WRITING ABOUT Bastille Day recently, I mentioned the Dublin 4 GAA club Clanna Gael Fontenoy, whose suffix derives from the site of a famous 1745 battle, in which Ireland’s “wild geese” regiments fought and triumphed in the service of France.
Cue a very interesting e-mail from Catherine Cavendish, also from Dublin 4, about the tensions that sometimes arise between metaphorical wild geese and real ones.
It appears that the aforementioned GAA club shares its Sandymount base – Sean Moore Park – with a large flock of light-bellied Brent geese. The geese were there first, in fact. They used to graze on the weeds of the old green strand, where Dublin Corporation created Sandymount Beach Park (now Sean Moore) in 1981 as a payback to locals who had endured years of having a city dump on their doorsteps.
Furthermore, the birds are notable athletes in their own right. At the risk of being controversial, one could say that Brent geese are the opposite of thousands of Dublin football supporters, in that they only appear here in the winter (I’ll get my coat now). Their summer breeding grounds are the Canadian Arctic, and their epic annual migration between there and Ireland is followed avidly by scientists and bird-watchers.
The light-bellied geese arrive in Dublin around October, and leave again in April (just as the light-bellied GAA supporter is emerging from winter hibernation and donning his distinctive summer plumage: last year’s Arnott’s jersey).
In the intervening months, however, the geese must negotiate the activities of hardier Gaels, such as the Fontenoys. Since 1981, the GAA club has expanded its facilities to the extent that, as Catherine says with a hint of annoyance, “almost all our public park is now the fiefdom of Clanna Gael Fontenoy”. This is an inconvenience to non-GAA playing locals, clearly. But it’s an even bigger inconvenience to the geese.
When the supply of their favourite estuary weeds runs out every year, usually in December, the birds resort to grassland instead. And being “site-faithful”, they prefer the green, green grass of their winter home: Sean Moore Park. Which as Catherine says, should make for a beautiful story: the icons of a famous Hiberno-French diaspora returning annually to graze on the playing fields of a club named in their honour.
Unfortunately, the ground-sharing arrangement has not worked so well in practice. GAA clubs tend to need facilities – flood-lights and nets behind the goals, for example – that don’t really suit birds. And the downside of the Brent geese’s unpaid groundsmanship is the deposition of natural fertiliser, which doesn’t suit GAA players.
As a result, Gaelic games have joined the long list of hazards that the geese have to compete with on the Poolbeg peninsula. And from Sean Moore Park at least, my correspondent suggests, they are being “squeezed out”.
The story could be more poignant only if the GAA club involved was the one actually called “Wild Geese”, which is based in North Dublin and featured on the TV series Road to Croker recently, when its Junior E hurling team was the subject of a remedial training session by Ger Loughnane.
The former Clare and Galway supremo diagnosed and treated a number of their problems, none of which were to do with bird droppings. But then again, the club is located in Oldtown, just north of Swords, and presumably within plane-circling distance of Dublin Airport. One would hope that all its wild geese flocks are metaphorical.
STILL WITH figurative geese, another reader – Cathal Cavanagh – has written clarifying comments I made about his namesake, Joseph Cavanagh, the Irishman who may or may not have led the storming of the Bastille.
I suggested there was no hard evidence of his participation, even in “his own later account”. Which piqued the interest of the latterday Cavanagh who, as a member of the Clann Caomhánach, has researched the subject extensively and would be fascinated to know of such an account, if there was one.
In fact, as Cathal points out, the only known description of Joseph Cavanagh’s role in the famous events of July 1789 is not by him, but in a contemporary pamphlet entitled Exploits Glorieux du Célèbre Cavanagh: Cause Première de la Liberté Francoise. As the title suggests, this does not stint in the Irishman’s praise, describing him as a key revolutionary agent who deliberately fomented insurrectionary feeling in the hours leading up to the attack. But it does not say he took part in the actual attack. Nor was Cavanagh one of those named in the official list of 1,166 participants; although,
Cathal says, this is not regarded as especially accurate.
FINALLY, AND still on the subject of Kavanaghs, I have been asked to point out that the Patrick Kavanagh Centre in Inniskeen hosts its annual writers’ weekend, starting tomorrow, with two days of workshops by the poet and novelist Catherine Phil MacCarthy. Beginners and those already writing are equally welcome. The course fee is €100 and more details are available at www.patrickkavanaghcountry.com.