The master teacher of Ireland

Bryan MacMahon was the Irish writer who best personified the cult of the local artist.

Most of his work was based on his native north Kerry, where he always lived. Novelist, short story writer and dramatist, Mr MacMahon was also an accomplished folklorist, collector of traditional music and song, and an authority on Shelta, the language of the travelling community.

One of the most anthologised of Irish writers - his story "The Windows of Wonder" is one of the most famous examples of the Irish genre - he was a surprising omission from The Field Day An- thology of Irish Writing.

His absence was noted with some regret by the Irish fiction 1965/90 section editor, who lamented an inability to "spare room for the fine work of Bryan MacMahon." Still, there wasn't enough space to include John Broderick or Molly Keane, either.

Any attempt to understand either MacMahon the man or MacMahon the writer must begin with the enormous impact 44 years spent as a schoolmaster in his native Listowel had on him.

He often likened the role of a teacher to that of a storyteller and actor. Speaking in an interview in October 1992, MacMahon explained: "When you are a teacher, you're six hours an actor on stage every day of your life. You are an actor and you have to hold their full attention."

His memoir The Master (1992) is dominated by his experiences as a teacher. The son of a mother who had devoted her life to teaching, MacMahon was as if predestined to teach. For MacMahon, education was always a liberating privilege. There is a strong didactic element in his work, albeit a non-dogmatic one. His fiction is concerned with explaining the cruel ironies of nature, particularly birth and death.

It is always, however, tempered by benevolence; far from the savagery of Liam O'Flaherty. MacMahon's dramatic vision is essentially realistic and never vicious. While an interest in nature prevails through his work, he always considered himself a small town, rather than rural, writer.

Above all he had a commitment to evoking the Ireland of reality rather than of myth or nostalgia.

In his plays he took on several of the themes which have traditionally stalked, and continue to stalk, Irish life: the fear of impending birth, death in birth, social ostracisation, sexual love as a source of disgrace and shame.

The Honey Spike - which was first performed at the Abbey Theatre in 1961, and revived as recently as January 1993 - focusses on a young traveller couple, a year married and awaiting the birth of their first child. Breda is intent on giving birth in the "Honey Spike", a hospital in Kerry. As the play begins the couple are far away, at the Giant's Causeway in Antrim, and the action develops into a race against time and nature as well as human hostility.

MacMahon's first stories, "The Good Dead in The Green Hills" and "Exile's Return" were published in Sean O'Faolain's literary journal, The Bell, while the same magazine's poety editor, Frank O'Connor, accepted MacMahon's first poem.

Throughout his long career, MacMahon always avoided the two main scourges of the professional creative writer - he never suffered from writer's block and he never received a rejection slip.

In person he was energetic, restless, opinionated, interested in everything and happiest when taking charge. More than many who aspired to being liberal, MacMahon managed to balance his genuine liberalism and openmindedness with a strong feel for tradition. The weight of lives lived, the value of the commonplace and ordinary, were essential to his sense of history. History and literature, he always maintained, were mutually dependent.

His interest in writing went far beyond his own work. It was his idea to set up the first writer's workshop in Listowel, which in time developed into the Listowel Writers Week. A hardworking and practical writer, he shared many of the qualities of his fellow Listowel man, John B. Keane. At his best, MacMahon combined common sense, humanity, instinct, accessibility and a natural understanding for the social and traditional orders which continue to determine Irish life. Active to the end, his last book, a collection of fictional dialogues between men and women, is published by Poolbeg Press next week. Entitled A Final Fling, Bryan MacMahon probably would smile at the irony.