North Atlantic Skyline - - Photographs from the west of Ireland (Galway, Mayo, Clare, Limerick, Roscommon and even Leitrim)

Oliver St John Gogarty

The Financial Times carries a generally positive piece about Renvyle House in Galway, though the correspondent seems less enthused about the effects of the Celtic Tiger

The Celtic tiger is still burning bright, and he's building himself some fine new lairs. Galway City in the far west of Ireland is now ringed with large, multi-bedroomed, satellite-dished and balconied houses, which have come to be known as "McMansions" - catalogue-bought grandeur. New roads and bypasses are also being built. The poetic west of J. M. Synge, the Technicolor west of The Quiet Man and even the satiric west of Father Ted is getting that bit more elusive as the euros wash over the peat bogs.

The McMansions are grouped tight together like the pristine urbanizacions that litter southern Spain. But eventually you break free and head down the N59. The ground gets peatier, the hillsides steeper, the prospect less promising for developers and more exciting for weekend escapers.

Tut tut…You'd think that the FT would be more enthusiastic about unfettered capitalism. Renvyle House was once the home of Oliver St. John Gogarty, and as it happened, I was driving down the N59 myself last night listening to an archived interview on RTE Radio 1 with Gogarty as he reminisced about his early life sharing a spartan apartment with another aspiring writer in Dublin at the turn of the twentieth century. Well, not so much an apartment as a gun emplacement, or Martello tower, and that writer was James Joyce.

Full marks to RTE for laying their hands on the interview - it was made by the BBC in the late Forties (apparently, no recordings exist or remain in RTE of Gogarty) - less laudable is the lack of reference to the programme on the RTE website (the search engine is just useless). The interview was recorded on acetate, so it hissed and crackled a bit and Gogarty was in his seventies when he gave it. But there was no lack of energy or fizzle in the conversation - Gogarty was quite a character and I suspect that the stories he told were just the clean ones. Gogarty features in Ulysses as Buck Mulligan, and describes the novel as "the pot in which we [Joyce's friends and acquaintances] were all boiled". He related the tale of why Joyce moved out of the tower. Gogarty knew a fellow studying in Oxford and invited him to stay with them when he visited Ireland. Gogarty describes him as a Gaelic zealot - he would let Joyce or Gogarty shine their shoes because the polish wasn't made in Ireland. When he discovered that the housing on the oil lamps weren't Irish either, he removed them, so that, in Gogarty's words, "we had plenty of smoke but no light". This chap wasn't a light sleeper either - he woke up one night screaming about a black panther, then produced a Colt pistol and fired a few shots at the beast only he could see, before collapsing back on his bed and nodding off again. Fearing a return of either the cat or the gun, Gogarty took the pistol. Twenty minutes later, the zealot woke up again, screaming and reached for the gun. Gogarty, in order to placate him, fired another couple of shots at some tins sitting on a shelf. The next morning, without a word, Joyce packed his things and moved out, never to return. Flatmates, eh?

Posted by Monasette at January 30, 2005 08:54 PM | TrackBack