REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE PRESENTATION OF THE IRISH TIMES LITERATURE PRIZES
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE PRESENTATION OF THE IRISH TIMES LITERATURE PRIZES - R.D.S. ON THURDAY, 15TH NOVEMBER, 200
I feel a special sense of ownership of this evening’s prize-winners having read every book on the short list (and they made for a terrific feast of reading) and having silently made my own selection which the judges proceeded unwittingly to vindicate in its entirety. My only regret is that I didn’t put money on the outcome - I guarantee if I had though I would have spent it all on books! The shortlisted books took me on many journeys yet in the five winning books, recurring words and sentiments and themes emerge out of very different experiential and thinking landscapes, pulling the reader in many different directions. This one reader among others owes a lot to the writers we celebrate this evening and to the Irish Times for guiding us so surefootedly to them.
The Weather in Japan, according to our distinguished award-winning poet Michael Longley
“Makes bead curtains of the rain
Of the mist a paper screen.”
I who have never been to Japan except through Michael’s word-painting eyes, instead saw Donegal where the sheeting rain fills the sparkling spring wells, in the amazing Cathal O’Searcaigh’s poem “An Tobar.”
He writes regretfully:-
“Ach le fada tá uisce reatha
ag fiaradh chugainn isteach
o chnoic i bhád uainn
is i ngach cisteanach
ar dhá taobh an ghleanna
scairdeann uisce as sconna
uisce lom gan loinnir
a bhuil blas searbh sulaigh air
is i measc mo dhaoine
tá tobar an fioruisce ag dul i ndichuimhne”
“But this long time, piped water from distant hills
Sneaks into every kitchen
On both sides of the glen
Water spurts from a tap
Mawkish, without sparkle
Zestless as slops
And among my people
The springwell is being forgotten”
The poem ends with the admonition:-
“Caithfear pilleadh arís ar na foinsi”.
“There will have to be a going back to the sources.”
The sources seem to promise to “out a stir in you and life” at least so the old woman in the opening line of Cathal’s poem says:-
“Cuirfidh se bri ionat agus beatha.”
Yet going back to the sources is precisely what Paulie does in William Trevor’s evocative Irish Fiction winner - the Hill Bachelors. Back Paulie goes, not to life and hope but to the grim humourless half-dead world of the small hill-farm to fulfil his dreary duty as the bachelor son of a widowed mother. The world of piped water of a dead-end job in a nondescript middle-England town is manifestly the destiny he wants but stoically denies himself. There is in his rural Irish condition little of the rich, stirring wordy landscape of O’Searcaigh’s beloved Min a Lea. Such different worlds in such a little island.
And Angela Bourke in the non-fiction section - she too goes back to true historical sources in her fine exploration of the cruel burning to death of Bridget Cleary in late 19th century Ireland. A lovely, clever and talented young woman her death at the hands of husband and relatives was shocking but there were deep running sources at work which no outsider could see or comprehend. Witches, fairies and ghosts had wreaked havoc inside people’s heads from generation to generation so that their thoughts jumped along tracks others could not follow. Judged by outsiders who did not know the sources, who had no roadmap to point them out, the killers were the uncivilised, the uncivilisable, Bridget’s death, heinous, evil, incomprehensible.
In his poem “All of these people” Michael Longley asks
“Who can bring peace to people who are not civilised?” The probing scholarship of Angela Bourke cannot bring peace but maybe belatedly some glimmer of understanding but Longley’s scary question is the same one that resonates in Michael Ondaatje’s lyrical “Anil’s Ghost”. Here too are mutilated bodies, ancient rituals, power struggles and clashes between old worlds and uncomprehending new ones. From Sri Lanka to Tipperary doesn’t seem so far when you read Ondaatje and Bourke at one sitting.
And I don’t know the answer to Longley’s sombre question. Like O’Searcaigh, I too am “Ag Tnuth leis and tsolas”- “yearning for the light” but while I wait for it to dawn, or maybe even in pursuit of it, I do know that there is phenomenal peace and provocation in the reading of each of our award winners work. They are individually magnificent, collectively a feast of the finest exemplars of the craft of writing.
That is why I am both delighted and honoured to be here with you this evening to present The Irish Times Literature Prizes for 2001. I congratulate The Irish Times for its promotion of literature and the arts; for its cherishing of the mysterious and potent value of the word; and for its courage and loyalty in offering Irish writers in particular an opportunity to work towards a prize which speaks of the respect in which they and their craft are held.
Patrick Kavanagh, never a man to sell himself or his craft verbally short, gives us a wonderful insight into the pain and self-sacrifice necessary to achieve the goal of artistic creation. In this poem, Ascetic, he says:-
“For this, for this
Do I wear
The rags of hunger and climb
The unending stair”.
With the help of the Irish Times I hope never to encounter any of our authors in the rags of hunger. In the case of Cathal O’Searcaigh who is on record as saying he has never met a calorie he did not like, I am reasonably confident such an encounter is unlikely. We meet every year in Gleann Colmcille. Cathal will be on his way back to Donegal from my home village of Rostrevor. My neighbour Sodilva knows I am on holiday there and she worries I will die of the hunger and so since Cathal is going that way she fills his haversack with jams, chutneys and a stone weight of brown bread. Cathal carries it on the bus over half of Ireland and delivers it to me in the parochial hall.
That is and always has been the way, the intimate, easy-going, heart-lifting way of the glen. I watch each year as he introduces an ancient civilisation to an audience of culture tourists and hold them utterly spellbound in a language they do not fully understand but in which he is the complete master. What a terrific reassurance it is to have such genius writing in the Irish language. What a privilege it is too, to have the distilled wisdom of Michael Longley, the relentless academic scrutiny of Angela Bourke, the subtle deep focussed eye of William Trevor all writing in Ireland and of Ireland, of so many Irelands.
The centrality of literature in Irish life is a phenomenon worth never taking for granted. The elevated place Irish writers occupy in the world of literature is a righteous source of pride and thankfully each generation adds its own stars to the long list. And we take pride too in the literary talent that comes to us from around the world. To an avid reader there is nothing more delightful than the discovery of a new writer, nothing more infuriating than exhausting everything he or she has written and waiting impatiently for the next novel or collection.
I remember my first encounter with Michael Ondaatje’s work fourteen years ago, when my brother brought me a gift of ‘In the Skin of a Lion’ and the craving for more began. It does not end with Anil’s Ghost - just whets the appetite for more. And the Irish Times reward of excellence, its encouragement of writers, is the best guarantee that there will not only be more but more of the very best.
So, well done to all of the nominees and congratulations to each of the winners. You have enriched our lives, given us many hours of quiet pleasure, opened us up to places and people unknown, opened us up even at times to our unknown selves. All that for less than the price of a modest round of drinks for two. Who could ask more of you - and yet we always do. I hope you take our impatience for more, as a deserved compliment.
Go raibh maith agaibh go léir.