The Pear Is Ripe by John Montague

Author:John Montague [John Montague]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Liberties Press
Published: 2014-04-11T04:00:00+00:00

PART III

4

CLADDAGH GOES NORTH

OR THE NORTHERN MUSE

The North of Ireland from which I emerged was barely comprehensible to my Southern contemporaries. In the 1950s, a threadbare, post-Emergency Dublin was grappling with poverty, priests and politics, and had little time or inclination to consider the complexities of the North. This obliviousness lingered well into the sixties. The fiery Bernadette Devlin, that modern-day Joan of Arc, would not impress herself on the outside world until late in the decade. As for poetry, it is hard now, after the advent of poets like Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, Michael Longley, Medbh McGuckian, Ciaran Carson and Paul Muldoon, to imagine a Northern Ireland that was not a literary hotbed. But I was regarded not as one of the first of a new movement, but as an anomaly: I had no poetic contemporaries from the North. Although Tom Kinsella accepted an offer to become one of the directors of Mary O’Malley’s Lyric Theatre in Belfast, he was suspicious of any of the survivors of the wartime crusade towards Ulster regionalism, which had been fostered by John Hewitt and others. And when I made reference to my Northern origins, he would counter, with a gruff laugh: ‘You’re not like them. You had the good sense to come down here.’

The urban north-east was more or less foreign to me, since I had not gone to Queen’s University. In the fifties and sixties I would befriend two older poets of Protestant background, John Hewitt and Louis MacNeice, who were both from that remote north-east, but Dublin had become my source. And yet, again and again, I was drawn to make pilgrimages northwards to my own old home west of the River Bann, in County Tyrone. After all, the place where one is brought up haunts the mind and heart, and furthermore I was well into my long, complicated poem on my complicated home territory, The Rough Field.

I was always trying to persuade my friend and fellow director (indeed the founding father) of Claddagh Records, Garech Browne, to consider the literary and musical possibilities of our lost Six Counties. But like most of my Dublin pals, Garech doubted that the stern North could yield much fruit. Yet he had met some musical eccentrics from Ulster at the various fleadhs cheoil, like Dr Galligan from Cavan (‘an atrocious tin-whistle player,’ according to the discerning Garech), who dressed as colourfully as any Irish-American on parade. But he was chairman of Comhaltas, the All-Ireland Traditional Music Association. And there was Brian O’Donnell, a squat, saturnine man, and a direct descendant of the great Donegal family, who was head of the Belfast branch of the Comhaltas. These two were prodigious drinkers, yet, on the other hand, in the middle of the flowing fleadhs, you might catch the honeyed tones of Paddy Tunney from Fermanagh, a practising Pioneer, or Temperance man, whom I first heard singing the original Sligo version of ‘She Moved Through the Fair.’

And then there was David Hammond, that soft-eyed, sweet-voiced singer

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