The West's Awake
by Cormac MacConnellRecent Posts
- A casual encounter between an American gangster and an Irish immigrant
- Birthday notes and family’s loss - first the happy, then the sad
- The one that got away - loving and losing the neighbor’s daughter
- 2012 - a years to look forward to
- Will 2012 roar or whimper?
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A casual encounter between an American gangster and an Irish immigrant
The one that got away - loving and losing the neighbor’s daughter
I'm telling this yarn exactly the way it was told to me a week ago by a wise man whose name I will hold back out of respect for his honesty and privacy.
I recorded it in his farmhouse home in sight of the thunderingly beautiful Cliffs of Moher on a surprisingly bright and mild January afternoon. We had the front door open all the time we were talking before his hearth fire.
Will 2012 roar or whimper?
I hope ye are all having a serene season to date as we venture into that surreal limboland between the dying of an old year and the incoming of its successor.
Gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh - Jesus was a wealthy child at Christmas
These are beautifully gentle days and nights. This is the season, whatever the weather, which brings out the best of us, which gentles us, which writes smiles on our faces far more often than normal, which warms our handshakes and greetings.
I love these days leading into Christmas even more than I savor Christmas itself. Are you like that?
Silent Night (Christmas 1915) - my song is a gift from above - VIDEO
It is a fact, however, that in a Christmas season about 20 years ago I got a rush of creative blood to the head above in Connemara and wrote one of the most popular Irish Christmas songs in less than an hour.
It came to me, air and all, after I'd watched a poignant TV documentary about the spontaneous soldiers' truce in the trenches during World War I. Deeply moved and somehow inspired, I was walking through the living room singing it, tears streaming down into my beard, before that strange hour was over.
Santa Claus’ double is still raring to go this Christmas
It was cold last weekend in rural Holland. I was visiting the warm-hearted family of the Dutch Nation in the eastern Gelderland region up against the German border.
There are dozens of picturesque little villages here. They are all crowned by a windmill which does not work any more but hallmarks the geography.
'Warm and still above ground' or 'Livin' to die and dyin' to live'
The blackbirds and thrushes and starlings accordingly are on their annual cider binge, pecking at the windfalls. By the late evening some of them are flying unsteadily on one wing. If they were mortal motorists the police would stop them for drunk driving and put them in jail.
I have some fun with my neighbor Jimmy White across the road, a man I mentioned to ye recently. He is now hale and hearty again and restructuring his fine garden by having a boundary wall constructed.
Family, funerals and a witch
Maura tells me he is down in John B. Keane's pub for one of the pub theater nights there, feeds me with a mighty fry and all the Kerry news, and releases me into the evening again.
The aura and spirit of John B. still strongly inhabits Kerry's most famous pub. It hits between the eyes as you enter, and the entertainment is as varied and rich as Keane's own work.
The summer’s getting shorter
I've been up there more than 20 times, maybe 30, always in the line of reporting duties for newspapers and magazines now long gone, and it is my firm intent to climb the holy mountain again.
I put on my boots and take my pilgrim's staff and put Ciara's leather hat on my head and start off through the afternoon crowds with a light heart and step. There are thousands gathering and climbing, just like always. Nothing has changed at all.
What's in a name?- Calling all Cormacs!
There was a debate here recently about all the implications of being a Paddy or a Mick on either side of the Atlantic. It was interesting.
For what it is, worth I made certain that none of my three sons would bear that burden. Accordingly they are called Cuan and Cormac Og and Dara.
Looking on the bright side - reflecting on the hell of post-Famine evictions and workhouses
I sipped an espresso from the small cafe behind me and looked down the floral path leading into the center of a walled garden that has become a major tourist attraction in the West Clare town. It was a long time before the reality of where I was, in historic terms, struck me like a bucket of cold water.
Down that very path, into the very same garden, the cruel Lord Hector Vandeleur walked with his agents away back in the post-Famine era, when his family owned the town, and planned the mass evictions of sick and starving tenants from his estates in an episode which is indelibly marked not just into Kilrush history, but nationally too.
Why Sarah Palin is disliked in Ireland
There are times to keep your mouth tightly closed and there are times to yell. This is one of these occasions.
In the name of the sweet and suffering Christ Almighty what is wrong with ye over there? How is it even remotely possible that a significant number of the citizens of your mighty and well-educated nation have created a political climate which sees Sarah Palin emerging as the most likely Republican choice to contest the upcoming presidential election?
A history of Ireland's stone walls
There is something quite exquisite and even exciting about stone walls and the men that build them. I've always thought that.
These craftsmen are working with grey chunks and flags of eternity building boundaries which will be still young when they are dead and gone. Stone walls last forever. And men don't.
My tears at the Queen Elizabeth's speech at Dublin Castle
I wept because of the damage that history did to my brain, because of the way it damaged the heads and perceptions of the good people, both Protestant and Catholic, among whom I spent my childhood in Ulster, because of the tortured and bloodstained impacts it had on all the people of this island, north and south, because of all the horrifics of all the Troubles between the two Bloody Sundays, because of all the tears and fears and heartbreaks.
And I remembered small things. My shopkeeper father Sandy was known for the high quality of the tea he sold in our country shop. When this old Queen was young and her coronation was being celebrated, the tea company in Dungannon sent out a gift hamper to their customers.
The man still on the moon - Solly Maguire
Driving back home from the village of Labasheeda on a crystal bright spring night garnished with stars, I saw Solly Maguire for the first time in close on 20 years. He had not changed one bit from the time I last saw him even though he is a big age now.
He still had the same ruddy cheeks, the huge wide smile, the head on one side. And he still has the double chins and the dimple in the center of the original one.
A remarkable man, Solly, and the father of a daughter with beautiful wisdoms about her.
I said, "Hello there Solly. It's great to see you looking so well." I saluted him with my right arm.
Sweet butter smells from the past
Through the iron garden gate across the street you could see the crimson blooming fuchsia bushes around the spring well where a dreadful bogeyman lived.
If you went to the edge of the well he could reach up through the cold water, grab you by the ankle and drag you down into some dark place where he would devour every last bit of you, even the skull itself.
Easter Fun, Foxes and Podcasts
I'M in a cafe in Shannon Town having a quick coffee. A little boy with his mother at the next table has a chocolate Easter egg in his hand. Together they open it, unfoiling the silvery skin. The little boy taps the egg on the table.It cracks and a bright yellow babuska-shaped container is within. The mother opens it. There is a plastic package inside.
The boy watches with starred eyes as she puts the pieces together to form a jaunty giraffe maybe two inches tall and brightly colored. Magic! I'm enthralled myself by the ingenuity of it.
Swallows make a welcome return
A flitting halo of lissome beauty over the emerging spring, I saw them on the second day of April where I always see them first. It is high over my neighbor Jimmy White's house across the road.
There were seven of them and, as I watched joyfully, I reflected I have been here in Carhue now for long enough to say with authority that not alone did I know their grandparents but also, given the unerring homing instincts of swallows, I also bred several of them in the sheds behind the cottage.
I'm not a sentimental man, but this sight, which I faithfully record for ye every year, always means something very special to me. I invariably manage to produce one salty tear from the corner of my left eye!
Spring Is in the Air
There is the old saying about March coming in like a lion and going out like a lamb. This one was a lamb from Day One, and she has filled the fields around the cottage with lambs and foals and calves and the ragged foundations of crows' nests in the tops of all the trees. It will only be a week or so before I am informing ye again that the swallows are back!
Under this month's moon there came a touch of milky frost every night. It was snappish and silent in the moonlight, silver on the lake, golden to the eye.
All is well - The Irish rugby team beat England
Lordy but we are an incredible and deeply damaged race.
Last Saturday morning we were all hungover after St. Patrick's Day and the Cheltenham races in England. We were aware that we were all broke, our banks were broke, we would go bust and belly-up were it not for the EU keeping a few bob in our begging bowl. We were morose.
The world was exploding with the outbreak of war in Libya, unemployment and emigration were getting worse by the hour, poor Japan was being racked by a radiation threat and the earthquake aftermath, both President Obama and the Queen of England were coming in a few weeks time and we have not enough funds in the kitty to give either of them a proper Cead Mile Failte of the necessary width and depth.
Do not make St. Patrick angry!
I want to point out strongly today that not alone should we respect and love the great St. Patrick, we should also fear him.
It is not just respectful to wear his shamrock and march in the parades during these special days in his honor. It is also bloody good sense and a shrewd spiritual investment in our future well-being and longevity.
Any glance at the good saint's life story proves this as plain as the nose on your face or the great green bunch of shamrock on your lapel. Mark my words.
Shaking off the doom and gloom - blasting into springtime with music and County Clare
Winking and shimmering in the morning sunlight, a powerful symbol of an Irish kind of spring, there is a great blob of frog spawn in the garden pond beside the bud of a lily!
To blazes (I say) with the chill of winter and the recession and all matters economic and political, and to hell with the darkish kind of stories I have been sending over to you for the last month.
No more of that. Enough of doom and gloom. Spring has sprung and so will I.
My dear old Ireland is dead - General Election changed Ireland forever
Things will never be the same again for my generation. A certain kind of genetic mould was broken beyond repair.
That was necessary. That is good.
Passing the torch in Kerry
The Dutch Nation, who does not possess an Irish vote, asks me in a puzzled voice, "Who is that strange-looking man with the flat cap on his head?" and I reply, "That is the new Healy-Rae, a strange-looking lad all right but out of a clan to be reckoned with.
“He's the kind of lad, like his daddy before him, who adds a bit of spice to our elections, a bit of strong mustard, and the Healy-Raes always wear flat tweed caps. 'Tis a kind of a trademark."
We’ll always keep hope burning
I was again in the real but also mythical fishing village of Doolin on the Clare coast just as the current election campaign was trying to get into its stride through the cold winds and driving rain.
Dev Og still a bright spot
There was this skinny young fellow from Dublin who came down to Connemara in the early seventies to manage the small and struggling co-operative project in Corrnamona in the heart of the mountains.
The place was dying on its feet in a mountainy region with one of the highest emigration bleedings in all of Connemara, and the times were hard. The lad looked vaguely familiar when I met him first when doing an article on the area for The Irish Press.
The fact the lad was from Dublin was not strange at all. The strong Gaelic-speaking community in Dublin at that time provided many of the young energetic managers that came to the Gaeltacht areas like Corrnamona.
Bring on Election Season!
We have always enjoyed our general elections, especially the winter ones where the politicians have Rudolph noses and cold hands, but dammit this upcoming one will be a stimulating humdinger altogether.
I can't wait for it to get going properly. Then we can totally relegate the recession to the backburner until Easter.
Old MacConnell's Almanack: what’s happening in 2011
The incredibly enduring Old Moore's Almanack foretelling the year ahead is in the shops again. The years change but Old Moore never does.
The flimsy emerald green paperback is the same as always as it surrounds the list and dates of the horse and cattle fairs and markets, the Tides Table, all the other perennial commercial information that touches our lives for the next 12 months.
Santa’s younger brother finally speaks out
If ye want to know why I enjoy the Christmas season so much more during the past decade, then glance upwards at my image on this page and you will agree, I think, that at least to the rounded eyes of a child, I do nowadays bear a certain similarity to Santa Claus his own self.
That photo is some years old now and I am somewhat more silvery and a little plumper of cheek nowadays. So the small ones dangling at the end of their mothers' shopping arms do tend to stop in their tracks when they see me on the town streets or in the shopping centers.
When the credit and credibility goes
I’m writing this in an Internet cafe in Cork before catching a plane to Holland in a few hours. The screen in front of me is devouring euros with all the greed of a Dublin banker, and it is cold outside and I'm having to rush a bit.
Forgive me for that but, after the budget we got earlier in the week, everybody is watching their petty cash a bit closer than usual.
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