Fuair sé bás AR AN LÁ seo in 1990
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I suspect that even Seosamh Mac Grianna (1900-1990), a curmudgeonly writer at times, might raise a smile to the fact that a commemorative plaque was raised to him in Saint Anne’s Park, Dublin on 29th May 2023.
Mac Grianna lived in a house in the area, since demolished, and a group of local Irish speakers from Raheny and Clontarf have come together to remember his years in the city.
It is a wonderful gesture, reminding us of the man himself and encouraging us to return to his writings.
A native of Rann na Feirste, one of the stronger Gaeltacht regions in Donegal to this day, Mac Grianna was certainly a product of his time.
Ferociously intelligent and driven, he was one of the first of his generation to avail of third level education and attended Saint Patrick’s, Drumcondra, where he became a teacher in his early 20s.
The momentous events of those years left an indelible mark on him. He wrote that he had intended to join the British army during the Great War but that the Easter Rising set him on a different path.
His creative language, he said, was English but the example of the great Pádraic Ó Conaire made him pursue his fiction in Irish.
He, and his wider family, supported the Republican side during the War of Independence and in the Civil War that followed. He was interned with some of his brothers and went on hunger strike.
The aftermath of the Civil War saw him living from hand to mouth, trying to get a teaching job in a partitioned Ireland before, eventually, throwing his lot in with freelance writing and literary translation. That saw him into his mid 30s when he becomes, in some ways, a living ghost. He lived in Dublin for many years before leaving for Donegal in the 1950s and, eventually, being given long-term care in a hospital in his native county.
His literary work, slim in number of books, is still highly regarded and rightly so. Mac Grianna saw early on the clash between the idealism of the revolution and the managers who follow in its wake.
His great novel, An Druma Mór, published in the 1960s but written in the 1930s, shows a small rural community beginning to believe that they might be able to shape their destiny rather than being simply martyrs to fate.
The Republican revolution promises them a voice in a country that has not been theirs for centuries, one in which their lives and deaths are of no importance to anyone but themselves. The clash between old and new is subtly drawn; the angst of what might be gained against what might be lost is superbly shaded while betrayal and failure lurk in the background.
An Druma Mór is a profound work and one that can be read again and again for its insights and its style.
His Irish is rich and idiomatic but also contemporary. He does not weave lines out of seanfhocail and seanchas – proverbs and folklore – but he knows those things deeply, loves them, turns them and polishes them, just enough, to make them his own and to make them relevant for current times. He set himself the task not of literary archaeology but rather of honouring what had gone before while looking to the future. (He wrote that he owed that debt to Pearse.)
He loved the Gaeltacht but hated the Pale and its institutions. He saw how the marginalised and those without power or influence were cast aside, writing in 1932:
“I am a Gael, born and reared in the Gaeltacht, and living now in Dublin. There are hundreds, thousands like me in the city. We have a language of our own, our outlook and tradition. Here we are in exile, as much as a Palesman would be in Paris or Moscow. Rather cruel, is it not ye men of the Pale? But add to it that we are exiles in our land.”
(That sense of being “exiles in our land” is one that you feel is no longer confined to Gaeltacht regions. Communities in rural and working-class areas are now feeling the effects of the State’s economic, immigration and emigration policies as they unstitch people from their physical and cultural holdings.)
It is amusing to wonder too what Mac Grianna would have made about Trinity’s plans to rename the Berkeley library due to the bishop’s sins. Mac Grianna blasted Trinity in an article, in Irish, in 1930, describing it as a “fixed foreign fortress which got 90,000 acres of stolen land in Ulster”.
Would Mac Grianna think it too late to recompense the Gael? After all, if Trinity is to atone for slavery why not Tudor terror too?