DE FACTO: New book on Aughagower’s social-historian priest

In the late 1970s a young woman from Arderry in Aughagower, outside Westport, took a spin with her boyfriend to Clonbur. He was picking up his granduncle from a B&B. While there she was told that a namesake of hers lived in the house, her boyfriend’s relation, Fr Patrick F Malone.
Upon meeting her, he told her that he and her father were also first cousins, and he had baptised her and chosen her name! He called her Noreen after his sister who was a nun in America. He gave her Frances as her second name, as Francis was his second name. “You are called after a nun and a priest,” he joked with her as he held out his hand.
From that moment, Noreen felt a special bond with this man, a returned missionary priest, who died in 1979.

Cult classic
Fr Malone was also a native of Arderry, born in 1895. He emigrated to the USA in 1915. When America joined World War I, he enrolled in the navy rather than be conscripted.
After the war he entered a seminary and was ordained in New York in 1925 for the Maryknoll Mission to China, where he spent over 20 years. He eventually returned to parish work in dioceses in America.
His holidays were spent in Ireland, where he clicked his camera, donned his movie camera and became a prolific writer of poetic verse. He had already dabbled in films, having made ‘The Life of Our Lord’ (filmed in the Holy Land) and ‘The Tear and Smile of China’, showing them to appreciative west of Ireland audiences in the 1940s. (My father, Joe McNally, titled his book, ‘Westport – The Tear and the Smile’, as a tribute to Fr Malone.)
Fr Malone showed the films across local halls in west Mayo as fundraisers for his missionary work. During the breaks to change the reels in Charlie O’Malley’s Hall on the Fairgreen, Westport, the crowd was entertained by songs from Mickey Killeen from Tubber Hill. Fr Malone would also teach the excited children the Hail Mary in Chinese!
In Ireland, he documented the visits of Princess Grace to Mayo in 1961 and President John F Kennedy in 1963, Beautiful Tourmakeady (which features Commandant General Tom Maguire, the noted War of Independence leader) and filmed various scenes of Irish rural life that ended up in his most famous film, ‘Lovely Ireland’.
This film features many characters from Westport and the surrounding areas of Aughagower, Killawalla, Kilmeena, Drummin and Tourmakeady. Unknowingly, he documented life in rural and urban Ireland from the 1950s through to the 1970s. ‘Lovely Ireland’ has become a ‘cult classic’ of social life in the Westport area.

Wish fulfilled
Fr Malone was an avid photographer and thankfully, hundreds of his snaps from China, of his various travels and of family, friends and neighbours are still around. He was a well-regarded poet and had many of his poems published in local newspapers and religious magazines.
‘Friends You Used To Know’, about remembering departed loved ones, was published in The Mayo News every November by the late Martin Curry. That poem is also the title of a new book on Fr Patrick Malone by the child he baptised, Noreen Frances Malone.
Noreen Malone Tunney (yes, she married her then boyfriend, Paddy Tunney!) has fulfilled Fr Malone’s wishes to have his poetry published, but she has done more. She has included his life story, film information, letters, newspaper cuttings and tributes.
The book, ‘Fr Patrick Malone – Friends You Used to Know’, was launched to a packed Aughagower Hall on Reek Sunday. Fr Malone was fascinated with Croagh Patrick and included its majestic peak in many ‘Lovely Ireland’ scenes. Aughagower Hall is a few hundred yards from his final resting place alongside his parents in a grave he dug himself underneath Aughagower Round Tower.
Last Friday, the book was launched in Clonbur, where Fr Malone died in the care of his beloved relations, the Halloran family. Thanks to the late Mary Halloran and the Slevin family (Sunnyside, Rosmalley, Westport) many of Fr Malone’s personal possessions, from prayer books to writings and press cuttings, were preserved and made available to Noreen for publication.