Voices in Ireland

Taking the reader by the hand, P.J. Kavanagh travels the whole of Ireland, north as well as south, relating writers to places in a country dense with association and almost obsessed by locality. We see, in effect, an, infinite number of Irelands, those that formed St Patrick or James Joyce, Yeats or Somerville and Ross, Flann O'Brien or Edna O'Brien, or the dancers at Lughnasa. We also hear the magnificent defiance of O'Rahilly, last of the feudal bards. We learn how Swift kept his congregation from straying, how Lord Longford (the brother of the present one) contrived to pay his visitors' travel costs, how the fiery Mary Wollstonecraft fared as a governess, and how Yeats - a Senator in old age - trained his bodyguard in his profession. We watch George Moore get AE to introduce him to the Gods, and Brendan Behan perform "Maud Gonne at the Microphone" with a towel over his head. Here also are the great men of letters Ireland never exported, men like Douglas Hyde, William Carleton, or James Clarence Mangan. And just as fresh are the perceptions of visitors. T.H.
White, who came to go fishing and stayed six years, thought Meath and Louth "what you might get if you brought Norfolk to the boil". Thackeray heard the Ptolemys learnedly discussed by street boys in rags. Geoffrey Grigson described the "coif of holiness" over Skellig Michael.