Life
1942- ; b. Moycullen, Co. Galway; ed. Moycullen National School, St Mary’s College, and UCG; teacher in Galway, Rockwell College, and Belvedere, Dublin; lecturer in Irish at Mary Immaculate College, Limerick; winner of IACI Butler Lit. Award; Bean Aonair agus Scéalta Eile (1974); Buicéad Poitín agus Scéalta Eile (1978); An Lánúin agus Scéalta Eile (1979); Ar na Tamhnacha (1987); Iosla agus Scéalta Eile (1992); et al. Gróga Cloch (1990), novel; Maigh Cuilinn, A Táisc agus a Tuairisc (1986), folklore and history of Moycullen; As na Cúlacha (1998), novel dealing the life of Connemara site-worker in London with a strong emphasis on his sexual appetites; issued Ingne Dearga Dheaideo (2005), stories. DIW
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Works
The March Hare and Other Stories, trans. Gabriel Rosenstock (Cló-Chonnachta 1995), 151pp., cover by Brian Bourke and Johan Hofsteenge [fifteen stories]; As na Cúlacha (Cló Iar-Chonnachta 1998), 307pp.; Gróga Cloch (Cló Iar-Chonnachta 1991), pb., pp.192; Taomanna (Cló Iar-Chonnachta 1991), 38pp.; Ingne Dearga Dheaideo (Cló Iar Chonnachta 2005), 195pp. [17 stories].
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Commentary
Pol Ó Muirí, review of As na Cúlacha (Cló-Iar-Chonnachta), in Irish Times (20 Feb. 1999), [q.p.]; an account of a Conamara Gaeltacht navvy on London building sites in the 1960s; ‘it is in a very coarse way a man’s story. Women are little more than objects of lust and the female form is depicted in savagely anatomical detail … . Men are the vital and brutish beings in this universe. They work and take their pleasures where and when they can find them. They narrator becomes a brute in a foreign field; freed from familial bonds and censure, he ruts his way around the concrete higheways and byways in an attempt to satisfy his lust. Needless to say, his cravings have a price. … there is a sense that this novel lacks a little something to lift it out of the minutely descriptive into the truly imaginative.’
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