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Irish Emigrant Book Review, No.99 (Oct 2003)
Le
Trace de Dieu, Mapping God - Fred Johnston
Fred Johnston’s novel is written in both English and French, with the
translation by Eoghan de Hoog. It is a mystery novel centring on the finding
of the body of a young girl in an Irish coastal village, a mystery which
is deepened by both the climate and setting, a community hemmed in between
mountain and sea. A further air of impenetrability is added by the nameless
characters who are carefully drawn but remain anonymous. The dark secrets
of a village life are gradually revealed, secrets over which the mountain
looms, both reflecting the mood of the village and protecting it from
the outside world. The unfolding of the murder case is revealed through
the personal testimony of those most involved, Brian the barman, the priest,
Father Dermody, and the man all suspected, the disturbing character who
was most closely involved with the young girl. Gradually, and with a turn
of phrase that reveals his poet’s pen, the author chronicles a series
of events which have impacted on his characters over a number of years,
skilfully weaving together the old and the new stories, the old and the
new murders, so that the reader comes to an understanding of the forces
that have been at play, however hidden, to lead to the present tragedy.
And then there are the outsiders, those who are part of the village but
are yet distant. The Barton family, whose privileged lives set them apart
from the villagers they serve in shop and garage; the Major, an Englishman
who has settled in the village; Guido, the immigrant whose children have
settled into school; and Manny, the old woman who leads a hippy lifestyle
and whom the children believe to be a witch. Also contrasted are the local
policeman and the detective drafted in to investigate the murder, and
the young reporter who finds himself unwillingly drawn in to the dark
secrets of the village. The denouement is startling in its complexity,
but when the guilty are led away the mountain once again becomes “benevolent
and impassive” as it looks down on the village. “Mapping God” has combined
language infused with imagery with a gripping story line to produce an
affecting novel.
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The
Kennedys, America’s Emerald Kings - Thomas Maier
There is a wealth of information in this wide-ranging study of the Kennedy
clan from the arrival of Patrick Kennedy in Boston in the 1840s to the
death of John Kennedy Jnr in 1999. Thomas Maier looks in detail at the
overwhelming influence of both their religion and their ethnic background
on the lives of five generations of the family that came to be regarded
as the royal family of America. Of necessity much of the detail about
Patrick Kennedy of Dunganstown, Co. Wexford, is conjecture; he lived only
nine years after arriving in the US, leaving his widow, Bridget, to rear
their four children. It was his son P.J. who began the improvement in
the family’s fortunes and their rise in politics, and he was the first
to make use of the tightly knit Catholic Irish community for his own advancement.
As well as providing support and leadership in times of trouble, however,
membership of the community also presented a difficulty with cultural
identity. Although born and raised in America P.J. was looked on by the
Brahmins of Boston as an alien being, not only Irish but also Catholic,
and this view of the Kennedy clan was to haunt them down the generations.
It would appear that his son Joseph’s relationship with the Church was
motivated more by political ambition than by piety, and he became an important
intermediary between the US government and the Vatican, at the same time
using his contacts for his own financial and political ends. The family’s
deeply felt and manifested adherence to the Catholic Church was most obviously
demonstrated by Rose Fitzgerald, who was instrumental in instilling the
importance of religious duties into her children. Her faith, though it
sustained her during the many trials and tragedies of her life, was also
responsible for a sometimes cold attitude to her children. This is particularly
true in her treatment of Kathleen, whose marriage to an English Protestant
peer she never forgave, and whose funeral in England she didn’t attend
though she had made the journey a short while before Kathleen’s death
in an aeroplane crash to try to reconcile her to the teachings of the
Catholic Church. In Thomas Maier’s account her reaction to the deaths
of her daughter and son-in-law, while hard to understand, make her a figure
to be pitied rather than condemned. Understandably, the bulk of this work
is devoted to the rise of John F. Kennedy to the role of President of
the United States, the first and only Irish Catholic to reach this peak.
And here the fact of his being a Catholic caused him more difficulty than
any other aspect of his campaign. Again the Church played a pivotal role,
with family friend and confidant Cardinal Spellman turning against the
Catholic candidate, apparently on the grounds that Richard Nixon, with
no need to prove his independence, would be more likely to grant the concessions
sought on Catholic education. A truer friend proved to be Cardinal Cushing
of Boston, a simpler and less political man, whose help and sympathy in
the wake of family tragedy was unstintingly given and greatly appreciated.
Jack Kennedy, through a series of articles, television and public appearances,
as well as backing from influential figures, managed to persuade sufficient
numbers of the electorate that he would, as the Constitution demanded,
keep separate church and state to fulfil his own ambitions and, more particularly,
those of his father, Joseph Kennedy. The Kennedy clan’s links to their
country of origin were kept alive through successive generations. P.J.
Kennedy paid a visit to his father’s home place in Wexford, a home which
he had been able to secure with a gift of money to his relatives after
they were evicted for non-payment of rent in the Land Wars of the 1880s.
His son Joseph made the journey home when he was US Ambassador to the
Court of St James, and while there he helped to broker an agreement between
Ireland and Britain which saw the handing back by the British of the Irish
ports. After the war Jack Kennedy himself visited Dunganstown. This visit
increased his interest in his Irish roots and he famously became the first
US president in office to visit the country when he returned in 1963.
The author has succeeded in presenting the differing personalities of
the Kennedy men from the turn of the 20th century to its end; neither
does he neglect the women, though he points out rightly that they were
in many ways subordinate to the men. He has presented both new and familiar
material in a way that gives a picture of a century and a half of American
life through the eyes of one family whose members learnt early to work
the system to their best advantage, though one feels that perhaps there
could have been more than one book, given the amount of material available.
There are a number of errors marring the text, notably on the first page
where the author refers to “the small hamlet of New Ross”; he names the
Boston politician Martin Lomasney, on two occasions, as Martin Lomansky,
and places Lismore Castle on the River Blackway rather than the Blackwater.
However a book on the Kennedys is to be welcomed which, while not glossing
over the sexual exploits of the men, does not give them disproportionate
emphasis.
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Dick
Walsh Remembered
- Selected Columns from the Irish Times Testament to the esteem in which
Irish Times journalist Dick Walsh was held for both his political writings
and his ability as a writer is the fact that this collection of some of
his columns between the years 1990 and 2002 has a foreword by John McGahern
and an Afterword by fellow journalist and political commentator Geraldine
Kennedy, now editor of the Irish Times. There is an ominous familiarity
about the subjects which concerned the late writer, the inability of politicians
to reinforce their words with action, the ever increasing evidence of
corruption in high places and the hypocrisy of many of our leaders, both
political and clerical, when it comes to delicate matters of morality
such as abortion and divorce. His comment on the troubles afflicting Brian
Lenihan in the presidential campaign of 1990 could well be applied to
many of his topics: “...we cannot confine the question to who did what
and when and why but how they came to regard it as acceptable to the rest
of us”. Dick Walsh was not afraid to speak his mind on any topic but was
as quick to praise as to condemn. He had a special regard for Mary Robinson,
as well as for Jack Lynch whom he described as “the last Fianna Fáil
leader over whose career no doubts are raised”. He had similar admiration
for Limerick’s Jim Kemmy but there is little doubt of his opinion of Charlie
Haughey, referred to variously as “the old scrounger” and “the old mudslinger”.
Charlie McCreevy comes in for similar approbation, for much of Walsh’s
focus is on the financial affairs of the State which unfailingly give
to those who already have but can never find the finances to help those
really in need. Dick Walsh, who died earlier this year after a long illness,
made an invaluable contribution to our understanding of what was really
happening in the corridors of power, a contribution which is sorely missed.
Indeed Wordsworth’s plea to Milton could be aptly paraphrased, for no
one has yet improved on Walsh’s perceptive eye on the political scene
in Ireland.
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Germany
Calling - Mary Kenny
Mary Kenny has chosen to write this book as “A Personal Biography” and
in doing so has interwoven her own thoughts and reactions with those of
her subject, William Joyce, better known as Lord Haw-Haw, the last man
to be hanged for High Treason in Britain. Comparing her own experiences
and understanding, she has produced a profile of a failed politician who
was viewed with odium by the Allies during the Second World War which
leaves the reader feeling some sympathy for her subject. The man whose
familiar “Germany calling, Germany calling” presaged a series of propaganda
broadcasts from Nazi Germany had a tarnished reputation in both Ireland
and Britain, but managed to reinvent himself after a move to Germany days
before the outbreak of war, when the relatively new communication method
of the wireless seemed tailor-made for his oratorical talents. The author
has gradually built up the portrait of Joyce from his birth in America
and his childhood and youth in Galway, where he was seen as highly intelligent,
very articulate, but always ’different’ from his peers. He seemed unaware
of boundaries, set by himself or others, and his sometimes foolhardy behaviour
caused him to leave Ireland at the age of fifteen under threat of death
from the IRA. In Britain he reinvented himself as a British subject and
threw himself in to the Fascist movement, being noted for the vibrancy
and eloquence of his speeches the length and breadth of the country. He
did not always get things quite right, however, and the author emphasises
this in a beautifully understated sentence: “William, for all his extreme
patriotism, never really assimilated the British, and more specifically
the English, mentality; they were not averse to a little private prejudice,
but did not care for ranting”. His political career in Britain was enacted
against a background of his immediate family suffering for his actions,
in particular his brother Quentin who was interned for four years during
the war, mainly because he was a brother of William’s. His parents, too,
suffered; his father because he was ashamed of his son’s anti-Semitism
and subsequent betrayal of Britain, his mother even more so because, despite
William’s beliefs, he was still her oldest son and loved as such. Mary
Kenny has succeeded in maintaining a high level of interest throughout
the narrative, giving William Joyce’s romantic and marital adventures
the prominence that they played in his life. He had a cavalier attitude
to his two wives, Hazel and Margaret, but in his own rather odd way he
loved them both. The author points out quite rightly Hazel’s mistake made
in not encouraging communication between Joyce and his older daughter,
Heather, whose devotion to his memory resulted in his being re-interred
in Galway in the 1970s. She also very satisfyingly gives details of the
subsequent lives of Joyce’s family, friends and colleagues, a fact which
helps to confirm our impressions of him as a man who could inspire great
devotion and loyalty despite his extraordinary prejudices. William Joyce’s
arrogance and self-importance led eventually to his capture in a German
wood, ironically by an officer of the British army who was an as yet unnaturalised
German Jew. It was only as his life drew to a close that a sense of peace
and a natural dignity manifested itself, and he went to his death with
a certain degree of equanimity. In chronicling his life Mary Kenny has
delved deep into her subject and has produced a consistently readable
account of one of the legends of the Second World War. And I think the
acknowledged fact that the book was latterly rushed to production excuses
the rather amazing geographical feat, as described in Chapter Two, of
travelling from Galway to the coast of Clare by crossing the Shannon estuary.
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Nothing
to Say - Gerard Mannix Flynn
James X - Gerard Mannix Flynn
These two works give two different viewpoints of the childhood experienced
by one James O’Neill, a child of Dublin’s inner city who is seldom out
of trouble. In the first, Gerard Mannix Flynn has plenty to say in this
record of his time in the correctional institution in Letterfrack, and
he says it with an ear for language that brings the reader into the inner
circle of the action. Although the account is redolent of suffering, both
emotional and physical, we also hear of the good times, of escapades with
the young James’ schoolfriends, of good times with his large family. But
nothing can hide the heartbreak experienced by both James and his mother
when he is sentenced to a period in Letterfrack, nor the terror of the
strangeness James encounters there. The barbarity of the conditions, the
cruelty of many of those in authority over the children, and the feeling
of helplessness in the boys is conveyed by the strength of Flynn’s language,
a strength which can convey both despair and hilarity. His description
of a game played on the train to Dublin, where a fight between cowboys
and Indians eventually encompasses the Marines and the Luftwaffe, is startling
in its authenticity, though its degeneration into a violent outburst from
one of the Brothers seems somehow inevitable. In “James X” we meet the
45-year-old James as he waits to give evidence in his case against the
State. Here the real truth emerges of the abuse he suffered, told in a
rhyming stream of consciousness that underlines the bewilderment often
felt by the young boy. Taken together the two volumes give an insight
into a life experienced by many in our society who, like the author, have
accepted that they will never receive justice from the Irish State, compensation
but not justice.
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Hardship
& High Living - Nellie Ó Cléirigh
There certainly seems to have been more hardship than high living in this
account of the lives of eleven Irish women from the early 19th century
to the establishment of the Free State. Even those like Mary Beaufort,
whose place in society might have been described as ’comfortable’, spent
a number of very uncomfortable weeks while on a tour of Connemara. Travelling
from Meath up to Sligo and down through Mayo to Galway in 1808 over mainly
indifferent roads and with stops at a number of very basic hostelries
called for a good deal of forbearance, which Mary seems to have had in
abundance for during the journey she was able to record with an eye for
detail both the people and the places she encountered. Two of the women
who might be described as experiencing “high living”, Maria Edgeworth
and Lady Aberdeen, both devoted much of their time to helping those worse
off than themselves. Among those whose lives were more of a struggle was
Margaret McCarthy, who emigrated to America in 1849, although the letter
reprinted here shows hope for the future, with Margaret encouraging the
other members of her family to join her. One group of women who combined
both high living and hardship were the nuns who travelled to the Crimea
to nurse the wounded soldiers. This group of women faced astonishing hardship
as well as animosity and some of them paid with their lives. From Mary
Beaufort’s journey in 1808 to Cecelia Gallagher’s incarceration in Kilmainham
in 1923, Nellie Ó Cléirigh has presented a diverse and fascinating
glimpse into the Irish female experience.
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Yours
sincerely - Angela McNamara
Angela McNamara has long been known in Ireland for her talks and advice
on matters of relationships and her strong adherence to Catholic principles.
In this book she describes how her childhood and early adult experiences
prompted her to take up a full time career in the field of sex education.
She had a sheltered upbringing, living in a large house in Rathgar and
being privately educated for a number of years, with the only raw notes
being the accidental death of a younger brother, a subject never talked
about within the home thereafter, and a brush with a paedophile friend
of the family. Her entry into the world of writing emerged from journals
she wrote about her four young daughters, and she was a regular contributor
to The Irish Messenger. This led to invitations to speak to secondary
school children about the challenges they were meeting in the newly-awakened
Ireland of the 1960s, and an article about the questions posed by teenagers,
submitted to the Sunday Press, led to the most high profile of Angela
McNamara’s activities. From these articles evolved the letters column
which ran for almost twenty years. What emerges from this autobiography,
apart from the deep religious faith of the author, is the nature of change
in Ireland over the second half of the 20th century. She lists sample
questions from the 1960s and from the end of the 1990s, and apart from
the different ages at which the questions were posed, to senior school
girls in the 1960s and to twelve-year-olds, both boys and girls, by the
end of the century, the differing subject matters point to a much more
apparently knowledgeable body of youth. In the relative innocence of the
’60s one girl asked should she take down a poster of Adam Faith from her
bedroom wall since her mother didn’t approve, while by 1999 a twelve-year-old
felt free enough to ask, “What age can you start using condoms?” However
this book is essentially more about Angela McNamara and how she has coped
with the difficulties with which life has presented her.
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Violence
and Nationalist Politics in Derry City - Ronan Gallagher
According to the author of this book, one in the Maynooth Studies in Local
History series, the seeds of the violence that erupted at the end of the
1960s in Derry were sown during a three-year period when the mayor and
corporation of the city were predominantly nationalist. And indeed in
the period from 1920 to 1923, when Hugh O’Doherty was mayor of Derry,
the account of the violence reads like an extract from reports on Bloody
Sunday and other events in the Derry of the 1970s. The establishment of
the ’B Specials’ and the introduction of a British Army regiment, in this
case the Dorsets, served to heighten sectarian tensions, tensions which
were exacerbated by conditions in the rest of the country where first
a War of Independence and then a Civil War were being waged. In setting
out the details of the period, Ronan Gallagher has concentrated first
on the fight for independence and subsequently on the work of the corporation.
This is a little confusing for the reader, since there is obviously a
good deal of overlapping, but it was probably the most practical way of
approaching the subject. In the event, he describes the task facing O’Doherty
as “trying to balance national republican aspirations with local politics
in the city”, a task in which he succeeded in pleasing no one. What the
book did bring home was the sense of betrayal felt by the people of Derry
that partition was allowed to cut them off from their natural hinterland
and from the State to which the majority gave allegiance.
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The
Harcourt Line - Brian Mac Aonghusa
This is both a lament for the old Harcourt Street railway line which served
Dubliners so well for over a century, and a commendation of those whose
foresight over the years urged the preservation of the trackbed for possible
future use. The narrative is a mixture of social history and railway facts
and figures, and the photographic illustrations are particularly effective,
though a large number seem to have been taken when there were no passengers
about. Mac Aoghusa has traced the history of the line through its closure,
part of a wider reduction of the national network of railway lines, to
its rebirth as the route of the Luas Line B.
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Fly
Fishing in Ireland - John Bailey
This is primarily a book for the fishing enthusiast, including as it does
detailed advice on fishing in various settings and seasons, but the photography
and the less technical sections of the narrative render it of interest
to anyone with an eye for the beauties of Ireland. Set out in four sections
covering the seasons, and further divided between the most notable loughs
and rivers of Ireland, John Bailey records not only the methods of fishing
and his successes and failures, but also the many characters he has met
on the way. The passion for fly fishing is possibly best summed up by
the words of Jimmy Foy, a guide on Lough Corrib for more than sixty years:
“There hasn’t been a day in my life when I haven’t got up longing for
my work to begin - and there’s not many of them can say that”. A discussion
of fish farming, the decline of sea trout and a recommendation of books
on fly fishing complete the text, though I was surprised to see no mention
of T.C. Kingsmill Moore’s “A Man May Fish”, surely one of the more important
works on fly fishing in Ireland.
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Treasures
of the Boyne Valley - Peter Harbison
It is hard to believe that archaeologist and art historian Peter Harbison
has left any detail out of this wonderfully illustrated book on arguably
the most famous river in Ireland. The earlier chapters follow in the footsteps
of Sir William Wilde who, in 1849, published “The Beauties of the Boyne
and its Tributary, the Blackwater”. Quoting extensively from the original,
Peter Harbison traces the course of the river from its source near Carbury
in Co. Kildare through Offaly, Meath and Louth and its meeting with the
Irish Sea at Mornington. He is not afraid to mix old with new in the associations,
noting that while Duke of Wellington’s had strong links with Trim, actor
Pierce Brosnan has also helped to put Navan on the map. The journey from
source to sea is punctuated by descriptions of monuments, castles and
churches; near Edenderry the author describes the region as being “puckered
with castles”. He also allows himself, as did Wilde, to stray from the
banks of the Boyne occasionally, as in a visit to the church at Cannistown.
The second section, “Treasures of the Boyne Valley”, is devoted to the
major sites along the Boyne including, of course, the three passage graves
at Dowth, Newgrange and Knowth, as well as Tara Hill, Slane, Mellifont
and Monasterboice. The photographs by Tom Kelly complement the text by
capturing the timelessness of the area encompassed by the seventy-mile
course of the river.
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Heart
Mysteries - Marie Heaney
Marie Heaney has made her selection of Irish poems on the themes of love
and loss, giving them the collective name “50 Poems from Ireland to Touch
the Soul”. Ranging from translations of early Irish poetry to modern commentary,
almost all of the poems have a short introduction by Ms Heaney to deepen
our understanding of individual texts. Among the translated works are
Frank O’Connor’s treatment of Muireadach Ó Dálaigh’s “On
the Death of his Wife” and “Keep to Yourself your Kisses”, an anonymous
poem translated by Máire Mhac an tSaoi. The loss of a parent is
a familiar theme, for example Patrick Kavanagh’s “Memory of My Father”,
and perhaps less well known, Denis O’Driscoll’s “Years After”, in which
he laments the early death of his mother, the way in which the family
learnt to manage without her, but concludes with the poignant “And yet.
And yet. And yet”. W.B. Yeats, Seamus Heaney, Oliver Goldsmith, Nuala
Ní Dhomhnaill, Moya Cannon and John Hewitt are just some of the
familiar voices to be found in this appealing volume.
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Martin
Turner’s Greatest Hits
Few people in this country have turned such a consistently accurate eye
on its political life than Irish Times cartoonist Martin Turner. Spanning
a period of thirty-two years, the cartoons in this collection bring to
mind so many controversies, some treated with a jaundiced eye, some with
great poignancy. In the latter category I would place his comment on what
became known as the “X” case in the early 1990s, when a pregnant girl
was refused permission by the courts to travel to England for an abortion.
Turner depicts the twenty-six counties ringed by a barbed wire fence with
the caption, “17th February 1992......the introduction of internment in
Ireland......for 14-year-old girls”. Politicians are, of course, a prime
target, and Turner takes particular delight in lampooning those caught
up in, or perhaps caught out by, the various tribunals. The wider world
stage also prompts him to pick up his pen and a large number of his cartoons
are aimed at the US motives for waging war on Iraq. It is comforting to
be given the means at least to derive some humour from some of the blacker
occasions of the last three decades.
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The
Stealing of the Crown Jewels - Myles Dungan
A number of books have been written on the theft of the Irish Crown Jewels,
known officially as “The Insignia of the Grand Master of the Order of
St Patrick”, but none, I think, with the light touch but convincing argument
of Miles Dungan’s work. The jewels were kept in a safe in Dublin Castle
and were brought out to be worn by the Lord Lieutenant on ceremonial occasions.
Responsible for their safekeeping was the Ulster King of Arms, Sir Arthur
Vicars, and he seems to have been less than diligent in carrying out his
duties. However it would appear that carelessness was his main crime and,
although his career was effectively ended by the scandal, he was never
seriously considered as the culprit. The investigation involved a range
of characters from King Edward V11 to Mary Farrell, the cleaner at Dublin
Castle, and was carried out by officers from Dublin and from Scotland
Yard. The jewels have never been recovered, though rumours of their location
have surfaced a number of times over the intervening one hundred years;
as recently as two years ago an article appeared in an English provincial
paper once again highlighting the association with the theft of Francis
Shackleton, a brother of the polar explorer who held the position of Dublin
Herald at the time of the theft in 1907. The entire investigation was
complicated by the fact that it uncovered a circle of members of the aristocracy
indulging in homosexual activities, a criminal offence at the time, and
the attempts to keep this secret are believed to have influenced the investigation
of the crime. However by following Sherlock Holmes’ famous dictum that
“when you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable,
must be the truth”, the author has come to a credible conclusion as to
who was responsible for a theft for which no one was ever convicted. It
was a crime made all the more extraordinary by the fact that, as The Times
commented in 1907, just days after the theft, it had been perpetrated
at a location “more constantly and systematically occupied by soldiers
and policemen” than any other in Dublin or even the United Kingdom. A
Dramatis Personae, list of sources and a Time line complete am eminently
readable account of one of Ireland’s most intriguing unsolved crimes.
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Able
Lives - Fiona Murdoch
2003 has been designated The European Year of People with Disabilities
and this, along with the staging of the Special Olympics in Ireland, prompted
this collection of stories of the lives of a number of Irish people with
disability. Different attitudes emerge from the profiles, some have accepted
their disability and have learnt to see the positive side, others are
still questioning why they were chosen and although the author attests
that she never met bitterness in any of the interviews, this emotion is
very apparent in at least one subject. One of the most positive interviews
is with Claire Gallagher, the girl who was blinded in the Omagh bombing.
Claire was already a promising musician and she has been able to continue
and deepen this interest. She also, along with so many of the people interviewed,
stresses the importance of the support she received from family and friends.
Complaints about the lack of facilities feature largely in the lives of
the disabled; Lorraine Leake, confined to a wheelchair by Multiple Sclerosis,
is scathing about the lack of facilities and extremely angry that her
two children have had to be her carers for so long. Fundraising has become
a way of life for many disabled, notably Caroline Casey of the Aisling
Project and Dubliner Rita Corley, who lost her sight as the result of
a car accident. This collection of profiles illustrates both the highs
and lows of disability, and the inordinate courage shown by many whose
lives have been deeply affected. The book is accompanied by a CD featuring
music by some of those interviewed, and all proceeds from the sale will
go to the Disability Federation of Ireland, the Aisling Foundation and
the Camphill Community Celtic Lyre Orchestra.
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