Michael Harding on Tom MacIntyre: Rugged faces in court knew he spoke their language

Tom McIntyre has traipsed the world from New York to Moscow with his plays and poems, but he still speaks the language of the drumlins and all those lovely haunted lakes, writes MICHAEL HARDING

I was in Bailieboro last weekend for a festival to celebrate the work of playwright and poet Tom McIntyre, a man I first met in 1976 in the mountains of west Cavan.

I was a boyish schoolmaster at the time and one day the locals in the pub told me that there was a poet in the old house on the hill.

“He arrived last night,” they said. “Nobody knows from where, or for why.” They thought it was my duty as the schoolmaster to approach the big old house on the hill and welcome the poet on behalf of the community – me being what they called an educated person.

So up I drove that evening in my Austin A40 and knocked on the door, though it was already open. A second time I knocked without success, but at the third knock I heard a faint voice from within.

“Help!” the poet cried, “help!” Fearing the worst, I went in and flew up the stairs to find a white haired man with extraordinary eyes propped up in a bed of many pillows, reading a book.

“Thank God you’ve arrived,” he said. “I am in urgent need of some fresh fish!” And that was the beginning of our friendship. Over the years I have sat with him at many hearthstones in many different houses, as the dusk settled around us and the wine stood warming by a blazing fire.

Not that it’s easy sitting with Tom MacIntyre. He doesn’t bother with small talk. Like an ancient philosopher, he interrogates his company, usually with variations of the one question – what are you doing with your life? And he can sit for ages without speaking; just sifting the silence for words, like a fisherman waiting for a trout to hop out of a lake.

The McIntyre Literary Weekend included staged readings of his plays, and a lecture by the distinguished director Patrick Mason.

On Saturday evening McIntyre was in the courthouse to read poetry. The courthouse in Bailieboro is a lofty room of shadows with dark wooden benches for lawyers, and a great podium with curtains where the majestic judges once presided over the troubled souls of the district.

The courtroom was a good choice for a poetry reading, because in the drumlin counties writers are always seen as outlaws, beyond the surveillance of State or church, in their chosen profession to be speakers of the unconscious, witnesses to the holy door, and standard-bearers for the invisible world that neither judge nor cleric can ever control. McIntyre rose to speak at 8pm. He is an elderly man, with white hair, and a gentle voice that still contains the thunder of a life lived intensely.

“I remember as a child,” he began, “dreaming of two horses; a brown and a dove-grey. It was my first great dream, and now recently I see them again. They return in old age, though not so much the brown, but more frequently the dove-grey.” Perhaps in an urban setting such an opening statement might sound erudite; might be taken as the introduction to a discourse on Jung or some other great analyst. But on the rugged faces of the people packed into the courtroom there was a knowing ease; they relaxed, because they knew he was still talking their language.

McIntyre has traipsed the world from New York to Moscow with his plays and poems. The Great Hunger was a ground- breaking play in Irish theatre. Rise Up Lovely Sweeneyis unequalled as a meditation on the allure of violence that overrides even eroticism in the Irish psyche. But most of all his love songs, and translations of love songs, his attachment to all the haunted lakes of Cavan, his relish for words and all their juicy innuendoes, mark him out as an unruly bard in that great tradition of south-Ulster poets that reaches back to people like Cathal Buí Mac Giolla Ghunna, Peadar Ó Doirnín and Séamas Dall Mac Cuarta.

His reading on Saturday night was peppered with references to ghosts, and other invisible things, and the creaking room of shadows wrapped itself around the speaker, and gave substance to the insubstantial – though speaking of ghosts in a secular age is no way of making yourself fashionable.

Fortunately, fashion doesn’t bother McIntyre, nor indeed the people who live in those dark drumlins and along the shores of all those lovely haunted lakes.

His reading was peppered with references to ghosts . . . and the creaking room of shadows wrapped itself around him, and gave substance to the insubstantial