I’m really enjoying the TG4 Seachtar na Cásca efforts. One by one, an hour will be given to examine the men who signed the 1916 proclamation. So far we’ve seen Thomas Clarke, James Connolly and Joseph Plunkett. Plunkett was a man I knew very little about, and while I was very familiar with the other two men the manner in which their stories were presented made for fascinating viewing. Fintan Lane, Diarmaid Ferriter and other historians lend a great hand to the programme, and TG4 continue to use the perfect bilingual approach. Present the show in Irish, and have the experts speak in the language of their own work, be it Irish or English.
Tonight sees Thomas MacDonagh examined. He is, after Connolly, the most interesting of the seven men to me. His role in the foundation of the ASTI Union is so often forgotten, and he moved throughout the Irish literary scene too, immortalised in the beautiful Francis Ledwidge poem ‘Lament for Thomas MacDonagh’ from which this post takes its title. He was appointed a lecturer at UCD in 1911, and in 1914 was central to the foundation of The Irish Theatre in Hardwicke Street.
His translation of The Yellow Bittern remains among my favourite poems.
” The yellow bittern that never broke out
In a drinking bout, might as well have drunk;
His bones are thrown on a naked stone
Where he lived alone like a hermit monk.
O yellow bittern! I pity your lot,
Though they say that a sot like myself is curst —
I was sober a while, but I’ll drink and be wise
For I fear I should die in the end of thirst…..”
The programme will air tonight at 9.30.
Click on the book for more.
Click on the book for more.
Donal
Ciarán
Sam
Come Here To Me! 
We went to see his gaff over the summer, beautifully located in the wilds of Leitrim. Despite its being a National Monument, the place was closed up although you could walk around and peer through the windows. It looked as if he had just left yesterday…
Thomas MacDonagh, from Cloughjordan, five miles from O’Bamas gaff in Moneygall and now the site of the Eco-Village that is showing the country a new way to live, founded the ASTI with another Cloughjordan man when the two were teachers in Kilkenny (when MacDonagh shared digs with Francies Sheehy Skeffington). He taught in Fermoy – a town ravaged by the Famine which was in the early 20th century one of the major garrison towns of the British Empire, with three divisions based there – and then in Pádraig Pearse’s Montessori-based school St Enda’s in Ranelagh, opposite which he bought a house when he married Muriel Gifford on his appointment as a lecturer in English (then called tutor) in UCD. He published several books of poetry, had two plays produced by the Abbey Theatre and was known as a riveting teacher and lecturer. By 1914 he was training the Irish Volunteers for the coming Rising, drilling in the huge grounds of Larkfield House in Kimmage (where the Sundrive Road housing estates and Superquinn now stand on the fields that were once there, and no sign of Joe Plunkett’s family home, Larkfield now stands). He was, according to the infectious gossip James Stephens, who talked to everyone from British soldiers and civil servants to revolutionaries, the first to be executed in the reprisals that followed the Rising.