Great McGahern provides hope at time of great loss
Written by Mike Cronin, Mark Duncan and Paul Rouse, the book is an offshoot of the GAA’s Oral History Project and, as the name suggests, rattles through the stories of the 32-plus counties that make up the association.
It was the Leitrim chapter, and some apposite references in writer John McGahern’s Memoir about Gaelic football in the county that caught our eye. McGahern’s father was a distant disciplinarian of the old school who had little time for his son’s hero, one Eddie McIniff, casual labourer, drinker and ace free-taker for the Ballinamore team.
As a small boy McGahern went picking potatoes with McIniff, who would dispense philosophy (“The country will be full of auld spuds and eejits long after we are dead and gone”) and free-taking advice to the child. Under McIniff’s tutelage the boy ended up kicking potatoes — accurately — through a gap in the hedge.
The day came that McIniff starred for Ballinamore against Aughawillan (McGahern’s home team), and afterwards the youngster diffidently approached his hero, who was mobbed by supporters out on the field.
He needn’t have worried. McIniff swung him up in the air. McGahern wrote: ‘“You played great, Eddie,” I was in tears. “We’ll always have spuds and eejits,” he said without a care.’
Then we learned of the death of Ciaran Jones last week in Wicklow as a result of the extreme weather.
The Garda was swept away by floodwaters as he tried to alert people in his part of the county, Manor Kilbride, to the dangers and his body was recovered a day or so later.
A few things: television pictures from the scene showed the raw power of the river in flood, as well as the desolation and distress on the faces of those awaiting news from the recovery teams.
Media references to Jones as being ‘off-duty’ when the accident occurred struck an odd note. While he might not have been working, in the strictest sense of the word, duty was clearly Jones’ priority as he made his way to the bridge in the downpour.
Finally, one of the most striking images in the TV coverage was a member of one of the search parties, face drawn and exhausted above the brightness of his hi-vis jacket as he was approached by a television reporter. News had just come in, obviously: the worst news.
I don’t know where we’ll go from here, he said, before the caption flashed up on-screen. He was chairman of Kilbride GAA club. Ciaran Jones’ club. The Garda had also been on the Wicklow senior football panel for the previous four years.
The obvious path here would be to ooze platitudes about the GAA’s place in the community but we preferred returning to the part of The GAA: County by County which we had originally planned to chat about.
Ciaran Jones’ story would fit neatly into one of McGahern’s gloomily accurate depictions of life in rural Ireland, though not the drama of his passing as much as its aftermath. McGahern would have done justice to the rawness felt in a country place after a shocking death like that.
He would have articulated the attitudes people construct for themselves to deal with that kind of unexpected blow.
The Leitrim man was such a skilled writer that he would have done justice to the terrible days that follow such an event, right down to the particular landscape, the tangled undergrowth next to the angry water of the river.
The fact that McGahern’s father was a Garda Sergeant adds to that, somehow, though it’s the kind of detail that doesn’t fit the overall sense of where this story goes.
The writer’s family also endured an untimely death, when McGahern’s own mother died young. Memoir is one of the last things he wrote before he died himself, and one of the last things he wrote in the book is about his mother: ‘When I reflect on those rare moments when I stumble without warning into that extraordinary sense of security, that deep peace, I know that consciously and unconsciously she has been with me all my life.’
My wish for the Jones family is that they’ll know that deep peace.
nmichael.moynihan@examiner.ie
Twitter: MikeMoynihanEx
