At a National Heritage Week event in my maternal homeland – a place called Magheracloone – at the weekend, the focus was on people and landscape.
So naturally, as one of the speakers, I combined these two themes by reading an extract from my recent memoir recalling how, at the age of seven, I broke my leg.
The link was plaster of Paris, which is made from gypsum, the only Irish deposits of which are under Magheracloone, in a seam that stretches from south Monaghan into neighbouring east Cavan and north Meath.
It used to be boasted that every new house in Ireland had a bit of Magheracloone in it, thanks to dry wall. Well, for a short but intense period of my early life, I may also have had a bit of Magheracloone wrapped around my leg. And very itchy it was too.
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Many years later, as also mentioned in the book, I was visiting the actual Paris – not plastered, I swear – and wrote a column while there drawing on the unlikely parallel between that city and the parish where my mother was born.
So great were the limestone and gypsum deposits under Paris once, and so extensively were they mined over the centuries, that in the 1770s, streets around what is now the Avenue Denfert Rochereau started to cave in.
As the city fathers urgently shored up the old mines, they also used the space to solve the city’s overcrowding problem. Not of the living, but of the dead. The mines became the Catacombs, filled with the overflow from the city’s cemeteries and ever since a macabre tourist attraction.
I didn’t realise then, however, just how close the parallel between Magheracloone and Montparnasse would become. For only a few years afterwards, part of the former caved in too. In 2018, huge sinkholes opened under the Magheracloone Mitchells GAA pitch, forcing the club and community centre to relocate. The indirect results included an immortal headline in this newspaper.
[ Frank McNally on the eccentric but also romantic hotels of ParisOpens in new window ]
It was over an interview a year later between Malachy Clerkin and the Magheracloone GAA great Tommy Freeman who, talking of the disruption to training schedules, worried that a younger generation of football players might “fall through the cracks”.
Normally, that would be just a metaphor, and I think that’s how Tommy meant it. But in this case, the risk was a bit more literal. Happily, nobody did fall through the cracks in the end. And now, great new things – human and infrastructural – are rising from the wreckage.
After accidentally breaking the neighbourhood, gypsum has been busy applying its curative powers to reset it. Thus, the heritage event took place in a magnificent new community centre, opened last year.
Elsewhere in the locality, following a period of asylum in neighbouring counties, the Magheracloone Mitchells have returned to a new, state-of-the-art complex, just up the road from the original.
And speaking of roads, even those have been transformed. A new, temporary one bypasses a stretch of the old R179, while a tunnel is being built, part of the redevelopment of the former underground mine into an open-cast operation.
All of this is being done under the watch of the French multinational Saint-Gobain, which has owned the gypsum mining company since 2005, and on whose name hangs another unlikely tale.
Not only is Saint-Gobain huge – a world leader in building materials with 180,000 employees in more than 70 countries – it’s also old. The original company was set up in 1665, by King Louis XIV no less, along with his finance minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert.
Its founding mission was to make glass and mirrors and, so doing, break the Venetian republic’s monopoly on that trade. One early measure of the company’s success is that in 1678, it landed the contract for the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles.
But Saint-Gobain the company was so named after Saint-Gobain the village in which it first operated, northeast of Paris.
And the village was named for a seventh-century Irish monk, aka Goban, who set up a hermitage there, supposedly thrusting his pilgrim’s staff into the ground to produce a spring. He achieved great local fame before, in AD 670, being “beheaded by marauders”.
Little else seems to be reliably known about Goban/Gobain except that he was a student of the more famous St Fursey. But the funny thing about a man now synonymous with the world’s largest building materials conglomerate is that he is also one of several namesakes of an ancient and legendary Irish builder, the Gobán Saor.
[ Frank McNally on France’s fondness for St Fiacre (except as a baby name)Opens in new window ]
The Gobán Saor may or may not have been the historical St Gobban, born around 560 and associated with north county Dublin. Either way, those and others of the name are etymologically derived from an old word for “smith”, as are latter-day Smiths and MacGabhanns.
On which note, although we don’t know where in Ireland the human St Gobain came from, it seems extraordinarily apt that his corporate multinational namesake is now operating partly in Cavan, the county where Ireland’s largest deposits of Smiths and MacGabhanns are still located.
