Islands of Ireland: Cows come home to Inishbarra

IT WAS written about an old ruin in Co Wexford but it may as well have been written for any other place.

A place such as Inishbarra, Co Galway, among whose overgrown boreens and collapsed glades lie the ruins of several such sheds and cottages. Derek Mahon’s poem ‘A Disused Shed in Wexford’ is one of the most popular poems in the country and its elegiac remembrance of lost souls strikes a very deep chord. And though it memorialises the dead of wars it attempts to reanimate lost souls wherever they may be.