I was pleased to read in the London Times recently about a hitherto obscure businessman named Paddy Dear, said to be worth “more than £100 million”, who was in the news for giving money away.
“Paddy Dear, discreetly dressed and softly spoken, does not brandish his wealth and is a philanthropist few have heard of,” read the report. He had “never given an interview before”. But now, he was breaking cover by publicly donating £10 million to his old school, Winchester College, for a bursary scheme to enable other children receive the kind of education he enjoyed.
Sure enough, until this, the only Paddy Dear I had ever heard of was the one in a famous Irish ballad – sung by John McCormack and Judy Garland, among many others.
Set in the aftermath of 1798, that begins: “Oh! Paddy dear, and did you hear/The news that’s goin’ round?/The shamrock is by law forbid/To grow on Irish ground.” (My favourite cover might be Peggy Lee’s, in which she bravely attempts an Irish accent but pronounces news as “nooze”.)
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As well as “Paddy, dear”, the singing narrator later meets an exiled Napper Tandy, who asks how “dear old Ireland” is doing. The singer replies: “She’s the most distressful country/That you have ever seen/For they’re hanging men and women there/For the wearing of the green.”
Controversially, beneficiaries of the real-life Paddy Dear will include the English middle classes, because even children of doctors or lawyers may struggle to afford the fees (£20,000 for boarders) at one of the UK’s most exclusive schools.
Fair enough. It’s his money. But I wonder if, in honour of his hibernophilic name, Paddy might also now be persuaded to throw a few million our direction, for the relief of distress in dear old Ireland? God knows, it’s as dear as ever now, what with the fuel prices.
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At a multinational music event in Dublin’s Button Factory on Tuesday night, the rapper God Knows – full name Munyaradzi GodKnows Jonas, a Limerick man of Zimbabwean heritage – paid tribute to the late Moya Brennan of Clannad.
This was in keeping with the spirit of Cara Sa Cheol (“A Friend in music”), the new TG4 series he was helping launch, featuring collaborations between Irish traditional musicians and those of immigrant backgrounds.
Nothing was lost in translation there. Unlike the occasion when Clannad’s breakthrough hit, the haunting Theme from Harry’s Game (1982), caused concern in the BBC. As the same London Times reported Wednesday, “the song reached No 5 in the UK singles chart, despite briefly being banned after a false claim that the Irish lyrics expressed support for the IRA”.
Far from promoting violence, in fact, the lyrics were inspired by an old Connacht proverb, which Brennan summed up as meaning: “Everything that is and was will cease to be.” As for the chorus, that was just traditional, lilting “mouth music”, slowed down: “fol-lol-a-do, fol-a-day”.
The soothing message, accompanying a TV series about the Troubles, was that all things must pass. But to the BBC, the song became yet another of the era’s suspect devices, and was briefly removed from playlists pending inspection of the contents.
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I had to leave the TG4 event early to attend the world premiere of a play called Ante Beckett, which was also happening in Temple Bar, 200 metres up the street at the New Theatre.
It was a world premiere outside Leitrim, at least. The play’s Omagh-born author, Joel Smith, lives in Manorhamilton, where it debuted last month. And the diminutive New Theatre, tucked away behind a shop (Connolly Books) on East Essex Street, was an aptly cosy venue for a story set in Samuel Beckett’s mother’s womb.
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Short, funny, and moving, the play features an embryonic future Nobel laureate wrestling with the predicament of imminent birth. As well as the usual trimesters, this is a pregnancy of two halves. Beckett (played by Paddy McEneaney) first has the womb to himself, then shares it with an annoyingly chirpy twin (Eoin O’Sullivan).
Fanciful as the setting might seem, it has a grain of biographical truth. The real-life, hypersensitive Beckett claimed to have “clear memories” of his prenatal life, mostly uncomfortable.
He also had a recollection, from shortly before birth, of his mother being among guests at a dinner party. He was a tough critic, even then. As paraphrased by biographer Anthony Cronin, he remembered that the dinner-table conversation “was, perhaps needless to say, of the utmost banality”.
Beckett’s birth, 120 years ago this week at his parents’ Foxrock home, was difficult too, lasting a whole day. His father, a builder and property developer of contrastingly cheerful temperament, went for a long walk in the mountains, with sandwiches and a flask of whiskey, to avoid it. Returning too soon, he then retreated to the garage and sat in his car, in the dark, until it was over.
The pacy Ante Beckett, by contrast, comes in at just under an hour. It runs nightly until Friday.
