POEMS AND STORIES OF MOUNTAIN MAN ANDY
Aclare’s Andy Hegarty, 87, lived in England and the US before settling outside Ballymote in 1968. He reminisced with Gerry McLaughlin
IN GAELIC IRELAND, the poet and seanchaí held almost as much meas or respect as the chieftain. The truly enchanting Andy Hegarty from Aclare, but living in Lavally just outside Ballymote, is a wordsmith and weaver of dreams, a poet with the eternal light of youth in his eyes – even though he is 87.
He is a merry and sunny soul who enjoys his jokes and is comfortable laughing at himself as he tells of a fascinating life well lived and very well observed.
Andy’s effortless ability to paint pictures of times past in a lovely-turned phrase is remarkable, as that rich south Sligo-Mayo burr takes you back to the days of matchmaking, American wakes, fairies, a donkey being slipped in the side door of a ballroom of romance and an “old woman who had a nose as long as a pick”.
He only took up writing poetry in 1990 and the only wonder is that he has not been published.
For his poems are as fresh, clear and true as a mountain stream from a proud mountain man.
There is a lovely natural rhythm and rhyme to them, and like the best of Patrick Kavanagh they have the real lyrical ring of truth.
For they spring from the parish where he grew up on the mountain side in Belclare, and you can smell the heath, heather, rock and whin in some of them.
Andy is a master of the anthems of the dispossessed and there are some great poems of longing and loss, poems of matchmakers, funerals and donkeys. The most moving of them all is the wonderful ‘My Heartache Sadness’, a poignant tribute to his lovely wife of almost 60 years, Anna Mae
Duffy, who passed away on August 31, 2019. You can read the powerful ‘My Heartache Sadness’ on page 19.
There are also many earthy poems rooted in the land that formed him, and none better than a poem about a matchmaker, from the point of view of the poor, warm-blooded young woman who was about to be wedded to an old man.
This is a poem that has echoes of Brian Merriman’s ‘The Midnight Court’, a bawdy critique of young maids and old men. Andy writes: When the deal was done, they set the day
Married I to be, my dowry £50 Raising a toast beneath his whiskey nose
The matchmaker viewed me all around
Bedad, said he, there’s breeding in that slip
Look at the width between her hips. Andy also writes searing poems of loss and leaving, especially about emigration and the tragedy of the American wake.
There are few better than Andy at capturing the heartache of parting in lovely lyrical verse which is as natural to Andy as breathing.
Andy said: “You have to chisel into the nerve of the thing and that has the ring of truth and that applies in all facets of life.
“If it does not catch you, it is not real. Real poetry hits you in the heart and all great poetry comes from the heart. “I write of what I know, my place. And I have seen all of the sorrow and sadness of emigration.”
Like all really good poetry, his verse has the ring of eternal truth.
In 1969 Andy was interviewed for the famous 7 Days programme by his friend and neighbour the late, great Ted Nealon to speak about emigration. In that programme Andy did not hold back and there were a few complaints. Nealon told Andy that he had got a letter from a disapproving party because he had said “the dogs would not even drink our blood”.
But that is Andy – he speaks the raw truth.
ANDY SAID: “Real poetry must be authentic and the poems of the people, the dispossessed, come from the heart. It is not a concoction like written history which is usually the preserve of the winners.”
He has been interviewed by RTÉ and other outlets like StoryTracks for his rich store of eloquent memories and haunting verse.
He said: “This is the computer age. Children have the thumbs wore off themselves in front of screens. But when I was young I heard the language of cant, a rich tongue used by Travellers, and I heard the stories and songs beside the fire.
“Now there are people coming to me
because they want to preserve this history, because otherwise it will go.” Listening to him is an education, as the poetry of his people is in every phrase. It is in his DNA for generations and his uncles were all musicians. Andy went to England at 15 and then to the US, where he worked hard and made a life for himself and his family before coming back to buy a 100-acre farm in 1968 where he now lives in Lavally outside Ballymote.
The boy from the mountainside did well in the land of opportunity, working as a steel fixer and a contractor, and has interesting, nuanced observations on “a peculiar place in many ways”.
He recalls the day “a black man in floods of tears” told him that John F Kennedy had been assassinated in Dallas on November 22, 1963, while Andy was at work in Chicago. In the intervening years he has been over and back to Chicago on various projects.
These days he is happy in the verdant fields of Lavally, very different from his native mountain in Belclare. But the memory of the mountain and his muintir is the spark that keeps his soul alive.
Andy said: “We were looking down on Aclare and it was beautiful.
“There were hundreds of acres facing into the sun with beautiful heather bells. There was a little lake and from our house you could see right across the valley over the Moy into Curry and Charlestown.”
ANDY WAS born in Belclare on September 11, 1934, to James Hegarty and Margaret Howley. He said: “The Hegartys came from Derry, four brothers. Maybe they were run out of Derry – I don’t know.
“My father was a mountain man like myself. There were eight in the family and we all emigrated.”
His earliest memory, which lent itself towards the poetic end of his life, is of Swinford.
He said: “It was in 1939 and we were at the railway station and there was a lady in long black clothes and she was crying. ‘You took Johnny from me and now you are taking Mary’, she was saying, in tears.
“I was five, looking at this woman crying. I did not understand then but I do now know the utter heartbreak in her words.
“It was a crucifixion to the woman, and that was a regular occurrence.” Andy went to school in Kilmactigue. He said: “There were lots to be done on the farm and I left school when I was 14 and you were trapped in a vicious circle.
“There was one lad, and he was so poor that he had no pants but a geansaí and he put his feet into the sleeves. “I met that man later in Ipswich and he had 300 men working for him.
“In those years in Ireland if you had a priest or a nun in the family you thought your were something.
“They should have gone for the trades, to make people who can create practical things down the line, and this is very relevant today.
“But they did not contribute to society in the way that people who work with their hands.
“The track of the school bag would be barely off your back when you had to go out and work.”
There was loads of “devilment” in
Andy’s youth in Aclare, but lots of despair too.
Many families supped sorrow from the rusty spoon of emigration as they said slán, often forever, to their loved ones.
Andy was one of those wrenched from home and family at the tender age of 15, when he went to Liverpool. He remembers all of this. And he remembers the matchmaking, which was coming to an end in his youth in the early 1930s.
HE PAINTS a graphic, totally politically incorrect picture of a custom that John B Keane immortalised in his great tragic play Sive. And he speaks with great simplicity and pathos about funerals and the mná caointe, the professional keening or “crying women”, who were paid around two shillings for their efforts as the coffin was brough in a side car to be buried.
It is clear that Irish must have been spoken around Aclare for Andy’s speech is peppered with rich Gaelic phrases.
One of the phrases the parents who were so sadly dispossessed of their brightest and best was Bíonn súil le muir, ach ni bhíonn súil le huaigh, which translates as “There is hope from the sea” – which took away their loved ones to America and England – “but there is no hope from the grave”. In Andy’s rich tones, an Ireland that is long gone lives on in his wonderful, clear memory and rich phrasing and it comes as natural to him as breathing, with not a scintilla of stage Irishry. Andy remembers the dances of his youth as clearly as yesterday
He said: “We used to go into McAlister’s dance hall. I remember when we had no hair oil and we could get a drop of castor oil and sure when you would warm up it would run down the side of your face.
“But there were a lot of fellahs and girls coming out from Mayo which was near hand, and they would be coming out at two o’clock in the morning and some fellah would shout: ‘Eggs and rashers for the Sligo Slashers and the Mayos licking the plate’. Of course the racket would get up.’
“You know there was a lot of devilment used to go on, not bad stuff, but there was nothing else to bloody do anywhere.”
And then he segues into a tale of cayenne pepper: “We used to light it and put it into cotton wool and go into McAllister’s hall and then they would all start sneezing and coughing, and we cleared the deck out.
“There was no radio and there was no light (electricity), but we got a radio because one of our relatives Brigid Hegarty was living with us and she was blind, so we got a free radio.
“The neigbours used to come in and listen to what this fellow Adolf Hitler was up to. The Second World War was on.”
Andy then recalls an ould fellah in Aclare who had a donkey who would be lashing and kicking.
He said: “Two of the boys captured him and brought him into town and the dance was on that night.
“They shoved the ould donkey in the side door and him up and down the dance floor and lashing and braying and squealing, women in swirling flowery dresses lepping up on the seats, thinking it was the divil himself had come out to dance.”
“That was the exuberance of youth and there was nothing else to do. “I remember an old woman in the village. And, God bless her, she had a nose on her as long as a pick.
“And she was in bed all the time. “They got the idea that they would put some hen eggs into the bed and she would hatch them out.
“After a few weeks the eggs were hatched, and the chickens were given oatmeal and after a few weeks they were ready to go out on the street. “I can see her yet, the poor woman. She would put a spoon of butter on the top of the tea and it would be floating around – I don’t know why. She had the longest nose I ever saw and we used to call her the anteater.”
IN THE SLIGO of Andy’s youth, matchmaking was fairly common and “drink” as well as the all-important “land” played a big part in an intricate rural dance where that same land was more important than love.
Andy said: “Matchmaking in itself was an art for some fellow. He would usually be a small man, a small maneen, and he would definitely have the gift of the gab. He could nearly talk you into anything.”
“There would be a girl in the village for marriage and the money that her brother would give with her. When he would go matchmaking he would get the money again and the money was going around in a circle.
“Her face was her fortune in a lot of cases. If she was a woman with a hump, you would want a lot more money.
“Some women might have bunches of hair on their chin like thistles. That would warrant a big dowry.
“But the poor woman would have no say and the little matchmaker would come around and state his case for the suitor, who was usually elderly.
“Of course, there was loads of drink and the matchmaker was there in all its glory with a nose as red on him as a tomato.
“He would come back on three or four occasions, first for the woman, and then they had to count the number of cows, which meant more
“In 1939 at the railway station there was a lady in long black clothes. I was five, looking at this woman crying. I did not understand then. I do now”