Irish Eyes

By Mattie Lennon

Shane Gallagher grew up on a farm in Lacken, overlooking the Blessington Lakes in County Wicklow. He says, “There was always something broke that had to be made or fixed for machinery, I learnt a lot from my father and mother around the farm. Went then and served my time working on trucks.”

He was, and still is, a mechanic but now he has found his true calling. (Didn’t Francis Bacon mention, “Mechanical arts and merchandise?”)

Shane says “There was always bits of scrap lying around the farm yard so instead of getting rid of the scrap metals I tried my hand at welding and forging sculptures out of it , from tin to steel to copper, then to cutlery, such as flowers, angel's, , birds, candles holders just to name a few.”

JFK Said, “In free society art is not a weapon.” But you should see the “revolver” that he (Shane not JFK!) has fashioned from a socket, a spoon and a few other bits and pieces from the kitchen drawer.

He didn’t lick it off the ground. It’s in the genes. His grandfather Jack had “the best pair of hands in the parish” He comes from a long line of people who had an appreciation of the arts. His sister Leslie Murphy is a well-known and gifted illustrator and painter who featured at Dunlavin Festival of Arts and his mother “can turn her hand to anything”.

Shane has ideas to make more and more sculptures. He told me, “I enjoy making them; it keeps me from going mad at mechanics.” He sees it as a hobby and discusses it with the utmost modesty. Stephen Spender said that, “Art is born of humiliation” but it would be more accurate to say that Shane’s art is born of humility. He doesn’t ever blow his own trumpet, even if he has fashioned said instrument from the exhaust pipe of a 1959 Austin A 40.

I’m no Nostradamus but I’m predicting that you will hear a lot more about this man from Lacken who got no formal training and is now up there with the best in the west Wicklow arts scene . His work can be seen in the Blessington Tourist Office. And on Sunday 27th October a large collection of his works was displayed in his old primary school which is now the Lacken Community Centre. Shane’s Instagram account is; shane_gallagher_crafts.

A LIFE AMONG THE DEAD

David McGowan is a man of many parts who has had, up to now, a chequered career. From working with the dead as a teenager when his father accidentally bought a hearse to witnessing a dead gang leader being shot in the head in Chicago. His A Life among the Dead is to all intents and purposes an autobiography.

The author is not critical by nature but he wasn’t impressed by the educational system in operation when he was in Primary School, “. . . there didn’t seem to be any purpose to some of the things we laboured over for hours on end. I recall being hit with the edge of a ruler by my first teacher. If a child didn’t have their homework done to her satisfaction, she would make them stand at the blackboard and say, ‘I am a dunce’ to the whole class.”

When a fellow student embalmer in Chicago who didn’t seem all that anxious about learning anything, told him later that he had been assigned to the funeral home to gain intelligence about mobsters, and was wearing a wire at all times, David felt rather naïve. On another occasion when a vehicle collided with the side of his hearse a paramedic who arrived promptly on the scene asked if he had anyone else with him “I innocently replied that I had one person in my vehicle. She panicked and asked how the other person was. I calmly replied that she was dead. She asked to see them, I presume in the hopes of of reviving them. She got very cross with me when she discovered that my passenger hadn’t died as a result of the accident.”

After one exhumation he discovered that the long held belief that a person’s hair continues to grow after death is not a myth.

This book is not all about embalming and the lingering smell of formaldehyde. He also gives vivid accounts of other aspects of his life. “Thousands flocked to Enniscrone for what was a very joyous occasion.” What were they waiting for? The arrival of a 48 metre long 767. And it arrived; but not by air. David McGowan brought it from Shannon Airport on the Atlantic ocean.

If you are sceptical about the existence of a paranormal the chapter headed Unexplained Happenings may change your mind. There are happenings that he doesn’t make any great claims about, he just suggests that it’s unlikely that they were coincidences. I feel that Liz Tuttle’s description of herself would fit David, “I’m quite a rational person, but I'm drawn to the irrational. I love coincidences, and I like to question that in fiction: 'is this random, or is there something working underneath?'

The author doesn’t force anyone to believe in another world but he had some strange experiences. One day his hearse broke down on a bridge over the river Moy as a large crowd of mourners walked behind it. It cut out and wouldn’t re-start. But a ”little push” got it off the bridge and it started.

He took it to the garage next day and , “They had no explanation for what had happened.” But weeks later a son of the deceased told him, “That his dad had often told him that he loved to look down at the river from the bridge to his favourite spot, the place where he had loved to go fishing in the river. He had often fished with his dad there in the past. “ But he had forgotten about his dead telling him, “that when he died, he wanted the hearse to stop in the middle of the bridge on his final journey.”

An A to Z of funeral undertaking and the director’s life story.

Don't miss it.

Endurable Infinity

Tony Kitt is a poet from Dublin, Ireland. His family hails from Co. Mayo in the West of Ireland, as well as from Italy and Greece. He has worked as a researcher, a music critic, a literary translator, a creative writing tutor, and a magazine editor. His poetry titles include Endurable Infinity (University of Pittsburgh Press, USA, 2022), Sky Sailing (Salmon Poetry, Ireland, 2025; forthcoming), and A Quiet Life in Psychopatria (MadHat Press, USA, 2025; forthcoming). His chapbook called Further Through Time was published by Origami Poems Project (USA, 2022). His poems appear in multiple magazines, and anthologies, including Oxford Poetry, Poetry Ireland Review, The North, Cyphers, The Cafe Review, Plume, Matter, The Fortnightly Review, The Honest Ulsterman, The New Ulster, Under the Radar, etc. They have also been translated into Italian, Greek, Romanian, German, Ukrainian, Albanian, and Chinese. He edited the Contemporary Tangential Surrealist Poetry anthology (SurVision Books, 2023), as well as the anthology entitled Invasion: Ukrainian Poems about the War(SurVision Books, 2022), and was the winner of the Maria Edgeworth Poetry Prize.

His collection of 76 poems, Endurable Infinity published by University of Pittsburgh Press, asks us, in the words of, George Kalamaras, poet laureate emeritus of Indiana to, “ …undo ourselves in the reconstitution of the possible.”

The following is the first stanza of Tony’s poem, Music for the Virus;

Life in a glass box is as lengthy as its utensil.
Drumroll entry. Piano stairs,
The age of John cage. A vaccine
Descending into judicial transparency.
A feast of poetry for Christmas.

And Joe Harrington’s Rambling House is still going strong after more than a quarter century.

Happy Christmas and I’ll see you next year.