Padraic Fiacc was known as the “Poet of the Troubles” due to his humane writing about that dark period in history. His birth name was Patrick Joseph O’Connor and he hailed from Belfast.
He was born 100 years ago in April 1924 on Elizabeth Street in the Lower Falls area of the city. His mother’s family were burnt out of their home in Lisburn during the pogroms of 1920 and he grew up on East Street in the Markets area of Belfast.
The family moved to New York in 1929 when he was around five years of age. Hell’s Kitchen in Midtown Manhattan was his new home initially. Growing up, he hung over the fire escapes on 98th Street and slept in the baseball pitches of Central Park to escape the intense summer heat.
He attended a high school where Latin and the humanities were taught. He relished the opportunities that the school gave him for intellectual stimulation and the chance to meet children from different backgrounds.
Poet of the Troubles – Oliver O’Hanlon on Padraic Fiacc
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“I remember” – Tim Fanning on the power of cinema to unlock the secrets of memory and nostalgia
It had a mix of pupils from the area (the majority of which were black) as well as the children of those who were fleeing Nazi oppression in Europe. He filled his time with poetry, music and painting. He wrote plays in French and Latin and later described his school years as “exciting and scintillating”.
Fiacc spent a number of years in a Franciscan seminary in upstate New York and also had a stint in an Irish Capuchin monastery. He stayed partly to escape the military draft and partly to get an education but left around the age of 21 as he discovered that it was not the life he wanted.
Years later, looking back on his time in New York, he seemed conflicted about it. On one hand, he enjoyed the cultural melting pot that it was and the opportunities it afforded him. He was particularly grateful about his school days and felt that his formative years were enriched by having African, Asian, Middle Eastern and European classmates.
He was also thankful for one of his teachers who transformed him from an “uncouth slum adolescent” into an “incurable aspiring poet”. Being able to see the actress Greta Garbo or the composer Sergei Rachmaninov alight from a taxi to browse in a downtown antique shop was also a positive. On the other hand, he did not miss the “furnace of a West Side summer”.
He returned to live in Belfast in 1946 and worked in various jobs including as a hotel night porter, before going back to New York for around a decade. When he came back to Belfast again, he bought a house in the suburb of Glengormley with his American wife.
In 1957, he won the AE Memorial Award for Poetry for his collection Woe to the Boy. His nom de plume “Padraic Fiacc” was a nod to his mentor Padraic Colum, who he met in New York. Fiacc was chosen to represent the Irish word “fiach” (raven in English).
He spoke of this time in Belfast as a hopeful period. That changed when the Troubles broke out and he would come to refer to the city as “Hellfast”. In 1974, he edited an anthology of contemporary poetry that dealt with the Troubles. Entitled The Wearing of the Black, it drew criticism from some who thought that it was too close to the bone.
Nine-year-old Patrick Rooney was the first child killed in the Troubles in August 1969. Fiacc wrote Elegy for a “Fenian Get” for the boy who was killed by what he termed a “trigger-happy cow-boy cop”.
In a poem entitled, Victory on Ship Street, Fiacc used irony to highlight the killing of two young girls who died when a car bomb was detonated outside a Catholic-owned bar in the now-vanished dockland area of Sailortown.
In October 1972, the bloodiest year of the Troubles, the lives of six-year-old Paula Stronge and four-year-old Clare Hughes were cut short. They had been trick-or-treating near their homes when the bomb went off. It was, according to Fiacc “another blow struck for our very own corner on Devil’s Island” and it resulted in “two wee girls in Halloween dress burnt to death as witches”.
Along with the Troubles casting a shadow on life in Northern Ireland, Fiacc experienced his own dark years. He had mental health difficulties and his marriage broke down but he continued to write poetry.
Gerald Dawe claimed that Fiacc was “much overlooked by the critical and literary establishment” and he was a “perennial outsider”. However, recognition from his peers did come on occasion, such as his election to Aosdána in 1981, the year he won the Poetry Ireland Award.
He died at age 95 in January 2019. Dawe lauded him for being the only poet that would be so “forthright and committed in saying the uncomfortable thing”.