A number of his Inniskeen neighbours from Co Monaghan recalled the writer Patrick Kavanagh with pride and fondness at the Irish Writers' Centre this week. They defended him stoutly, ready to disagree with anyone who dared mention his notoriety as a difficult and sometimes rude individual.
Peter Murphy, chairman of the Patrick Kavanagh Society and the writer's next-door neighbour for many years, recalled driving him to Mass every Sunday: "I never met him in a bad mood. I always found him alright. He always came down at weekends and during the week sometimes. He used to stay with his two sisters. They were retired matrons."
The evening was a celebration of the publication of a new selection of Kavanagh's prose, launched by poet Gerald Dawe. A Poet's Country: Selected Prose, edited by Antoinette Quinn and published by Lilliput Press, is the first collection of Kavanagh's prose to be published in nearly 40 years.
"We all think we know Kavanagh - cantankerous, iconoclastic, subversive, troubled, mocking," said Dawe. However, he said Quinn's book gives us "the gaiety of Kavanagh's creative mind alongside the hard-earned truth telling of his 'personal statements'." The book reminds us "just how much a breath of fresh air he is, never mind was", said Dawe.
Marie-Louise Colbert recalled being at Kavanagh's wedding in Senator Eoin Ryan's house on Leeson Park in Dublin. "He could be quite rude but he was never rude to me personally," said Colbert. The wedding, she recalled, had an "enchanting" quality to it. Sheila Bradshaw, another great friend, recalled his funeral some months later, in 1967.
A number of people came from the Patrick Kavanagh Rural and Literature Resource Centre in Kavanagh's native Inniskeen, six miles outside Carrickmacross. There are 4,500 visitors to the centre each year, including second-level students, preparing for their Junior and Leaving Certificate exams, said Rosaleen Kearney, the centre's administrator.
Jean Carron, a tour guide in the centre and an actor who honours the poet in his one-man show, A Little Drop of Paddy, recalled calling to Kavanagh's house when he worked as an ESB employee in 1963. Kavanagh invited him in, and Carron says, "I had a great chat with him for an hour and a half in his own home. I met him in a great mood."