It Occurs To Me:  Loose tongues and ‘dark’ hypocrisy

The INTO Annual Congress was in Derry earlier this week, and two of the principal people in attendance were both from Donegal…general secretary John Boyle and outgoing president Dorothy McGinley. 

Coincidentally, I was re-reading John McGahern’s The Dark around this time, and I was reminded of McGahern’s ‘encounter’ with the INTO hierarchy in the mid-60s. Also, I watched the excellent Bothy Band programme on TG4 last Sunday night, and seeing Paddy Glackin playing the fiddle brought back many parallel memories. Some thirty years ago, I presented an idea to BBC Radio Ulster about interviewing the sons of gardaí who had become famous artists - writers and musicians - including Paddy, and Cavan novelists Dermot Healy and Shane Connaughton, amongst others. The radio programme was entitled A Policeman’s Lot, inspired by the song from The Pirates of Penzance, an opera I had sung in while a second year student in St Eunan’s College. 

I rang John McGahern and he graciously agreed to do an interview. 

I subsequently spent a few hours with him in his home in Leitrim, an afternoon I will treasure for the rest of my life. He recalled that his family and friends were not pleased when The Barracks was first published. 

"Everyone was examining it, to see if they were in it. A local butcher offered me money to put in my next book a portrayal of a customer he didn't like that would make him ashamed to show his face in the town. It was like the tradition of the Gaelic poets, who were paid money to write in derision about people."

When he sent his father, Sergeant Francis McGahern, a copy of the book he received a "sharp response" saying thank you but he had no intention of reading it. But ironically when The Dark was banned his father complained that McGahern wasn't standing up for himself enough. 

"There was a marvellous example of how the family was stronger than the church or state in Ireland. My aunt had a shop where the head of a local secondary school, who was a priest and later became a bishop, used to buy his cigarettes. He removed my book from the library and when she heard she told him that until he put it back he could buy his cigarettes somewhere else."

Just after The Dark was banned he was on a live TV programme in Belfast and was invited to attack the church but said he could no more attack it than he could his own life. He recalled that an Orangeman in the audience stood up and said - to huge applause - "Here is a man whose book has been banned by the Papist government in the south, has been sacked by the Archbishop of Dublin, and he comes up here to Belfast and praises the Catholic church. Moscow couldn't do a better job of brainwashing".

His meeting with the then general secretary of the INTO didn’t go well! 

 "I was told 'if it had just been the book maybe we could have done something for you. But by going and marrying this foreign woman in a registry office you have made yourself a hopeless case. There are hundreds and thousands of Irish women going round with their tongues out looking for a husband.' Now I was as anxious to meet young women as any young man…And I'd never noticed any tongues hanging out." 

Keeping going

Interestingly, some in the media were equally negative. Joe Kennedy, a 29-year old feature writer in the Irish Independent  in 1965, got an exclusive interview with McGahern and flew to London where John had been forced to go having lost his teaching job in Clontarf. However, the editorial board ‘spiked’ the interview and the Irish Times got the exclusive.

McGahern told Joe: "I came back from Spain, but because of a minor accident there I was not able to resume work and on the date the leave of absence expired I notified both the Department of Education and the school manager to this effect. I did not receive a reply from either. Three weeks later I again wrote to the manager saying I had been passed by the doctor and would return in a week. The morning of the day I was due to travel I received a telegram from the principal of the school with the message 'Telephone before travelling'. I presented myself for work on Monday morning, October 11. The principal met me at the school and told me that the manager had left instructions that I was not to resume duties, that he had taken his holidays two or three days previously and would interview me when he returned four weeks later. Over four weeks had elapsed since my first communication with the manager and I had received absolutely no communication from him."

By this time, The Dark had been published and banned and the whole matter had become a subject of public discussion and was eventually raised in the Dáil by the Labour Party leader, Brendan Corish.

Mr McGahern told Joe: "I returned to London and, in a little over four weeks, returned to Dublin to see the manager. Practically the first words he said to me were: 'What entered your head to write such a book? You caused a terrible shemozzle. I couldn't take you back after that. There'd be an uproar.'

"He told me he hadn't read my books, but that people had come to tell him that there was some vulgarity in The Barracks, but that he personally had no objection to a bit of vulgarity. But what had entered my head to write the last thing, he asked. Didn't I know there were certain things that could not be touched on? Then he turned to the question of my reported marriage (Mr McGahern married Finnish theatrical director Annikki Laaksi in Helsinki in November).

"I admitted that though I was legally married I had not been married in the Church. He advised me how to go about rectifying that, how to go about it when I went back to London, 'for my peace of mind'. Then I asked, since I wished to live in Ireland, was there any possibility of getting an appointment - when I had regularised my marriage - in, perhaps, a different school at some later time when the publicity would have died down. His answer was definite: 'Nowhere in the Archdiocese of Dublin, but maybe down the country'. It was this statement that leads me to believe that the manager was not acting independently, but under instructions from a higher authority."

John was probably alluding to the infamous Archbishop McQuaid, and this alone would have made the Indo very nervous. 

In my meeting with the great writer, I detected no bitterness in a humble man who wrote and farmed in his beloved Leitrim, and as I drove back to Derry, some words of his friend, Seamus Heaney, came back to me. In his brilliant poem ‘Keeping Going’, Seamus wrote:

“I see you at the end of your tether sometimes,

In the milking parlour, holding yourself up

Between two cows until your turn goes past,

Then coming to to the smell of dung again

and wondering, is this all? As it was

In the beginning, is now and shall be?

Then rubbing your eyes and seeing our old brush

Up on the byre door, and keeping going.”