Keys To My Life review: Michael Harding walks back through his past
Brendan Courtney and Michael Harding on Keys to My Life, on RTÉ One.
In the drawing room of the artist’s retreat at Annaghmakerrig, Co Monaghan, Brendan Courtney asks writer Michael Harding if this is a home from home.
It is, and Harding tells the Keys to My Life presenter of first coming here in 1984 as a “raw 30-year-old wanting to be a fulltime writer”.
That same year in this room, he met his wife “sitting at that table there”. He is, he says, very grateful for this place.
Courtney describes Harding’s writings as “layered with a deep sense of place”, and it’s interesting that the first three stops on the writer’s tour of remembrance are all public spaces – rather than homes he lived in.
First Cavan town and the infant school at St Clare’s, scene of Harding’s very early education. He’s almost awestruck as he takes in the building – “I didn’t believe it was going to be exactly the same” – and runs his hand over the staircase banister. “I’m touching my own childhood from 64 years ago.”
Then St Patrick’s Hall – in the tiny Cavan village of Glangevlin – where he learned to do the quick step in the ‘70s.
And from here to the Glan Bar, closed now, but Courtney has a key, so Harding can “revisit his musical early 20s”.
It’s not the way it was, Harding observes as he enters, and then a beautiful moment of pleasurable recognition: “I used to sit there! That was my seat”.
It’s ironic – given how important these public spaces are in Harding’s life – that he didn’t ultimately find a home as a priest in the most sacred public space, the Church.
Ordained in 1980 and given a parish in Fermanagh, he left four years later. “John Paul II created a Church where I couldn’t belong,” he says.
In the episode’s second half, Harding visits former homes: the Stoneybatter cottage where he went to write in the mid-‘80s, a chic Sandycove sea-view apartment, and the remote Roscommon farmhouse, where he came on his wedding day in 1993 – the newly-married couple cut the cake on the low wall outside.
Though they lived here just a year, this home represented an awakening in his life.
“A huge part was finding the beloved. And being blessed with a child, a human being, to mind.”
Keys to My Life, at its core, brings people back to their lives in meaningful places. Here, in this rural homestead, Harding shares his own way of doing this – he roots the memory of being in a place through words and song.
“When I first came here, I did a thing I often do… learn a song, so you’ll always remember the moment in this place when you sing the song.”
- Keys To My Life is on RTÉ One and the RTÉ Player
