Ireland – Page 2 – For the fainthearted . . .

It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France

The comparative study in the Fifth Year English course includes Philadelphia, Here I come! by Brian Friel. I picked up a copy that lay on a student’s desk. ‘Has your teacher explained to you the Marie Antionette bit?’

The student looked justifiably mystified. I opened at a page where the line occurred and read.

“It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles”

‘No,’ said the student.

‘I’m sure he will.’

Brian Friel’s character, Gar O’Donnell quotes those lines from Edmund …

A reality worse than the novels

John McGahern’s letters speak of a different time. A present at the Christmas before last, the collection illuminates the world of his novels.

There was a time when I would have doubted John McGahern.

The doubt would not have been a questioning of the veracity of the accounts in his novels of 1950s Ireland; they are too detailed, too consistent, too alive with emotion, to be anything other than accurate reflections of the realities which he encountered. Doubts would have been more in the nature of wondering whether the scenes, …

The saying of places

The voice of Google Maps became too much to bear. Successive mispronunciations of Irish placenames prompted me to turn it to mute.

To be fair to Google Maps, pronunciations can be arbitrary. Sometimes, as in the case of Dun Laoghaire, the Irish spelling is used but it is read as ‘Dunleary,’ an English pronunciation. Sometimes, as in the case of Aghaboe in Co Laois, the English spelling is used, but, derived from the Irish, the pronunciation has a soft ‘g’ and a ‘v’ sound for the ‘b’,

Sometimes, there …

Life will know no other setting

An Asian man was behind the counter of the filling station. Smiling, and with a perfect, educated accent, he greeted each customer and thanked them for their custom.

It seemed hard to imagine how someone of such comportment came to be serving in a petrol station on a Sunday morning. The most likely explanation would be that a shortage of health service staff meant that his wife had been granted a visa and that he had come with her, and that the excessive cost of living had forced him to …

The debts men incur live after them

‘The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones’ declares Antony in William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Perhaps in more contemporary times, ‘the evil that men do’ might be replaced by ‘the debts that men incur’ – debts definitely live after them.

Family tree research has brought a frequent occurrence of Joe’s name. Joe died in January 1915. A bachelor farmer, he was seventy when he died at the house where he was born and where he had lived his life. His funeral …

A late spring

Of course, the weather warnings last night were a case of a boy crying ‘wolf.’ Perhaps tonight will bring serious problems for tomorrow morning, but for today the snow did not arrive in Co Meath. Instead, there was persistent rain, not the soft rain, but instead it was the rain of the cold, penetrating, chilling sort that speaks of a prolonging of winter. It was the sort of rain that makes you slam the car door shut and run for the dryness of the building.

There is not a great …