Sense of place

“In his best-known poem, ‘Cill Aodáin’, Raftery, who understood the importance of place, evokes, for me, the arrival of spring in as resonant a way as Vivaldi’s musical heralding of the season”

Second Reading
Fr Kevin Hegarty

The football and hurling championships have begun. They have started slowly but, over the coming weeks until September, they will build up into a crescendo, as Micheál Ó Muircheartaigh demonstrated in a monologue he recorded last year.
A major reason that the GAA has thrived is that, from its inception, it organised its competition on the units of parish and county, thereby inciting passionate local loyalties.
Charles Kickham, in his novel of 19th Century Tipperary, ‘Knocknagow’, created the character of ‘Matt the Thrasher’, who ‘performs splendid athletic feats for the credit of the little village’.
The founders of the GAA realised that a sense of place is particularly important to Irish people. It lies deep in our historical psyche.
In early Irish poetry there is a genre of writing known as the dinnseanchas, poems and stories which describe the original meanings of place names and form a kind of mythological etymology. An early epic like the ‘Táin Bó Cuailgne’ is full of dinnseanchas as it links various incidents on the journey of the Connacht armies from Cruachán to Carlingford with the names of places as we now know them.
In Irish Ardee means Ferdia’s Ford. It was here that Ferdia and Cuchullain, once brothers in arms, fought their last great combat. Cuchullain eventually killed Ferdia with his magical weapon, the gae bolga.
We, in Connacht, have often been at the mercy of mysterious interventions from the other provinces. I cannot help wondering, ironically, whether Kieran Donaghy was the gae bolga who destroyed Mayo in the All-Ireland Final of 2006.
Patrick Kavanagh was a poet who had a strong sense of place. Though he spent the latter part of his life in Dublin, emotionally he never left Monaghan. As Seamus Heaney has written: “For 30 years and more he lived the life of a small farmer’s son in the parish of Inniskeen, the life of pain and football matches, of Mass-going and dance-going. He shared his neighbours’ fundamental piety, their flyness, their brusque manners and vigorous speech.”
Kavanagh wrote often of the importance of the local: “Parochialism is universal; it deals with the fundamentals. It is not by the so-called national dailies that people who emigrate keep in touch with their roots. In London, outside the Catholic churches, the big run is on the local Irish papers. Lonely on Highgate Hill outside St Joseph’s Church I rushed to buy my ‘Dundalk Democrat’ and reading it I was back in my native fields. Now that I analyse myself I realise that, throughout everything I write, there is this constantly recurring motif of the need to go back. So it is for these reasons that I return to the local newspapers. Who has died? Who has sold his farm?”
Of course, sometimes he did wish for a more sophisticated literary life. He longed occasionally to escape the ‘stony grey soil of Monaghan’ for the ‘city of kings, where art, music and letters were the real things’. Yet, as he expressed in ‘Epic’, the credo of his literary life, he came to understand the profound importance of the parochial. At the start of the poem he compares, ironically, a quarrel between neighbours over land in Monaghan in 1938 with the conflict between nations then brewing in Europe. He then proclaims that universal experience is contained in the local: “That was the year of the Munich bother./Which was most important?/I inclined to lose my faith in Ballyrush and Gortin./Till Homer’s ghost came whispering to my mind./He said: I made the Iliad from such a local row./God’s make their own importance.”
Anthony Raftery, born in Cill Aodáin, near Kiltimagh, in the late 18th century, also had a deep understanding of the importance of place. In his best-known poem, ‘Cill Aodáin’, he evokes, for me, the arrival of spring in as resonant a way as Vivaldi’s musical heralding of the season.
The tradition of poets, celebrating the local, is alive and well in Cill Aodáin. Recently I was happy to launch a volume of poetry by Terry McDonagh, a native of the village, who now divides his time between living there and Hamburg, where he has taught English at the university. Entitled ‘Cill Aodáin and Nowhere Else’, it is a collection of accessible and thought-provoking poems on his native place, its landscape and history, its people, its celebrations and its rituals:

“The great song of Cill Aodáin
Was in full swing
When bones were weapons,
The Universe was flat
And animal tracks were ghostly trails.
This countryside endured before
Eve listened to the snake; prior to
blushing, invasions, honeymoons and Disneyland
– even before we learned
to draw back curtains to see the moon.”
He does not neglect the dark side of rural life, especially the loneliness and depression that is the lot of so many:

“History has left its mark; loud calls
from abroad gave hope, but they
left lone men and women behind
to dream
of grass that might come up greener.
I remember seeing an elderly man
weeping into a filthy Pollard bag
at the wheel of his abandoned tractor
in a leafy secluded lane one Sunday;
His neighbours would have been at Mass.”

The illustrations of Sally McKenna, an American artist, gloriously embellish the book. The Scottish poet, George MacKay Brown, once wrote that we all need ‘a place of order, a place of remembrance, a place of vision’. Terry and Sally have found it. Treat yourself to the book.