FESTIVAL DIARY:Its past as the base of the Connaught Rangers has left the Roscommon town with a rich history that complements its festival of art, comedy and music, writes Michael Harding
THE MOYLURG WRITERS group has been chronicling Roscommon life for 25 years, in stories and poetry, and its members read every year at Boyle Arts Festival. We had lunch at the Stone House cafe, near the river, and they delighted in telling me that one of their members, Gerry Boland, has a book coming out next year.
They also told me that, long before modern restaurants, there used to be a curry house in Boyle, set up by soldiers who returned from India with sacks of exotic spices. The Connaught Rangers were formidable warriors, based in Boyle, who marched across the globe with fife and drum, and then brought tunes and instruments back to the hills and glens of Roscommon and Leitrim, endowing the region with an enduring tradition of flute music.
I told the Moylurg writers I wanted to see the art exhibition, so they directed me to King House.
Boyle Arts Festival kicked off on Wednesday night with a concert by The Coronas. In the next 10 days Joseph O’Connor, Ardal O’Hanlon, The Kilfenora Céilí Band, Paul Durcan and many more class acts will be performing, but it’s the art on the walls that makes Boyle special for me.
I’m not a critic, but there is always a moment when I see something in the canvas, a real presence that smiles back at me. It’s like what Peter Brook once said of theatre: it makes the invisible visible.
And art is also an act of remembrance. In every work is a sense of what the world looked like for a single moment, in the artist’s eye.
I spent all afternoon in King House, just standing open-heartedly before beautiful works by people such as Neil Shawcross, Barrie Cooke, Imogen Stuart and Katie Wilson.
Art eats into the mind, breaking down cliched perceptions and building new ideas. John Minihan’s photograph of Samuel Beckett, for example, taken in 1984, shocked me because in that year people in Northern Ireland were still walking over the dead bodies of their neighbours to construct their own Ireland, and in Beckett’s bright eyes I fancied I could see the joy of the emigrant, someone who had escaped the cyclic loop of Irish history, the intellectual solipsistic nightmare from which there is no escape except the geographic.
In fact the history of modern Ireland can be summed up in the history of King House itself, built in 1720, as a family residence, and for years the barracks of the Connaught Rangers.
The Irregulars held the house during the Civil War, and tried to blow it up as they left, but it was a rainy night in July, and the weather saved the building. The Irregulars saw no place for such an icon in the pure republic they were hoping to construct by walking over the dead bodies of their brothers.
In the 20th century an elegant room of King House was used to stack turf, and calves were kept in the basement all winter, though it was not fun trying to get the fattened beasts back up the stairs when spring arrived.
Those were the days when Ireland disremembered anything that was slightly British, when we forgot that in many Irish homes, on a single mantelpiece, there might be photographs of uncles serving in Congo side by side with older photographs of grand-uncles, serving in Punjab.
On my way out I saw a man painting a plinth in the main hall.
“This house is magnificent,” I declared.
“Did you meet Maureen O’Sullivan?” he asked.
I said: “No.”
He said: “She’s in the attic!”
So I went back up and found the film actor sitting on an elephant as she smiled at me from a Tarzanposter.
Maureen was a Boyle girl, who had a pony and sometimes went to Dublin Horse Show, and lived two doors down from the barracks, where her father was an officer, before she went to Hollywood and watched her own little girl grow up and marry Frank Sinatra.
Another famous Boyle woman, Margaret Cousins, an enlightened feminist, is not yet officially remembered in King House. She went to India in 1913 and later commented that by 1925 Ireland was a place in which she longer felt at home, and where there was no longer room for such as she.
The cattle and the turf have long been banished from King House, and during Boyle Arts Festival the work of the nation’s finest artists adorns the building so elegantly that I thought I saw the ghost of Margaret Cousins lurking on the landing of a stairs, where centuries of tramping feet have curved the wooden steps, and where as a young girl she often played, and where I fancied she still smiled at me, from a distance.
