Getting ambushed by brilliant minds in Kilkenny

FESTIVAL DIARY:Love and longing drives MICHAEL HARDINGthrough the streets of Kilkenny, soaking up the atmosphere and action at this years Kilkenny Arts Festival

THE MINISTER for Culture looked immaculate in a white jacket as she opened the festival in the courtyard of the Pembroke Hotel last Friday.

It must have been a last-minute decision to do the speeches in the open air, because the monitors were all inside, and it was eerie to stand in front of her and hear her voice coming from inside the building behind me.

Later I wandered up through the narrow streets of the city where thin sophisticated people sat outside restaurants, drinking coffee.

A crowd was queuing at the Watergate Theatre to hear Philip King sing songs and Joseph O’Connor read from his novels.

I sat at the back of the auditorium, happy as a child at the fireside, as the pair of boys on stage chatted about music and song and the way the Irish are great storytellers. It was a cozy affair and the audience was enthralled.

King described the piper Seamus Ennis living in a caravan in Dublin at the end of his life. It was a stark image. Then on the PA we heard a slow air, Easter Snow, from the pipes of the master, and O’Connor read a poem by Dermot Bolger, so elegant in its imagining of old ghosts at the window of a piper’s caravan that the hair stood up on the back of my neck.

I got a take-away pizza in Mizzoni’s at midnight as a woman tried to get the man behind the counter to refill her empty Ballygowan bottle with water from the tap. Instead, he gave her a fresh bottle for free, and she went off pleased, with a man much younger than herself, who was so intoxicated he didn’t seem to know where he was, but they clung to each other tenderly, as they headed down the street.

Nightclubs pumped out rap music and in my hotel bed I felt like a child gone early to its cradle.

At 2.30 the revellers came out on the streets in high spirits, and woke me, though in a short while they were all taxied away, and the night became as silent as it might have been when Cromwell was sleeping across the river, or when Jonathan Swift was lying in his bed in the college up the street.

“You look happy,” the waitress said to me at breakfast. I said “I’m in love.” I meant with Kilkenny, but her English wasn’t great so I didn’t go into detail.

Then I went to the Set Theatre, where a documentary about Gabriel Byrne was being screened, and even at that hour of the morning the actor’s face was mesmerizing, and I felt he was talking directly to me.

It takes generosity in an actor to refine personal agony into an art as public as theatre, and there are shades of powerful sorrow in Byrne the actor, and Byrne the man; his intense screen presence stayed with me all morning, as I idled about on High Street, Butter Slip and Pudding Lane.

At John’s Bridge a poet with grey hair was leaning against the wall, a paper cup of coffee in his hand, and we greeted each other and rejoiced a while, at being alive in such a city of ordered civility.

And in the evening I went to the cathedral to hear Robert Fisk deliver the Hubert Butler lecture. I sat on a beanbag because the place was so full.

Hubert Butler, who helped found Kilkenny Festival, celebrated his wedding breakfast at Tyrone Guthrie’s house in Monaghan, 80 years ago, in a room where I too fell in love, almost 30 years ago, and where I first met all those young aspiring writers who are now grey and famous and walking the streets of Kilkenny.

In the medieval cathedral, Fisk sat on a big leather armchair as Olivia O’Leary did the introductions. Then he rose, looking almost lonely, in a casual cardigan, and speaking with wry humour, occasional satire, and enormous intellectual clarity.

Fisk’s physical stature may have been diminished by the towering vaults of the cathedral, but his dignity was immense as he delivered his very particular message, and challenge to the audience.

“Above all else, the people of the Middle East want justice,” he declared. “And that,” he added, “we don’t intend to give them, but we pretend in our newspapers that we do.”

Hubert Butler would have been proud of him. In fact Jonathan Swift might have offered his admiration, because both Butler and Swift were writers who bore witness to the truth and who addressed the political realm with savage indignation. And that’s the tradition in which Fisk too lives his remarkable life. And that’s why I love Kilkenny Arts Festival; because it’s possible to get ambushed by brilliant minds in the most unexpected of places.