DISPLACED IN MULLINGAR: I FOUND A therapist on YouTube during the week, explaining how some people are always on the run from themselves. "They never have a fundamental conversation with their inner self," he said, writes MICHAEL HARDING

"The wheel is going around, but the mouse is dead." His audience laughed.

He was a shiny-faced therapist, with slippery eyes, oozing the confidence of a man who never ran away from anything.

I envied him. Then I turned him off, and walked up town, past the limp St Patrick's Day bunting, that still flapped in the wind and rain over the Market House. The streets were drenched. The smell was of clean, fresh weather.

In the Greville Arms, a crowd had gathered to raise funds for a cancer retreat centre on the outskirts of town, and to launch a CD by Noel Battle, a local mouth-organ player, and seven times All-Ireland champion on the harmonica.

The hotel was packed. The audience was beguiled by boys on fiddles, young girls on concertinas, and a man in a brown tweed jacket who strummed his guitar with exquisite delicacy, as a lady rendered five verses of The Rocks of Bawn. When Noel Battle's daughter took to the stage and played her flute, the audience was completely mesmerised.

I stayed at the bar, relishing my pint of Guinness like a suck calf with its head in a bucket of milk, thinking about Packie Duignan, the great flute player from Arigna, Co Roscommon, who once declared with irony: "We are all outlaws." Duignan was an artist of bardic stature, boisterous betimes in public houses, whose wild music was nothing less than a defiant critique of a society repressed by respectability.

"We are all outlaws," Duignan remarked, in a Sligo pub, the only night I ever met him; the landlady's shoes squeaked across the carpet, as she glided through the congested but silent lounge, to answer a knock on the door.

"There are two great silences in life," Duignan whispered. "One of them is the silence in a church before a funeral. But the other is the silence in a pub, when the guards are outside."

Packie Duignan spent a great amount of nights travelling the countryside in other people's cars and small vans. He was frequently lost in fog or bad weather, and consumed an enormous amount of sandwiches, before going home eventually, to rest in Arigna graveyard, when all the deeds were done and all the songs were sung.

As I walked home later, by the light of the street lamps, I remembered a moment long ago, when I became an outlaw, and fled from the scene of a crime. It was an autumn evening and I was nine. I watched an older boy point a pellet gun at the glowing glass of a street lamp, and fire. Suddenly, the world went dark.

"What do we do now?" I whispered.

"Run," he said.

Later that night, I looked at my old father in his slippers, and felt disappointed in him. I had seen something illicit. I had seen the possibilities of life beyond the boundaries of a faded drawing room. I had been outside in the dark, where people are made strong by bold acts.

My companion that night was no musician. But he was an outlaw, in so far as he got expelled from school and took the boat to England. Later, the outlaw turned hero and made the front page of an evening newspaper; according to one witness, when the hero noticed a neighbour's house was in flames, he broke down the door and saved the lives of two older ladies. The newspaper photograph captured him unconscious in the ambulance, as the medics placed an oxygen mask over his face.

I saw him a few years later in the surgical hospital in Cavan, his chest peppered with gunshot, after a botched attempt at suicide. He said: "I always managed to mess up everything."

He lasted another few winters, before he discovered an effective method that ensured he didn't botch the job a second time around.

He was a lonely outlaw, but his ghost still lingers around the edges of my domestic life, especially on mornings in spring when the sun shines through the patio doors in my Mullingar kitchen.

Forever young, he sits in my rocking chair and watches me pouring milk on the All-Bran, as I get older, waiting for the coffee to percolate; the outlaw ghost who didn't waste his time listening to the clichés of a therapist on YouTube.

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