TRADITION has given Ireland much to be proud of, but the burden of tradition has also been responsible, both indirectly and otherwise, for sustaining prejudices and causing much suffering.
During the two years he spent working with the Placenames Commission in the 1950s, Ciaran Mac Mathuna was conscious of the suspicion local people had of maps, especially Ordnance Survey maps. "It was to do with land and tradition, a traditional fear of outsiders coming in to take over the land."
Referring to the recent spate of vicious attacks perpetrated on old people in rural areas, he says: "In Ireland, there have always been men who live out their lives alone. Old bachelors living in spartan conditions; no electricity, no comfort, yet sometimes with thousands of pounds stashed away in damp old mattresses. They've never lost their traditional distrust of banks and they leave themselves open to these terrible raids."
According to Mac Mathuna, the burden of tradition as much as confused notions of guilt and censoriousness made it difficult for many to accept the reality of the recent divorce referendum. "Of course, I voted Yes."
While commentators have decided that Mac Mathuna the broadcaster has, through his soothing Sunday morning programme of music, song and verse, Mo Cheol Thu, come to epitomise a gentler Ireland, far more important than this is his profound understanding of Ireland and its complex, contradictory culture. Few could match his awareness of the need to balance scholarship with entertainment and this is the formula he brings to his programme. "Mo Cheol Thu, is not intended as `scholarly' - the music and readings are selected with a view to easing people into Sunday morning, you don't want a great blast of a ceili band at 8 a.m. It's quiet music and popular poetry yes, there's a lot of blatant nostalgia."
Now 70, Mac Mathuna is a gentle, wise man with a wide interest in all music: it is too easy to misinterpret his slow, softspoken tone and assume he is a dreamer. Credited with spearheading the national revival of traditional music, he is an astute observer, practical, exact, shrewd, alert to ironies such as the fact that, Douglas Hyde's painstaking work translating poems from old Irish into English so encouraged the reading of these English versions that the original Irish, rather than being revived. fell into disuse. "This had the effect of creating a new language which ironically overshadowed the very language it was trying to promote."
Sea - a journey in search of the seal legend - (1954), it is a mystic study of land and seascape, entering the realm of myth and legend pursuing the ancient seal man story. It is a beautiful book, Mac Mathuna remarks: "I wish I'd written it."
He was born and grew up in a house on Mulgrave Street in Limerick, about 50 yards from writer Kate O'Brien's family home. "It was a strange looking house; they were a strange family," he remarks. The youngest of five boys and one girl, he never knew his mother, who died when he was just over a year old. "My mother has been dead for 69 years, she died on January 26th, 1927 - 69 years ago today." He announces it as a fact, without emotion. "I never knew her, but I remember as a boy often being told by people, your mother was the most beautiful woman in Limerick," Christine Mac Mahon, whose family had come from Clare; she had gone into hospital for a minor operation, "so routine it was hardly worth talking about" but she never woke up and died at the hospital. "I don't think she was more than 40 at the time."
LEFT alone with six children under eight, his father, a schoolteacher, found life difficult. "He hired a housekeeper to come in and look after us. He was a quiet man, spoke very little. Sad. He had a lot to be sad about. My father was 50 when I was born - he was born in 1875, imagine that." James MacMahon was involved with the Gaelic League, yet never forced any of his children towards the Irish language. "None of us went to the school he taught in, St Patrick's National School, a country school on the edge of the city. He never came to our school, he didn't involve himself. It was his nature. As a teacher, he knew of the way some parents can become a nuisance.
Mr MacMahon, who died at 92 in 1967, emerges as a remote, almost shadowy presence. But Mac Mathuna stresses that his 1930s childhood was very happy "it was a different world" - and speaks about the long summers spent fishing and swimming on the upper stretches of the Mulcair River at Newport, his father's home village, in Tipperary, about 10 miles from Limerick and very near Glenstal Abbey.
"They never bothered changing the clocks when the new time came in, so you had `old' time and `new' time together for a part of the year when we went back to the city. It was as if it was a different place to the rest of the country and the people wanted to keep it that way.
Even so, it is surprising that he is a city person. I'm not really, we were not that far from the country and I spent so much time in the countryside. Life was different then. No one locked a door, you didn't have to. Not like now." Although he has lived in Dublin for most of his life, he still sees Limerick, a historic place with a difficult recent history, as home and believes that that city has benefitted greatly from the work of a former city architect, Jim Barrett. "All along by King's Island, near the courthouse and King John's Castle, St Mary's Cathedral" a fine Norman building, "all that part of historic Limerick and the river itself is much more of a focal point because before you could only see it from one side. Limerick is doing well now. It's become much better, it's a nicer place."
As a boy he attended Sexton Street CBS, and was a good student, later winning a university scholarship. He played hurling and "I remember playing God, look at me now - tennis." Initially, he wanted to be an engineer and arrived at University College, Dublin in October 1943 with a definite career plan.
"My eldest brother, Terry, was an engineer. Then Tom, my second brother, started to do architecture. And Brian was doing arts. I was `found out' in engineering within a year, I knew it wasn't for me and I switched to arts."
He took a BA degree in modern Irish Latin. It took him a long time to get used to Dublin.
Although he was a student during the war and post war years and experienced rationing, his strongest memory of that time was the winter of 1947. "It was fierce, so cold. The snow lasted till May."
War was something that happened somewhere else and Mac Mathuna is amused now to admit that he has vague memories as a schoolboy of hearing Lord Ha Ha, William Joyce's wartime broadcasts and actually heard the then British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, announcing the outbreak of the second World War on September 3rd, 1939. "It was a Sunday, and I wasn't a bit interested because I was waiting for the All Ireland hurling final to begin - it was between Cork and Kilkenny."
On graduating and completing his MA in Irish, he went straight into employment. "I got a temporary job teaching at Castleknock for six months in 1951 and also did relief work with the Dublin VEC. As there was a flu epidemic, I had plenty of work filling in for sick teachers." Earlier, he had been himself hospitalised for almost a year with pleurisy, contracted while playing what was to be his last game of tennis. He wonders if God Himself had decided to take a hand in the ending of his tennis career.
But back to his first career as a temporary teacher. "We were paid by the hour. I did well." Well enough that he could afford to go on an ambitious motoring trip during the Easter holidays of 1951. Two of his friends and himself set off in a big American car to drive to Rome. "We went to Dover to Dunkirk - Dunkirk had not recovered from the war - and we went on to Brussels and visited the Irish college at Louvain where the Franciscan monks had been since the 17th century and published spiritual tracts and manuscripts in Irish at a time when they could not have been written at home because of the Penal Laws...
One of the young students they met was Thomas O Fiaich, later Cardinal O Fiaich. "We drove down along the Rhine to Cologne and to Heidelberg and then swung over to Rome" where another friend, a Limerick priest, arranged that they meet the Pope, Pius XII. "I touched his hand in St Peter's - along with a thousand other people. It was a special audience for French students. We drove back through Paris."
Although the young Mac Mathuna seems to have had a relaxed attitude to life, his MA thesis on the themes in Irish folk songs was to play an important part in deciding his future career.
On joining the Placenames Commission in 1952 he travelled the country as part of a team working on discovering the origins of placenames, and attempting to standardise the Irish versions of them by restoring the Gaelic names anglicised by the Ordnance Survey in the 1830s as part of British government policy.
He visited marginal areas, mainly in the west, such as east Galway and north Clare where occasional Irish speakers still survived. "It was a scholarly and official job. It was fascinating to discover the way names of natural features were older than those of. inhabited places which had been affected legally or illegally by the transfer of land." He quickly discovered he had a talent for talking to people, and more importantly, for listening.
AFTER two years with the Commission, he joined RTE where his brief was to collect traditional music. In many ways, it was the same sort of job speaking to people, gathering lost, endangered information and listening. About that time, Ciaran MacMahon became Mac Mathuna. Stressing that he was not the first person RTE sent out in the field to gather traditional music (Seamus Ennis the piper, Sean MacReamoinn and Proinsias O Conluain had begun working on the project in 1947), Mac Mathuna agrees that being neither a musician nor a singer proved an advantage in that it gave him an element of professional detachment. "There were fewer distractions for me, I was not going to be asked to sing or play a tune. It was easier for me just to listen." His programme, A Job of Journeywork, featuring live music, began in 1955 and quickly attracted a following. The first extensive. recording sessions took place throughout Clare in January 1955, "From that we got a lot of the programmes." From Clare, he moved on to the music of Kerry, to Antrim, Galway, Mayo, Donegal, Leitrim and Cavan and so on. It was a national project. "We tried to get to as many places as possible." The programme also covered music festivals across Ireland - all the while collecting and compiling valuable, pioneering archive material.
During 1962, and later in 1966, the programme collected Irish music as played in the United States, "we called those shows American Journeywork."
A Job of Journeywork continued until 1970, when Mo Cheol Thu began and that programme, recorded in studio, celebrated its first 25 years recently with an album of selected recordings. Released at Christmas, it has already sold more than 12,000 copies and Mac Mathuna in his slow, careful way mentions: "We were in the bestseller lists there, between Bruce Springsteen and that Icelandic singer, Bjork." Among the selected recordings is an early one of a young Seamus Heaney reading in the mid 1970s from Door into the Dark (1969), his second collection. The poem, The Given Note which was inspired by a story of the Blasket Islands told to the poet by Sean O Riada, describes a musician being given a tune, hearing it coming through the air: "On the most westerly Blasket/In a dry stone hut/He got this air out of the night."
Awarded an honorary doctorate at UCG in 1990, the same year he officially "retired" from RTE, Mac Mathuna has won two Jacobs awards and has three grandchildren as well as three children.
IN Ireland, a country known for its harsh handling of reputations, he enjoys a popularity approaching love. He has always been fairminded and is anxious that RTE's enlightened policy towards"saving our music", begun by the station as early as the 1940s, be fully acknowledged. "In fact, from its first day of broadcasting, 7 years ago this year, RTE - or Radio Eireann as it began - has given special attention to the traditional music of Ireland." Equally, he believes in radio's superiority over television for music. It is the purer medium, he believes. "Even though I did television, radio is a better medium for music. There are no pictures to distract your attention."
