Free in for women on a Monday night wasnāt it?
Must have been Wednesday was the Art College night so, a night for Costelloes.
A few lads woke to see an unkempt bush after that night Iād say.
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Iused to always do my work in the pub. I never went for the conversation or chat. I went into the snug with my briefcase and got on with my correspondence. The old people used to joke: āYouāre off to your office again.ā
It was nice to be able to have a pint and to get on with a bit of work. I used to have three pints of Guinness every day. How do you manage when the pandemic comes? Well you have a few tins of Guinness at home instead. I had an operation for cancer last year, so I have one tin of Guinness and a bottle of Erdinger a day now. When I came here first to Crusheen in Co Clare, there were four pubs. Now there is one. Thatās typical of country places. The countryside is dying.
A lot of my books were written in the pub. I do them by longhand. The one Iām doing now ā God only knows Iāve been at for the past five years ā will be huge. The manuscript is about six inches high already. I wasnāt a bit bored during Covid. Iām snowed under with work all the time
The book I have to do, Military Memories , Iād be doing that inside in bed at night. I let the people speak for themselves in it. Itās their voices in quotations. I have my own room in the house. My āofficeā I call it. Itās an untidy bloody room piled with notes.
Itās a difficult thing to make a living as a writer in this country, even though Iāve sold well over quarter of a million books by now, but the [podcast] recordings and the storytelling make a difference. Iāve been storytelling for well over 30 years. I donāt remember what my first storytelling session was. There have been so many here and all over the world. The last one before the closedown was in Japan, and Russia before that.
All the stories I tell are the ones I have heard down the years from old people, the old folklore. The stories I tell, the ones you see in my book Meeting the Other Crowd: the Fairy Stories of Hidden Ireland , are not nicey-nicey ones for children. That book is definitely for adults. Folklore is people and people are quare animals.
These old stories teach us respect, respect for the landscape. You donāt interfere with fairy property, fairy forts, bushes, paths. And if they teach us respect for the landscape, they are teaching us respect for ourselves ā and that message was never clearer than now.
Small things mean a lot in a space of 60 or 70 years. For example, I have an almighty amount of photographs. I donāt know where the family got the camera, but my motherās two brothers were in the British navy during the war and afterwards, and I have a great number of photos of them and I have a lot of photos of her as a young girl. That tells you a lot about the family, more than words even. My uncles brought back a lot of knick-knacks from foreign parts. An exquisite Buddha hand-carved in ivory from the Far East in the 1930s. There are brass candlesticks from India. I have my motherās and grandmotherās stamp collections too, on envelopes, some from the 1840s.
My mother was from Tarbert, a seaport town in Co Kerry, where the English fleet used to come in before independence. It was a very prosperous place because of that, you see. My mother had books from before the Famine. One book is from 17-something. Thereās a stamp on it: āTarbert public libraryā and the date. The name John Fitzgerald Windle is on all the books in lovely old copperplate writing.
The books are right here in the room with me. I often wonder what happened: how my mother got these, I do not know, but she was a big reader, as were her two sisters. They lived until they were in their nineties, whereas my mother died of cancer when she was just 49. Iām from Brosna in Co Kerry and then I went to college in Cork. While I was there my mother died, in 1969. Later on I went to college in Galway where I did an MA in phonetics. I was a teacher for twentysomething years in Limerick, teaching English at an Irish-language school.
A tour guide once said to me, āIāve heard you tell that story 59 times and itās never the same twice. How do you do that?ā And I said, āI donāt know. I just tell the story.ā But heās right, you canāt tell the same story twice, because if you do, youāre just acting. There is no script for storytelling. You know the story in your head. Many times Iām travelling all day to get to a venue but itās worth doing for the sake of the people I collected the stories from because, as long as Iām able to tell the stories, theyāre not dead.
I donāt think Iāll go back to the pub. Now that I have my āofficeā, thereās great comfort in being at home, rather than walking out on a stormy night in the winter.
Guests at the Cahernane House Hotel can enjoy an evening of storytelling with Eddie Lenihan as part of its two-night Halloween package from ā¬349pps, available from October 23-25; cahernane.com
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How many quarters now? Rugby, Opera, Colbertā¦
Georgian, Market, Medieval, Fashionā¦ thereās a lot more than four anyways.
Why is this in the Limerick thread?
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Judge Larkin also told the man that by the next court date on November 18, he must get a job.
Seems legal
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The right job for them
Would love to know have the motherās have jobs if children are of school going age?
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Focus Ireland confirmed it is considering buying the homes āsubject to approval by our fundersā.
What the fuck is going on there at all ?
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Focus Ireland receives approximately half of its budget each year through state funding and raises the other 50% through donations from the public, events and corporate support.
I suppose oversight and accountability isnāt a bad thing given whatās been going on in that sector
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Skangers
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