FINE GAEL chairman Padraic McCormack showed off his circus skills at Galway’s leg of the national arts day of action yesterday.
The Galway West TD even had his own box of juggling balls, as he rolled up his sleeves and joined Mike Hennelly and Steven McGinley in a round below the steps of the Town Hall Theatre.
“This is something politicians never have to do,” master of ceremonies and Galway Arts Centre director Páraic Breathnach said.
Former Macnas man Gary McMahon, who was watching the performance, recalled how McCormack had juggled his way, literally, through the opening of a Galway Arts Festival when he was city mayor in 1992.
McCormack said that he was self taught, and had learned for a part in the Renmore pantomime. “If I’d known that Michael Kitt was going to be here with the accordion, I’d have done it to music.”
Then up stepped independent TD Noel Grealish, to read William Wordsworth’s Daffodils.
“Like my political career . . . wandering lonely,” he said, recalling how he had learned it at national school over 40 years ago.
The event organised by broadcaster and arts activist Lelia Doolan had opened with a rendition by Simon O’Dwyer from an trumpa crédha, a bronze trumpet modelled on the Lochnashade trumpet in the National Museum of Ireland, followed by a reading by Aosdána member and Galway-based poet Moya Cannon.
Former arts minister Michael D Higgins also read from his own work, while Fianna Fáil Galway East TD Michael Kitt also played with Madame Bonaparte in duet with the renowned musician Mairtín O’Connor.
Singer Mary McPartlan joined the pair to sing The Galway Shawl, and Fine Gael senator Fidelma Healy Eames stepped up to recite Things by Eloise Greenfield.
Minister for Social Protection Éamon Ó Cuív arrived last, but not least, and joined poet Colette Nic Aodha to read a piece of her work inspired by the late great writer Mairtín Ó Direáin, entitled An Direánach.
It seemed the right time, the right place, the right choice for a former Gaeltacht minister, for the Aran islander’s birth centenary takes place this year.
