Pathfinder: Manchán Magan

 

I will follow these gallant heroes beneath the clay
The warriors my ancestors served ever since Christ’s day.
From Cabhair ni Ghoirfead / I Will Not Cry for Help by Aogán Ó Rathaille.

Many poets, and all mystic and occult writers, in all ages and countries, have declared that behind the visible are chains on chains of conscious beings, who are not of heaven but of the earth, who have no inherent form but change according to their whim, or the mind that sees them.
From Irish Fairy and Folk Tales by W. B. Yeats.

I remain haunted by the death of the writer and broadcaster Manchán Magan. Ongoing outpourings on my social media feeds, and across mainstream media, reveal I am not the only one so affected. Over his lifetime, it’s fair to say, he became a national icon – ‘regarded as a representative symbol,’ and now even ‘worthy of veneration.’

Above all perhaps, Manchán – properly pronounced Man-a-chán as I was recently informed by a Gaeilgeoir from west Kerry – tapped into, and indeed engendered, renewed appreciation for the Irish language, stripping it of associations that led many of my generation to recoil from it in our early years.

Instructively, Hugh Ó Caoláin, reachtaire/chair of Trinity College’s Cumann Gaelach recently argued that the language now occupies a new cultural space in the national consciousness:

I think there has been a huge mentality change. It doesn’t represent conservatism any more. It’s progressive. It’s about non-colonialism and reclaiming our indigenous culture. A lot of young people look at the culture that was and realise such richness is being lost.

Indeed, according to Pól Ó hÍomhair (20) another member of the Cumann:

As a gay man, I would always view Irish as a symbol of a modern progressive, non-colonial, inclusive Ireland.

It is hard to imagine that progressive shift occurring in the absence of Manchán’s almost messianic zeal. As a journalist, he embraced media old and new – from video blogs to best-selling literary-historical works – all presented in the inimical style of shaman-scholar-wanderer.

His output was prolific and multi-dimensional. Whereas Gaelic-Irishness once seemed restricted to asserting a singular national identity, Manchán brought appreciation to a more inclusive and elevated plain, which might occasionally lapse into an arrogance he was aware of being prone to.

A light-hearted description of English as ‘a relatively recent West Germanic language’ developed by ‘gangs of land-hungry Angles, Saxons, Jutes and Frisians,’ hordes of whom displaced an apparently more noble Irish language, unfairly denigrates a tongue he revelled in, and which has been the preferred medium for many Irish writers who have left an unmistakable imprint.

Moreover, the early English were also subjected to colonisation, after the Norman invasion of 1066, which accounts for why over half of its vocabulary derives from French. Indeed, English wasn’t an official language in England until 1362, when the Statute of Pleading first made English an official language of the law courts.

Furthermore, after colonising England the Normans crossed into Ireland in 1169 at the behest of an Irish chieftain, Diarmait Mac Murchada. He had sought military assistance from the Norman lord Strongbow, giving his daughter Aoife’s hand in marriage in return.

Thereafter, the Normans under Henry II conquered most of Ireland, bequeathing distinctively ‘Irish’ names such as FitzGerald, Burke and Lynch. Most of them living beyond ‘the Pale’ of settlement around Dublin, however, eventually adopted the Irish language and customs. They later declined to convert to Protestantism, thereby forming part of the Irish nation, ‘more Irish than Irish themselves,’ which emerged in the wake of the seventeenth century Plantations.

The heady brew of language and identity may create divisions, which often dissolve when subjected to historical scrutiny and poetic meddling. Manchán was mostly engaged in scrutiny and meddling, but faint traces of his forebearers’ chauvinism occasionally appeared.

Proselytizing ‘the first, official language’ is only one aspect of Manchán’s legacy. He also awakened reverence for the land and people through documentary work in particular, for television and radio, and unashamedly drew attention to numinous presence ‘immanent in the landscape.’

After long travels, and encounters with peoples on the edge, he fostered awareness of our connections to aboriginal cultures, as well as drawing attention to exploitative practices etched into our landscape. He was unafraid to float metaphysical concepts and point to the uncanny; or allow the truth to get in the way of a good yearn.

What follows is a personal reflection on a public figure I knew a little, and whose educational formation I shared to a surprising degree. I also use this as an opportunity to explore ideas around language and identity, which foreground Manchán’s own work and upbringing, as well as my own.

Encounters

I distinctly recall three encounters with him. Each left a mark. The first was at Another Love Story music festival, in 2017 or thereabouts. Our conversation ranged over environmental issues. Initially, I was wary of someone who worked within mainstream media, providing cover with slim doses of virtue, as I saw it. Yet I found we shared many of the same ideals.

The diaphanous sprite on film seemed remote from this formidable presence in the flesh. After all, this was a man who had crossed continents, daring to go to places that made me cower. I wasn’t won over entirely, however. I wanted more from him, more unsettling resistance.

We next met at Dublin’s first Extinction Rebellion demonstration in 2019, a movement which at that time exhibited a child-like innocence, at least for many Irish participants. He had the same friendly presence, despite my reticence, but I found something else there now, a commitment to resistance.

That first demo occurred at precisely the same location, in front of the GPO on O’Connell Street, as another rather more pivotal gathering in 1916. Nearby, on Moore Street, one of its leaders – who showed up despite believing it to be a doomed enterprise – Manchán’s granduncle Michael Joseph O’Rahilly – known as ‘The O’Rahilly’ – was shot by British machine gun fire. He made it as far as a nearby laneway, now called O’Rahilly Parade, where he succumbed to his wounds.

There was a glow to Manchán that day. Later, I recall him forming part of a vanguard that staged a sit-down protest, blocking car traffic along the quays. I watched on, unwilling to face what seemed, with Gardaí in attendance, another doomed enterprise, inviting arrest. Now who was the real resistance fighter? It would not have been his first time behind bars. But the authorities were all too canny that day. There were to be no high-profile martyrs.

The last encounter I had with Manchán was in late 2020 at the Fumbaly Café, the remarkable enterprise and creative space owned by his partner Aisling. Those were the dark days of Covid lockdowns, when faces were hidden from view as in a bad dream. Everything seemed impossible.

I vividly recall him insisting that a big change had come over the world. He asserted, prophetically, that the kind of musical and food events that I had been putting on were in the past, and so it has proved. In truth, he left a bleak impression. I wonder about the ill-effects of isolation on his gregarious soul.

Educational Background

Recently, I learned that Manchán and I attended, five years apart, the same Jesuit school in Ranelagh, Gonzaga College, where his funeral took place.

If ever we were to meet again in some celestial sphere, or after reincarnation, I would be intrigued to find out a bit more about his experience there. He has revealed that he wasn’t entirely comfortable in a setting which, at least in my time, seemed calibrated to produce upstanding members of the professional classes.

There were creative outlets, in school plays and operas, and academic endeavour was encouraged, but it hardly nourished alternative ideas. Religious instruction was prescriptive rather than expansive. Mysticism, or anything autre for that matter, was hardly in vogue in Gonzaga in the late 1980s, while the Irish language only seemed relevant as a Leaving Cert subject. School Irish certainly provided me with no insights into the extraordinary literature that emerged in the oldest written European vernacular language north of the Alps.

I have looked back over a few photos of Manchán among classmates in school annuals. Like myself, he did not participate in any of the rugby teams given such prominence. He looks like a slightly forlorn dreamer, albeit a tougher school might have knocked the day-dreaming out of such an ethereal character.

The Gonzaga Record contains two references to Manchán from his fifth year in 1988 – aged between sixteen or seventeen. An account of the school opera recalls: ‘Backstage was handled admirably by Manchan [spelt without the fada presumably to his annoyance]Magan, and things never got far out of hand.’

It is surprising to find that Manchán is not treading the boards, centre stage, mesmerizing audiences. I half-expected to find an account of him wearing a cloak of crimson bird feathers, like his great-great-great-granduncle Aogán Ó Rathaille, the last great poet of the Bardic school. Manchán had noble pedigree, and in later life at least, he didn’t hide any light, or ancestry, under a bushel.

Theatrical design, nonetheless, relies on a capacity for improvisation, which presumably he also harnessed when building the first strawbale house in Ireland, an ‘ecological, mortgage-free home’ home in Westmeath for less than €6,000 in 1997, after he was left a small sum of money by his late grandmother.

The 1988 Record also contains, fittingly, a picture of him next to a large litter bin, which he and twenty-five other students pushed around Dublin’s city centre, collecting rubbish and raising money for charity.

The unusual symmetry in our educational background runs deeper. We also both attended the co-ed Mount Anville Montessori school, attached to the girls’ secondary school of the same name in Goatstown, from around aged four to eight, before entering the all-boys Gonzaga ‘Prep’ School.

Furthermore, after completing his Leaving Cert, Manchán enrolled, as I did, in nearby UCD to study History, although he studied Irish along with it, while I did pure history. Nonetheless, that’s perhaps seventeen years of almost the exact same educational formation, five years apart.

Mother Tongue

As alluded to there was a significant fork in the road insofar as Manchán studied History and Irish, a language which took on huge significance throughout his life. Indeed, it was his first language and mother tongue. This vital connection deepened over childhood summers spent in west Kerry, where Gaelic remained the lingua franca. He was also raised alongside his maternal grandmother Sighle Humphreys (1899-1994), a firebrand Republican and Irish language activist.

Fluency in Irish gave Manchán an opportunity to present travel documentaries, at the behest of his brother Ruan, for TG4 from 1996. It was then that he really took to the stage, and never really left it.

In contrast, I trace a troubled relationship with Irish to my mother’s preference for European sophistication – she spoke French, Italian and German. Born in leafy Donnybrook, close to where Manchán grew up, she had little sympathy for Republicanism either, writing a letter to the Irish Times in 1966 expressing disapproval with the 1916 Rising on its fiftieth anniversary. She argued there was another, non-violent, path to independence.

The other side of my family was a different story however. My namesake paternal grandfather from Sligo acted as auditor of UCD’s Irish language society, as ‘Proinsias  Tréanlámagh,’ in the late 1920s. His father, my great-grandfather Luke Armstrong, acted as ‘Head Centre’ for the IRB in Sligo during the Land War of the 1880s. He was accused of treason, and only narrowly escaped the hangman’s noose. Moreover, my father gained a partial university scholarship through a somewhat utilitarian attention to the language.

Nonetheless, for me, especially in my formative years, Irish represented a conservative authority in school, and even a violent nationalism I repudiated in the midst of the Troubles. It didn’t help that I had an Irish teacher in secondary school who I felt bullied by, which only repelled me further.

Moreover, like Manchán I spent my summers in the west of Ireland living in an alternative reality to my Dublin suburb existence. As a garrison town, however, the hinterland of Sligo has a very different relationship with the Irish language to west Kerry. An historic crossing point between Connacht and Ulster, there are enduring ties to Northern Ireland. A rail line connected Sligo with Enniskillen until the 1950s. The prevalence of English since even prior to the Famine did not, however, prevent the poet W.B. Yeats and his painter brother Jack from drawing on its lore and folk tales to furnish their art.

I also went to an Irish College in the Gaeltacht of Connemara for a few weeks one summer and got along fine with the language. But the accommodation offered by the host family was cramped and shabby, and the food appalling – under-cooked frozen pizza leaves a nasty aftertaste.

Then at college, studying history, I made a good friend whose father participated in the so-called Language Freedom Movement, which campaigned during the 1960s against Irish as a compulsory language. He kept a photograph of this father speaking at a rally with placard in hand – and a fist seemingly attached to his chin. That fist belongs to the arm of a priest, the future primate of all-Ireland, Cardinal Tomás Séamus Ó Fiaich. For me at the time, that image epitomised exactly what the Irish language stood for.

In contrast, I took pride in the achievements of Irish writers in English. I recall empathising with James Joyce’s Stephen Hero, when Stephen Daedulus decides to take a course in the Irish language. His teacher Madden takes exception to Stephen ‘running down your own people at every hand’s turn.’ In my copy of the novel I marked Stephen’s response: ‘I would like to learn it – as a language, said Stephen lyingly.’ Thus, Joyce chose ‘silence, exile, and cunning.’

Joyce’s rejection of national chauvinism comes to the fore in the ‘Cyclops’ episode of Ulysses where we meet the ugly prejudices of ‘the Citizen’ (apparently modelled on the Gaelic Athletic Association’s founder Michael Cusack) who opposes miscegenation, ‘A fellow that’s neither fish nor fowl,’ and blames a woman for Ireland’s subjugation: ‘The adulteress and her paramour brought the Saxon robbers here.’

The Citizen offers a one-eyed account of Irish history in which the country only prospers in isolation from England: ‘We had our trade with Spain and the French and with the Flemings before those mongrels were pupped.’

In contrast, Leopold Bloom rejects entirely the gathering forces of hatred that culminated in World War I:

it’s no use … Force, hatred, history, all that. That’s not life for men and women, insult and hatred. And everybody knows that it’s the very opposite of that what is really life.

The Citizen asks what that really is, to which Bloom replies: ‘Love … I mean the opposite of hatred’. The Citizen guffaws witheringly: ‘A new apostle to the gentiles … Universal love.’

Manchán’s views were, assuredly, more in line with those of Leopold Bloom than the Citizen, but a tension between universal lover and little islander is evident in his background.

Irish Nationalist

In many interviews – which I have belatedly binged on – Manchán alludes with pride, but also some wariness, to his forebearers, especially the aforementioned The O’Rahilly. That wariness was justified.

R. F. Foster certainly arrives with his own biases. Nonetheless his Vivid Faces – The Revolutionary Generation in Ireland 1890-1923 provides insights into The O’Rahilly’s brand of ethnic nationalism. Foster claimed the Volunteering movement gave ‘full rein to O’Rahilly’s obsession with heraldry, titles and coats of arms; his papers include much semi-mystical correspondence about the spiritual symbols of the Volunteer flag and the need to evoke occult Celtic harmonies.’ Manchán would have approved of this, but other aspects would have been far less appealing.

Foster points to The O’Rahilly’s ‘Anglophobia’ that had been ‘nurtured by a sojourn in America,’ which he concludes ‘represented an extreme and violent tendency within the movement (p.190).’ Foster also references an account of his ‘violently racist beliefs about American blacks (p.14),’ entirely at odds with Manchán’s politics.

Manchán understood Irishness and the Irish language in an expansive way. For him it was always about sharing insights. He has helped stripped it of association with severe Catholicism and chauvinistic patriotism, connecting Irish identity with indigenous traditions around the world.

He also expressed romantic love through it. I recall a touching article he wrote for the Irish Times describing how he had found himself drawing on the Irish language to express his love for his partner, Aisling, whose name means ‘dream’ or ‘vision,’ and was a Gaelic poetic form used by W.B. Yeats in ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus.’

Manchán decision to build a small house in rural Westmeath also recalls Yeats’ arising to ‘The Lake Isle of Inissfree’ – ‘a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made,’ to ‘live alone in the bee-loud glade.’

Yeats County

Last year, I embarked along a similar path, purchasing a house in Sligo, where I discovered a wild beehive lodged into my house, just two kilometres away from where my father was born to my grandmother, also called Sheila!

Sheila Armstrong was a very different character to Sighle Humphreys, however. Born in Liverpool to an Irish immigrant publican and his Sligo-born wife I suspect she didn’t have a word of Irish, and was a tremendous snob, besides being the kindest soul imaginable.

Her Catholic devotion did not extend to Republican sympathies. I recall the horror on her face when witnessing TV images of the Enniskillen bombing in 1987. This was a place she went to on occasional shopping trips, including to Gordon Wilson’s drapery, whose daughter Marie was killed in the outrage.

The phrase ‘mother tongue’ implies we are handed down an affinity with a language through the maternal line. My mother and surviving grandmother displayed no interest, and even a little resistance, to the Irish language, which probably left an indelible mark.

I have also wondered, with a name like Armstrong and given my mother’s maiden name was FitzGerald, whether I truly belong to the Irish nation, conceived by some early revolutionaries as an Irish-language speaking entity based on bloodlines. Born into an Irish Catholic family, I do have ancestry with more Irish-sounding names, but I suspect many of my forebearers spoke Old English or Old Norse for long periods after settling in the country.

Nonetheless, as I engage more closely with Manchán’s work and legacy, I recognise compelling reasons to develop a greater understanding of the language. The psychological barrier, and trauma even, is slowly ebbing away.

I doubt I’ll ever become fluent in the language, but I can at least get over feelings of inadequacy and irritation when I hear it spoken. At the very least, it provides a key for understanding the origin of our place names, and vital insights into flora, fauna and human history.

That is not to say I don’t take issue with some of Manchán’s imaginative flights. There may be thirty-two words for a field in Irish, but given the language’s distinctive periods and pronounced regional varieties, I doubt anyone apart from him has ever known them all! Nonetheless, in a period of extreme homogenisation let us celebrate Manchán’s magical vision for Ireland. The king of the faeries has returned to his realm.

Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.