Irish Eyes

By Mattie Lennon

Are you familiar with Seamus O’ Rourke and his podcasts from YouTube or elsewhere or have you read his first memoir Standing in Gaps? If your answer is no let me introduce you to this award-winning playwright, actor, director, poet, and an independent producer with his own company Big Guerilla Productions. His latest work, Leaning on Gates has been described by a better brain than mine as, “a cross between To School Through the Fields and The Catcher in the Rye.” He has been Holden Caulfield-type Salinger’s fictional character, but there is nothing fictional about this work. It is an honest autobiographic account of a thinking man marooned in rural Ireland, the centre of which is Carrigallen, Co Leitrim, where Gaelic football and Sunday mass are the highlight of the social calendar. Living at home with his traditional Irish family, he is a dreamer and talented footballer.

Every line in the book rolls off the tongue when read aloud. There is the description of sitting on his father knee as a child, “He rarely went unshaved, but this day he had growth on his face, and I was fascinated by its roughness to the touch. Yet it felt like I was taming him with every stroke. As close and as intimate as a father and son could be. I didn’t feel pride or love or joy . . . it was just being on my daddy’s knee and stopping him from having his tea. I only touched his face once after that.”

Many decades when his mother returned from the Poor Clare nuns in Drumshanbo and asked him if he was in the IRA. "No. . . . I said with a bemused look on my face."
“Well it must be the only thing you’re not into. I was with the nuns in Drumshanbo this morning and they’re praying for you and I’m going to pray for you because I don’t know what else there is. I’m afraid you could be too far gone, but I hope some of us gets strength from somewhere soon.”

Seamus O Rourke did a lot of living between the well-remembered touching of his father’s face and the day his mother returned from the nuns.

Apprentice carpenter, playing full back For Leitrim, sharing a damp bedsit on the North Circular Road in Dublin with two other Leitrim footballers, saw the good points in Joe “Clamping+” Maguire in Garrigallen, who could “make good fodder out of bad hay” and visits to Mullen market where “the cheap outweighed the useful and the shiny outshone the wise.”

He was a better welder than his father but he felt that he didn’t outshine him in anything. He felt that he wasn’t as good as his father and at 20 years of age, was asking himself “Is what I’m doing good enough.” He couldn’t be sure. “I wasn’t sure of anything.”

On page 153 Seamus tells us, “There is no romance between these pages because I was useless at romance-never got the right run at it.” Despite the fact that he had a red sports car at seventeen years of age he wasn’t a big hit with the young ladies of Carrigallen and the surrounding areas. And then . . . in the mid-eighties he headed to America as part of a Gaelic football team. “Our young farmer’s mickeys were wrung out from watching Baywatch and Wonder Woman- they needed to go forth and sin for Ireland."

He spent a short time in New York initially working as a labourer for “Shovels” McGrath, “ . . .a thick Connemara alcoholic.”

Did his romantic life improve during his short stay in the States? You’ll have to read Leaning on Gates published by Gill Books.

Even when the author left Leitrim his heart didn’t go. When James Joyce was asked, "Will you ever return to Dublin?" he replied “I never left.”

Part of Seamus O’Rourke was still living and socialising with the motley crew of fellas he grew up with. It could be said of the book that, all Leitrim life is there.

And the humour? Veteran Irish broadcaster, who is not known for splitting his sides laughing said of it, “Absolutely wonderful, I laughed out loud so many times.” I can second that.

A friend of mine from Mayo once told me, “If Wicklow and Leitrim ever meet in an All-Ireland final it should be played in Knock, because it’ll be a f…..g Miracle.” So, coming from west Wicklow, which has so many things in common with Leitrim such as the quality of the land a certain style of football, I could identify with almost all of the author’s experiences apart from the fact that I didn’t have a fancy car when I was seventeen--I managed to get a second-hand Morris Minor when I was 32 and I certainly didn’t win any medals for my country.

Speaking of sport, Patrick Kavanagh was no great shakes as a goalkeeper and didn’t have all that much interest in sport but he did say that no one could write a comprehensive account of Irish life that ignored the Gaelic Athletic Association. Likewise nobody could write a comprehensive history of the GAA who ignores Brian Cathy. This man of many parts from Ballymore, near Strokestown, County Roscommon, was a Gaelic games correspondent and was a commentator for RTÉ, specialising in Gaelic games. When RTE decided to “downgrade" him in 2011 numerous Gaelic games figures, including Mickey Harte, Kieran McGeeney and Justin McNulty, expressed their disagreement with RTÉ's treatment of Carthy, by writing a four-page letter to director general Noel Curran and boycotting the organisation. The same year Brian launched a podcast in August 2022, focusing on Senior Club Championship results.

Brian has written some 30 books, including the best-selling 'Football Captains, The All-Ireland Winners'. His latest offering The Championship 2024, omits nothing pertaining to the Football and Hurling Championships. It contains the results of every single game in both senior codes. It contains 35 spectacular photos and is a must for anyone with the slightest interest in the GAA.

Details from: sliabhbanproductions1@gmail.com