Synge is remembered at 11 o'clock this morning at Oak Glen in Glencree, Co Wicklow, when Minister Ivan Yates unveils a Synge Stone, suitably inscribed with verse by the subject. Having read through his chapters on Wicklow in a collection of his prose works, you go on to his western experiences in the Congested Districts, and the words in the conversations leap off the page, as vividly and authentic, you would think, as if Synge had had, long before its time, a portable tape recorder.
Here is a plaint for poteen. . . "for it was a great trade at that time, and you'd see the police down on their knees blowing the fire with their own breath to make a drink for themselves, and then going off with the butt of an old barrel, and that was one seizure, and an old bag with a handful of malt, and that was another seizure, and would satisfy the law: but now they must have the worm and the still and a prisoner, and there is little of it made in the country. At that time a man would get ten shillings for a gallon, and it was a good trade for poor people."
And then the Ferryman of Dinish Island, who had been a sailor and seen much of the world. Why did he come back? "My two brothers went to America and I had to come back because I was the eldest son, and I after holding out till I was forty. I have a young family growing up now, for I was snug for a while; and then bad times came, and I lost my wife, and the potatoes went bad, and three cows I had were taken in the night with some disease of the brain and they swam out and were drowned in the sea.
"I got back their bodies in the morning, and took them down to a gentleman beyond who understands the diseases of animals, but he gave me nothing for them at all. So here I am now with no pigs, and no cows, and a young family running round with no mother to mind them; and what can you do with children that know nothing at all, and will often put down in the pot as much as would do three days, and do be wasting the meal, though you can't say a word against them?"
There were tears in his eyes and Synge asked him how he lived from one day to another. "They're letting me out advanced meal and flour from the shop and I'm to pay it back when I burn a ton of kelp in the summer." He had a daughter in America, only nine months there but she had sent him three pounds. "It's to America we'll all be going, and isn't it a fearful thing to think I'll be kept here another ten years, maybe, tending the children and striving to keep them alive, when I might be abroad in America living in decency and earning my bread?" From articles published in the Manchester Guardian in 1905. Synge died in 1909.