From Raglan Road to Kruger’s... 70 years on

ONE of Ireland’s most famous love ballads celebrates its 70th birthday this week and it has a special connection in Dingle.

Patrick Kavanagh’s Raglan Road was first published in The Irish Press on October 3rd 1946. The West Kerry interest in the poem/song is in its subject –Hilda Moriarty from the Green in Dingle. Pauline Murphy @ RealPMurphy has researched the circumstances and the poem and here’s a synopsis of what she discovered.

The poem, when first published, was entitled ‘Dark Haired Miriam Ran Away’ and Pauline suggests this was a ruse by Kavanagh to save embarassment. She describes how “Hilda Moriarty was a 22 year old medical student in Dublin at the time and the Kerry native captured the heart of then 40 year old Kavanagh who spotted her walking on Raglan Road in the Autumn of 1944”.

Hilda whose social circle in Dublin included many artists and poets described in an interview with RTE how she had “upbraided the poet about his Tarry Flynn and his writing about cabbages and turnips and potatoes ... you should write something else to which he replied that he would”. The result, according to Hilda, was Raglan Road.

Kavangh’s love was unrequited but with true artistic endeavour he pursued his muse to Dingle for Christmas 1944, and spent the festive season in Kruger’s in Dún Chaoin. Pauline Murphy explains that this was the first Christmas that Patrick Kavanagh had spent away from his mother. She also describes how while he was staying in Kruger’s in Dún Chaoin “he put his talent to some use and wrote an article for the Irish Press called My Christmas in Kerry. In it he detailed how the unlicensed premises he was staying at had no problem selling booze on Christmas day. Kavanagh’s host saw this article as a breach of trust and to rub salt in Kruger’s wound, Kavanagh took his bicycle to the train station for the Dublin train without asking him”.

“Years later when Kruger was applying for a liquor licence the judge recalled Patrick Kavanagh’s Irish Press article from Christmas 1944, but Kruger dismissed its author as nothing more than a vagabond bike thief!” she said.

The relationship between the two Kavanaghs survived this upset as the famed poet is known to have visited again years later.

Luke Kelly who made the ballad famous recounted in an interview with Ciarán Mac Mathúna how he met Patrick Kavanagh in the Bailey pub in Dublin. “He was singing in his way and I was singing in mine,” said Luke Kelly and Kavanagh said to him “you should sing Raglan Road.

Seventy years since Patick Kavanagh first wrote it, Raglan Road is now known worldwide and the song has been sung by artists from Ed Sheeran to Van Morrison and Mark Knopfler.

Hilda Moriarty went on to marry Fianna Fáil Minister Donogh O’Malley, she ran as an Independent in the General Election of 1969 but lost out on the seat to Des O’Malley the nephew of her deceased husband.

Hilda never forgot her “peasant poet” and when he was laid to rest in his stony grey soil of Monaghan in November 1967, she sent a wreath of red roses in the shape of the letter H