An Irishwoman's Diary

Imagine if a ship had to anchor in Dublin Bay to pump emergency supplies of drinking water to a city community. You would know all about it, no matter which radio or television station you turned to, and no matter which newspaper you picked up the following day. The ship's captain would be deluged with requests for interviews, the thirsty populace would be photographed with empty pint glasses in outstretched hands, there would be comments and analyses from experts on the nature of the problem.

So it might have been on the Aran island of Inis Meain last week, when the Irish Lights ship Granuaile under Capt Dermot Gray performed a unique humanitarian mission. There were no cameras there to witness it, but I can confirm that the vessel pumped 13,000 gallons of water ashore to a group scheme that was almost dry.

Ironically, the task was performed on the afternoon that a wind-powered desalination plant was being opened on the same island by the Minister for Community, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs, Mr Ó Cuiv. The €2.3 million plant is meant to solve Inis Meain's continual water problems - but it wasn't working on the day in question, because the intake pipe has been choked with seaweed.

Call in the Committee of Public Accounts? Well, no, because it didn't catch much media attention, outside the faithful reporting of west coast events by TG4 and Ráidio na Gaeltachta. Still, the increasingly narrow and very set agenda pursued by the national electronic and print media is something that west coast communities find perplexing. And if there is "good news" to tell, it has to have a Dublin interest, or a publicity machine behind it, because otherwise it just isn't "news" at all.

Clifden Arts Festival

Clifden Arts Festival is not one of those "set" events on social diarists' calendars. It has no PR consultants, and for that reason the efforts of its main organiser and founder, Brendan Flynn, are largely unacknowledged - beyond his own community, that is. For, as the people of Clifden, Roundstone and Letterfrack know full well, he has introduced them - and their children attending local schools - to writers, poets, playwrights and musicians of international repute over the past quarter-century.

Grace O'Grady was one of his pupils in Clifden Community School. She recalls how the teacher would arrive into the school yard in his 1969 black Volkswagen beetle and alight slowly, bearing a bundle of books.

Moving tribute

"He walked silently into the dark classroom, not with the usual defined footsteps confirming authority, but with a presence altogether different," she has written in a moving tribute. "Standing there, wearing an oatmeal Aran cardigan, tweed tie and camel-skin sandals, there seemed to be an earthiness and detachment about him that was certainly out of the ordinary."

When he spoke, she writes, "it was to read something from The Irish Times about the London Philharmonic Orchestra." And he "mentioned Yeats, and exotic names like Lorca, Proust and Gorke Manrique, whose poem he roughly translated: 'Our lives are the rivers that flow into the sea, which is death. There all the rivers, large, of middling size and smaller are the same when they arrive...' In the next breath, she says, Flynn would be speaking about local placenames such as Coolacly, Derrygimla and Ballinafad.

Originally from Ballinasloe, Co Galway, Flynn spent many years away in Africa and Spain before coming to Connemara to take up the post in Clifden. He brought a creative energy which allowed everything to be possible. Flynn himself has always paid credit to the late Brother Killian Kearney, principal of the school from 1974 to 1983, who allocated an afternoon a week to creative studies.

From 1974 on, the school doors were open in festival week to a "stream of artists, writers and poets, who expanded the school walls and tore strips off the prescribed syllabi," Ms O'Grady writes. "Many of these first visitors have continued to return: Richard Murphy across from Omey, reading Sailing to an Island, the first to make poetry a living art; Tom McIntyre following with translations from Irish poems, no evidence yet of the quirky playwright he was to become; Des Hogan, reading from his early short stories, accompanied at a later date by Neil Jordan; John McGahern, fondly remembered for his reading of Faith, Hope and Charity, that sad, moving story of the Irish workers killed in the buildings in London; Seamus Heaney reading in 1979 from Death of a Naturalist, his early collection of poems."

Last year, the US-based Sicilian writer Gioia Timpanelli returned to Clifden for a second time. She has been described by Frank McCourt as the world's best storyteller, and someone who would have been a "seanachie", earning "dinner and bed with the magic of the word", had she lived here. Grace O'Grady quotes Theo Dorgan, poet and editor of Poetry Ireland, as crediting Brendan Flynn with a a "Zen appreciation of the arts". She believes that "his equanimity and lightness of touch have become characteristic of the man, who greets and meets every pilgrim making the journey west to Clifden each Mean Fomhair".

Street parade tonight

O'Grady has so much more to say about her mentor, who has always worked to ensure that the festival has a strong schools dimension. Tonight, after a week of Seamus Heaney, Maeve Binchy, Sam McAughtry, the RTÉ Concert Orchestra and much more, the festival takes to the streets. Macnas, the Belfast Circus, Diced Carrots, the pupils of 14 local schools and community groups promise a spectacular parade and fireworks, beginning at 8 p.m.