Man of Stone - Remarkable documentary about Mountcharles man Patsy McInaw

As part of the Kilcar Film Festival this weekend, a documentary named Man of Stone will get another outing and it will also be an opportunity for the Donegal public to view the story of a remarkable 78-year-old from Mountcharles, Patsy McInaw.

The documentary is produced and directed by another Mountcharles native Michael McMonagle assisted by Manus Brennan and Emer O'Shea, who are to be complimented for telling the story of one of the great characters of our time.

Patsy’s passion for stone was handed down from his father Jim and it was accompanied by the rare gift of being able to tell a story. An hour in Patsy’s company passes quickly and you leave feeling energised.

He remembers going to Glencoe National  School around the Lakeshore and the teachers there, Miss Carr, Miss Dowds, Miss McLoone and Master Cunningham, especially the headmaster Master Cunningham and his influence on him.

“At the time we didn’t know there was another course in life apart from physical work and I felt Master Cunningham was trying to enlighten us,” said McInaw, who said that he didn’t have any great grá for school and would be off with his father whenever he could.

“I wasn’t a good tender of school. But I enjoyed it. I never got any hassle. I have no memories of this corporal punishment, which was there. I wouldn’t deny it. It just didn’t happen to me.”

Patsy’s father, Jim, was well ahead of his time, having been born in the US but returned  to Mountcharles at the age of six in 1912 with his parents, Paddy and Ellen and they built a house on the home farm with a roof of Bangor slates, a rarity at a time when the vast majority of roofs were thatched.

Jim McInaw was encouraged by his parents, especially his mother, to explore different things and he became very interested in electricity and radio.

“My father was always buying technical books on electricity and radio. He would get them from Newnes of London, on hire purchase of course.

“They were always about the house and he used to take notes. Flattening out tea bags and sugar bags and writing on them and he would put a wee bit of wire through a corner of them and hang them on the dresser.

“That was his filing cabinet,” laughs McInaw.

Patsy remembers going rambling with his father, which was the norm at the time, and that is where the talent of storytelling originated.

“He used to go rambling in a house down the road, Cannons. He used to tell stories about the world being round, which was a bit unusual. 

“He said that if you went out the back door tonight and went on straight you would come in the front door.

“I was five or six at the time and I was listening to this. And then my father went outside, maybe the call of nature. The ‘oul fellas were sitting round, talking to one another and one of them said, ‘Ah scus to it, that oul McInaw, he reads far too many silly books’.”

While Patsy McInaw’s school education ended at 14, he graduated from the School of Life and is a wonderful example of how life should be lived. 

He began work on reclaiming much of the family farm at age 11, a major physical undertaking. “It didn’t take a degree, there were only two cows, two calves and a donkey!”

After school there was a short period spent labouring in Coventry before he came home and went to work with a monumental sculptor Brendan Monagle and spent 18 months with a hammer and chisel. His love of stone was already there as that came from his father, who repaired old stone houses.

“He was never referred to as a tradesman. He was just a handy man,” says Patsy, who added that his father was no good with a spade but through a barter system, he got work done on his farm in exchange.

“It was a bit like the shops in the town, no money changed hands.”

The graphic used for the documentary Man of Stone

One of Jim McInaw’s talents was his ability to fix radios, and it was a time when the wireless became an important part of the local community. Patsy has endless stories about his father’s talent with the wireless.

“There came an oul character here with a wireless, Mick Gillespie.  He was a tailor. My father asked him, ‘man dear what’s wrong with it Mick’? ‘I don’t know Jim, I don’t know? It won’t speak. It won’t say a word.’

“My father was a wee bit like the Gestapo, he had it talking when he came back,” laughs Patsy.

Jim McInaw had no qualifications and was self-trained in the art of fixing radios although some people at the time thought it was not much of an occupation ‘looking into the back of a radio with one eye closed.’

“But they were happy enough later to listen to the radio when it was going and fixed.

“It was the same as some of them coming to help him with spuds.  The tasks were regarded as equal,” says McInaw.

Patsy McInaw took confidence from his father’s ability to do jobs and take responsibility for rebuilding stone walls in houses..

“My father wouldn’t have been any better at the work than others but he was prepared  to take on the responsibility.”

McInaw enjoyed his days playing with St Naul’s GAA club, joining them as a minor in 1964 and then playing junior.  He was playing alongside some big and tough players, like Eddie Gallagher and the Coughlans.

“You had to watch yourself with Eddie, regardless of what colour jersey you had on,” laughs Patsy.

He thoroughly enjoyed the games played on McCahill’s Holm in Drimarone and remembers one particular day. There was no training at the time and preparation for games was different.

“One time I went to the bog with six or seven on a Saturday up at Johnny Eoin’s up Lettermore. They were short of a wheelbarrow and they gave me a bag to pull out the turf on. It was a bag that Magees used to send out their yarn in. I kept at that all day.

“Then I went to the football on Sunday and my two bloody thumbs wouldn’t go up past my ears. And I could hear ones on the sideline shouting, ‘stretch yourself, you big bastard’, because I was bigger than most of the rest of them, but I was handicapped that day.

“I had a wee sort of a consultation with PJ Flood one day. I think he took exception to me. I wouldn’t have been a great footballer but I would have been awkward or a hindrance to the opposition.

“I always thought it was very important to get the ball and give it to somebody else, preferably someone with the same colour jersey.”

McInaw spent 15 years working with Mick Kelly in construction and also along with Donal Kelly and those were enjoyable endeavours, as he calls them.

But working with stone was always to the fore. “It was  more of a passion. I enjoyed working with stone. I got fully engrossed in it trying to figure how to lift the right stone.

“I always went with the assumption that you only lift a stone once. I really got a lot of enjoyment out of it.

“Getting associated with the Dry Stone Wall Association was a great perk to me,” he says.

The opportunity to really get involved with stone building came during lulls in the construction trade around 1989 when Patsy and his wife, Patricia, a Glenfin native (he laughs that she was lucky to get out of Glenfin) began building a wall around their house.

“We got stone from Eamonn Monaghan, God rest him, and myself and Patricia and Eddie Boyle quarried it. Eamonn wouldn’t take any money for it. He maintained that we were intimidating him by offering him money.”

What started out as a wall around the house then extended to over 2.2km of dry stone wall all around the farm - truly a sight to behold, which is shown well through drone footage in the documentary.

The initial build was 150 yards around the house. “We did that when we thought we weren’t working,” laughs Patsy.

Now retired, Patsy hasn’t changed anything. His family of five are all within a 30 mile radius - Annemarie living in Glenfin; Brendan in Bundoran; Roisin in Garrison with Joseph and Claire living locally.

Among his nine grandchildren is Sarah McInaw, who narrates much of the remarkable documentary Man of Stone.

Patsy has been involved in other ‘endeavours’ including the stone map in Glencolmcille, work at the Pier at Mountcharles and he assists at ‘stone building workshops’.

One of his great experiences was being invited to the Dry Stone Wall Festival held in Inisheer every year, where he meets those with the same passion for stone as himself.

“I would have gone every year from 2013 and although I missed that last few years, it has been a great thing to get involved in at an older age. It was a lovely experience.

“You would never think stone would become popular again,” he says.

One of the characters of our time, Patsy is a person who never gets too excited.  “I was fortunate that way”.

Apart from his remarkable ability to build stone walls, Patsy McInaw also has a great ability as a storyteller and with this documentary, Man of Stone, both are blissfully captured.

Man of Stone, the documentary, will be screened in the Aisling Centre, Kilcar on this coming Saturday, February 1st as part of the Kilcar Film Festival

Manus Brennan, Michael McMonagle and inset Emer O'Shea, who collaborated to produce Man of Stone