PATRICK GALVIN:THE POET and playwright Patrick Galvin, who has died aged 83, began his literary career in London and saw it blossom in Belfast.
His work drew on and reflected his experiences in his native Cork, but was not limited or constrained by them. His early work showed the influence of Gaelic folk poetry while his later poetry reflected his interest in Spanish history and culture, most notably the work of Federico García Lorca.
He lived and worked in Belfast at the height of the Troubles in the 1970s, and a 200lb bomb was detonated outside a theatre where one of his plays was being staged. As a playwright he thrived on the constant tension, but was uneasy that his creative work needed such stimulation. In attempting to come to terms with this apparent contradiction, he explained: “You’re closer to life and death in Belfast . . . you’re forced to examine your prejudices when you live here.”
Having observed political violence at close quarters he concluded that nothing could be worse than killing for a cause “not only irrelevant, but obscene”.
Born in Cork in 1927, he was the second of seven children of Patrick Galvin and his wife Bridget (née O’Brien). The family lived in a two-roomed attic flat in Margaret Street, and he was educated by the Presentation Brothers.
His mother worked as an office cleaner while his father was a casual docker. His parent’s opposing political allegiances – his mother was a republican, his father a Free State supporter – made for heated debate in the politically volatile 1930s.
His literary leanings were inherited from his father who, though illiterate, had an extraordinary knowledge of Irish ballads and folk songs. He was taught to read and write by Mannie Goldman, a local “scribe” who introduced him to Tolstoy, Emile Zola, Voltaire and Marlowe among others – “and for good measure, the ballad history of my native city”.
He left school at 11 and became a messenger boy, later working as an assistant cinema projectionist. At the age of 14, and deemed to be beyond his parent’s control, he was sent to St Conleth’s reformatory school, Daingean, Co Offaly. There he survived beatings, cut turf in the bog and heard first-hand accounts of the Spanish Civil War from an Oblate brother who had fought on the Republican side. After two years he was released, walking barefoot to catch the train home to Cork.
Unable to find employment, he travelled to Belfast and enlisted in the Royal Air Force. He described serving in West Africa during the second World War as “sheer absolute boredom”.
Demobbed, he worked briefly at Cork docks before moving to London. He earned enough from odd jobs to support himself while he wrote poems and songs. He also performed on the BBC radio programme As I Roved Out, presented by Séamus Ennis. He later recorded seven albums of Irish ballads. His first published poems appeared in Poetry Ireland.
Writers he met in London included Dylan Thomas, Louis MacNeice and Brendan Behan. His first poetry collection, Heart of Grace, published in 1957, was followed by Christ in London (1960). These two volumes harked back to the folk ballad tradition and were noteworthy for their enthusiasm and stylish bravado.
The Woodburners(1973) was more contemplative, partly in response to the eruption of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland. One of his best-known poems, The Mad Woman of Cork, which has been compared to Yeats's Crazy Jane sequence, reflects a deep compassion for the poor and deprived.
In the early 1960s he spent 18 months working in an Israeli kibbutz. Invited to lecture on Irish folksongs in Berlin and Leipzig, he was intrigued by East Germany but dismayed by its political culture. The state’s promotion of world peace was so aggressive, he recalled, “that it was almost frightening”.
Two early plays, And Him Stretched(1960) and Cry the Believers(1961), were staged in London and Dublin. A television play, Boy in the Smoke, followed in 1965. Awarded a Leverhulme Fellowship, he wrote a series of plays for the Lyric Theatre, Belfast, that included Nightfall to Belfast (1973), The Last Burning(1974) and My Silver Bird(1981).
We Do It for Love(1974) was his biggest commercial success. Ambitious, romantic and sentimental, it nevertheless inspired a generation of Northern playwrights. At its core was the proposition that ordinary working people held the key to a resolution of the Troubles.
This provoked strong criticism. Berated for refusing to acknowledge that the Border was at the heart of the conflict, he replied: “I’m afraid that particular heart went out of me the first time I saw the remains of my fellow-Irishmen being swept into plastic bags.”
Galvin’s political stance was probably best summarised in a publisher’s blurb which described him as: “Catholic, yet not clerical; Irish, yet not ultra-nationalist; internationalist, yet not irresponsible”. Nevertheless, he felt that historical revisionism was due a swipe in a verse he added to The Boys of Kilmichael.
He was a founding editor of the literary magazine Chanticleer and with John Boyd edited the Lyric Theatre’s journal Threshold. Following a term as writer-in-residence for the British East Midlands Arts Council, he returned to Cork in the early 1980s.
Folk Tales for the General(1989) is regarded by some critics as the high point of his poetic career. His New and Selected Poems was published in 1996.
The final volume of his memoirs, Song for a Fly Boy, was published in The Raggy Boy Trilogy (2002), together with the preceding volumes, Song for a Poor Boy and Song for a Raggy Boy. The memoirs combine Galvin’s ability to tell a compelling story with his natural dramatic flair and contain some of his best writing. A film version of Song for a Raggy Boy was released in 2003.
A member of Aosdána, he took part in writer-in-residence programmes in Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown and Co Kerry. He received the Irish-American Cultural Institute’s O’Shaughnessy Award for Poetry in 1995. A founder of both the Munster Literature Centre and Poetry Now festival, in June 2006 an honorary doctorate was conferred on him by University College Cork.
Galvin had been ill since suffering a stroke in 2003. Three of his four marriages ended in divorce. He is survived by his wife Mary Johnson, children Gráinne, Macdara, Christine and Liam; his son Patrick Newley predeceased him.
Patrick Galvin: born August 15th, 1927; died May 9th, 2011