The Nestor of Irish literature speaks once more …
“Our first dramatist! How strange it sounds! But it is true”: such was one reviewer’s excitement in 1900 about a new play by an tAthair Peadar Ó Laoghaire. The Clondrohid man’s fame only grew from there until in 1911, Seán T. Ó Ceallaigh could claim that “almost every man, woman and child in Ireland who has ever handled an Irish book knows the name and loves it”. W. T. Cosgrave
concurred, saying that “What Thackeray and Dickens have done for English literature, Father O'Leary has done for Irish.”
Jump ahead to March 21, 1920 and Peter Hegarty (born 1893) was in Castlelyons church when the news broke. In fact, curate Michael Aherne was just giving the Benediction to end Passion Sunday Mass when, according to Peter: “He was called into the sacristy to be told that the canon had died. At the same time, somebody else called Miss O'Leary from the chapel. We all waited on in the chapel ’til Fr. Aherne returned and then he told us the canon had died and asked us all to pray for him.”
The Miss O’Leary referred to was an tAthair Peadar’s sister Máire Ní Laoghaire and, living with him since he was made parish priest of Castlelyons in 1891, it seems safe to assume that she was at his funeral two days later. Peter likely was too, as he said “the circumstances surrounding his death left the deepest impression on me.” Picture the scene: Tuesday, March 23, 1920, just after 11 o’clock Mass. Castlelyons churchyard filled to overflowing. A bearded gentleman watches the coffin being lowered into the ground. Suddenly he exclaims: “Disgraceful! That coffin plate has at least seven grammatical errors!”
Who’s that, you ask? That’s Osborn Bergin, “prince of Gaelic scholars”. Such talk at a funeral might seem tactless coming from anyone else, but not so much Osborn, when everyone knew what a stickler he was about grammar. Besides, it may have been pity that moved him to complain, knowing that it would bother his old friend to spend eternity with ungrammatical Irish on his coffin.
The seven grammatical errors aside, the one thing Osborn likely felt unconcerned about was his friend’s posthumous fame. After all, he had only to read his obituary in The Evening Herald to be assured that the “Very Rev. Canon Peter O’Leary, LL.D., P.P, Castlelyons” is “known and beloved in every corner of the world.” The deceased would likely have agreed, once predicting, much like Elvis, that “I will be alive after my death”.
CENTENARY COMMEMORATION
Ah, but what a difference a century makes. Jump ahead to Saturday, March 21 2020 and only a scant few braved the cold and the coronavirus to gather in Castlelyons churchyard to mark 100 years since the death of a literary giant in the early days of modern Irish. As John Arnold drolly reported in The Avondhu, it almost didn’t happen. Yes, thanks to Covid-19, all centenary plans were shelved.
So slán beo leis an dturas treoraithe planned from Castlelyons go Muscraí. Hasta la vista freisin to the exhibition Ceannródaí Ceanndána planned for the Grand Parade Library, also postponed ‘til God knows when. Indeed, we had resigned ourselves to letting the day pass unremarked when organiser Eilish O’Brien got a call from Tomás Ó Mainnín to let her know that TG4’s roving reporter was on his way to film a segment for the evening news.
So a priest (thanks Fr. Gerard Coleman!) and a piper (thanks Jimmy Morrison!) were secured at short notice and an impromptu ceremony began. As I listened to Eilish read a graveside prayer from Mo Shlighe Chun Dé (a pocket prayer book by an t-Athair Peadar, kindly loaned for the occasion by John Fitzgerald of Bishopstown), I could not help but think of the differences between past and present. On this spot in 1920 the mourners must have packed in cheek by jowl to judge by the photos in the March 24th, 1920 edition of The Cork Examiner, one showing the funeral procession stretching all the way back the village. Yet in this same spot 2020 there were scarcely ten of us present, all gingerly keeping an eye on each other to stay the recommended six feet apart at all times.
Still, there were some continuities between past and present: Jimmy Morrison and his sister Eileen, for instance, two living links with 1920, descendants as they are of the “Hugh Morrison and Miss Morrison” (nephew and niece of an tAthair Peadar) mentioned in newspaper reports of the funeral. Eamon Cotter was another link with 1920, representing his grandmother Mary Smith (born 1895) who was also at the funeral as evident from her statement that “I remember them carrying his coffin up to the cross and back”. Her grandparents were native Irish speakers, hence an tAthair Peadar’s question to her father: “Why don't you talk lrish like your father and mother for it's many the talk in lrish I had with your father down by the Bride?” (13% of the Fermoy area were native speakers in 1891).
Mary Smith had a story to tell about Máire Ní Laoghaire that showed how Castlelyons was a very different place from where she and Peadar grew up in the Muskerry Gaeltacht. So the story goes, Máire was going into the village one day when she met an old woman. She greeted her in Irish only to get the affronted response: ‘Why I can speak English as good as yourself!’ Mrs. Smith chuckled to recall this, but it serves to show the shame that ordinary people felt at speaking Irish publicly for fear it be taken as a sign that
they were poor and ignorant.
GAELTACHT IRISH
An tAthair Peadar did much to lessen this stigma, not least by championing Gaeltacht Irish as the basis for modern Irish at a time when others wanted a return to the seventeenth-century Irish of Geoffrey Keating.
Watching Fr. Coleman bless an tAthair Peadar’s grave, my thoughts turned to Peter Hegarty again as he served Mass for an tAthair Peadar back in his altar boy days. And he knew someone who was a prime example of the kind of native speaker whose linguistic knowledge tended to get overlooked. That man was Din Regan, a labourer on the Hegarty farm in Kilcor, whom Peter remembered reading Irish books with as a boy. The reading sessions between spailpín and schoolboy always took the same pattern: Peter would read while Din, who was illiterate, would listen. Describing Din as intelligent for all he was illiterate, Peter recalled how: “As I stumbled over a sentence he would take great delight in telling me the next word for being a native speaker he knew the phrase”.
Din's reaction shows the novelty of the situation for him, in that he clearly wasn't used to lrish giving him an advantage over anyone. Instead, he must more often have experienced Irish as an impediment and something to be ashamed of even. Hence, why native speakers (most of whom were illiterate like Din) found Séadna something of a revelation in that hearing it read: “They heard something which they had never heard before, their own speech coming out of a book at them”.
Who else, I thought, ticking off the other people we can deduce were at the funeral, as I tried not to shiver in the March cold. Well, newspaper reports listed David Kent, M.P., among the dignitaries present. He may have felt duty-bound to come for it was an tAthair Peadar who answered his brother Thomas Kent’s call for “a priest and a doctor! We've a man dying!” in the desolate aftermath of the Siege of Bawnard in 1916. After administering last rites to Richard Kent, the small white-haired priest climbed into the army truck to accompany Mrs. Kent into Fermoy.
(Incidentally, it was watching a copy of an tAthair Peadar’s ‘Mo Scéal Féin’ being offered up in memento of Thomas Kent at his State funeral on 25 September, 2015 that first gave Eilish the idea to write her account of his life. But her interest in him went back much further than that, to her neighbour Bill Shea’s talk of “the priest in his long black coat and hat" who used come for walks up the Ballyarra road back when he was a boy).
CONQUERING HEROES
Another person who might have liked to attend the 1920 funeral was Dr. Kuno Meyer, but alas he died in Leipzig the previous year. Kuno had cause to remember the glory days as hadn’t he sat in a carriage with an tAthair Peadar in 1912 when crowds cheered them on their way to receiving the Freedom of Cork? A pair of conquering heroes in stately procession down the South Mall, inseparable in the public imagination because, to borrow a phrase from Seán T. Ó Ceallaigh, “Where Dr Meyer stops the work is taken up by Canon O'Leary”.
Yet it was more than professional ties that bound the Castlelyons priest and the portly, moustachioed German professor: they were friends too as clear from an inscription Kuno wrote in a book he gave his Irish friend: “To Canon Peter O’Leary, The Nestor of Irish Literature, With affectionate regards, From Kuno Meyer”. That note has always intrigued me: what was it about an tAthair Peadar that reminded Kuno of Nestor, the grizzled warrior from Homer’s Iliad? Was it Nestor’s reputation as a “clear-voiced orator”, as an tAthair Peadar was also known as a gifted public speaker? Like Nestor, did his voice “flow sweeter than honey”?
Luckily, we can judge for ourselves as he was recorded in July 1907 by Rudolph Trebitsch who came to Castlelyons looking for speakers of endangered languages to record for the phonograph archive of the Academy of Sciences in Vienna. The Austrian anthropologist wanted only people born before 1845, (that is, people over 62 years of age) on the grounds that fluency in Irish had declined drastically since the Famine. An tAthair Peadar’s sixty-seven years at time of recording was likely not the only quality he had to recommend himself. Or so one would assume from Trebitsch’s peeved report to the Academy of Sciences in Vienna that the target group for recording could not be fully realised as “While I did occasionally find speakers born in Ireland before 1845 … their clumsiness, lack of teeth or other signs of old age usually prevented me from choosing them for the phonograph.” We can take it from this, that an tAthair Peadar had none of these defects! Bail ó Dhia air!
With recording technology still in its infancy, the process must have seemed strange to those involved. Take Maturin Bulson whom Trebitsch recorded in Brittany. He expressed his astonishment at “this strange type of chimney”, which is able “to put down almost at the same time, speech and a voice from every people in the world. ‘Speak,' a foreign gentleman tells me’, Maturin said, ‘speak, and I will take your voice with me’”.
It seems that an tAthair Peadar did not mind Trebitsch taking his voice away with him as the Austrian recorded him twice: once reading from An Craos Deamhan and again, reading from Aesop A Tháinig Go hÉireann (a book which, incidentally, Peter Hegarty remembers reading with Din). An tAthair Peadar had to be concise when speaking into the phonograph funnel as the wax cylinders onto which his voice was etched had a maximum recording time of two minutes.
HIS VOICE ECHOES ONCE AGAIN
So, to round off proceedings on that strange day in March 2020, I asked Tomás Ó Mainnín of TG4 whether he’d like me to play the 1907 recording. ‘Oh, by Dad!’ he said, his eyes lighting up with sudden interest, ‘Bhfuil a leithéid ann? Tá go deimhin’, I said, pressing play on my laptop.
And so, with all our other centenary plans come to naught, it was nice to hear Castlelyons church echo once again with the voice of the small white-haired priest who once loomed so large in the early days of modern Irish.