By Terry Reilly
Congratulations to Mayo-born Enda Kenny, who is the new Taoiseach (Prime Minister) of the Republic of Ireland. His party—Fine Gael—swept into power with the help of the Labour Party, in the process all but wiping out the powerful Fianna Fail party, which had been the dominant force in Irish politics since it was founded by Eamon De Valera in 1926.
From Islandeady, near Castlebar, and son of the late Henry Kenny, one of Mayo’s most legendary Gaelic footballers, Enda Kenny’s victory was one of stunning proportions. His party won seventy seats, with Labour taking thirty-seven to give the two coalition parties a solid majority in the 166-seat assembly. The Greens were wiped out, Fianna Fail reduced from seventy-seven representatives in 2007 to a mere nineteen, while Sinn Fein and Independents accounted for fourteen seats each.
Kenny is Fine Gael’s first Taoiseach since John Bruton, from 1994 to 1997, and the first Fine Gael leader to win government in an election since Garret FitzGerald in 1982. Kenny served as Minister for Tourism and Trade from 1994 to 1997. He has been leader of Fine Gael since 2002, and is the longest serving Deputy in Dáil Éireann still in office, and is the incumbent Father of the Dail. He is also a two-term Vice President of the European People’s Party.
His first eight days in office took in many engagements, including a whirlwind visit to Washington and the White House for St. Patrick’s Day celebrations and the traditional presentation of a bowl of shamrock to US President Barack Obama who plans a visit to Ireland in May.
Less than forty-eight hours after he received his seal of office from President Mary McAleese at Áras an Uachtarán, Kenny attended an EU leaders’ summit in Luxembourg and the following night, back in his hometown, he received a hero’s welcome.
Conceding that Ireland had an economic mountain to climb, he told the crowd of 3,000 people that the country would defend its case ‘as equals’ in the EU. “And what I believe in is that we have within ourselves as a people the creativity, the imagination, the ingenuity, the capacity to be the best in the world. Irish people for centuries, because of adversity, because of economic circumstances, were forced to travel to other countries, give their duty to those jurisdictions and make their way in far distant lands,” he said. “They’ve proven on thousands of occasions how they’ve measured up in the field of literature or sport or art or business or whatever. When Paddy puts his mind to it, there are very few who can match his intention.”
After waiting for so many years to reach the pinnacle of Irish politics, Kenny is faced with many serious challenges as the country battles to bring order to its off-colour finances, with unemployment nearing 15% and with emigration taking over 1,000 people out of the country every week. The figures are stark. In the year to April 2010 as many as 65,300 people left the country, about the same number as left in 2009. This is just below the 70,600 people who emigrated in 1989, a year when unemployment stood at almost eighteen per cent.
English-speaking countries such as Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the US remain favourite destinations with a new generation of Irish emigrants.
Poet Raftery did not write Mise Raiftearai!
When we went to primary school one of the first poems we learned was Mise Raiftearaí an File (I am Raftery the poet). It tells of the poet’s longing to be back in his native Mayo at the dawning of spring. Though one of the most enduring poems in the Irish language, the man credited as author didn’t actually write it, it is claimed!
Not only that, but Anthony Raftery’s autobiographical verse may in fact have been penned on the American side of the Atlantic, according to research for an Irish TV documentary. While working on the project over the past four years that award-winning director Sean Ó Cualáin learned through the academic work of Ciaran Ó Coigligh that the poet never wrote Mise Raiftearaí An File, recited by generations of schoolchildren. It was actually penned by Seán Ó Ceallaigh in Oswego in New York state, published in a journal called An Gaodhal in New York and later credited to Raftery by Douglas Hyde, Ireland’s first President scholar and founder of the Gaelic League.
And though the blind wandering poet railed against the oppression of a Protestant landlord class in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, it was Hyde, son of a Church of Ireland minister, who did most to put him on a pedestal after his death.
Much of Raftery’s verse had survived in the oral tradition, and was highly critical of the Protestant establishment and supportive of the secret Whiteboy activity in Co. Galway, where he lived. Yet Hyde considered him to be of sufficient stature to publish an anthology of his work in 1903.
The documentary traced Raftery’s early years in his home county of Mayo, where he lost eight siblings to smallpox and was blinded by the disease himself. The programme suggests that his description of bodies laid out in another of his famous poems—on the drownings at Eanach Chuain (Annaghdown) on the shores of Lough Corrib—was inspired by one of his own last images of his dead brothers and sisters, before he lost his sight.
Ó Cualáín says it is regrettable that there has been no event to commemorate the 175th anniversary of Raftery’s death in an old shed in Craughwell, south Galway, on Christmas Eve, 1835, when he was buried in the dark by candlelight at Killeeneen.
It comes as something of a jolt to find that all those years after our teacher drummed what was accepted as Raftery’s epic poem into our heads, he didn’t in fact write it!
Fr. Horan DVD
A number of readers asked me some time ago to let them know when a DVD of the musical on the life of Monsignor James Horan of Knock (On a Wing and a Prayer) would be available. The good news is that it goes on sale in May with proceeds to the Mayo Roscommon Hospice. Anyone interested can email me and I will fill them in further. Or email www.hospice.ie.
Until next time, slan
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; www.terry-reilly.com.
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