Brendan Flynn was midwife to Clifden Community Arts Week when it began 32 years ago and he is still driving it forward today
BRENDAN FLYNN recognises the distinctive frenzied chorus of the Arctic terns that congregate around north Connemara in April. The birds, regarded as the “champions” of long-distance migration in their commute from the north to south pole and back again, land to nest on a reef on Salt Lake close to his home and Clifden Community School. And with spray from the world’s oceans on their feathertips, they inspire Flynn into action. “I know that if the programme isn’t ready by then, I am in trouble.”
The “programme” for Clifden Community Arts Week, the longest running community arts festival in Ireland, took up one A4 sheet some 32 years ago, but now it is a much more ambitious production. Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney, fellow poets Paul Muldoon, Mary O’Malley, Michael Longley, Gerard Smyth, musicians Scullion, Cherish the Ladies, Finghín Collins . . . these are some of the many participants in this year’s event, which opens on September 17th.
Once again, there will be readings, music, comedy, theatre, film, an archaeological field trip, John Durning’s art trail, and an extensive workshop schedule for primary school students, co-ordinated by Eily O’Grady.
The second-level community school staff and students will also be a focus for much of the activity, for it was at the school that a “stream of artists, writers and poets, who expanded the school walls and tore strips off the prescribed syllabi” began arriving for the festival from 1974, one former pupil, Grace O’Grady, has recalled.
Flynn, who is originally from Ballinasloe in east Galway, spent his teaching career in the school – latterly as vice-principal – after some years working abroad in Africa and Spain. The late Br Killian Kearney, school principal from 1974 to 1983, allocated an afternoon a week to creative studies.
That time was taken and treasured, shaped and stretched gradually into what is now a 10-day festival of international standing. The otherworldly English teacher who could speak to his pupils of Manrique, Lorca, Yeats and Proust in one breath credits the school staff and entire Clifden community for this; he says he is “just the messenger boy”, but it is generally acknowledged that he was and is the essential magnet.
Seamus Heaney was one of the first visitors, reading in the library, and other early guests included the late John McGahern, Richard Murphy, Neil Jordan and Desmond Hogan. The Clifden Anthology, collated by school students Niall Black, Brian Hogan and Ian O’Malley for the festival’s 30th anniversary two years ago, was dedicated to late Clifden friends, writer John Moriarty and poet Michael Hartnett.
The collection of poetry and prose is a snapshot of work by dozens of writers and artists who have fallen under Flynn’s spell, ranging from Áine Ní Ghlinn, Paula Meehan and Joan McBreen to Colm Tóibín, Michael Viney and John Waters. One excerpt, a radio essay by Martin Drury, recalls a former mentor; but it could have been Flynn, for it captures his impact on his constituency.
Drury writes of being a 12-year-old boy in a classroom, working on a composition but locked in a “thought bubble” and unable to find words to describe eating chips. The teacher offers to help. “After listening to me attentively, he suggests that I lick the tips of my fingers. And that does it: the sensation is recalled. Like a skilled museum attendant, my teacher has helped me to open the case of my memory, and the sensation of salt and vinegar is released. . .”
Flynn recalls how initial Arts Council funding virtually stopped during the last recession in 1984 and for several years thereafter.
“Somehow we survived and had to plan accordingly. But we have to honour the artists and we cannot be put in a situation where we cannot acknowledge them. These are people who the tiger never touched.
“I think during the current debate on our economy it is wonderful to hear so many voices emphasising the importance of the arts now,” Flynn says. “We have such a journey ahead of us, and the words of WB Yeats are so relevant now when he wrote (in The Circus Animals’ Desertion) of how ‘Now that my ladder’s gone, I must lie down where all the ladders start/ In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.’
“As musician Martin Long said to Siobhán Long , this is a time for re-invention and a time to recognise the healing power of music and the arts,” he continues. “Just think of the translated text for Francisco Goya’s famous painting in the British Museum – ‘imagination abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters; united with her she is the mother of the arts and the source of wonders’. . . doesn’t that say something about our society now?”
“In the mid-1930s, US president Franklin D Roosevelt believed in encouraging the imagination,” Flynn says.
“Barack Obama is echoing these words. I feel a powerful step needs to be taken forward. . . perhaps that is why I feel so energised.”
The 32nd Clifden Community Arts Week runs Sept 17-27. Programme details and on-line booking on clifdenartsweek.ie
The festival will be opened by teacher and hurling manager Ger Loughane in the West Connemara Leisure Centre, Clifden, on September 17th.
Arts Council arts director Martin Drury and child psychologist David Coleman are key speakers at a conference on the critical contribution that arts can make to children’s lives and to society as a whole, hosted by the Baboró international children’s festival in Galway in October.
The Natural Born Artists conference is funded by the Arts Council, NUI Galway and the European Commission’s Culture 2007–13 programme and full details are on baboro.ie
