THE DEATH of the writer Patrick Galvin is a loss not just to Cork’s literary life, but also on a national level. His was one of those maverick voices which probably never received the acclaim it was due and he came from a generation of writers for whom there were few enough official honours.
However, his work was and will remain cherished by those who recognise its distinctive qualities and the fearlessness of the writing. An iconoclast, he was – and quite admirably so – one of those writers indifferent to literary fashions and at odds with the trends.
First and foremost, the multi-talented Galvin was a poet, a fact he firmly established with the publication of his debut collection, Heart of Grace, in 1957. The deeply personal title poem – about the brutalities of his experiences as a child in a reform school – was a precursor to the work for which he is probably most widely known because of its transfer to the cinema screen, Song for A Raggy Boy. Galvin's harrowing poem and his evocative novel – part of his memoir trilogy – broke the silence on institutional child abuse long before the horrors of the Ryan report were revealed.
Having turned his hand to writing for the stage during a formative period in London in the 1950s, he later became writer-in-residence in Belfast's Lyric Theatre where he was a provocative dramatist with works such as We Do It For Loveand Nightfall to Belfast.
Apart from his writing, he was an energetic instigator of cultural projects – as founder of the renowned Poetry Now festival in Dun Laoghaire which, to no one’s credit, recently ceased to exist in the form that made it one of the country’s major literary events since he established it. He was also a co-founder of Cork city’s dynamic and vital Munster Literature Centre. Nor will his accomplishments as a songwriter and folk-singer be forgotten, especially wherever and whenever his ballad-eulogy to his socialist hero James Connolly is sung.
His contribution to our literary life has left its traces in places beyond Cork – though Theo Dorgan makes a very relevant point in saying that “together with Frank O’Connor he was probably the truest voice” out of that city. Galvin’s deep humanity was fostered in the working-class environment of Margaret Street where he grew up and where he first developed the socialist principles that were to become his guiding precepts. The Raggy Boy’s impulse has always been to side with those on the margins – these and the dispossessed were the first with a claim on his pen.