An Irishman's Diary

IT’S A measure of the GAA’s greatness that a man such as George Sigerson is now best known for presenting a cup to a Gaelic football competition – the 100th finals of which take place next week.

But a life that stretched from pre-Famine Ireland to the Civil War, embracing achievements in medicine, neuroscience, botany, linguistics, literature, and politics, surely deserves a wider space in the public memory. And next week will also see the start of a campaign to rescue Sigerson from the ghetto in which he has become trapped. Not with a cup, as it happens, but with that related trophy – a plaque – to be erected on his former home in Dublin.

Leaving the man aside for a moment, the house itself is well worth marking. In the tumultuous years of the late 19th and early 20th century, No 3 Clare Street was one of the city’s most famous meeting places for artists, musicians, intellectuals, and plotters.

It was where, for example, WB Yeats met the old Fenian, John O’Leary: soon to join romantic Ireland “in the grave”, as the poet bitterly wrote. Pádraig Pearse was a visitor too. So was Roger Casement. And in the days after Easter Week, many on-the-run republicans found refuge there, including Cathal Brugha.

But it was Sigerson who made it such a pivotal address. Douglas Hyde would pay him the posthumous tribute that "every Gael who suffered for Ireland or who did good work for Ireland had . . . a roof and a home in Dr Sigerson's house". And although the guest list did reflect the owner's politics, it was not exclusive. A correspondent for the English Daily Chronicledescribed Sigerson as "the most hospitable man in Dublin – which is to say much".

Like Brian O'Nolan (who originated in the same year as the aforementioned colleges GAA competition and is also the subject of centenary celebrations in 2011), Sigerson was born in – or near – Strabane, Co Tyrone. In fact, among his many later claims to fame was that he wrote the words of what became that county's unofficial anthem: The Mountains of Pomeroy.

But his medical studies took him to Dublin and Paris, where he studied under the “father of modern neurology”, Jean-Martin Charcot. Also early in his career, reflecting another of his scientific interests, he was proposed for membership of the Linaean Society of London by a certain Charles Darwin, with whom he was friendly.

Back in Dublin, Sigerson lectured at the Catholic University and was still on the staff when it became UCD, serving as professor of botany and later of zoology. Then there were his literary activities. As a linguist, he taught himself Irish to a high standard, thereafter translating old Gaelic poetry, most famously in Bards of the Gael and Gall (1897).

He was chairman of the Irish National Literary Society during the extraordinary period from 1893 to 1924. As such, he earned the inevitable mention in Ulysses – a kind-of military medal for anyone who was prominent in Dublin circa 1904 – when Joyce quoted him saying that “our national epic has yet to be written”. And he somehow also found time to be a prolific journalist and historian.

Funnily enough, amid his long and astonishingly varied life, sport does not seem to have played a prominent part. But a measure of his standing in post-independence Ireland was that he was a made a senator in 1922. And that on the day the chamber sat for the first time, he was unanimously chosen to preside until a vote for cathaoirleach could be held.

Those were bitter times in Ireland, however, and the following February, Sigerson – by now in his late 80s – was forced to resign his to save the same house that will be decorated next week.

It had been threatened with burning by republican extremists, just as Sigerson himself had been warned that he would be shot. The shooting he could risk, he said. But his house was a family residence, a medical surgery, and a virtual museum of manuscript, and other artefacts. He was not prepared to risk all that. In the event, his vacant seat was never filled, so he was able to return to the Senate when the Civil War ended.

Sigerson died in 1925, and even the unionist-leaning Irish Timeswas moved to elegy: "When he was a boy in Strabane," it wrote, "Ireland was a romantic land with a population of eight millions, in tongue and manners scarcely changed from the land of Carolan. Now the last scholar who could tell of that vanished Ireland is himself a memory."

I suggested earlier that the campaign to reclaim his memory would start next week. In fact, the struggle to have a plaque erected in Clare Street began more than seven years ago, in 2003. It was the initiative of a fellow Tyrone man and scholar, Dónal McAnallen. Despite his determination to broaden Sigerson’s fame beyond its sporting confines, Dónal himself is of impeccable GAA stock, being a brother of the late All-Ireland winning captain Cormac, so tragically lost to his family and sport in 2004.

In any case, Dónal's campaign finally reaches fruition on Wednesday March 2nd, when the bilingual plaque will be unveiled by Dublin's Lord Mayor, Gerry Breen. After that, the assembly will proceed to the nearby National Library for the second prong of the Sigerson memorial initiative: the publication of a biography. Written by Ken McGilloway, the book is called George Sigerson: Poet, Patriot, Scientist, Scholar. Which title, if not an exhaustive summary of the great man's life, is at least an improvement on the cup.