It Occurs To Me: Poetry and the price of peace

The accompanying photo shows Seamus Heaney’s brother Dan, his wife Mary, and Anna Galligan in Lumen Christi College.
Last Sunday, to end the Friel Days celebrations in the north-west, we celebrated the 50th anniversary of Heaney’s brilliant 1975 publication, North.

Well done to Sean Doran, Liam Browne and Arts Over Borders.

Glenties, Dunlewy, Sion Mills and Derry have benefited greatly from the celebrations.

Seamus Heaney’s alma mater, the old St Columb’s College - now Lumen Christi - was the venue for some of the readings. Both my sons went there. I was honoured to be asked to read Heaney’s magnificent A Constable Calls.

Seamus Heaney’s brother Dan, his wife Mary, with Frank Galligan and Anna Galligan in Lumen Christi College

The Heaney Corridor upstairs is a wonderful mix of poignancy and commemoration, and the corridor begins its journey at the old college sick bay, mentioned by Heaney in his classic poem, Mid-Term Break; here are a few verses:

I sat all morning in the college sick bay
Counting bells knelling classes to a close.
At two o'clock our neighbours drove me home.
Next morning I went up into the room. Snowdrops
And candles soothed the bedside; I saw him
For the first time in six weeks. Paler now,
Wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple,
He lay in the four-foot box as in his cot.
No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear.
A four-foot box, a foot for every year.
John McGillan was a past pupil there and he read the powerful ‘Ministry of Fear’:
Well, as Kavanagh said, we have lived
In important places. The lonely scarp
Of St Columb’s College, where I billeted
For six years, overlooked your Bogside.
I gazed into new worlds: the inflamed throat
Of Brandywell, its floodlit dogtrack,
The throttle of the hare. In the first week
I was so homesick I couldn’t even eat
The biscuits left to sweeten my exile.
I threw them over the fence one night
In September 1951
When the lights of houses in the Lecky Road
Were amber in the fog. It was an act
Of stealth.
On my first day, the leather strap
Went epileptic in the Big Study,
Its echoes plashing over our bowed heads,
But I still wrote home that a boarder’s life
Was not so bad, shying as usual.

I was delighted to meet Denis Bradley who read the poem Exposure. A past pupil, Denis was a priest in Derry in the 1970s and as we chatted afterwards and alluded to the leather strap going ‘epileptic’, he told me a great story about a golfing companion from Donegal - Denis is a Buncrana man - who spent 18 holes talking about his time as a boarder in St Eunan’s.

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“Judging by what he told me, Frank” said Denis, “St Columb’s was only in the ha’penny place!” Mind you, he recalled one notorious St Columb’s priest who so enjoyed strapping that - not content with battering the class - waited until a pupil from another class who was only doing the roll call, and strapped him too!

After leaving the priesthood, Denis worked as a counsellor, establishing two shelters and treatment centres for alcohol and drug addiction in the city. He is now married, with three grown-up children.

Last year, he published Peace Comes Dropping Slow: My Life in the Troubles. In it, he writes:
“I ended up as a boarder in St Columb’s College in Derry.

"It was big and cold and the food so bad that I was hungry for the greater part of five years. There was an underlying homesickness, but I was not always unhappy there. I made good friends, and it enabled me to grow a resilience that I think helped me in later life.”

With Brendan Duddy, Denis was a member of the ‘backchannel’, which acted as go-betweens for the IRA and the British government, and he also served as the first vice chair of the Policing Board, the latter post earning him an unmerciful beating from dissidents with a baseball bat in 2005 in a Brandwell pub.

They were “bold enough to attack my home on a few occasions and bold enough to hit me over the head with a baseball bat in a pub one evening when watching a football match with my youngest son”. Having left the priesthood, Denis worked as a counsellor, establishing two shelters and treatment centres for alcohol and drug addiction in Derry. He married, and has three grown-up children.

Meeting Big Hugh

Last week, I was delighted to meet Hugh McFadden, as he was sipping coffee in Letterkenny. Hugh is always unfailingly courteous, and a few years ago, I had the pleasure of working with his class in Scoil an Linbh Íosa, Killymard, with whom he won two consecutive Cumann na mBunscol County Championships.

It could have turned out differently for Hugh in his early years.

At the age of 16, he signed for Finn Harps. He then signed a one-year scholarship with Sligo Rovers, Rovers having won the 2012 League of Ireland Premier Division.

According to Hugh, there was interest in him from other League of Ireland clubs too. In any event, he got a call from then Donegal under-21 manager Maxi Curran initially, and senior manager Jim McGuinness called upon him around three months afterwards. Soccer’s loss was certainly our gain.

As regards his class, they were a happy creative bunch of kids, and obviously hero-worshipped their favourite county footballer. I thought he had a great year for Donegal, and would have loved to see him on the field from the outset in the All-Ireland Final.

Anyway, as he reminded me, it was back to school last week and back to ‘porridge’ (county training!) in the New Year.

He told me his mammy reads me every week! She reared a big man with a big heart.

The Tuam babies scandal
I see where Father Brendan Kilcoyne, a former diocesan secretary of Tuam has criticised the excavation of remains underway at the former mother and baby home in the town, praising the nuns who ran the institution.

He added that “a fortune of money” was being spent on the excavation works despite the completion of a “first-class” government inquiry, that the works would take two years, during which time a “black mass” would take place in Tuam, peddling “black propaganda” about the history of the home.

Fr Kilcoyne said there was an “outrageous myth” that children at the institution had “met an untimely end through bad action”. He described the nuns who ran the home as “outstanding” and said he did not believe there was any “bad action”. He said an impression was being given in an “unscrupulous manner” that children died through bad action or criminal behaviour in Tuam, and that they were “deliberately buried in a septic tank”.

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Notwithstanding the outstanding work done by Catherine Corless who discovered the scandal in 2014, let me remind Father Kilcoyne of these facts: A local health board inspection report from April 1944 recorded 271 children and 61 single mothers in residence, a total of 333 in a building that had a capacity for 243.

The report described the children as “emaciated”, “pot-bellied,” “fragile” with “flesh hanging loosely on limbs.” The report noted that 31 children in the “sun room and balcony” were “poor, emaciated and not thriving.” The effects of long term neglect and malnutrition were observed repeatedly.

Children died at the home at the rate of one a fortnight for almost 40 years, one report claims. Another appears to claim that 300 children died between 1943 and 1946, which would mean two deaths a week in the isolated institution.

In the home’s 36 years of operation between 1926 and 1961 some locals told the press this week of unforgettable interactions with its emaciated children, who because of their “sinful” origins were considered socially radioactive and treated as such. One local said: “I remember some of them in class in the Mercy Convent in Tuam – they were treated marginally better than the Traveller children. They were known locally as the ‘Home Babies’. For the most part the children were usually gone by school age – either adopted or dead.”

Whatever about your perceived Catholicism, Father, what about a bit of real Christianity?