Talented writer Patrick Galvin tells John Masterson how his life story informed his books WOMEN have played a big part in writer Patrick Galvin’s life. As a teenager in Cork he was in love with films and film stars and Betty Grable, well, her legs really. They were enough to get him to go to war ...

Already a leading Irish poet and playwright, Patrick Galvin gained unexpected international fame when a section of his 1990 autobiography, The Raggy Boy Trilogy, was made into a feature film, Song For a Raggy Boy (2003), starring Aidan Quinn and Iain Glen. A dark and brutal film, which won a host of awards, Raggy Boy is the story of Galvin’ s early adolescence in an Irish reformatory school run by the sometimes sadistic Christian Brothers. The son of a docker, Galvin grew up in extreme poverty in Cork city in the early 1930s and first came to prominence with his powerful long poem Heart of Grace (1957), an account of the brutalising of a young boy at borstal, which was widely praised by critics including Edwin Muir and A. Álvarez. As one of the few 20th-century Irish poets of working-class origin from before the advent of free secondary school education, his poems recount the experience of the Irish urban poor like no others.

After leaving reformatory school Galvin sold sheet songs and ballads in the streets of Cork, worked as a messenger boy and also as a cinema projectionist. He joined the RAF under age, using his brother’ s birth certificate, and served in Sierra Leone, the Western Sahara and Palestine. After the war he settled in London and began writing poems and songs. He recorded seven LPs of Irish ballads and numbered among his friends Ewan McColl, Brendan Behan and Dylan Thomas. His most famous song, covered by Christy Moore, recounts the execution of James Connolly. All his later dramatic and poetic work drew heavily on his experience as a ballad singer and his knowledge of Irish music.

His first play, And Him Stretched, a political drama, was staged at the left-wing Unity Theatre in London and then at the Dublin Theatre Festival where it won the Best New Play award in 1962. A year later he followed it with the controversial Cry the Believers which won Play of the Year again at the Dublin Theatre Festival. Dublin audiences were shocked by a scene where the Irish flag is torn in two. “Frank O’ Connor hated it,” recalled Galvin, “and Siobhan McKenna said she couldn’t believe what was happening on the Irish stage even though she hadn’t seen it. We were sold out for weeks.”

In the mid-Sixties and early Seventies Galvin wrote several more books of verse, notably The Woodburners (1973). Dublin, Belfast and Cork are mentioned in Galvin’ s poems, but it was Cork and the people of Cork that always gripped his imagination. The Mad Woman of Cork (1973) became one of his best known poems and was widely translated. In 1974 Galvin began a productive association with the Lyric Theatre in Belfast through a Leverhulme fellowship in drama. Under the direction of Mary O’Malley, he brought to the stage The Last Burning, a play about the last witch to be burnt in Ireland, Nightfall to Belfast, and the musical drama about the troubles We Do it For Love (1975). Playing small roles in the musical were Liam Neeson and Gerard Murphy, both then unknown. The Lyric Theatre came under attack during Galvin’ s residence. When Nightfall to Belfast was staged, a 200lb bomb exploded directly outside the theatre, destroying the director’ s car. “Fortunately no one was killed. Authors may deserve to be shot or blown up, but they shouldn’ t involve people,” Galvin reflected.

Throughout much of his career he attracted — some say courted — controversy. In the early Fifties he sparred with Sean O’ Casey in a series of letters to John O’ London’ s weekly. O’ Casey refers to Galvin spikily in his autobiography. In the Sixties Galvin sacked his literary agent, the celebrated Margaret Ramsay (“She was hopeless,” he said) and in 1976 he publicly disowned his own play The Devil’ s Own People, in an irate letter to The Irish Times. The work, which was running at Dublin’ s Abbey Theatre, starred Ray McAnally who reputedly excised Galvin’ s use of the F-word from the script each night. Galvin was also in demand as a director and directed several of Samuel Beckett’ s plays at the Lyric Theatre, Belfast and a British tour of The Importance of Being Oscar, starring Bryan Johnson in 1988.

He toured extensively around the world, particularly in Mexico and Canada, giving poetry readings and was a noted orator. He had a strong interest in Spanish culture and for several years lived in Spain. His later work, including Folk Tales from the General (1989), show the influence of Federico Garcia Lorca and other Spanish Surrealists. In 1984 he was elected to Aosdána, Ireland’ s elite creative arts body, and in 1994 he received the O’ Shaugnessy Award for Poetry. The same year he settled permanently in Cork and became resident writer at Cork University which published his Selected Poems. He suffered a major stroke in 2005 but continued to write.

A poet and playwright who combined a strong sense of the community that shaped and formed him, Patrick Galvin was one of Ireland’ s most distinctive and original writers, a master of understatement who combined black humour with intense compassion. He was married four times and had two daughters and three sons. [End; reparagraphed here.]

Galvin was born in Cork in 1927 at a time of great political transition in Ireland. His mother was a Republican and his father a Free Stater which gave rise to ongoing political tension within the household and later informed his well loved poem “My Father Spoke with Swans” and his autobiographical memoir Song For a Poor Boy. An autodidact, he came to know and love literature through the Russian, French and Irish classics. His early poetry shows the influences of Gaelic poetry whilst his later poetry reflects more international rhythms and themes. He had grown up during the time of the Spanish Civil war under the shawl of his mother’s Republican politics and later discovered a great affinity with the Andalusian poet, Federico García Lorca; these influences are evident in his epic poem about Michael Collins, “The White Monument”. His childhood ended dramatically when he was sent to Daingean industrial school, noted for its abuse of young people in its care. This experience had a powerful influence on his earlier poetry which expresses the fear and brutality of that time:

In his prose memoir Song For a Raggy Boy he contextualises those experiences within the Europe of the second world war. Irritated by Ireland’s neutral stance he joined the Royal Air Force in 1943. His anti-war memoir Song for a Flyboy from 2003 records his war experiences and his play The Devil’s Own People from 1976 denounces Ireland’s neutrality in the face of fascism and the Holocaust.

After the breakdown of his first marriage, at the age of 21, he went on to establish himself as a folksinger, song writer and collector, recording nine volumes of folk songs as well as publishing Irish Songs of Resistance 1798 -1922. He travelled widely during this period going behind the ‘Iron Curtain’ to East Germany as a troubadour. These experiences marked his work and his personal life. He began to publish poetry in many leading English and Irish journals and he co-founded and edited the literary magazine Chanticleer. His first collection of poetry Heart of Grace, 1957 was closely followed by the second Christ in London, 1960 . At that time he was also in the process of establishing himself as a playwright in London and Dublin where his work was closely monitored by the Catholic Church hierarchy in Ireland, which found that his play Cry the Believers was not one ‘to which young, impressionable minds could be exposed without risk to faith’. He was given the reputation of being the ‘Enfant terrible of the Irish Theatre’ by one Irish critic. He came back to Ireland in the 1960s but, unable to adapt to the conservatism of that time, he returned to London and spent intervals abroad in Israel.

In 1973 he returned to Ireland, this time to Belfast as Writer in Residence at the Lyric Theatre. It also saw the publication of his third collection of poetry The Woodburners. That period of time with the Lyric Theatre established Galvin firmly as an exciting dramatist. His groundbreaking play We Do It For Love (the first satire about “the Troubles”) broke all box office records for an Irish play at the Lyric. Through his work there he was influential in inspiring a new generation of writers in the north of Ireland. His final play at the Lyric, My Silver Bird, was an operetta based on the life and times of Grace O’Malley, dramatically culminating in the battle of Kinsale and the fall of the Gaelic order. The score was composed by Peadar Ó Riada. The play was first staged the night after Bobby Sands died and due to the prevailing political climate it was prevented from travelling to and showing at Cork Opera House as scheduled.

Galvin later went to live in Spain where he completed his fourth collection of poetry Folktales for the General. He returned to Cork in the 1980s and he began to work on his memoirs Song for a Poor Boy, Song For a Raggy Boy and Song for a Flyboy. In 1997 he wrote the screen play for Song For a Raggy Boy which got its world premiere at Cork Film Festival in 2003. Patrick was Writer in Residence with East Midlands Arts (UK), Dun Laoghaire Rathdown Council, Portlaoise Prison and finally with University College, Cork, where he was awarded a Doctorate of Literature in 2006. Galvin cofounded the Poetry Now Festival, which went on to become Ireland’s leading poetry festival. With his wife Mary Johnson he co-founded the Munster Literature Centre in Cork which has given birth to the Frank O’Connor Festival and to the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, one of the largest in the world.

Throughout his life he has adapted his own work and other works for both BBC radio and RTÉ radio. He travelled widely giving readings of both his prose and poetry, much of which is recorded in the Library of Congress in Washington. In 1984 he was elected to Aosdána. Patrick suffered a stroke in 2003. In spite of this, in 2005, the year of the City of Culture Cork, he co-translated the collection of poetry Everything But You from the original poetry of Turkish poet Yilmaz Odabashi. Latterly the constraints of his lengthy illness and his inability to give creative expression to his thoughts on the current state of Ireland, with its culture of greed, exploitation and refusal to deal with systematic physical and sexual clerical abuse, contributed greatly to his demise. He was survived by his daughter Grainne and son Macdara from his marriage to Mary Johnson and his daughter Christine Bygraves from a previous marriage. His widow Mary Johnson died a few months after his death. He was predeceased by his oldest son Patrick Newley in 2009.