By
noeleenm on September 29th, 2006
I haven’t experienced such energy, such vitality, such rhythm, and such sheer enjoyment in a musical since ‘Mamma Mia!’ – the show based on the songs of Abba – till Bray Lakers staged ‘Dance through the Centuries’ in a sold-out Mermaid Theatre in Bray last night.
Who are Bray Lakers…? Well, they’re a club formed for young people with special needs in Bray and its surrounding area. Mostly they’re in their twenties, and the range of their disabilities includes Down’s Syndrome and Fragile X. The range of their abilities includes drama, singing, playing percussion, and, above all, dancing.
The volunteer producers had come up with a linking device of a full screen black and white ‘home movie’ (crackles and all!) as a backdrop, but, instead of showing these young men and women as children, it showed them in rehearsal for the show. Often our old-style seafront or promenade were used for the rehearsals, which added to the ‘home movie’ effect.
It started with a young man and woman from the show strolling on the beach, throwing stones languidly into the water, and then suddenly realising that they were late for the show. Text, reminiscent of the silent movies, underscored their horror-struck mime.
They were seen rushing up off the beach, frustrated by a closed railway crossing, the boy hauling the girl away from a shop window where she stops to admire jewellery, and finally rushing into the theatre – where they appeared in reality on-stage in front of the now blank screen.
It was neat. The slap-stick, burlesque music changed to a slow, romantic number and they danced together as a voice off-stage explained how dance and rhythm came almost before memory, with the beat of the heart…
The heart to which they referred, incidentally, was an absolutely enormous red velvet prop hung to the left of the stage. It was prepared in the home of my friends, the O’Reillys, whose Miranda and Darren were both dancing in the show. The entire family stepped over and around it for weeks – as they did around the 75 costumes that Elaine was making on the dining room table meanwhile – and then found it wouldn’t fit out through the kitchen door! The problem was eventually resolved, and the heart transported – slowly and precariously – on the top of a station wagon to the theatre.
From heart beat it was an easy transfer to African drums and tambourines, which a group of the youngsters played as the ‘cavemen’ came dancing and whirling on stage. One young man, Derek, was in his element as the caveman who was attempting to catch his cavewoman (Derry), club her, and drag her off to have his way.
First he lost his wig of long bushy hair. It was promptly claimed by another dancer to his great, exaggerated dismay. At the end of the scene, still unsuccessful in catching Derry, he appealed in mime to the audience for more encouragement, dragging out the delighted response until his mother finally stood up in her seat and with a firm gesture of her thumb towards the wings indicated in no uncertain terms that he was finished! He saluted her with his club, calmly – and took another bow before he left.
By now the screen was showing rehearsals of the Egyptian dance scene in black and white, the sinuous dance movement with hands and hips and knees proving a bit too much for some of the young men and women – a foretaste of what was to come!
As black and white gave way to glorious coloured costumes in this less-engrossing-for-the-participants dance, some members of the cast could be seen wandering out of line temporarily to search for mother or father or sibling or friend in the audience. Beaming smiles and waves signalled successful identification, until a hissed prompt from off-stage drew their attention back to the dance again.
When swans at Bray Harbour appeared next on the screen, and the title ‘Swan Lake’ followed it, there were a few nervous expressions to be heard sotto-voice in the audience. But it worked…
The ‘ballet dancers’ came on, engrossed in the gentle music of Tchaikovsky and moving and bending with a slow, graceful absorption that was elegant in itself. The leading couple attempted no strenuous leaps or fancy arabesques, but moved together with a gentle, serious grace that was somehow very touching.
This gentleness carried into the next scene – Pocahontas’ wedding – which was shot first in a field of flowers, with a beautiful tranquil girl and a handsome smiling lad standing beneath a tree full of blossoms, and looking as if they might indeed be pledging their troth to each other. The close-ups of their gentle, happy faces helped create an atmosphere that transposed itself onto the scene on-stage. It was like managing to look at a wedding album, before the wedding.
But it was to be the end of the low-key performances as the black and white screen showed now the cast preparing for a good, old-fashioned cowboy shoot-out! Each performer swaggered into the rehearsal room in turn to take aim and shoot the viewer.
On stage, the victims of the shoot-out (some lowering themselves oh-so-carefully as they died!) quickly made a miraculous recovery to join in a barn-dance of immense vitality. It was followed, immediately, by the Can Can…
The second part of the show started quietly again as one young woman with a really lovely voice sang solo, but it was the only quiet moment for the rest of the night.
In a scene more reminiscent of ‘The Field’ than Michael Flatley’s glitzy show, the lads lined up on Bray beach in caps and shirts and braces and old-fashioned trousers, hands deep in their pockets! When they were all in place they went into their version of Riverdance.
I don’t think I have ever laughed so much and cheered so much at the same time, as they repeated it on stage, this time joined by the girls, who were a little more elegant, but no less boisterous.
One girl was dressed like the lads, though, and the reason for her ‘cross-dressing’ only became apparent when she was joined in their finale of Riverdance by Daniel, tall, crewcut, and gangly – and dressed in a glittering Irish dancing dress. He brought the house down.
It was Daniel’s Dad, John, incidentally, who was Master of Ceremonies for the night. He did a brilliant job of it, engaging the audience in an on-going patter that kept the show ticking over so well between acts that he had to be forcibly dragged off the stage, along with the microphone, at one point. The ‘haulier’ was one of the black-clad volunteers who moved props, danced prompts in the wings, and even occasionally joined in discretely on-stage, when shyness anchored the cast’s feet.
By the time Riverdance had come to a whooping end, the lads were throwing their caps into the audience. I was half-expecting a shirt or two to follow. They were on a roll…
That exuberant energy was the starting point for their final dance – Rock ‘n Roll. They danced ‘as if nobody was there’, belting out the rhythm. And then, suddenly, somebody else was there, too.
‘Elvis’ strutted up from behind the audience somewhere, complete in his glitzy black suit with gold turned up collar, and bouffant hairstyle, and climbed on-stage.
I have seen the young man who played Elvis dance before at parties, and his movements are studied and stylised and absolutely rhythmic. Again the audience was on its feet.
Derek, the cave man, who had been rock and rolling with the best of them, watched his friend dancing for a while, looked at the audience reaction, and then strolled over to Elvis and invited him to jive…
They did.
It was one of the most enjoyable shows I have ever seen, and, judging by the standing ovation that lasted right through their final number – with the cast clapping and cheering us back – it was one of the best shows anyone else in that audience had ever seen either.
Bravo, Bray Lakers… Bravo, bravo, bravo…
Posted in Books/films/theatre, Ireland | No Comments »
By
noeleenm on September 27th, 2006
I have quite an appalling ability to confuse names – of people sometimes, of places very often – and I did it the other day with a television series when I wrote ‘Little House on the Prairie’.
Thinking about the various members of our house family settling down in a finally quiet home the other night reminded me not of ‘Little House on the Prairie’, but another series about a rural American family, set almost half a century later – the Waltons.
Do you remember the voices coming out of the darkness of a house settling down for the night – ‘Good night, John Boy’, ‘Good night, Jim Bob’, ‘Good night, Mary Ellen’, etc.? That was what was stirring my lame memory before I fell asleep…
‘Little House on the Prairie’ was based on a series of books by Laura Ingalls Wilder about growing up in the late 1800s in America’s frontier mid-West. She made her family immortal, and beloved.
‘The Waltons’ was written and produced by Earl Hamner, a prolific novelist, script writer and producer, based on his family and their growing up among the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia during the Great Depression of the ’30s. His ‘Walton’ characters were sometimes based directly on a family member (particularly brothers and sisters), but at other times were a composite, as with Grandma and Grandpa Walton, who combined the qualities and characteristics of both sets of Hamner grandparents.
But both shows were based on family and societal values that belonged to a simpler, and in some ways – despite the Depression, despite two World Wars – a better world.
It was those simple values, that sense of security within a family and within a community, that I believe made those two shows so popular for so long.
I know that in my own home the beliefs matched our way of life, while the setting, the accents, the difference in culture, provided a fascinating contrast. We all wanted to know what it was like to grow up in a log cabin…
‘Little House on the Prairie’ was first shown at the beginning of the ’70s, yet it was still being shown towards the end of the ’80s in Ireland. I know because my mother, then frail and almost housebound, loved it.
By then she was sometimes confused about things that had come late in her lifetime – like television – while totally clear on what had always been there – like her deep love for small children.
So, whenever ‘Little House’ started, with credits rolling against a background of the smallest little girl running uphill through a field full of flowers, my mother would lean forward and watch anxiously, hoping that this time Carrie wouldn’t fall…
My mother (and my father) was born in 1906 in Ireland. Eight years later Ben Streets was born into the same kind of America that Earl Hamner knew.
I have never met Dr. Ben, as he became, but his son, David, was a volunteer in Esmeraldas, Ecuador, at the same time as me, and we have remained friends ever since.
Several months ago, I received, to my delight, a hefty package from David, who lives in Black Mountain, North Carolina. It contained the first part of his father’s memoirs.
Ben and his sister, Eva, were the children of a miner, but Ben went on to become a dedicated GP, and his sister an equally dedicated teacher.
They remained close friends all their lives. Eva, who didn’t marry, died at the age of 92. She lived next door to her brother and his family.
Dr. Ben, like Laura Ingalls, tells the story of his life simply. He is not a novelist like Earl Hamner, but the ‘real America’ shines through his stories.
It reminded me of an American Franciscan nun whom I met once in Guayaquil in Ecuador. I remarked innocently that the only part of the United States that I knew at all was New York.
She drew herself up to her full five foot height, and said with dignity: “Kansas is America, Idaho is America, Texas is America, Mississippi is America, but New York is Little Italy, Chinatown…”
That little nun saw New York become a melting pot of cultures long before we saw a changing Ireland for the same reason. But is it really any less real?
We speak different languages, eat different foods, sometimes think in different ways, but our essential humanity is the same. Even when it comes to mistaken identity…
Last weekend, I discovered that the house bathroom had not been cleaned, and I did a stern housemother act on both Gint and Wojtek, whose house chore that is – I was assured it would be corrected.
The following day I was in the bathroom again, because of sleeping in the attic, which is bathroom-less, and discovered it was just as grubby.
War bonnet in place, I went looking for Gint, because Wojtek was still out at a party.
“We did clean it”, he protested. “You couldn’t have”, I snarled and hauled him up to the bathroom to confront him with what was definitely a very grubby bath and sink.
Muttering that they really had cleaned it, he went off in search of cleaning materials and, while I sat with my cousin drinking tea, we could hear the sounds of scouring overhead.
Then Gint passed us on his way to put back the cleaning materials. The spray bottle he was carrying looked unfamiliar, so I wandered after him and had a look.
They had used fabric conditioner for ironing to clean the bathroom, both times. I’ll let my remarks on men’s ability to read labels be drowned in the sound of the water as Gint washed down the bathroom yet again.
Marie, who had been highly amused by the whole incident, then told us that her son, Gerard, had decided to clean the windows while Marie and Joe were on holidays a few weeks ago. He even decided to wash the net curtains.
On Marie’s return, Gerard remarked on how good he had found the ’stain remover’. “What stain remover?”, asked Marie, puzzled.
He produced what he thought was for whitening curtains. It was for whitening dentures. Luckily, unlike the fabric conditioner, it worked.
As Gint and Wojtek’s ages combined are two years less than mine, I think I have an excuse for muddling names now.
What I am a bit worried about, though, is that – having found that ‘The Waltons’ was set in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virgina -Â I now find myself, each time I get up from my desk to make coffee, clip-clopping across the floor as I hum the Laurel and Hardy song…
Do you remember that?!
Posted in Ireland, USA | 1 Comment »
By
noeleenm on September 25th, 2006
We played ‘musical rooms’ at the weekend in our house – at least some of us did.
Deirdre, BháinÃn, and Indi the dog moved out of the attic and out of our house. We’ll miss them.
Indi, by the way, is short for Indiana Jones, though Indi, an affectionate giddy little female, is one of the least macho animals I have ever come across. Their last dog, Mo, a Golden Labrador Retriever, was more aptly named, especially when a pup. Mo is short for Momojo, which Deirdre says means ‘little golden peach’. Aaaw…
When they of the lovely names moved out, I moved up to the attic – which is our spare room as well as my office – because my cousin, another Marie, was coming to stay for a few nights. Marie does not like attic stairs.
I love my cousin enough to give up my downstairs bedroom for her. She loves me enough to put up with my moans at the fact that a) she doesn’t drink alcohol at all but she doesn’t drive either, having a handy husband called Joe to do it for her, and a trusty old bike when Joe isn’t around, and b) she doesn’t drink alcohol yet I was the one climbing the attic stairs at 1.30am in the morning after our cousin, Betsy’s, retirement dinner.
We walked to and from the restaurant – it was a lovely night, and a lovely dinner party – and I concentrated hard while climbing the ladder after two very full glasses of delicious Shiraz. It’s just as well Indi doesn’t drink either – imagine having to manage four feet going up the ladder!
The dinner was on Friday night and on Saturday we went with my sister, Mary, on a shopping trip to Gorey in Co. Wexford and Arklow, further south than Bray in Co. Wicklow. For the past two years, Mary and myself have done our Christmas shopping in these comfortable country towns, finding them much less frenetic than Dublin city, and with more unusual gifts and clothes.
Nonetheless, by Saturday night I was exhausted and cranky (as they’ll both attest) because I hate shopping and soon tire at it, and was dismayed to find that I then couldn’t sleep properly because the furious blasts of rain storm continued through the night (after a dry day), waking me as it beat ferociously against the big attic skylight.
As Magda had been working in a new job all week, then waitressing for a few hours on Saturday, then went disco dancing with some friends till the wee hours of the morning, we were both half comatose when yet another Maria (we’ll probably start our own talent show) came by arrangement to see Grazine’s old room. Wojtek still hadn’t come home from his party the night before, but at least Gint and Joe (who had come to reclaim his wife) and Marie (who had slept well downstairs away from the storm!) were all wide awake and bushy-tailed to greet her.
Maria is from southern Germany, and, as I suspected from her e-mails – she’d contacted us through daft.ie – we took to her immediately. She’s studying in Germany to teach both sports and English, and is taking six months out here in Ireland to improve her fluency.
At first, though, she wasn’t sure if it was going to work out after all. The chemistry definitely worked for all of us, but the distance between Dublin (where her friends and possible future employment are located) and Bray is short on the map – 20k to the centre of the city – but quite long when you’re on a bus or train…
She went away promising to ring with a decision before night, because there was already a queue of other people who wanted to see the room. To the pleasure of all of us, she is moving in on Tuesday night, with the proviso that if she finds employment in Dublin, or if she finds the journey to and from her friends too long, she will move out again around mid-November, when Pavel’s girlfriend, Renata, is coming for six weeks anyway. If Maria stays, Renata will be sleeping in the attic, and seems happy with this. I just hope Renata doesn’t drink – or else has a good head for it…
Just before ‘German Maria’ left, my cousin (Dublin Marie) and Joe had said their goodbyes. Magda had gone waitressing again for another few hours, Wojtek still wasn’t home from his party, Gint went out – and I went to bed.
When I emerged I found that Wojtek had returned and gone to his bed, Gint nearly had a heart attack because he thought I was out (going to bed in the middle of the day being a rare occurrence for me), and then Magda arrived, white-faced with tiredness. We ate together, sleepily, and then she headed to bed, facing today the second week of her new job and the first of her night French classes.
I lasted only another two hours before deciding to take advantage of a quiet house (Gint was watching a film at a very low volume upstairs), calm weather, and the edge gone off my extreme nervous exhaustion.
For a few minutes I lay in bed listening to the quietness around me, and grinning to myself as I remembered the ‘Little House on the Prairie’ television series that my mother used to love.
Instead of ‘good nights’ coming from each of the rooms, though, there was just deep relaxed breathing. The house stretched, yawned, and went to sleep.
Posted in Germany, Ireland | 4 Comments »
By
noeleenm on September 22nd, 2006
Last night storms lashed Ireland. Today they have abated, but only in the way a small, fierce terrier will retreat when threatened, darting stubbornly back in to attack as soon as he sees an opening.
Torrential rain and gusting winds are coming in fierce, sporadic bursts – while in between a weak sunshine reveals a dripping-from-the-bath world.
It’s autumn.
Sometimes this season can be one of the most beautiful of all, with leaves changing the ‘forty shades of green’ to forty shades of brown and russet and gold and yellow, and the subtle translucent light of autumn skies.
It’s as if all the hard work and energy usually needed to grow and be fruitful can now be converted instead to one last great burst of sheer colour and exuberance.
Retirement can be like that, too.
The need to work for a living should, at least, be finally over, and there’s time to follow all the dreams you never had the time to indulge – until now.
Last Sunday, I met with three friends for lunch. Our friendship goes back some forty years, when we were all involved in Guiding. Breda is the first of us to retire, and over our own celebratory lunch we looked at photographs of the retirement parties they had organised for her in Cappagh Hospital (where my sister-in-law, Marie, is now recuperating from a replacement knee operation).
Breda worked in Cappagh as a nurse for over thirty years, the latter part of them as head of the recovery unit, where patients arrive after surgery. She was a dedicated, compassionate, intelligent nurse, and, from the photographs and gifts and accounts of the parties, it’s obvious that her colleagues appreciated it.
It was, and is, an emotional time for her, but she’s looking forward to her own autumnal display of colour.
Breda has always been an academic. I’ve often felt that the mortar cap and gown would have suited her constantly enquiring brain better than a nurse’s uniform – but that would obviously have been a loss to a great many patients who benefited from her comforting, expert care.Â
Instead, she kept academia as almost a hobby, attending university at night to gain an excellent primary degree in Philosophy a few years ago.
When asked what use philosophy would be to her, she looked as if she’d been asked about the usefulness of a beautiful view from her window.
“I just like it”, she said, in bewilderment.
Now: “I’m not into sports, I can’t grow a plant to save my life, and I’m not artistic – though I’d love to be.”
So she’s returning to university to complete a Master’s Degree in Economics. And she can’t wait…
My cousin, Betsy, also retired this month, and tonight I’m joining family and friends and ex-workmates at a restaurant to celebrate it.
Betsy had a very different life from Breda. She worked in a laundry for most of it, and her nursing consisted of taking care of both her parents at home.
Uncle Willie, a funny, loving and hard-working man (Betsy resembles him in his humour and his hard work), smoked all his life, and the last months of it were spent at home, following the amputation of one of his legs.
He was my mother’s youngest brother, and they maintained a close ‘big sister, little brother’ relationship till the day he died.
Aunt Julia was Willie’s quiet, smiling counterpart, made more quiet by the deafness that plagued her for a long part of her life, despite hearing aids. After Willie died, Betsy became her mother’s ears and conduit to the rest of the world, as well as nursing an increasingly crippling deterioration of Aunt Julia’s spine.
When Aunt Julia, too, had gone, Betsy changed jobs, and went to work in a factory where most of her workmates were younger – and the funny, fun-loving person that is my cousin came out to play.
Her retirement parties, as well as her birthday parties, seem to be stretching over at least a fortnight, as her young colleagues organise a fitting farewell.
Her retirement plan is seemingly to take it easy enough to have plenty of energy for the trips and the parties she intends to go on enjoying until she is at least 80. Then she’ll see…
I hope for her, and for Breda, an autumn full of colour, with very little rain and only enough wind to fly a kite.
Posted in Friends, Ireland | No Comments »
By
noeleenm on September 20th, 2006
Last Sunday night my sister-in-law, Marie, was entertaining her fellow patients in Cappagh Orthopaedic Hospital in Dublin by singing (and dancing to) ‘How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?’
The following night she was lying in bed, with pain killing drugs being fed into her spinal system through a catheter, and with vibrators attached to two little bootees to help her circulation. She’d had a knee replacement.
Needless to say, the two events were not consequential, unlike the pain that failed contestants must feel when they are voted off the television programme designed to choose a Maria for ‘The Sound of Music’.
Seemingly, musical entrepreneur, Andrew Lloyd-Webber, decided to turn auditions for the female lead in his forthcoming show into a television series, with the co-operation of the BBC. A nice marketing move…
According to Alan Riding in The New York Times, over 2,000 young women applied for the role of Maria, and this was pruned down to 10 who took part in what is really a weekly talent show, testing their singing, dancing and acting ability.
The audience votes for each performer, and the two performers with the least votes then have to compete against each other, with Andrew Lloyd-Webber deciding which one will remain.
I have never seen it, but to me this kind of talent show – where the worst is rejected, rather than the best elected – sounds like a modern day version of the kind of public entertainment provided at the Colosseum in ancient Rome. People go there to see pain, as much as talent.
Yet I’ve heard a lot of people talking about it, and it seems the audience ratings are extremely high.
The story upon which this musical is (loosely) based is the story of a real woman, Maria Augusta Kutschera. Maria did join a Benedictine convent, and was released to act as tutor to one of widower Georg von Trapp’s seven children, partly because of the family’s need and partly because the Reverend Mother of the Abbey was worried about Maria’s health.
Georg von Trapp was not the cold patriarch portrayed in the musical, but a caring father, who had the sense, when he proposed, to push his children’s need for a mother, as much as his love for Maria. They went on to have three children together.
I read ‘The Story of the Trapp Family Singers’ many years ago, and spirituality, patriotism, honour, and music all played equal roles in this family’s history. It’s recorded that the Trapp family were upset at some aspects of ‘The Sound of Music’ – such as the portrayal of their father. I wonder how they would have felt at the Lloyd-Webber method of choosing someone to play their beloved mother’s role…?
Somehow I feel that ‘our Marie’ dancing about the hospital ward to cheer up the patients who had already had their operations, and their recital of the Rosary the following day when she was down in surgery, was a far more authentic reminder of that strong woman.
Posted in Ireland, McManus Family | 1 Comment »
By
noeleenm on September 18th, 2006
We have had a very full house over the past week because of our extra guests – Deirdre, her daughter, BháinÃn, and their dog, Indi. Apart from being very considerate guests (including Indi!), Deirdre especially has provided an anchor point in the kitchen as I fell in and out of office and meetings and phone calls.
She became, in effect, a substitute ‘house mother’ in terms of an ear to listen while my mind was absent, even on the few occasions that my body was physically present during these last frantic weeks before the Oral Hearing of our fight against the loss of the Dargle flood plain.
I kept up a running contact with them all.
…Enough to say ‘goodbye and good luck and don’t be a stranger’ to Grazine and Eddie, who finally, suddenly, found the home they had been looking for together. A house had become vacant two doors away from a friend of Eddie, so they were able to beat the queue.
…Enough to wish Magda well in the new full-time job she’s starting this morning in the local branch of Woodies, a giant home decor and DIY store.
…Enough to rejoice that Gint has found work, at least for a few weeks, with an ex-employer.
…Enough to commiserate with Wojtek when he made the very hard – but very mature – decision not to go home on holidays for these two weeks as he had planned, because he would miss the beginning of his course in ‘DJ and Music Production’.
…Enough to occasionally collapse at the table in the kitchen and join in the stories and laughter being swapped there.
One of the amusing things to emerge from even those few occasions was the discrepancy with which Deirdre and I remember Irish history. It reminded me of how Gerti, a German friend by then living in Ireland several years, used to explain how things were done in Germany – only to be contradicted by her friend, Tina, when she was visiting. Tina, still living in Germany, would look at Gerti in genuine puzzlement and say: “I never heard of that…”
And of Elke and Michele, who would be in total agreement on the important things, like how to cook pasta, but would have wildly divergent customs sometimes that caused both of them to doubt the other’s authenticity as true Italian.
With Deirdre and myself it was first Celtic Christianity and Sile na Gigs, and then the initial reaction of Irish Catholics in Northern Ireland to the deployment of the British Army in Belfast in 1969.
The first disagreement turned out to have its roots in our different spheres of interest. Deirdre studied archaeology, and remembers vividly her indignation when she learned how Sile na Gigs – ancient stone carvings of ‘crones’ with exaggerated genitalia – were ordered to be destroyed by the Church in Ireland.
She maintained that the destruction of these ancient figures meant that the arrival of Christianity in Ireland was accompanied by the destruction of Pagan symbols, and the consequent loss of valuable archaeological remains.
My reading (not a formal training) in Celtic Christianity had given me the opposite impression. It seemed that Pagan traditions were absorbed and changed, rather than destroyed. In fact, the Pagan belief in deities existing in wood and river and mountains translated very simply into Celtic Christianity’s constant awareness of the presence of God (one God) in nature. That awareness was still very clearly there as late as Joseph Mary Plunkett, poet and hero of the 1916 Rising, in his poem ‘The Presence of God’.
“Perhaps it was after the Synod of Whitby, when Celtic Christianity began to give way to Roman Catholicism?”, I suggested, but to both of us it seemed that the antiquity of Sile na Gigs would predate this…
To my surprise, when I went to check it, I found that the prevalence of Sile na Gigs on old churches, abbeys and castles was medieval. Their purpose has been suggested as being fertility symbols (generally rejected), a warning against the sins of the flesh, a ‘womb as tomb’ symbol, and/or to ward off evil.
Whatever their purpose, the major destruction of these carvings seems to have taken place in the 17th century.
The only note I could find about their destruction says: “Destruction of the Sheelas, at least in Ireland, began in the 1600’s with provisional statutes ordering parish priests to hide any Sheela Na Gig.”
As Cromwell landed in Dublin in 1649, and ravaged Ireland’s Catholic population during his reign of terror here (he died in 1660), it’s hard to imagine Catholic priests bothering about Sile na Gigs in the middle of it… Was it then Cromwellian soliders, who – along with their destruction of churches and abbeys – destroyed what the Puritans would definitely have seen as obscene images?
Whoever destroyed them, though, it was certainly long after the golden age of Celtic Christianity and the Synod of Whitby, which took place almost a thousand years before…
The second disagreement confused me even further…
Deirdre grew up in Belfast city, and when I made some mention of Catholics initially welcoming British soldiers in Belfast, she nearly had a fit.
“British soldiers were always in the North, and they were never welcomed by Catholic nationalists”, she declared, vehemently.
I was puzzled. I was quite sure the British Army had been brought into the North of Ireland, to take over from the distrusted RUC, and that initially Catholics had seen them as – if not friends – at least some form of protection against the RUC. It didn’t last long, I knew, because the soldiers were given orders from above not to be so evenhanded, but I was sure it had happened.
It’s hard, though, to argue the history of Catholic Republicanism in the North of Ireland with someone who remembers as a child giving her name as ‘Yvonne’ when crossing through a Unionist area because ‘Deirdre’ would immediately have identified her as Irish and Catholic.
The solution to this difference seems to lie in the difference between Deirdre’s age and my own.
When the Stormont Government, under Terence O’Neill, appealed to England to send in the British army in the wake of the attacks on the Civil Rights marches that took place in the North of Ireland in the ’60s, Deirdre was a very young child. I was reading newspapers and listening to and watching horrifying news broadcasts.
The ‘Battle of the Bogside’ between nationalists and the RUC in August 1969, and its appalling aftermath, was the culmination of this violence.
Any army had to be better than a police force that protected one side of the community, and sometimes even joined in on that side.
The honeymoon period between the nationalists and the British army was shortlived, though. In 1970, a curfew was imposed on the Lower Falls (the main nationalist area) by 3000 troops. In 1971 internment without trial was introduced. In 1972, 26 protestors were shot by members of 2nd Batallion of the British Parachute Regiment during a Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association march in the Bogside area of the city of Derry. Many witnesses, including bystanders and journalists, testify that all those shot were all unarmed. Five of those wounded were shot in the back.
This is the Northern Ireland, and the British Army, of Deirdre’s childhood. It’s little wonder she doesn’t remember a time when the Army wasn’t there, and that very brief time when they weren’t the enemy.
There is no bitterness in her voice when she talks about those days, but ‘Yvonne’ gave her own child a beautiful Irish name, which, please God, she will never need to alter to cross alien territory in her own land.
BháinÃn means ‘little fair one’.
Posted in Ireland | 1 Comment »
By
noeleenm on September 15th, 2006
Autumn sunshine has come back to Ireland over the past few days, with high light blue skies streaked with gaudy pink in the evening, and pleasant winds stirring the trees. It’s a relief after the pouring rain we experienced on Monday, followed by days of heavy drizzle.
The suddenness of Monday’s lasting downpour is a sober reminder of how weather, and consequently the river systems dependent on them, can change within hours. The lack of preparation of our local Council, in our neighbourhood particularly, for such an eventuality is very frightening.
From over 600 homes in our flood prone community, over 100 are either one-storey houses or ground floor apartments. A very high percentage of these would be home to elderly or disabled people. In many two storey houses, other elderly people live who can no longer climb the stairs because of age or infirmity.
Despite the fact that our area has suffered four major floods in the past century, and that all the experts agree we are now due another one, flood protection works promised by the State twenty years ago have never been put in place, the river (Dargle) itself is in a disgraceful state of neglect, and no Emergency Flood Plan exists.
Bearing in mind that the first of three major flood warnings – for 10th September, 9th October, and 6th November – related to last weekend, the Council’s refusal to agree even a basic warning system for our community, the absence of a priority evacuation list, and their failure to provide sandbags in our area is truly frightening.
We had asked that the river be monitored over the high flood risk period, and that residents would be told in advance that, if the river became dangerous, cars with loud hailers would tour the streets, warning people to get themselves and their property to safety, if possible. Elderly and disabled people, particularly in one storey houses, should be told to wrap themselves against the weather on hearing the warning, and to wait inside their front door for rescue.
That simple system would mean that residents could feel safe (floods always seem to happen here during the night) as long as no loud hailers were heard, and that elderly and disabled people had time to get ready and get to the door before rescuers came.
Instead the Council refused to leaflet the river flood basin area with any kind of information, except for two estates nearest the sea. They insisted that the warning system used, if needed, would be knocking door to door…
Two weeks ago I called to the ground floor home of one of our flood campaign members, who uses a wheelchair. I knocked, waited what I considered was enough time for him to answer the door, decided he wasn’t at home, and was out on the road and climbing into my car when he came flying out the door in his wheelchair.
“Will you wait”, he yelled in exasperation. “You need to give me time to get off the settee and into the wheelchair.”
…And that was in the middle of the day and he was already fully dressed. Can you imagine how long it would take an elderly or disabled person at night to hear and interpret knocking and shouting at the door, to get out of bed and to the door to try and respond – and then multiply that time by over 100 to judge how long it would take to warn the most vulnerable of our community?
It’s little wonder that the same Council is supporting an application by developers to build on the flood plain downriver from our homes, in exchange for providing flood protection works. It’s the same kind of logic.
As ‘developer led planning’ becomes more prevalent, more and more community action groups are springing up all over the country. Communities are simply no longer willing to let bad planning through without a fight.
In nearby Greystones, a village when I was growing up and now a fair-sized town because of its proximity to Dublin, a strong community group was formed in response to plans to build a huge development right at the harbour.
A public/private partnership is proposed there through which Greystones Harbour will be rebuilt – and the Council in return will issue a compulsory purchase order on the beach and foreshore.
Greystones Protection Group fought the application, which went to an Oral Hearing before An Bord Pleanala over five months ago. No decision has yet been issued by the Board.
One of their people – Evelyn Cawley, who studied planning as a direct result of this campaign – has been advising our group, SWAP, on preparing for our Oral Hearing where we will argue our case against building on the flood plain.
Her advice has included joining the Greater Dublin Bay Alliance (Greater Dublin, for planning purposes, is considered to stretch from Fingal in Co. Dublin down to Wicklow) which was formed in an attempt to prevent the kind of piecemeal planning that seems to be happening along the coast, as well as inland.
Strength lies in unity. And if the present Fianna Fail/PD Government – or even the main ‘opposition’ parties of Fine Gael and Labour – don’t soon realise the strength of real opposition building up against the kind of planning decisions being made by their councillors at local level, and ignored by their TDs at national level, both the Green Party and Sinn Fein will gain a lot of seats in next year’s General Election.
Posted in Flooding, Ireland | No Comments »
By
noeleenm on September 13th, 2006
Yesterday I met my friend, Maureen, for lunch – eventually. The difficulty wasn’t that Maureen lives in Australia. She’s home on holiday in Ireland at present. The difficulty was that we had arranged that she would phone me on my mobile when she was in the approximate neighbourhood of my office so that I could then give her directions.
I had left my mobile at home.
Not only did I leave it at home, but I didn’t even realise that I had done so, and was watching jealously the parking space I had reserved for her arrival. We were to go to lunch at two o’clock and as the hour came near with no phone call I thought she’d been delayed. Then I thought perhaps she’d lost my mobile number and so I checked my home answering machine. Nothing.
By the time the complete absence of my mobile anywhere in my vicinity dawned on me, it was already past two. I rushed frantically to the restaurant, thinking she might have gone there (she hadn’t, as she didn’t know where it was), waited there half an hour (while she waited further up the road from my office, telephoning my mobile constantly), came back to the office and checked my car (still no mobile), went back to the restaurant (still no Maureen), and eventually went home for the mobile. Not only was the mobile waiting for me – with six missed calls – but a note from Maureen, who had gone there in desperation, was waiting, too.
It says a great deal about our friendship of over forty years that she not only didn’t murder me when we eventually met up, but that we managed to have a lunch together that went right through the afternoon till seven o’clock in the evening, and we were still talking as she prepared to drive away…
Maureen was a year behind me at school, but her older sister, June, and my older sister, Sally, were in the same class and so we knew each other’s families. In our late teens, Maureen stopped one day with some friends to watch a ceili (Irish group dance) being held on Bray seafront. I was already in love with the whole Irish scene, but Maureen…
“Next thing I knew, someone pulled me into a dance, and I never left.”
That group of friends went to ceilis together all over Ireland, took part in competitions, talked and sang and danced till the early hours of the morning, and fell into work, still on a high, the next day.
Among the ’stalwarts’ were Maureen, Cliona, Patty, Dermot, Kevin, Willie, Paddy – and myself – but the circle rippled outwards into wider and wider friendships all over Ireland. At the heart of the group were Sean and Eithne, in whose home we practically lived, while Sean encouraged the Irish language, music and dancing, and Eithne encourage confidence and friendship and romance.
It was a great time, a great way to grow up, and it forged friendships that lasted all our lives.
Eventually, of course, we went our different ways, and Maureen’s way took her to Angola to work for two years. There she met Dobri (short for Dobrivoje), from the part of Yugoslavia that is now known as Serbia. They fell in love, and came back to Ireland to get married before emigrating to Australia and a new life.
Their children were given the Catholic faith and Yugoslavian names, and Maureen and Dobri worked hard together at rearing them and at running their family construction business.
Dobri was the eldest of four children, unusual in Yugoslavia, and his brother, Vlasta (short for Vlastimir) went out to Australia also, where he married Helen.
Life was good for them in Australia, although they lived in fear of what was happening to Dobri and Vlasta’s father, aunt, and two sisters who remained in a Yugoslavia ravaged by war and ‘ethnic cleansing’, as the fall of the Soviet Union led to the break up of the former republic into Slovenia, Macedonia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Serbia and Montenegro. Some 250,000 people died in the process.
Ten years ago, the idyll that was Australian life for their extended family was also shattered.
Dobri was diagnosed with a brain tumour, and it was twisted about a major artery in his head. At the same time, their family firm was taken to court in a case that they rightly won, but which almost destroyed them at the time.
Maureen is a great believer in the power of prayer, and she stormed heaven at that time. Dobri survived the operation to remove the tumour, and slowly began to learn again to walk, to talk, to function as an adult human being. The court case was resolved and it seemed as if their troubles were behind them.
Then Vlasta was diagnosed with the most malignant form of leukaemia. At first the doctors held out no hope at all, but eventually they tried chemotherapy, three times. It failed miserably.
“Vlasta would normally be around 13-14 stone in weight”, Maureen explained. “He went down to 7 stone, and he looked like a skeleton.”
With the help of the Red Cross (”they were fantastic”) tests were carried out on Vlasta’s father and aunt and sisters in Yugoslavia to look for a bone marrow match.
…But it was the slowly recovering Dobri who turned out to have the perfect match for his brother.
“They injected marrow into him first”, Maureen explained, “and that was very painful. Then they drew the marrow out and put it into a bag to be taken up to where Vlasta was waiting in the theatre above. But Dobri’s marrow seemed to ‘mature’ so quickly that it was ready long before Vlasta was prepared and I had to keep the bag warm against my body, and jiggle it, till they could take it!
“When they put the marrow into Vlasta it was like a miracle. You could actually see his face colour begin to come back straight away. He immediately began to get better.”
The doctors told the family that if the leukaemia recurred within a year, they would not put Vlasta through the procedure again. If it recurred within two years, they would consider it. If he lasted three years, they would definitely repeat it.
That was nine years ago, and Vlasta is healthy and happy, as is Dobri…
“If Dobri had not survived the brain tumour, neither would Vlasta have survived the leukaemia. None of the others were a match.”
The trauma and the near loss of both brothers made the already close family rethink the amount of time devoted to business. For the past five years, Maureen has come home to Ireland for four weeks to see her own siblings – and her friends.
She is shocked sometimes at the changes she sees in Ireland when she comes, and maybe that’s one of the reasons we’re comfortable together, because we were reared with the same values and have seen no reason to change them. She is comfortable too with the atmosphere in my ‘new family’, as she always was with the family in which I grew up.
“We get a lot of Serbians over to work in Australia, and it’s hard for them at first. It was the same for the Vietnames people before them, and they’re doing really well now in Australia, especially in the restaurant business.”
 She looks approvingly around her: “We all need a chance…”
Posted in Australia, Friends, Ireland | No Comments »
By
noeleenm on September 11th, 2006
It’s not only the young people in our house who are planning to study during the winter. This year I intend to try again to improve my command of my own language – Irish…
…That is, once the Oral Hearing into our appeal against high density development on the flood plain has been heard. …Once I’ve managed to put flood protection into place around my own home. …Once my car stops breaking down (three times in as many weeks). …Once my body stops breaking down (two streaming head colds and flu-like pains and aches in between). …And once I’ve stopped dropping my mobile phone into the toilet and then flushing… I only did this once so far. It occurred to me then that it might be a good idea to try it with the car.
Last year I joined an Irish evening class for adults with my niece, Edel, and my nephew, Maurice. This year my friend, Frances, is also planning to join us. Like me, she is ashamed, she says, that she doesn’t speak her own tongue fluently. Unlike me, she has recently been experiencing a most unexpected bonus in that fluency.
Frances went through Deep Brain Stimulation at the end of July because the Parkinson’s Disease she has been battling for the past twenty years (since her late twenties) had become so much worse that it was worth the gamble on what is still an experimental procedure.
For Frances, thank God, it seems to have worked well, although it’s still early stages. She improved enormously in the early days after the operation, then hit some rocky patches which the hospital had told her to expect: as the brain swelling goes down the brain produces less dopramine, the natural chemical that is lacking in Parkinson’s sufferers.
It will take up to a year to get the full benefits from the operation, she was told, so fine-tuning will go on periodically. She’s due to go back to hospital for a day on 21st September, but meanwhile she has had some strange, and nice, side-effects…
The first she noticed was the return of her sense of smell, which she lost over the years of her illness and consequent heavy medication. The second is that Irish words that she had forgotten she ever learned now seem to be flowing easily from her tongue, somewhat to her own astonishment!
Frances’ young grandson, Aidan, is learning Irish at school now, and she helps him with his lessons. She’s amazed, and very pleased, at how much she has retained from her own school days. So she’s joining the class too, in case the words try to escape again…
I heard recently about a group that seems to bring that side of my life – my patriotic Irish side – and my love of, and curiosity about, other cultures together.
Called ‘iMeasc’ (meaning ‘among’), the organisation was founded last year by and for foreign people living in Ireland who want to speak Irish. Some of them were already fluent in the language when they came here. Others started from scratch.
They formed, they say, partly because they didn’t want the influx of foreign people into Ireland to be used as an excuse for the Irish language to be downgraded or forgotten. Consequently, they became very irate indeed when a suggestion was made at official level that the requirement of fluency in Irish be lifted for foreign nationals who wanted to join the Garda Siochana, Ireland’s police force.
The group was founded by a Dutch journalist, Alex Hijmans, and an Australian translator, Ariel Killick, and, according to an article last June by Irish Times journalist, John Waters, iMeasc offers activities as diverse as bellydancing, yoga and African drumming – all through the medium of Irish!
I came across John water’s typically well written and argued article when I was looking for more information on iMeasc, but I heard about the group first from a local gaelgeoir, Sean O’Briain, who in turn had been told about it by another gaelgeoir- Padraig O’Fearail.
Padraig, himself an ex-journalist, is the owner of a book shop here in Bray called ‘Cupla Focail’ (a few words). He told me that the man who manages the shop for him, with excellent Irish, never even knew the language existed until he was 22.
His parents had emigrated from Mayo to Leeds in England when they first married, and had never spoken in nor of Irish to their children. One day the son found a document written in a language he didn’t understand and asked his father about it.
“Sure that’s Irish”, replied the father, placidly. Fascinated, the son went on to learn Irish and returned to live in Ireland. He was here when his mother, by then a widower, was close to dying.
In constant contact by telephone, his family back ‘home’ in England told him that they thought he should come back. His mother had taken some sort of ‘a turn’ and was now speaking in gibberish.
When he went back to Leeds he found she had reverted to the Irish she had spoken as her everyday language as a girl in Mayo…
Ar dheis De go raibh a anam – may her soul be on God’s right hand. …As may the souls of all those who die far from the sight of their native land and the sound of their native language…
Posted in Ireland | 4 Comments »
By
noeleenm on September 9th, 2006
There’s a sense of ‘battening down for the winter’ in our house at present, despite the lovely autumnal sunshine we’re now enjoying.
Partly it’s to do with Gint coming back to Ireland, from his home in Latvia, last weekend. His summer is over, and he’s back looking for work.
Magda is also job searching, as her hours have been reduced to a half-day since the schools reopened. Wojtek has enrolled for his course in DJ Techniques and Music Production, and Magda is thinking about doing French.
Gint thought he had secured a place on a FAS (Government training scheme) course, which would have trained him as a fork-lift driver – a valuable added skill – and he would have been paid at the same time.
A proud Latvian, who has never claimed a penny benefit in his life (”We would be shamed”), Gint found this concept so strange (”I thought they was saying I had to pay! Is it possible that they will pay me to learn!!!”) that he backed out of the office and said he’d think about it, so that he could check out at home whether he could possibly have understood properly. He had gone to FAS to look for a job, and had been offered the course.
When I reassured him that FAS do offer courses to help people gain new skills he was over the moon, dancing about the kitchen, and wondering if he should study finance instead, so that he can start his own business!
The next morning he went up to enrol and the course was already full. To make it worse, he had seemingly misunderstood the amount he would be paid for the duration of the course. He wouldn’t be able to live on what he’d get there, even if he gets a place next January.
It was a different Gint who sat in the living room, trying to concentrate on a book, last night.
Grazine and Eddie are also searching, but they’re searching for a small studio or apartment, where they can live together. They’re having as much luck as Gint. Everything seems too far out, too expensive, or has just gone.
Our local supermarket is usually a good place to find adverts for accommodation, but they lost the key of their community noticeboard about two months ago! Seeing his desperation, I went around with Eddie to the supermarket and asked if we could see the adverts that are waiting to go up when the key is found.
There must have been over a hundred of them, yet, when we waded through them, only two were possibilities. The first, when we rang, turned out to be right out on the edge of Bray, and Grazine doesn’t drive. The second wanted ‘professionals only’: Eddie works on building sites and Grazine works in a shop.
That kind of notice annoys me beyond belief. They’re two of the nicest, most decent people you could meet, and putting both of them into suits won’t make them any more so.
Strangely enough, despite the fact that Grazine is now ready to move on, we’re actually seeing much more of her, and of Eddie, than we did. They’re coming back here to eat after work, and, while Grazine cooks, Eddie goes out searching for accommodation possibilities, both on supermarket noticeboards and on the internet.
Both – but especially Eddie, the extrovert – are trying to talk English a little while they’re cooking, and eating, but – now that Gint is back – communication in Russian is also possible. …And very much easier for Eddie…
Grazine also speaks Russian, but not as fluently, I suspect, because she is younger. Neither Wojtek nor Magda speak it, although their parents would have had to do so.
It’s like Irish here, only the other way round. My parents didn’t learn Irish at school because they both left school before Ireland gained her independence from Britain. When I went to school Irish was obligatory.
But, like Irish, spoken Russian (at least Russian spoken by a Latvian and a Lithuanian!) seems to be sprinkled with the occasional English word. It was funny to hear Gint and Eddie chatting away the other night, with ‘computers’ and ‘fork lift’ scattered liberally throughout…
I wish I could remember the Dutch word for ‘cosy’ – it describes the atmosphere of homeliness when everyone is settled in together in a house.
It’s a good word for here, in our house, right now, especially since today we have three more living creatures coming to join us.
Deirdre and her daughter, BháinÃn, used to live on our road. They had an elderly dog when I got to know them first, from walking Pal, and they got Indi not long before they finally lost their old friend.
All three were due to move out of the house they had been living in today – but the house they were going to fell through.
It’s hard to find accommodation for a couple, but when the couple – mother and daughter in this case – are accompanied by a young dog, it’s even harder.
We have a big attic in the house, and, for the moment it’s becoming home to Deirdre, BháinÃn, and Indi, till the accommodation they hope will be found in the coming week, is secured.
Access is via a ladder, it’s a bit squashed for two grown-ups (BháinÃn is around 20 now), never mind the dog, but at least they’re safe and warm and together.
I checked with the rest of the ‘family’ here before confirming my offer, and got the usual good-humoured response that most young people seem to have to sharing their space with people who are nice, and in a bit of a jam.
The final part of the ‘battening down’ has to do with the flood warning issued for this weekend – the very early hours of Friday, Saturday, and Sunday for Bray. Luckily, the fine dry weather we’re experiencing means that we don’t also have a rain swollen river coming down alongside us to meet those high tides this weekend.
You can read about our local Council’s complete lack of preparation for possible flooding in our area, plus our community’s ongoing campaign to stop high density building on the floodplain downriver from our home, on our website – http://www.braywatch.com/.
Here it’s enough to say that it’s very possible that the only thing that will save us over the next few months from becoming ‘boat people’ on our own roads is the fact that we live in a two-storey house.
At least there are lots of us now to fill sandbags…
I wish I could say the same for the very many elderly people who live in one storey houses even closer to the river than we do. If you want to help them, please join our e-mail campaign and shame our politicians into action…
Posted in Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland | No Comments »