him. “There’s not much nourishment in that”, he commented disgustedly.

Mother Teresa was once said to have been on American television for interview when she viewed one of the advertisements during their so-intrusive ad-breaks. She remarked on the irony of bread being advertised which boasted that it was not fattening or nourishing. Most of the world looks to bread, she noted, for the very qualities that the American market was boasting about as being absent from their product. Bread that does not nourish seemed to her as yet another Western madness.

‘Teaching your granny to suck eggs’ was a futile occupation indulged in by those who thought they knew better. Grannies were commonly thought to be experts in egg-production and consumption. Cracking a raw egg on your front teeth and allowing it to slide down the swallow-hole was not exactly haute-cuisine or good manners but it was thought to be a remedy for all kinds of weakness and loss of appetite; self-induced or otherwise. One old-time toper who used to frequent our pub had a more sophisticated version of this ‘cure’ that he grandly called a ‘Bombay Oyster’. His recipe was a raw egg covered over with sherry and consumed in one swallow. This combined the traditional ‘hair-of-the-dog’ cure with some semi-solid nourishment and a sense of sophisticated bravado to help steady up his shaky equilibrium.

Eggs came in a variety of shapes, sizes and tastes. There was the occasional surprise of twin embryos in a double-yoked egg. A shell-less egg occasionally turned up, prompting the addition of some extra ‘grit’ in the diet of the hens. We occasionally ate pigeon eggs, pilfered from the wild and pullets’ eggs when the domesticated young hens started to lay. We graduated on to duck-eggs when our stomachs had become accustomed to strong flavours. The green duck-eggs were the stronger flavoured as became their darker shell. Brown hen-eggs were somehow favoured over white ones. This often led to the deception of boiling a white-shelled egg in tea-leaves for the usual time that it took the egg to cook. The stain from the tea-leaves would by then have changed the shell-colour to a convincing brown.

Omelettes were yet to come as our society became more travelled, more sophisticated in diet and more Europeanised. Quiche was, we were told, ‘only for wimps’ when it first came on the diet scene and as for salad… ‘Mayo, God help us’ was still a county in the west from which most people emigrated, rather than the egg-based dressing that goes with everything nowadays. We’ve come a long way from bacon and egg breakfasts and the tea-time boiled egg with salt and butter. The current talk of world food shortages and rising prices might send us back to our staples of the past and the humble egg will certainly be there, on and in the menu.

Fr Murtagh's Blogspot

2008-05-05T07:36:00.000-07:00

No 1

Rhyming in the New Year

My father used to exchange books of Robbie Burns’ poetry with a townie friend of his. I wondered how he understood the Scots idiom of the verse. It seemed like a foreign language to my untrained ear. There was a tradition of poetry reading and verse writing in our area. Several local men and women were known to indulge in what Patrick Kavanagh’s mother used to call, “the curse o’ God rhymin”. Much of what was written locally took the form of parody or satire. Local events and characters were recorded in humourous ballads that were occasionally set to music. They were not exactly Shakespearean in insight or word-carving but they represented the aspirations of a dormant literary culture.

The poetic tradition in South East Ulster was a strong one. The best remembered local poet of times past was Art McCooey (1738?-1773). He was remembered as much for his rakish life as for his poetry. It was said that he had once walked a horse and cart full of dung up and down a field all day, in a poetic trance as he composed his verse, forgetting that his allotted work was to empty the cart and scatter its load on the pasture. He was also known for his drinking and for flouting convention in his marriage arrangements. Some of his ‘aisling’ or ‘vision’ poems survived and his Úr Chill an Chreagáin is a kind of anthem for South Armagh. Patrick Kavanagh acknowledged his influence by writing a poem called ‘Art Mc Cooey’, alluding to the incident with the cart load of dung. Kavanagh’s poem ends, ‘Wash out the cart with a bucket of water and a wangle/ of wheaten straw. Jupiter looks down./ Unlearnedly and unreasonably, poetry is shaped/ Awkwardly but alive in the unmeasured womb’.

The beginning of the year belongs, however, to the Scots poet, Robbie Burns. New Year’s celebrations invariably end with the singing of Auld Lang Syne, (literally: old long since) a poem that he re-worked and made popular across the world. He was an approximate contemporary of Art McCooey and both, like the later Patrick Kavanagh, were regarded as ploughman-poets. He shared some of Art’s other interests too. He had a complex love life and a taste for convivial company. He also died young. He had written almost all his poems by the age of twenty seven and he was dead a decade later in 1796.

Robert Burns is Scotland’s National Bard and his name is known throughout the world. His memory is kept alive in a particular way through the Burns Suppers that take place this time of year, especially around the birthday of the poet, January 25^th. The memory and works of few poets have been promoted as skilfully as have those of Robert Burns. There is a local Burns connection in that his sister and her husband are buried in Dundalk, in the graveyard of what is locally called ‘The Green Church’. She was married to a gardener, Robert Gault, who built Stephenstown Pond for the local landlord Matthew Fortescue.

One of Robert Burns best known poems comes from his ploughman days. During the course of ploughing a field, he accidentally turned over the nest of a mouse and he addressed a word of apology and a reflection on the incident in the form of a poem. The poem was simply called, ‘To a Mouse’. Using the idiom of modern English, the poem ending runs:

But, mousie, thou art not alone,/In proving foresight may be in vain,/The best laid schemes of mice and men,/ Go oft astray,/ And leave us nought but grief and pain,/To rend our day.
Still thou art blessed, compared with me!/ The present only touches thee,/ But, oh, I backward cast my eye/ On prospects drear,/ And forward, though I cannot see,/ I guess and fear.

One of the best known of Robert Burns poems arises from his sense of social justice and concern for the dignity of the individual. It is called “A man’s a man for a’ that”. Robert lived at a time of great unrest in mainland Europe and in his own country. The French Revolution was sweeping away old ideas of privilege and caste. In Scotland there was discontent with the Treaty of Union with England. The poem celebrates the worth of the ordinary person and is often sung as an anthem by those who dream of a more equitable society. It was sung at the official opening of the devolved Scottish parliament.

As we begin the New Year, I finish with a quotation from the poet of Hogmanay and of January. The poem is called ‘A bottle and friend’ and it counsels a Scottish version of the Latin axiom, ‘Carpe Diem’ - seize the moment. It reads: ‘Then catch the moments as they fly,/ And use them as ye ought, man: /Believe me, happiness is shy, /And comes not aye when sought, man”.

No 2

Beauty in the back yard

There is something very beautiful about a blanket of snow. It made me pause. I stood and stared as it transfigured all that I am familiar with. Even the skeletal trees came to life again. Their burdened branches shivered and shook off some of the excess snow at their tips. Shrubs collapsed and hugged the ground. Ditches took on the appearance of barbed-wire barriers as their angular branches stiffened and pierced each other awkwardly. It was the light that totally transfixed me however. For a moment, I thought that a spaceship might be hovering in the sky, bathing the area in a light so beautiful that I could not name it. Against the starchy white of the snow-blanket, the ambient light seemed warm and subdued; a night-light for a sleeping world, tucked away under its fleece of newly-fallen snow.

Each building wore a night-cap of frosted snow before the night was out. Like icing on a Christmas cake, the starchy snow-cap set off the mottled colours of the winter-battered walls. Window-ledges were decorated with sprinkled fringes of snow and roof-eaves were lace-edged; honoured with icicles. Parked cars sank into a deep sleep, refusing to leave their places until they had been released from their burden of frost and snow. Even the dogs stopped barking as the silence of snow permeated the muffled night.

I searched in the snow for signs of night-life when I woke up the following morning. Some early birds were holding congress at a safe height above the prowling cats. Their tell-tale excursions on the ground were mapped out in the delicate, arrow-like indents of their feet on the snow. The blackbirds had been having an apple-feast every morning until now. The autumn load of an apple tree had given up its attempt to hold on and the fruit had fallen on to a cushion of leaves underneath the tree. ‘The apple does not fall far from the tree’ as the proverb puts it. This wind-fall was for the blackbirds and now they were deprived of their apple a day.

The priest-graves in the churchyard looked colder than ever. Their Celtic-cross markers had caught a little of the snow-fall in the niches of their eternal circles. Their blankets of grey gravel refused to crunch underfoot. The snow, like a pair of new shoes, creaked and complained as it was forced into new forms and shapes by Mass-going feet. Soon the snow was veined with paths of regular footprints as people made their way through the churchyard, stepping out delicately along their traditional routes. Saint Bernadette knelt in the snow, her Pyrenean ‘capulet’ or veil now overlain with snow. The ‘lady’ sheltered in her rocky niche, smiling down, enigmatic as ever.

It was a short visit. The snow was soiled and churned up by midday. The underlying imperfections were visible again. Car tyres sprayed their muddy excess sideways as they pushed the snow aside and made tracks to return to business. The toppled torso of a hastily-built snowman rolled down a lawn. How the mighty are fallen! Holiday lie-ins were cut short and snowball fights broke out before numbness stopped play. Parents stood in the doorways of their lined-up houses and remembered.

Inside, cold young hands were wrapped around mugs of steaming tea. Old hands consecrated the fire in their hearths as they sat, spreading out their palms to absorb the heat. Grey columns of smoke rose vertically into grey clouds as the rain threatened. The slanting showers came and the snow dissolved like sugar beneath it. Only the sheltered hedgerows and the narrow country lanes hung on to their deposits of New Year snow. These deposits of frost and snow were what Patrick Kavanagh was thought to be referring to when he wrote of the ‘bright shillings of March’ in his famous poem, ‘Shancoduff’;

‘My hills hoard the bright shillings of March

While the sun searches in every pocket.

They are my Alps and I have climbed the Matterhorn

With a sheaf of hay for three perishing calves

In the field under the Big Forth of Rocksavage’.

“Bad weather we’re havin’ Father”. I agree for the sake of conversation and convention. I didn’t tell my greeter that I had been pulled up in my tracks the night before by the beauty of the ‘bad weather’. I might as well have been in a trance, my body and mind simultaneously put on ‘hold’, like a mystic who is reduced to wordless-ness. The surprise of the snow was not only in its unannounced arrival or in its hasty departure. Its beauty and its ability to beautify, managed to surprise my jaded senses. ‘The beauty of this world hath made me sad’, wrote Pádraig Pearse in his poem, The Wayfarer - ‘This beauty that will pass’.

No 3

The giving hand is always uppermost

The first black man I ever saw was, perhaps inevitably, a British soldier. I used to feel indignant when I saw black soldiers patrolling the streets and fields in our area. Of all people, I thought, they should know what it is like to live under the yoke of oppression and here they are as part of an occupying army. It was strange to see black soldiers patrolling the more remote parts of the countryside. I’m sure they were making a little indent in the history of the place in their being the first Africans to ever set foot on the fields of that particular part of the country.

Somehow we absorbed some of the racism that was directed against Africans, even as we deplored and fought against the racism that we dealt with daily, especially in our interactions with British or Northern Irish security people. My first direct experience of this racism in action occurred one day when I was with a friend of my brother. He was two years older than me and much more street-wise. A black soldier was on patrol on the streets of our village and he was taking cover in the doorway of my family home. My friend began to abuse him from the safety of his nearby perch. He teased the black soldier, calling him all kinds of rude and racist names and then hid his face from sight.

The soldier endured his tormentor patiently and bided his time until he was able to encounter him. In a restrained and gentlemanly fashion he told my friend that he must never again use such abuse to another human being. He told him of the need to respect others and of the dignity of each individual and he generally gave him a lecture on the evils of racism. My friend responded meekly and with compliance. Having acquitted himself with much dignity, the soldier moved off with the rest of his patrol. As he left and as my friend spotted his escape route, the soldier reminded him that he must never call people names just because the colour of their skin happened to be black. My friend began his retreat but not before he had the last word in the encounter. ‘O.K. Snowflake!’ he responded as he made his getaway, cheeky to the last.

Many years later, I met an African priest who happened to be studying the same course with me in Dublin. His name was Hyacinth and he was unaware of the character of the same name in the television programme, ‘Keeping up Appearances’ or of how ridiculous she managed to make herself. We became friends and through him I was introduced to many of his confreres and colleagues over the past fifteen years. He has now been nominated as a bishop in his own area in Southern Nigeria and I have accepted his invitation to be there for the ceremony. In this context, I recently visited the Embassy of Nigeria in Dublin to obtain a visa.

The office for passport and visa business was located at the back of the building, in a basement area. It seemed as if the immediate message was written into the layout of the building. This business of dealing with the practical concerns of Nigerian nationals and a few Europeans was to be kept out of sight and away from the gracious entrance to the Embassy in Central Dublin. ‘The giving hand is always uppermost,’ runs an African proverb. In this case it was the Africans who had the power of giving or withholding and I waited silently as the numbers on the wall-clock turned towards my designated turn.

The waiting-room, like most functional rooms of its sort, was equipped with moulded-plastic seats, water dispensers and little else by way of distraction or amusement. There were two other white faces in the room but it was overwhelmingly a Nigerian space with Nigerian rules of communication and interaction. ‘Where have you come from?’ snapped an Embassy official as he interviewed a Nigerian man who was accompanied by his wife and family. ‘From Navan’, was his incongruous reply. His wife unwrapped a slice of white, buttered bread and gave it to her small daughter as a snack.

The atmosphere was one of subdued annoyance and irritation as officials tried to explain to the supplicants what forms and procedures were needed for their particular request. Mine was simple and it was granted officiously but without delay once I had made personal contact with the Embassy staff. The experience made me reflect, however, on the indignities of being a non-national in a strange culture; on having a black face in a white country; on being at the mercy of officials of either skin colour who have power over your plans and your destiny; on being a minority in an ocean of other-ness; on the daily indignity of holding out an expectant hand, knowing that the giving hand will always remain uppermost.

No 4

A road too wide to cross?

The late Cardinal Tomás Ó Fiaich once got himself into a spot of trouble, diplomatically speaking, when he suggested that most political prejudice in Northern Ireland emanated from the Catholic community while most religious prejudice came from their Protestant counterparts. It was not an original observation but it contained enough truth to sting commentators into action. I was reminded of this recently by the news and chat-show item regarding the selling of Rosary beads in the gift-shop of an Irish Anglican Cathedral and the hostile reactions that this evoked. The depth of anti-Catholic feeling that arose from some quarters was not surprising to those who were brought up in Northern Ireland. It is a reaction that has occasionally been turned on fellow Protestants as in the infamous case of the Reverend David Armstrong, a former Presbyterian Minister, who fled Northern Ireland in 1985. He recorded his story in a book titled ‘A Road Too far’.

The story really began with his move to Limavady in 1981 to take up a post in the First Presbyterian Church there. Shortly after his arrival, the newly-built Catholic church opposite his own building was bombed. Rev Armstrong visited the bombed building and offered condolences to the Catholic clergy and Bishop. He also spoke on television. A petition had been signed against the building of the church and soon after his visit and interview the Minister began to receive hostile messages.

Things settled down and in December 1981 Reverend Armstrong held the first Christmas Day Service in his church. Shortly afterwards he was invited to the official opening of the Catholic Church following repairs and rebuilding. He again received a hostile reaction from the local governing body of his Church. There were veiled threats about ‘losing your congregation’. In 1983, a new local Catholic priest, Fr. Kevin Mullan introduced himself when they met while on hospital visitation. On the Christmas Day of that same year, Fr. Mullan asked him to wish Happy Christmas to his congregation on his behalf. Reverend Armstrong suggested that Fr. Mullan should greet them personally. They both crossed the road that Christmas and wished each other’s congregation a Happy Christmas. There was much applause in both churches but there was a significant degree of negative reaction recorded by Rev Armstrong too. This later escalated into death threats to his wife and family.

The national media got hold of the story and it featured prominently in a Sunday newspaper. A television programme was recorded and shown. Negative reaction continued when a group of Apprentice Boys tried to insist on another Minister receiving them when they marched to a church that was in Rev Armstrong’s care. He refused their request and they marched elsewhere. In 1984 a visiting party of Christians from Britain that included some Catholics were invited to a Service in his Church and he later preached in the Catholic St. Eugene’s Cathedral in Derry. He also planned to visit Massachusetts, U.S.A. that year alongside Fr. Mullan. Before the visit took place he heard that a group of Free Presbyterians were planning to picket his church that Christmas. The picket was duly put in place and there were some unpleasant scenes within the Church when some picketers who had entered the building abused Fr.Mullan.

There was more trouble for Rev Armstrong as the elders of his congregation turned against him. He was advised to cut his ties with Fr. Mullan and not to travel to the U.S.A ‘with the priest’. He went on the trip but had to cut it short because of a family bereavement. Shortly afterwards he resigned. He preached his last sermon to his own congregation and crossed the road, saying farewell, to much applause, to Fr Mullan’s parishioners. He left for England with his wife and family shortly afterwards, taking up an offer of hospitality and an opportunity to study at Oxford University from Church of England sources. He later served in Cambridge before moving back to Ireland in 2000, settling for some time in Carrigaline, Co.Cork.

As Rev Armstrong departed Northern Ireland in 1985, a supportive statement was issued by Cardinal Tómas Ó Fiaich. ‘I hope there will never be a road between Protestant and Catholic that is too wide to cross’ he had written. He also said that the episode was one of the saddest moments of his life. David Armstrong writes of his appreciation of the Cardinal’s words and of how he was moved by this unexpected source of support. The Cardinal had also given more practical help. It all earned him a rebuke from the authorities of Rev Armstrong’s Church for interference in internal matters.

With the new dispensation in place in Northern Ireland it might be hoped that such attitudes might eventually dissolve but old prejudices die hard. The political settlement in place has won much acclaim internationally and is being held up as an example of successful conflict resolution, with many public figures taking various shares of the credit for its success. Dare we hope, as we end another ‘Week of Prayer for Christian Unity’ that the religious wing of the conflict might make similar strides towards abandonment of prejudice and achieve similar resolution?

No 5

The seven deadly sins.

Every year, during Lent I withdraw a book from my shelves called, ‘The seven deadly sins’ and I try to read through it during the six week season. For the record, the seven deadly ones are pride, covetousness, lust, anger, envy, greed and sloth. Pride is considered to be the principal, over-arching sin, the original and the root of the others. In ages that were less literate than ours the seven deadly sins often decorated works of art. These were then used to teach people as our high crosses or stained glass might have been used as teaching aids here in Ireland. The deadly sins were illustrated by symbols, by motifs and by figures, sometimes animal figures. Pride, for example is portrayed arriving, by carriage of course, drawn by six animals symbolising the particular sin that rides on each. Sloth rides an ass, gluttony a swine, lechery a goat, avarice a camel, envy a wolf and wrath a lion.

If you wish to identify those ‘deadlies’ that are particularly yours, try these exercises. If any one of the list seems no big deal to you, you have already rationalised your way around it. Think again and think real. Listen to your opponents and enemies, especially those who make a virtue out of rudeness by calling it truth. Search out the patterns of your life and examine the events of each day. Pray, reflect and read some spiritual books – ‘nothing too recent’ as one sceptic of modernity wrote lately.

Ideas of what sin is have changed of course. We rarely hear the old distinction made between mortal and venial sin. The modern diagnosis of social or structural sin, the sins of a system are more likely to be given a hearing though. Attitudes to guilt and shame have changed too mostly because of the influence of the ‘self-help’ industry, the ‘new age’ movement and the influence of popular psychology. Modern Irish writing with its ever present backdrop of ‘Catholic’ guilt has had its influence too. In this genre of writing or subsequent film-making, sometimes called ‘misery-litt’ we Irish are portrayed as permanently guilty, with shame as our constant fear. Repression, sacrifice and denial make up the daily diet of the fictional characters.

Somehow, along the route to modernity, society got rid of belief in hell. It evaporated and with it went sin, shame and guilt. We were told to express ourselves without reserve where before we had been taught the language of renunciation. We were taught to salve our self-esteem rather than to save our souls. We were chided for feeling guilty and shameful and told to accept ourselves as we are and that what mattered was that we assert our rights, that we have good feelings and liberty to pursue happiness regardless of the effects on others. So long as it felt good, all was considered fine. So long as you were happy, all was allowed. What nonsense! We need a wholesome sense of guilt and shame if we are to live peacefully together. Guilt, shame, repression, sacrifice and renunciation are all necessary, healthy and maturing when they are experienced appropriately. Critical thinking is at least as important as attending to feelings. Reason regulates the emotions. Duties and responsibilities are as necessary to good living as some rights. When these neglected ideas are missing, society loses out because it becomes more selfish and self-centred. It becomes more fragmented, more conflicted, more violent and less happy.

We ought to feel guilty when we do something that is obviously wrong. We should feel shame when we hurt others by word or action. A complete absence of guilt and shame is the mark of what is called the anti-social or pathological character type. It is often guilt that motivates us to change our behaviour, to mature beyond the foolishness of the seven deadly sins. It is the itch that alerts us to the fact that something is wrong with our attitudes or behaviour. It can get under the skin of rationalising, the unreal excuses we use to cover up the true, messy motivations for our behaviour.

Guilt didn’t go away of course. Rather than feeling guilty for the ‘deadlies’, people in this end of the world were taught to feel guilty about other things. New ‘social’ sins emerged. Smoking in company is definitely a modern ‘mortaller.’ It is more serious in contemporary estimation than most of the ‘deadlies’ listed above. It used to be fashionable, even estimable. Dessert time and food generally has become an occasion of sin and of guilt for the virtuous body-worshipper. Using pesticides rather than organic solutions is considered a sinful act of environmental sabotage. Some contemporary ‘sins’ are found only in particular cultures. Fox hunting has come in for particular odium in parts of Britain, while Hallal or ritual slaughter of animals is allowed, as is the abortion of children, even in the third semester. There is not much consistency there. Ideas of right and wrong can obviously become caught up in a web of political correctness and of fashion.

The effect of a look at the seven ‘deadlies’ can help us out of this confusion. It can clear the fog of prejudice that obscures the vision of those immersed in any culture. There are centuries of worldly wisdom, deep wells of spiritual strength and profound psychological insights in the compiling of the seven. They provide the motivation behind the great scandals and excesses of our time as truly as they did in the past. They are markers on the way to understanding the dark and murky underworld of human consciousness. They have featured in literature from earliest times and they are as contemporary as Brad Pitt and the film ‘Seven’ or the stories in your daily newspaper. If you search carefully you might even find some of them in your own less glorious moments.

No 6

‘He who sits on the cushion of advantage goes to sleep’ (Emerson).

From our earliest awakenings we were made conscious of the relative advantages that were enjoyed by our people. It took practical and symbolic shape and form in the enthronement of a ‘Mite-Box’ on teacher’s table or shelf. Though we considered ourselves as the forgotten ones; the disadvantaged ones in the ‘cold house’ for Catholics that was Northern Ireland, we knew that there were the infinitely more disadvantaged ‘black babies’ out there in the heat and in the darkness. We spoke of ‘Foreign’ Missions and of other peoples who lived in a distant ‘Far East’. The subtle message was given to us that all else other than our own was foreign and distant and that we were children of the light. The civilisation of the En-light-enment in Europe had set us on a central cushion of advantage.

We dropped our pennies into the mite-box for the ‘blacks of Africa’ and for the warm feelings of satisfaction that this form of giving gave to us. Our school books and religious magazines furnished our minds with images of pot-bellied African children in situations that could only evoke pity and compassion, laced with a touch of condescension and self-congratulation on our relative advantage.

Our Irish missionaries were ambassadors for the nation and the heroes of missionary magazine stories. Our empire was a spiritual one, extending to all corners and crevices of the accessible world. We had self-confidence in faith that we had never been able to muster culturally. Emancipation had given us a faith-story of a heretical Goliath having been slain by an Irish Catholic David who was now empowered and had built up an extended kingdom at home and throughout the world. We had the self-confidence to take on the whole world and its conversion to our faith. It had been demonstrated by our history to be a resilient faith that resisted centuries of aggression and eventually triumphed over injustice. At the height of our triumphant feelings, in the middle decades of the last century, we took on nothing less than the conversion of China. We were an underdeveloped, isolated, island nation of a few million people taking on the extra missionary commitment of saving souls in nothing less than colossal China.

As we grew up and moved into exile from the world of the mite-box we became, in the words of an Anthony Cronin poem, ‘In some ways better than our begetters/In other ways, worse’. The tide of political correctness swept away references to Foreign, Far or Black and we learned new concepts and longer words like indigenous, inculturation and reverse mission. We began to apologise for our empire-building and to direct our light on the structural darkness that was nearer home. The cushion of advantage became ever more comfortable as education unlocked our potential and as our collective purse began to fill. This collective purse we called ‘the economy’ and it soon took the place of discarded but formerly central concepts such as community, country, culture or catholic. We increasingly spoke of ‘career’ rather than of ‘calling’.

In the new dispensation that is contemporary Ireland it is the likes of Bono or Bob Geldof who have publicly taken up the dropped baton in the race to ‘make poverty history’ and to demonstrate our Irish missionary drive, though with little personal sacrifice on their own parts. They represent the still-smouldering Irish impulse to reach out to a suffering world. There is no shortage of projects and good causes or of people who wish to work in the developing world for a period, following the compulsory gap-year in Australia of course, for a limited period only, before returning to the comfort of the cushion and to the lifestyle to which we have become accustomed. The days of the reckless ‘peregrinus’ or missionary monk setting out to sea on a rudderless voyage to wherever God guided him, or the Irish missionary laying down a life commitment to exile are all but over.

Some of the ‘black babies’ have returned as priests and are now preaching to us. The empire has struck back. They are occasionally bewildered by our brand of heathenism, our hedonism and our poverty of values. They see the pain and the chaos of a society that is suffering from a relatively short period of intense ‘affluenza’. We have gone to fevered sleep on our cushion of advantage. Though we occasionally talk in the turbulence of our slumbers, the prospect of our awakening this side of tragedy, or of cure, is poor. Maybe someone should remove the cushion from beneath our slumbering heads.

No 7

Where the rainbow goes to Mass

An Irish seminary professor that I knew once visited Africa. He wrote an article when he returned home, telling of his experiences. The article was titled, ‘Where the rainbow goes to Mass’. He was so taken by the vivid colours of Nigerian dress that he saw the whole rainbow range of colours every time he attended Mass.

‘Welcome to Lagos,’ my friend said as we exited the airport, ‘where nearly everyone is mad!’ We made our way through the taxi touts outside ‘Arrivals’ only to find that our own contact had not arrived and would be almost an hour late. It was hard to tell whether Lagos traffic or African time non-keeping were to blame. Despite the cratered road surfaces, the dilapidated, fumes-belching vehicles and the skeletal remains of crashed vehicles on the road verges, I learnt from the licence-plate of the car in front of me that Lagos regards itself as a ‘centre of excellence’.

Markets spring up everywhere here, especially by any roadside that delivers people, potential customers and traders. Our car later eased its way painfully through a ‘night-market’, deftly avoiding and dodging the swarms of motor-bikes that are found everywhere in the country. Shopping is a different experience here. From a dusty, ramshackle ‘tigín’, held together by a couple of sheets of rusty galvanised iron, traders, often in traditional African dress, look out for custom. In this season of ‘hamartan’ or dry cool wind, they fan small wood fires to warm themselves and carry candles or ‘Hurricane’ lamps during night-market. Day market can be anything from a few yams, piled up like a small turf-rick by the roadside, to a purpose built plastic kiosk, painted in garish colours, renting the latest DVDs or selling phone-credit.

Sunday is the annual ‘Open Day’ for the missionary society that is hosting me. It is an opportunity for another of the ‘celebrations’ that Nigerians delight in. Forgetting their troubles and the squalour that surrounds them, they let loose their voices and their bodies as they sway and sing unselfconsciously. A fatted pig, tethered to a strong shrub, succumbs to the heat and sleeps away his penultimate day of life. A bound lamb grazes contentedly beside him, innocent of the sacrifice that he is and will be.

I have begun to keep monastery hours here, getting up before dark for travel or for early morning Mass in the seminary chapels. The liturgy is Easter-like as the day breaks between the saying of Morning Prayer from the Breviary and the beginning of Mass. The Oratory benches are lined with white-soutaned young seminarians. They move piously and sing or tap out drum-rhythms as they respond to the ritual. They are geographically well removed from their contemporaries in our end of their world; a physical distance far surpassed by the cultural and spiritual chasm that modernity has opened up between their world and ours.

These seminarians, living in Spartan conditions, are our spiritual descendants in many cases, having inherited their faith from Irish missionary activity. It is more than a little unsettling, one young priest tells me, when he hears that the Irish, who brought them to faith, have abandoned their zeal for spreading it and their desire to express it in practice or in priesthood. The ‘purpose of my visit’ as the immigration people always ask, is to attend the consecration of my friend as a bishop. As a white priest, I attract my share of the deference with which people treat authority figures here. There is much bowing and curtseying. Titles are thrown around like confetti at a wedding and it is not just a religious or Catholic thing.

A legion of house-churches, sects and religious organisations of all kinds advertise their presence on rusting, paint-faded name-plates. Whether it is a church, hotel or small shop, it appears to me that there is an inverse relationship between the grandiloquence of their names and the reality of the facilities that front on to the dusty, red dirt-paths The Intercontinental Hotel vies with the Celestial Church and the Marvellous Emporium Supermarket for exaltation of title and paucity of resources. There are few problems here with public self-esteem.

Like an autumn swallow, I head south for the heat and for the climax of my visit. The car journey takes seven hours, one hour of which is spent trying to anticipate and avoid pot-holes and drivers who are swerving onto the opposite side of the road in the same manoeuvre. Police road-blocks are frequent; the blockade taking the literal form of blocking the road with some fallen timber or with whatever debris can be found in the ‘bush’. A good-humoured encounter ends with the handing over of a requested donation for ‘the fuel fund’ or ‘for water’, that essential human fuel in a hot climate.

Nigerian natives say that N.E.P.A. the National Electricity Board means ‘Never Expect Power Always’. Life here is organised around the power-cuts and the generator’s rationed output. Like progress on the motorway, it’s a stop-go process. Maybe progress is only ever made in fits and starts rather than in the straight and steady lines that we prefer. The rooster-call of daybreak finds me meditating on our own development as a nation, from medieval agricultural methods and living conditions to the push-button technology of today and all in the space of a forty-year generation. Many things become possible when a nation wakens up.

No 8

Thoughts from a far country

It is Friday, the First Friday of the month and the last day of the working week. Morning Mass in the Cathedral Church begins at 6 a.m. Guided by the beam from my latest-technology-torch, I stumble my way over rough ground to the modest, galvanised, girders and open-breeze-block building that serves as a cathedral in this not-yet-diocese, the Vicariate of Bomadi, in Delta region, the southern part of Nigeria.

On reaching the level concrete path that encircles the church, I catch a glimpse of a startled face turning away from the yellow glare and spotlight of my torch. A sleeping, homeless man re-adjusts his ‘wrapper’ and turns his face back to the wall. Inside, the only light is from a few candles around the sanctuary area but the people keep arriving and taking their places in the pews. Being Irish, I shuffle apologetically into the backmost pew and sit nearest the edge, beside the main entrance door, ‘The great escape’, always needs careful planning.

In the almost-light of the candles, the dark outlines of well-wrapped women cast further shadows along the aisle. Occasionally, I catch a glimpse of their care-lined faces. The features of the poor seldom differ. Written on their foreheads and carved in the crevices around their mouths and in the dark valleys under their eyes are sad expressive lines, together making up the her-story of their lives. In the darkness, sounds are amplified. The slow roll of the weary dragging feet of the elderly contrasts with the sharp, staccato flip-flop cracks of the more agile, as they crush the dust under their step rather than pulling it with them like the older ones.

Outside the compound, roosters compete with a ranting Pentecostal preacher for the public ear. By the time prayers begin, there are several hundred people in the church; young men dressed in shirt and jeans with shirt-tails left loosely out and cuffs turned up, á la mode, as they say on mainland Europe; very young girls dressed in headscarves like miniature old women; workers and elderly ones with cheap plastic rosaries around their necks; all are represented as they gather in kin-groups. The signal for 6a.m. is given and prayers begin with the saying of the Angelus.

A Rosary and several trimmings later and it is almost time for Mass to begin. The half-light of dawn gives the liturgy a sense of unfolding; an almost mystical movement from darkness to light; from shadow to substance; from unknowing to recognition. A plaintive chant is taken up with gusto at regular intervals by all sections of the congregation. The electric lights finally come up and the shadows dissolve. I find to my momentary embarrassment, that I am seated in the almost exclusively women’s aisle.

I am unable to hide my white but increasingly reddening face, even in the shadows. This allows me particular and special attention. As I kneel down for the Offertory of the Mass, the kind lady who is my immediate neighbour in the pew anticipates my move and prepares the way by brushing some dust off the wooden kneeling-board with her bare hand. I protest mildly but it is too late. My cover is blown but the honour of the community is retained. The ‘Oyibo’; the white man-priest has been honoured. The dust has been cleared from before his sandalled feet. The African mantra, ‘You are welcome,’ takes on its incarnate form.

‘The white man has the watch but the African has time’. There are no clock-watchers here and the liturgy is allowed to run its full course. The diminutive and spirited bishop steps forward to deliver his homily which is relayed in triplicate by himself and two translators who interpret the message in the local dialects. The main story in the readings of the day is that of King David’s adulterous and murderous liaison with Bathsheba, the wife of Urriah the Hittite. The scripture stories are followed by some people from their Bibles and missals. I wonder silently what dramas are brought to mind for those listening to this lascivious story of sexual indiscretion. ‘The poor man’s opera’ has its comforts and its crucifixions for every generation and race.

Communion time finds me kneeling by the altar-rails, tongue extended, in old-style reception of the Eucharist from the priest. The dividing line between priest and people; between the sacred and the profane; these are maintained in the hope perhaps that lines, whether written on the face, heard from The Book or finger-drawn in the dust of daily interactions, might make sense of the scripture of life. I have a commitment to meet my friend nearby at 8a.m. It is now 7.50 and Mass is almost but not quite over. Being an Oyibo, a white-man and a punctualist, I find that tension is rising within me. Being Irish, I get up and leave Mass early.

No 9

Hitting the middle years

This month is an important one for me. During March I will hit fifty or fifty will hit me. I’m not quite sure which way to look at it. I know that it is just a number, no different than forty-nine and year number forty-nine has not been in the least traumatic. The number fifty is lodged firmly somewhere in the grey matter behind my forehead, like a giant speed-warning sign or an old-fashioned milestone, reminding me that it is imminent and that I had better take note. The year of my birth has been branded into my mind with especial emphasis recently. I have discovered that it is a mistake to use such data as alarm codes or P.I.N. numbers that are used regularly. Nobody needs daily or regular reminders of how far back in the last century the happy event occurred.

Soon I will become a ‘Quinquagenarian’, a fifty year old. It sounds more dignified than ‘middle-aged’. I have become conscious recently of how over-fifties are described in the media. ‘A man in his fifties’, as the news reports often say, conjures up all kinds of images that I can not identify with. ‘Being over fifty is not what it used to be,’ the radio advertisement reassures me. The images of ‘what it used to be’ are not very comforting. The claim that the advertiser makes for his magic oil is not very convincing.

It is hard to imagine being fifty. I dread to think of how people, especially much younger people, perceive me when I think of how I viewed my parents when they were fifty years old. A comedian described this realisation-of-age process with the following quip. One morning I woke up, looked in the mirror, and said - ‘Who is that old guy wearing my pyjamas?’ The effects of advancing age are only evident, to me at least, on occasion. The print in telephone directories has been getting smaller recently. The little lines in the Missal on the altar swim around momentarily before my eyes settle down and focus properly. When I genuflect in an almost empty chapel, my knee-joints crack loudly and the sounds amplify and echo around the place, before returning to haunt me. If I squat at a hospital bedside for too long, I rise with a stiffness that I had not noticed before. I have begun to note that there are occasional special offers, concessions even, for people like me; those who reach the gold-standard of fifty.

There is something about the number fifty that suggests a mid-point, even though the truth is more likely to be that it is the beginning of Act Three, and next stop is the Finale and Curtains, if I am lucky enough to live out the average lifespan. Older people will say, ‘sure you’re only a child,’ but they are not very convincing. The writer Victor Hugo does reassure me, however, when he wrote that, ‘Forty is the old age of youth; fifty is the youth of old age’.

Turning fifty is not, however, a terminal affliction and I intend to survive and enjoy this stage of life just like I did my country childhood, my searching adolescence, my student-life twenties, and my priestly thirties and forties. I will reassure myself by thinking of those I knew who never reached fifty and those greats of history who died long before they had flowered or harvested the autumn of their lives.

Being fifty is a challenge I can rise to. I do not intend to indulge in any of the stocktaking exercises that are recommended or the lists of fifty that might be compiled. I do not intend to have a mid-life crisis or man-opause and indulge in any age-denying foolishness. I will allow myself a home-made, rudimentary health check and award myself a pass on the human equivalent of the N.C.T.

The big picture that has emerged from my recent ruminations on the prospect of ageing has been a canvas splashed with vivid recognition of how abundantly blessed my life is and how much I like it. I am as curious as I was at ten years old; braver and more confident than I was at twenty; wiser and more thoughtful than at thirty, and mellower than I was at forty. I am blessed with good health, a loving family, with friends and with meaningful work that I care about and enjoy. I have imagination and hope and passion in as generous a measure as ever. There are, of course, things that I will continue to work at changing. These imperfections begin in myself and ripple out into all kinds of structures and situations. The difference is that I am no longer in a hurry. Fifty years of living has taught me how to cope with whatever life throws my way. I do not feel any pressure to begin revolutions without or within. I have grown cautious and conservative in my ways; the very qualities I despised and chafed at in headstrong youth. In a way, I am looking forward to being fifty. The alternative, as the saying goes, is unthinkable.

No 10

One of the first ‘Paisley’ jokes that I heard ran as follows: ‘If Paisley and another man were ploughing in a field, how would you know which one was Paisley?’ The answer: ‘The one with the most ‘gulls’ following him’. It seemed that country people in my area could not quite understand what attracted people to follow the preacher or what his appeal was to the crowds. There were jokes about him from the very start of his public career. These stories revolved around his physique; his voice; his appearance at the ‘Pearly Gates’ and his apparent contempt for things Catholic or Irish. People were unsure whether to take him seriously or not, or indeed how he could be taken seriously, so strange was his style and the tone of his message.

When we Catholic priests give homilies at funerals, we are sometimes accused of overstatement or hyperbole regarding the deceased. There are very few people about whom many positive things cannot be said and the tradition among people is not to speak ill of the dead, (De Mortuis nil nisi bonum). It seems that the tradition has been extended to the politically recently deceased as commentators showered generous tributes on the First Minister when he announced the (almost) end of his political career lately. Much has been made of the last year of his political life and the extraordinary turn that politics has taken in Northern Ireland, now governed jointly by those known as ‘The Chuckle Brothers’. At best it shows that even the apparently most intransigent can be brought to change. Redemption is always possible, might be the Christian interpretation on such personal transformation.Wasn’t it David Trimble who said of someone else that, ‘just because you have a past does not mean that you do not have a future’.

The career of Ian Paisley spanned about forty years. He came to public prominence around 1968. It may seem mean-spirited to ask but what is the legacy of the other thirty-nine years? For all of that time he has been a regular feature on the political landscape, scowling and howling in equal measure as he delivered his half-sermon, half-speech, prophecies and denunciations. His emotional speaking style and content borrowed from contemporary American evangelists, from old-style pulpit oratory and from Apocalyptic biblical imagery. He was not, in my view, an orator capable of finely-honed sentences or speeches but rather a demagogue with the ability to whip up base emotions by playing on people’s paranoia and fears. What he lacked in content he made up for in volume.

His tactics often appeared crude and attention-seeking. Anyone who followed his career will remember some of the political stunts for which he became well-known, especially in his younger days. He craved attention, recognition and even honours and tolerated no rivals to the throne in the kingdom that he built up over the years as his political power increased. The irony is that he became a counter-image of all that he railed against in matters of religion. He was all but pope of the Free Presbyterian Church that he founded, giving way only recently to a successor. Mainstream Presbyterians are famous for changing their Moderator every year. His word generally went unchallenged. His judgments were not considered fallible. When Ian Paisley founded his church he deviously called it the ‘Free Presbyterian Church’ with the implication that the mainstream Presbyterian Church was not free. Similarly, when he founded his political party, he called it the Democratic Unionist Party, again implying that the other Unionist parties were undemocratic.

In 1966, Ian Paisley was awarded an honorary doctorate from Bob Jones University in Carolina, U.S.A. The University was regarded as a degree-mill, churning out scarcely-recognised qualifications. It was fundamentalist, virulently anti-Catholic and regarded as racist, allowing its first black students admission in 1971. It only permitted married black students initially and later sought to ban inter-racial dating among the unmarried blacks who first entered in 1975. The ban lasted until the year 2000. ‘Doctor Paisley’ craved academic recognition just as he sought political honours from the British establishment when his ‘No’ became ‘Maybe’ and finally ‘Yes’. His wife and other party members have joined the ermine ranks of the House of Lords. She is now Baroness Paisley and her husband is a ‘Privy Counsellor’, an advisor to the Head of State.

One of my former teachers once expressed the worry that Ian Paisley claimed to read the Christian Scriptures every day and yet, he said, it seemed that that the imprint or the spirit of the Scriptures did not seem evident in his pronouncements or demeanour. Commentators have said the he was a devious and skilful politician but I have not heard anyone claim that he was a holy man. This is despite his being the founder of a Christian Church. He appeared to most observers as a man of the sword rather than as a man marked by the message of ‘The Book’.

His contribution in the early days of the Troubles was to provoke further division with incendiary speeches, rallies and forays. His powers as a demagogue were formidable. More and more ‘gulls’ came along and followed. It all begs the question as to what kind of electorate ends up with an elderly, somewhat unstable cleric as their First Minister. ‘The sixteenth century is alive and living in Northern Ireland,’ as a Radharc television programme of 1989 demonstrated.

One final Paisley story: Ian Paisley was on a tour of a multi-denominational school and he asked the pupils: "Give me an example of a tragedy. "A little Presbyterian girl stood up and said: "If a person fell off a tree while playing, that would be a tragedy." "Very good", said Paisley, "but that would not be a tragedy, that would be an accident!" A little Protestant boy stood up and said: "If a busload of children crashed off a cliff, that would be a tragedy!" "Another good one", answered Ian, "but that would not be a tragedy, that would be a great loss." A little Catholic boy stood up and said, "If you were in a plane flying over this country, Mr Paisley, and it blew up, then that would be tragedy!" "Excellent", said Ian, feeling very chuffed with himself, "but how would you know that was a tragedy?" "Well," said the young lad, "it wouldn't be a great loss and it certainly wouldn't be an accident!”

No 11

Seachtain na Gaeilge came to an end recently. It was timed to end on the Feast of Saint Patrick when we remember our Christian heritage and when we celebrate things Irish. In a gesture that is truly Irish, Seachtain na Gaeilge runs for a fortnight rather than the week of its title. Only in Ireland could we have a week that lasts for a fortnight! Many of us will be familiar with the concept of a Seachtain na Gaeilge from our school-days when we occasionally tried to speak a little more of the language that differentiates us, even from our closest Celtic cousins.

I am in the habit of saying a prayer in Irish with altar servers when we return to the sacristy after celebrating Mass. Sometimes I engage the pupils from Primary School in a conversation to ascertain their attitude to the Irish tongue. Many times they will express a negative attitude to learning the language, even telling me that they ‘hate’ Irish. Sometimes I ask them if they ever met a Frenchman who hated French or a Spaniard who hated Spanish.

I am always surprised when I encounter this negativity as my own experience of learning Irish was so different. In fact I chose to go to Primary School half an hour earlier than usual in the morning to learn Irish. There was no Gaeilge on the school curriculum in those days but we had an enthusiastic teacher and fíor-Ghael who generously gave us the opportunity to learn our language. The pupils to whom I tell the story usually look baffled and bewildered at the very idea of anyone going to school ‘before school’ to learn Irish, of all things.

It seems that we sometimes only begin to appreciate something when it is removed from us or forbidden to us. Maybe that is part of the Irish national character as well. On leaving Primary School, I got a scholarship to a pre-Gaeltacht, Summer School in the Servite Priory in Benburb, County Tyrone and I later attended the Gaeltacht in Glenvar, near Kerrykeel in County Donegal over three summers. I took Irish as a specialist subject when I began studying for ‘A’ levels. Though I have forgotten much of what I learned, I still retain a love for the language and speak it regularly, if imperfectly, with some of my Gaeilgeoir friends.

The negativity that occasionally surrounds any mention of learning Irish is difficult to understand. The economic argument, the ‘what good is it to me?’ question, is still aired when people complain that Irish is of no material advantage to them and therefore it is a waste of time learning it. Some people have been put off learning the language by the method of teaching it or by the attitude of perfectionists who regard Gaeilge briste, or imperfect Irish, as an abomination. There are more riches, however, than monetary ones and the Irish language is a gold-mine of cultural wealth. A whole corporate personality is hidden in the way Irish expresses itself. There is living history and a multitude of ideas and insights into human nature in the literature associated with the language. In denying ourselves access to this, or ignoring it, it is as if we were to neglect or kill off an elderly relative because they were no longer economically viable or because we could not care enough to try to understand them.

A few years ago I went with a colleague on a last-minute sun-holiday to Spain for the first time. I found myself surrounded, not by Spanish culture but rather by English language and symbols. My reaction was to speak with my friend in Irish and create a bubble of Irishness in this sea of British ‘chav’-culture. Every evening before our meal we sat in a designated spot and enjoyed a pre-prandial drink, observed the natives and our near-neighbours in holiday-mode and commented on it all, ‘as Gaeilge’. We came to call the corner in which we habitually sat, ‘the Gaeltacht’. I have to admit that we took pleasure in confounding both sets of people as they overheard our guttural language and wondered what planet we had arrived from. There is a certain legitimate pride in speaking your own language and there may even be practical uses for speaking, in the words of the ballad, ‘a language the stranger does not know’.

Back in Northern Ireland, a war of words is going on over the use and promotion of languages. There is a great deal of posturing as one side tries to score political points against the other. Maybe it is better than a war in which people are the targets. ‘Jaw, jaw, jaw, is better than war, war, war’ to paraphrase Winston Churchill.

One of the hidden treasures of the Irish language is its spiritual understanding. As we approach Easter I leave you with one traditional prayer that has wonderful insight into the meaning of Easter and of Redemption. It contains a great deal of theology, linking the trees of Eden and Calvary in a simple and memorable form. It is called ‘Rí na hAoine’, King of the Friday:

O King of the Friday - whose limbs were stretched on the cross - O Lord, who did suffer the bruises the wounds, the loss. We stretch ourselves beneath the shield of thy might - Some fruit from the tree of thy passion fall on us this night.

No 12

Most people know the frustration of having lost something, if only temporarily. It is a common observation that we can cope with having spent money, however foolishly, but when we lose it and fail to find it again, the loss seems very acute. In these days of stock-market losses and failing banks, the amounts spoken of run into figures that we can not really appreciate or imagine. I do not know where the money that is ‘wiped off’ the price of shares goes either. When millions of Euro are wiped away, does it simply disappear off a page, enriching nobody, or does the loss turn into tangible gain for someone else? If it simply disappears, was it then just a paper-trick in the first place, an illusion, albeit one that could theoretically have been cashed in for real money, printed on special notes? Whatever the answer to these rhetorical questions, we know that the root cause of the crisis lies in the offering of money on loan, largely to poorer people who could ill-afford the burden of paying it back with interest.

In the terminology of high finance, these loans are called sub-prime mortgages. The money is loaned at a higher rate than the usual one; sub-prime referring to the less than ideal credit status of the borrower. The practice is often defined and defended as lending to borrowers with compromised credit histories. There may even be the intention on the part of the lender to watch the hapless borrower fail to meet repayments and then to seize their assets and securities. The profile of the people to whom these loans are often offered has led to accusations of racism and of exploitation. Many of those who take on the loans are people who would not ordinarily have access to easy credit. Whatever the morality of the practice, it has led to all kinds of unintended losses for both poor and rich alike. The difference is that the rich can afford to shed some superfluous assets while the poor lose all that they used to have.

The process of enriching the rich while the poor get progressively poorer has a long history. It seems that human nature has an inbuilt potential for exploitation. It has often been said that if the world’s wealth were equally distributed at any one moment, it would quickly make its way back to imbalance through the trickery and treachery by which fools and their money are soon parted. In the Old Testament, the Prophetic Tradition regularly denounced what was called ‘latifundialisation’ or the extending of one’s own property portfolio at the expense of weaker others. The Gospel has Jesus simply condemning those literate ones who enriched themselves by, ‘swallowing the property of widows’.

The Irish are no strangers to dispossession. The land and assets of families and of churches or monasteries have historically been swallowed up by the victors in the aftermath of ‘conquest’. Many families lost everything and were forced to emigrate or into internal exile; ‘to Hell or to Connaught’ as Cromwell infamously decreed. That historical experience may go some way to explaining the generous Irish outreach to the dispossessed of the world. We have ‘been there’ as contemporary jargon puts it.

One of the great stories of dispossession and exile is that of the Flight of the Earls. Last year there were many commemorations of their leave-taking and the beginning of their long journey into exile and eventually into death and extinction. Their journey, begun in late 1607, continued in early 1608 as they made their way across mainland Europe, hoping to reach Spain and military assistance but ending up in Rome and under virtual house-arrest. They were welcomed by many local dignitaries as they journeyed and they were able to feast at others expense as their ‘pilgrimage’ progressed. Before leaving they had collected rent from their vast properties and tenantry in Ulster. This money, along with other necessaries, was carried on a pack-horse that the party had acquired.

As they made their way overland through the Swiss city of Basle, heading for the Northern Italian city of Milan (then a Spanish dependency), they chose to make their way through a narrow, snow-bound Alpine pass. They were somewhat apprehensive as they journeyed through areas that were committed to the Protestant faith, fearing that the local inhabitants might be hostile to them. A different kind of misfortune was in store however. They reached a deep glen that was spanned by what was known as “The Devil’s Bridge”. The pack-horse that was carrying their money lost its footing and fell into the ravine. The horse was eventually rescued but the small fortune of one hundred and twenty pounds Sterling was irretrievably lost. To add salt to the wound, it all happened on what should have been a day of celebration; the National Feast Day of the Irish, March 17^th 1608.

No 13

‘Shopping as it should be’

Shopping is something of a new experience for me. Of course, I used to be sent to the shop when I was a boy, but the process was simpler then as I operated from a short list that I handed over to the shopkeeper. My mother trusted the shop to put the correct groceries or other items in the bag and I dutifully carried them home. It made life a lot easier and there was the certain reward of a ‘penny-chew’ or toffee at the end. There was no choosing between endless varieties of products or ethical opportunities to support the developing world by buying Fair Trade. We bought goods rather than labels in those days. The choices were made by mother, or often by necessity, and the prices were decided by the shopkeeper.

In the townland where I grew up there was a wonderfully atmospheric little shop that served as a home, a shop and a meeting place or céilí-house in the evening time. It was also a little bit of social history preserved in stone. The house humbly presented its gable end to the road as was the custom then. It was a low, one storey, thatched house with a kitchen and two rooms. The woman who lived there kept the place tidy and immaculately clean, inside and outside. The exterior was whitewashed and finished off at the level of the ‘street’ with a band of black paint or tar. The strong visual effect of this contrasting colour scheme was set off by the gentle gold of the thatched roof.

Inside the ‘kitchen’ the focal point was, of course, the hearth, with its iron crane and hook, on which swung the large, heavy kettle. The hook could be adjusted upwards or downwards so that the kettle sat nearer or farther away from the heat of the open fire. The fire was powered by a bellows. Visitors, on invitation, often took a ‘turn at blowing the bellows’. The usual furniture of a traditional Irish cottage survived in the ‘shop’ while, elsewhere in the townland, the chip-board and formica revolution was displacing it. There was the settle-bed on which we sat for the mandatory few moments ‘craic’ before we entered the ‘shop’ proper. I wondered how anyone could possibly settle in the ‘settle-bed’ at night for, during the day, it looked like a coffin with a high headboard. The dresser with its array of delpht stood to attention in the corner and the marble-topped wash-stand marked it on the other side of the bedroom door. The tin buckets for fresh water looked modern beside the thick-sided ‘milk crocks’ with their burnt-red hue that was topped off by a glossy black strip and lip. A tall, stately, parlour lamp kept vigil in the deep-set, little, lace-curtained front window and an oil lamp that hung from the open rafters threw shadows at night vying with the light from the fire.

The woman who owned the shop was known to us as Maggie. We hardly knew her family name for she was more widely known by her patronymic. She was called Maggie-Charlie. She had a mild physical deficit which meant that she wore hand-made boots that were specially made for the shape of her feet. This small difference was, however, an endless source of curiosity for the child-observer. She dressed, as women did back then, in a ‘shower-of-hail’ pinny and she wore a coarse hairnet. Maggie was a kindly, welcoming figure but she was mysterious too, with her oddly shaped feet and her museum-piece house.

The upper room served as the shop. An American trunk or something like it was used as a counter. She kept a small range of edible necessities and a few luxury products. One of these latter was tobacco and cigarettes. My father used to smoke plug tobacco, ‘Spearman’ by trade name, which was cut from a tobacco-stick with a semi-circular, tar-stained knife that was used only for that purpose. The ounce of tobacco was often smuggled across the border, in from the nearby Republic, or the ‘Free-State,’ as we insisted on calling it. Customs men regularly took an interest in such drug smuggling so Maggie would ‘hide’ the tobacco down our necks and under our clothes or down the side of our Wellington boots, ‘in case we met the Customs’. An elderly cousin of my father who ran a pub in town, used to visit her every Christmas and leave fifty shillings for sweets, a shilling per week, for his young cousins in the country. He later decided that sweets were bad for us so we used to get biscuits instead. As the price of confectionery rose and the annual stipend remained frozen, we used to negotiate subsidised biscuits every week rather than total ‘freebies’.

A violent robbery and time’s toll put an end to the shop and to the way of life that it had preserved. We heard of ‘super-markets’ for the first time and the art of shopping changed forever. As I wander along the aisles of the supermarket, picking up goods that I had not intended to buy and forgetting what I came to buy in the first place, I sometimes wish that I had a short list which I could simply pass across the counter and have my necessities parcelled up and handed to me so that I could carry them home safely and enjoy the occasional luxury of a cheap packet of biscuits or a sticky ‘Paris’ bun.

No 14

Bring flowers of the fairest

The sight of pale primroses growing on a mossy bank takes me right back to childhood. It transports me, not only to a particular time of my life, but to a place near to my home and to my heart. I have learned, perhaps with the passage of time, and in the words of Patrick Kavanagh in his poem Prelude, to ‘bring in the particular trees/ that caught you in their mysteries/ and love again the weeds that grew/ somewhere specially for you. / collect the river and the stream/ that flashed upon a pensive theme’.

Our house was near the end of a narrow country road that led to the border. On either side of the road the fields sloped sharply upwards, giving it the local name, ‘the hollow road’. The rain-water that was thrown off the drumlin hills collected in a rushing stream that was channelled along one side. This stream served the several roles of drainage, of linking the local lakes and of dividing the townlands of Teer and Corliss. Its bank was quite deep and it was approachable only by descending a damp, mossy incline. The shade of the bushes and trees that overhung it gave it an almost tropical feel. It was in this cool, shaded and moist environment that the primroses of my memory grew most abundantly.

We picked them, of course, for children are naturally curious, acquisitive and destructive. Primroses are difficult to harvest because they are low-growing. We felt our way down the stalks with two fingers until we had covered a decent length and then we pinched out the flowers and brought them home triumphantly. They often decorated our improvised May-altars in the absence of anything more florally correct. Sometimes we contented ourselves with inhaling their understated but pleasing scent. If we were in a particularly adventurous mood, we dug the whole plants out and tried to transplant them to a verge nearer home. They seldom thrived. It seemed as if they missed company. Primroses are at their best in a spread, preferably along a natural bank with a bed of dark green moss, all the better to accentuate by contrast, their pale, pastel petals and their egg-yolk centres.

Another yellow April-flower that has the power to take me back in time and place is the Yellow Iris, otherwise known as the Wild Iris or simply as ‘flaggers’. They also feature in the poetic landscape of Patrick Kavanagh and they appear in one of his most extraordinary poems simply titled, The One, where he explicitly links nature and his belief in a Creator whom he showers with a trinity of ‘beautifuls’. He speaks of; ‘a humble scene in a backward place/ where no one important ever looked./ The raving flowers looked up in the face/ of the One and the Endless, the Mind that has baulked/ the profoundest of mortals. / A primrose, a violet, a violent wild Iris – but mostly anonymous performers/ … prepared to inform the local farmers/ that beautiful, beautiful, beautiful God/ was breathing his love by a cut-away bog’.

There were marshes and boggy spots aplenty around home where wild Irises could be found. These places were often somewhat difficult or even dangerous to approach because of the terrain that the flowers favoured. The wild Iris is a tall, strong-stemmed, plant that is firmly anchored in its marshy basin. Its flowers, which bloom at this time of year, are very delicate and sparingly produced. The stems are hardy and sword-like while the flower is brittle and finely mottled. They do not survive for long as cut-flowers, perhaps in protest at being removed from their nutrient-rich bog environment.

This did not stop us seeking them out, however, and using them in an age-old ritual that did not sit easily with the piety of the May-altar. Every May-Eve, we children sought out these flowers and used them to ward off the evil spells of witches. Witches were supposed to hold their covens or Ard-Fheiseanna on May-Eve or the ancient feast of Bealtaine. The secret to warding off their evil presence or their ill-intentions was to throw some ‘flaggers’ on the roof-slates or over the porch of your house and to fling some more on to that eco-prophet of conservation and recycling, the ubiquitous ‘dung-hill’. The poet Longfellow perhaps knew something of the power of the Iris to represent the gods when he wrote; ‘Thou art the Iris, fair among the fairest,/ who, armed with the golden rod/ and winged with the celestial azure, bearest,/ the message of some God’.

These ‘humble scenes’, in ‘backward places where nobody important’ ever looks remain as potential moments of epiphany or of revelation to the open-minded observer. A single flower, in all its fragility, can carry many associations and memories. The sight of a bank-full of primroses not only signals the promise of more-to-come and of May-flowers. It can also carry the mind back to a time and place where May-altars and witches’ conventions were part of the furniture of the rural imagination.

No 15

Nostalgia isn’t what it used to be

The last two columns I wrote could be described as exercises in nostalgia. This may have resulted from having visited my home place for a wedding on Easter Monday. The journey back to the scenes of my rearing and the contact with people whom I had not met for a long time appears to have sparked off something in my imagination. Whatever it stirred up in my conscious mind or in the unconscious basement of my brain, the result took the form of an outpouring of memories that had been carefully collected during my childhood spell in Eden.

The writer Alice Taylor (To School Through The Fields) tapped in to this market for things sweet and nostalgic in her accounts of rural Irish life during her childhood. Other authors have squeezed all the bitterness out of their early recollections in the genre that has come to be known as ‘misery literature’ or ‘misery-litt’. There appears to be market for both kinds of story. People have always looked back in anger or through the rose-tinted lens of nostalgia. Occasionally an author combines the two, alternating anger with wistful remembrances.

A Northern Irish clergyman-poet, W. R. Rogers, described the process of memory or recollection in a poem that he wrote for Easter called simply ‘An Easter Sequence’. In describing the Calvary scene and how it was remembered, he wrote, ‘Still, that is how things always happen, lousily, / but later on, the heart edits them lovingly, / abstracts the jeers and jags, imports a plan / into the pain, and calls it history. / We always go back to gloss over some roughness, / to make the past happen properly as we want it to happen’.

The word nostalgia originally meant homesickness, a neuralgia for the ‘nostos’ or home. There is something within all of us that pulls us back to whatever we call home. It may be for a temporary visit or the desire to retire in a familiar environment or it may just take the form of fond recollection. The security and simplicity of life as we experienced it, or as we remember it from childhood, becomes ever more appealing as life gathers ever more complexity in our more mature years. The desire to be somehow ‘at home’ in the world is a strong one.

James Joyce wrote that when he died, the word ‘Dublin’ would be found written into his heart. This quote always reminded me of the confectionery ‘rock’ that we used to buy during my childhood. This had the name of the seaside resort in which it was bought written into it. Like several other great writers, Joyce lived his life largely in exile and in protest, yet his writings famously describe the Dublin of his childhood in extraordinary detail. He quipped that Dublin could be recreated from his texts in the event of it being destroyed. This sense of an unreachable home, set in the past or in the future, has inspired many great literary works and an avalanche of maudlin, saccharine songs and ballads with little literary or musical merit.

It was Patrick Kavanagh who gave subsequent scribblers permission to hone in on the local and to name places and people, the ‘home’ that reared them. His own relationship with the environment of his childhood and early manhood was ambivalent. Like others, he moved away from it, yet he never escaped it. It gave him images and experiences that moved him to inspired verse or prose, even as he disparaged it. In his famous poem, ‘Stony Grey Soil’ he accuses his native place of stunting his growth, hemming him in, blinding his vision and retarding his poetic development. ‘You flung a ditch on my vision / of beauty, love and truth. / O stony grey soil of Monaghan / You burgled my bank of youth!’

Navigating the terrain between remembering things as we wished them to be and remaining realistic about the limitations of any place and time takes skill and balance. There is a tendency among the most nostalgic to be contemptuous of the present and to be uncritical of the past or the portion of the past that they are elevating. There is never any realistic prospect of going ‘Back to the Future,’ as the film title puts it. If we wish to achieve real perspective and sound judgement on the merits of times past, it is wise to look back beyond living memory and to take the long view. Time has a way of changing our view of things and of people. There are inevitably many aspects of life and habits of living that we would not wish to return to. Nostalgia is, of its nature, selective. The heart edits out the pain, as the poet quoted above suggested, and we make the past happen properly, as we would have wished it to happen. Wishful thinking is all we then end up with.

No 16

A rabbit out of the hat

It was a grand Spring evening and Ben was feeling content with his ten years of life. The road out of town was downhill and before long he would be across the border and in sight of home. His mother would surely be ‘watching’ him back so there was an edge to his final urban adventure. He propped the bicycle against the wrought iron bars that shielded the bevelled glass of the last shop in town and entered. The journey home would be sweetened by a couple of Highland Toffee bars. There was adequate time to reduce them to liquid consistency by a combination of athletic chewing, to the rhythm of the turning bicycle wheels, and the body-heat generated by a young man pumping pedals. The door-bell that alerted the shop-keeper to an entering customer sprang into tinkling sound.

As Ben emerged from the high-countered shop, his heart missed a beat and appeared to sink right down into his strong, laced-up, Blackthorn boots at the same time. There was a ‘fella’ sitting on his bike. This was a townie fella with his hair shaved tight to his skull, as if he had been suffering from nits. He was snotty-nosed, dishevelled and weather-beaten. Ben had seen him, or one of his multitudinous brothers, before. He knew where they lived and he had been just a little bit afraid as he passed their house. It was on Ben’s way home, a little out of the town. They seemed like a wild crowd, full of self-confidence and bravado, unafraid to confront strangers or harass them. Ben tried to remember the fella’s first name. He was not the kind of intimate that you could roar at, so Ben thought out his softly-softly tactics on the hoof as he approached his hijacked bicycle.

‘Are you any good at a scrap’? It was not the dream start that Ben had hoped for. He had never heard the word ‘scrap’ used in that context before, except in British comics. He thought that the fella’s family might have a different concept of ‘scrap’ and its potential for self-enrichment. Ben knew exactly what the fella’s invitation meant and he instinctively figured that the outcome of a scrap would not be to his advantage. He would not last three seconds in a fist-fight with that fella.

Ben walked over, unsteadily, for his knees were knocking, and he pluckily placed his hand on the handlebars of what used to be his bike. At least he might be able to ensure that the fella would not ride off on the bike and maybe someone might come along and intervene. He did not want to antagonise his adversary yet he knew that if the fella wanted the bike there was not a lot Ben could do about it. The fella’s house was a few hundred yards down the hill on the left hand side of the road. He asked Ben if he wanted a lift and offered him ‘a bar’. The fella was fifteen or sixteen years of age. Ben was ten and terrified, trapped between his aggressor and the handlebars of his own bike.

When they arrived at the fella’s house, he asked Ben if he wanted to sell the ‘bike’. Ben said he couldn’t sell it for he’d be ‘killed’ if he went home without it. He accepted this reply and almost sympathised with Ben on his predicament of being offered an undisclosed sum of money; not being able to take it and on having a family that might kill you over a lost bicycle. Ben’s family used to have pet white Albino rabbits and he said he would get one for the fella and bring it up to him some day. It was a sort of black rent or protection racket on Ben’s part, buying time and ensuring safe passage out of town. It made him feel wimpish but it was an instinctive gesture of generosity.

A week or so later, Ben, true to his word and eager to please; a desire born out of fear, he dampened down his anxiety and brought a rabbit as peace-offering to the fella at his home. The teenage recipient was dumbstruck and Ben could not at first figure out why. This big fella hugged that rabbit like nobody ever hugged a rabbit before. No-one in Ben’s farming family ever hugged animals like that. You would think it was human the way he handled and hugged it. Ben was astonished at the affectionate way the fella held this delicate, furry, pink-eyed creature. What a curious mixture of affection and aggression this fella was turning out to be.

Ben was still wary of townies, rabbits or no rabbits. This dread was somewhat tempered, however, when he saw the fella in town on subsequent visits. He even called Ben over once and introduced him to another fella who looked twice as tough and equally dirty. He described Ben as his ‘friend’, making Ben feel suddenly grown up and ‘well-in’. A little white rabbit, pulled out of the coward’s hat, sealed their relationship, saved his bicycle from being hijacked or stolen and kindled flames of real affection from the crushed embers of humanity in a fella from town.

No 17

The spirit of sixty-eight

It was a time tinged with rebelliousness. We had that famous poster-image of Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara-Lynch in our classroom and the spirit of rebellious 1968 had spread all over Europe. The French still call the activists of that era ‘soixante huitards’ or ‘sixty-eighters’. The Americans had their own upheaval. The Civil Rights Movement there was strong and inspiring, especially under the leadership and oratory of Martin Luther King. Eventually the spirit of ’68 reached the far Western European shores of Ireland. People shook off their shackles and took to the streets in protest at all kinds of indignities and injustice.

There was less of a spirit of entrepreneurship or careerism among teenagers then. The idea of an ‘us’, that was worth sacrifice, had not been beaten into retreat by the individual, self-regarding ‘I’. Some of us became intoxicated by the revolutionary spirit that prevailed. Many young people foolishly threw away their lives and brought others with them as the ‘Troubles’ took hold in Northern Ireland. Some spent large portions of their youth and early maturity in gaols or in exile. It took the space of a whole generation, almost forty years, to make people wise up to the waste into which the spirit of 1968 had deteriorated.

That was the backdrop to a short scene in the teenage drama of life in the North during those years. Donal and I were good friends and we shared some of the same interests. One of his siblings was said to be ‘involved’ somewhat in one of the paramilitary groups that evolved around that time. She spoke of ‘Molotov Cocktails’ as if they were groceries that you could buy, or drinks that you might try sometime, rather than lethal petrol-bombs. She went further and taught us the technique of making home-made explosives. There were no, ‘don’t try this at home,’ warnings so we graduated as teenage bomb-makers, eager to put into practice the knowledge we had acquired.

At the time it was possible to buy a common weed-killer, sodium-chlorate, which came in powder form. It was available from chemists with no questions asked. When it was mixed with a reducing agent such as common sugar and packed into a cylinder, it could become explosive. This was our recipe and our raw material. We mixed our ingredients and packed them into a length of copper piping that had been abandoned by the plumbers on a half-built housing estate. As an experiment, we packed in some coal dust and a few nails to add special effects to our home-made bomb. The fuse was made from some of the sugar and weed-killer that we had held back for the purpose. Then we (dangerously) hammered the pipe-ends closed, leaving a trickle open on one side for the fuse to ignite the mixture.

The chosen evening having arrived, we placed the pipe-bomb in the garden of a semi-built house, lit the fuse and retreated to the garage of the house. The fuse burnt a very vivid orange. Unsure whether we had time to run before the fuse fully burnt its course, we stayed and sheltered until the device exploded with what seemed like a thunderous bolt. Then we both ran across some gardens, in the knowledge that someone would certainly investigate a strange explosive sound in the neighbourhood. It all ended in farce. The garden fences of the houses along which we were running were being strung with horizontal strips of steel wire and then faced with sheep-wire. There must have been a scarcity of sheep wire so the horizontal strips were uncovered and somewhat invisible in poor light. It was twilight and my friend, who was running faster than me, ran straight into four strips of tightly-strung wire and fell across it into the adjacent garden. When I arrived, he was winded and lying writhing on the ground. He called my name in great distress and when I stopped and asked him what had happened, he replied, I’ve been shot! I’ve been shot!

When he awoke the next day he had four horizontal strips of bruising along his body from his chest level to his ankles. The incident on the previous night had not been our first experiment but it proved to be our last. We returned to the scene some time later and retrieved the ends of the copper tubing which now looked like the butts of a pulled Christmas cracker with jagged edges on both sides. There was some damage done to the glazing nearby but nothing had been demolished other than a little of our innocence. We awoke to the dangers that our game was exposing us to and the sale of sodium chlorate across shop-counters was, coincidentally, banned around the same time. The empire had struck back and our short-lived revolution was over.

No 18

The boy in the hen-coop

One of the joys of growing up in a rural area was the available space that we had to play in and to explore. Even our Primary School had an expanse of three whole fields through which we were free to run. When we were old enough, we had a long walk home through the countryside and once home, the family farm, if not the townland, was at our disposal. It is probably true to say that there was more freedom of movement for children then, though there were places that were out of bounds too. Flax-holes, where inquisitive children might go to collect frogspawn, were strictly off limits. The grassy carpet that covered these long-abandoned pits was deceptive. Underneath was a quicksand of dark mud or ‘glar’. We were only allowed to play at or to fish in the local lakes and rivers under the supervision of a parent. There were limits to where we might visit yet our expansive playground was limited only by the tiredness of our legs.

One of the stories that we all heard and that horrified us at the time was that of the boy who had been reared in a hen-house. He had been confined there for so long that he perched like a hen and only spoke hen-sounds. We were all familiar with hen-houses then and we knew that hens are not house-proud by nature or affectionate companions. One of the worst possible jobs in a farmyard was the cleaning out of the hen-coop. The story of the hen-house boy captivated the mind of the general public for a generation. The poet Seamus Heaney wrote a poem about the incident. ‘The child in the hen-house/ put his eye to the chink. /Little henhouse boy, /Sharp faced as new moons /Remembered your photo still /Glimpsed like a rodent /On the floor of my mind’.

The incident happened over fifty years ago, in 1956, in Crossgar, County Down. It was still talked about all through my childhood as if it had happened just the week beforehand. The child had been ‘discovered’ by other, neighbouring children who were out playing and peered into the hen-house. They returned several times, gathering more friends each time as they tried to figure out who or what was being confined in the locked house. The boys were terrified by what they found and eventually alerted some adult authority.

What turned out to be a seven-year old boy called Kevin was taken to a Children’s Home run by Religious Sisters. On examination he was found to be severely affected by rickets, probably because of lack of sunlight. He had severe curvature in his ankles and could not stand up for any length of time. He was only thirty inches high and weighed a mere two stone. During a subsequent court-case, his mother claimed that she only locked the boy in when she was going shopping in the local town. She was sent to gaol for nine months. The hen-boy responded to treatment, including surgery on his feet and speech therapy. He eventually left the Children’s Home for sheltered employment.

Seamus Heaney’s poem about the incident is called Bye-Child. His empathy with the incarcerated child is obvious. The stolen freedom of childhood and the cruelty of captivity obviously moved him deeply. He wrote, ‘Little moon-man, /Kennelled and faithful /At the foot of the yard, /Your frail shape luminous, /Weightless, is stirring the cobwebs, old droppings /under the roosts /And dry smells from scraps /She put through your trapdoor, /morning and evening. /After these footsteps, silence, /Vigils, solitudes, fasts, /Unchristened tears’.

If Kevin had been born and incarcerated in our own time, the chances are that he would not have been found by the inquisitive boys who pulled back the bags that were covering the windows of the hen-house and peered inside. In a sense, we may have more freedom to travel nowadays and the money to make more consumer choices. Our children are less free, though, to wander and to explore their neighbourhoods. Adults are less free to get involved in the lives of their neighbours. We have left the imprisonment of ignorance and poverty only to become imprisoned by a host of fears and addictions in many cases. Children, too, can be imprisoned without the use of a single lock or bar. There are chains of our own making that can be the strongest and most difficult to break. Maybe the recent terrible revelations of the incarceration of a whole family in Austria and our memories of the hen-house boy in County Down will awaken us and give us the freedom to look out for each other again. ‘Ar scáth a chéile a mhaireann na daoine’ as the Irish proverb puts it. ‘In the shelter of each other, the people live’.

Fr Murtagh

The war to end all wars

The ‘No’ days of November

The reign of 'Good Pope John'

The Van Gogh experience

A question of riches

A County Louth Harvest morning

When a bank goes burst

The power of example

The pursuit of happiness

It’s a funny old world

The pursuit of happiness

Content to be solitary

Getting to know you

Getting to know you

Good-Bye good men and women

Wee Hughie

We're all Green Fools now

Rain, rain, go to Spain

Making a show of yourself

The dream lives on

Days of wine and roses

Growing old is not for sissies

Those lazy, hazy days of Summer

The green green grass of home

School’s out for summer

When being young was very heaven

When being young was very heaven

The end of the oil age

The ghost of 'Danny Boy'

Going to work on an egg

Going to work on an egg

Fr Murtagh's Blogspot

The boy in the hen-coop

No 19