An Irishman's Diary

It`s good to know that at least one citizen of the State has not been caught up in this millennium madness. It is right that the end of the century should be marked, but this hype about where we are all going to be at midnight on December 31st next is, to put it mildly, getting a bit tedious.

The poet and academic Brendan Kennelly is refreshingly original in his plans for this particular New Year's Eve. He hopes to be "asleep in bed, with God's help" when the midnight chimes ring out.

So Kennelly tells Eamonn O hArgain in An Riocht '99, the annual yearbook of the Kerry Association in Dublin. Kennelly does not say if he will be sleeping soundly in his living quarters in Trinity College or in his native north Kerry. Perhaps it is as well not to speculate. John B. Keane

O hArgain quotes John B. Keane, who once remarked: "There is no such thing as a conventional Kerryman. If you try to analyse him, he will change his pace in order to generate confusion."

There was an occasion when Kennelly was a source of considerable confusion for at least one Kerry GAA follower. Kennelly was an accomplished Gaelic footballer in his youth, a fact that perplexed a hardened and experienced spectator at a club game in his native county one wet evening many years ago.

At the time, he was gaining a reputation as a young poet of promise, and the man on the sideline could not reconcile the skill of the player with that of the wordsmith. "You know," he remarked to a fellow spectator, "for a poet, young Kennelly has a great kick of a dead ball."

Kennelly went to Trinity as a student in 1953, then left for a time to become a clerical officer with the ESB, before a stint in London and the resumption of his university studies. In the early 1950s an ESB job was regarded in rural Ireland, devastated by wave after wave of emigration, as a veritable passport to riches. Kennelly's father, delighted that his son had opted for a permanent and pensionable occupation, told him that he would, within a short time, be standing knee-deep in carpet.

Contemporaries from rural Kerry included the late Dr Paddy Moriarty, later to become the ESB's chief executive and chairman, and John Falvey, who afterwards pursued an academic career and was chief executive officer of Kerry VEC. Moriarty was active in the Kerry Association for years and a contributor to its yearbook.

First sighting

Kennelly has penned a poem to recall his first sighting of his fellow Kerryman in the ESB headquarters in Dublin:

One May morning in Nineteen Fifty-four

I saw a blonde young man

Striding down a corridor

In Head Office: watchful, confident, relaxed.

"That's Paddy Moriarty," John Falvey said,

"He's from Dingle, sharp as they come.

He has a warm heart and a cool head.

As good as ever came out of the Kingdom."

None better, I'd say. Who can forget that smile,

How he'd story the evening and night away,

Spreading his light with dignity and grace ?"

"Ta se ag dul in oige - That was his style,

Gone down the corridor of years now,

Paddy Mo, who brought such honour to this place.

Also in the yearbook, Denis P. O'Sullivan from Kilgarvan writes about an incident in 1957 involving none other than Jackie Healy-Rae, whose Dail ambitions were probably no more than a glint in his eye at the time. O'Sullivan, a Kerry hurling selector, and Healy-Rae, the driver, made their way to Dublin for a game between Roscommon and Kerry.

Roscommon's Gerry O'Malley suffered an eye injury when he was accidentally hit by the ball. He was in deep distress when a bystander came to his assistance. In language, peculiar to his native heath, and sometimes nowadays heard in the corridors of Leinster House, Healy-Rae was less than impressed by the assistance given to O'Malley. Pushing the bystander aside, he declared: "Sweet anam on diabhail, you blooming cloumpan, do you want to pull the eye out of the man ?"

O'Sullivan recalls that HealyRae took over, but stewards intervened and insisted that the bystander be reinstated to administer the first aid. The bystander was none other than the chairman of the Roscommon County Board and later president of the GAA, Dr Donal Keenan. Healy-Rae, it has to be said, would not be as impetuous today, unless he was elbowing an opponent on to the political sideline.

Kitchener

The incident is just one of several anecdotes contained in the yearbook, which is the work of many hands, including Luke Moriarty, Noel Gerrard Smith, Attracta Flattery, Marion Walsh, Mary McAuliffe and Sheila Prendergast.

Also revealed, by the way, is that Field Marshal Horatio Herbert Kitchener, of "your country needs you" fame, was a Kerryman. He was born in June, 1850, at Gunsborough House, Ballylongford, a fact that may not be widely known outside of the Kingdom. Mind you, as Moss Walsh notes, it was a fact which he did not want to be reminded of himself.

Whenever it was hinted that he was from Irish stock, Kitchener would paraphrase the Duke of Wellington's disclaimer of his own Irish birth with the remark that "a man can be born in a stable and not be a horse". As they will tell you in the Kingdom, Kitchener's denial of the location of his birth was his loss entirely.