| Kavanagh Country
By Malcolm Rogers
Recent research on behalf on Irish tourism has found that “international
consumers [i.e. tourists] valued in Ireland what they perceive as a simpler
way of life, embracing values that modern Western countries have lost or
forgotten”.
This perception may be somewhat at odds with the reality of walking down
O’Connell Street, with its burger bars and mountains of litter, or a stroll
through Dublin 4 with its shiny Seamuses screeching along in their BMWs
braying into their mobile phones. However, insofar as this recent survey’s
findings are true — that ‘ould Ireland’ does still exist — they are much
more readily to be found not in Dublin, nor in the recognised tourists haunts
of Kerry, Connacht or Clare, but in the sleepy backwaters of Ireland — places,
in fact, like Monaghan.
This weekend the Patrick Kavanagh Centre will be holding its annual Kavanagh
Weekend — and you’ve still got time to book. But in reality you can visit
Monaghan anytime and invoke the spirit of one of Europe’s greatest poets,
and in the process get a good taste of what old Ireland used to be like.
Not that Kavanagh confined his life to Monaghan. He worked in Dublin
— indeed Raglan Road was first performed in the newspaper offices of the
Irish Catholic. Benedict Kiely, who was also working in the newspaper’s
office at the time, describes how Kavanagh arrived in one day and asked
his workmates if they thought his new poem would go with the old air The
Dawning of the Day. Kavanagh proceeded to sing it there in the office —
to some mild critical acclaim — but it wasn’t till he sang it to Luke Kelly
that the song began to establish itself as one of the towering ballads of
the last 100 years.
The poem is one of unrequited love which began on a leafy street in the
south east of the grand Canal in Ballsbridge.
Dublin became Kavanagh’s home after he returned from a stint working
in London, but it was Monaghan which inspired his poetry. He might have
won the Nobel Prize for Literature, but he was unlucky in his epoch — the
war years and their immediate aftermath meant he never really commanded
the prestige abroad in the manner of Yeats and Joyce. And yet it’s no exaggeration
to say that it was him more than Yeats who was the principal influence on
Irish poets of the late 20th century.
Patrick Kavanagh was born in Inniskeen on October 21, 1904. His father
was a cobbler and farmer and grew up in the shadow of the “hungry hills”
of Ulster. Kavanagh left school intending to follow in his father’s footsteps
but turned his back on farming: “I dabbled in verse, and it became my life.”
Much of his poetry is autobiographical, the earlier poems written about
his life in rural Ireland. Eventually, however, lack of opportunity in Monaghan
forced him to make the journey to Dublin.
Patrick Kavanagh died in 1967 and was buried in Inniskeen. In Dublin,
his adopted home, he is immortalised according to his wishes:
“O commemorate me with no hero-courageous tomb — just a canal-bank seat
for the passer-by.”
He got his wish — a bench and bronze statue can be seen opposite the
Mespil Hotel on Mespil Road side of Baggot Street Bridge. This stretch of
canal was the site of Parson’s Bookshop, where in the 1950s and 1960s Kavanagh
met other writers such as Brendan Behan and Flann O’Brien. The place can
still be visited — but it’s a café these days. However Paddy’s favourite
watering holes, O’Donohue’s and Davey Byrne’s are still going strong in
their original capacities.
Inniskeen, Kavanagh’s birthplace, situated on the Monaghan /Louth border,
is mentioned in the Annals of the Four Masters. “Combustes Maeldun in Insula
Caoin”, it says, referring to a local chieftain who was burned to death
on the local island of Inis Caoin on the river Fane in the year 636 AD.
Funnily enough, it’s also not far from Rockcorry, the birthplace of Robert
Gregg, the inventor of shorthand. He undoubtedly wrote: “Kvngh, may hav
been bttr writr, but I ws far quiker.”
The Patrick Kavanagh Rural & Literary Resource Centre is housed in the
historic St. Mary’s Church, next to the cemetery where the poet is buried.
Material relating to the poet is well exhibited as well as items on local
history.
Also on view are 12 specially-commissioned paintings illustrating Kavanagh’s
epic poem “The Great Hunger”, a miniature model depicting Kavanagh’s classic,
“A Christmas Childhood”, the poet’s death mask and other memorabilia associated
with him.
One truly memorable feature of the Centre is the unique performance tour
of Kavanagh Country, which takes in many local sites immortalised by Inniskeen’s
most famous son, with anecdotes, historical facts, wild rumours and even
the odd poem along the way.
The tour rounds off back at the Centre with a half-hour one-man show
by Inniskeen actor Gene Carroll.
The Patrick Kavanagh Monaghan Tour takes in many of the places familiar
to the poet and which shaped much of his work. The county of Monaghan would
be well worth a visit even without its poetic heritage. If its tranquillity
you’re after, you’ll find it here. Throughout the county a rural way of
life pertains which, because of the economy of the area, and its proximity
to the border, has remained in large part unchanged for decades.
The verdant countryside is the glory of Monaghan. The word itself comes
from the Irish Muineachán — ‘the place of thickets’ — and everywhere you’ll
find tangled thickets of blackthorn and whitethorn, ash trees and alder
bushes tumbling across the drumlin landscape.
The county is mostly made up of low hills with gentle valleys and lakes
in between. This poignant place is redolent of an Ireland which has almost
disappeared. There is no factory farming hereabouts — no factories at all,
for that matter — and the hedgerows are still full of the sound of songbirds.
If you want a restful, truly Irish holiday you can find it here in spades,
at the back end of Ulster. As Patrick Kavanagh puts it: “My hills hoard
the bright shillings of March while the sun searches in every pocket.”
For details visit
www.irelandnorthwest.ie/whats_on
or contact the Patrick Kavanagh Centre, Inniskeen, Co. Monaghan, Ireland.
Tel: 00 353 42 93 78560 Email:
infoatpkc@eircom.net.
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