An insight into Fr Harry’s game

It was refreshing to hike up to Shannon in Clare a couple of weeks ago to spend some time with Fr Harry Bohan, who’s written a memoir of his varied career, Swimming Upstream — Finding Positives in a Negative Ireland.

Refreshing is the word, too, because it’s always good to meet someone with a positive outlook these days. One of my favourite phrases from Evelyn Waugh is the effortless aside that it has never been difficult to distinguish a Scot from a ray of sunshine, and on that basis a lot of us are gene-pool Scots, at the very least.

That’s not the case with Fr Harry, and I don’t just say that because he got scones ahead of my visit, though that doesn’t hurt. The full fruits of that chat will be in the paper shortly, and as you might expect, it’s a wide-ranging chat that puts the GAA in its proper context in Ireland, and rural Ireland in particular.