seamus dubhghaill

Promoting Irish Culture and History from Little Rock, Arkansas, USA

Tag Archives: Protagonist


by Leave a comment

Death of Caitlín Maude, Poet, Actress & Language Revival Activist

Caitlín Maude, Irish language poet, language revival activist, and actress, dies in County Dublin on June 6, 1982. She is also well-known for her campaigns to improve the lives of women in Ireland.

Maude is born on May 22, 1941, in Casla, County Galway, and reared in the Irish language. Her mother, Máire Nic an Iomaire, is a school teacher, and she receives her primary education from her on a small island off the coast of Rosmuc. Her father, John Maude, is from Cill Bhriocáin township near Rosmuc. She attends secondary school at Coláiste Chroí Mhuire, Spiddal, an all-Irish language school in County Galway. She later credits one of her Irish language teachers there, Sister Ailbhe, as an early influence in cultivating her writing confidence.

Maude attends University College Galway, where she studies English, Irish, French, and Mathematics. She becomes a teacher, working in schools in Counties Kildare, Mayo, and Wicklow. She also works in other capacities in London and Dublin.

Maude begins writing modern literature in Irish in secondary school and develops a rhythm of poetry closely attuned to the rhythms of the Conamara Theas dialect of Connacht Irish, spoken in her native district. Though not conventionally religious, she admits in an interview that she has a deep interest in spirituality and that this has left its mark on her poetry. She is noted as a highly effective reciter of her own verse. Géibheann is the best-known of her poems, and is studied at Leaving Certificate Higher Level Irish in the Republic of Ireland. A posthumous collected edition, Caitlín Maude, Dánta, is published in 1984, Caitlín Maude: file in 1985 in Ireland and Italy, and Coiscéim in 1985.

Maude is widely known as an actress. She acts at the university, at An Taibhdhearc in Galway and the Damer Theatre in Dublin, and is particularly successful in a production of An Triail by Máiréad Ní Ghráda at the Damer Theatre in 1964. She plays the protagonist, Máire Ní Chathasaigh, an unmarried mother who experiences family rejection, a stay in a Magdalene laundry, and ultimately murders her infant child followed by suicide. In 2017, Former Irish Minister For Justice Máire Geoghegan-Quinn cites this performance as “pathbreaking”: “Caitlín Maude played the role, when nobody talked about the issue and when, as we know, women were still devalued, still caricatured, still incarcerated and disenfranchised if they became mothers out of wedlock.” Maude herself is a playwright and co-authors An Lasair Choille with poet Michael Hartnett.

Maude is very active in the  Celtic Revival. She founds An Bonnán Buí, an Irish-speaking social club in the 1970s in Dublin. As a member of the Dublin Metropolitan Gaelgeoir community, she is active in many direct action campaigns by the language revival organization Gluaiseacht Chearta Sibhialta na Gaeltachta, including the campaign that forces the Irish State to establish a Gaelscoil (Irish-medium primary school) Scoil Santain in the suburb of Tallaght, County Dublin. A second Irish language school, Scoil Chaitlin Maude, opens in Tallaght in 1985 shortly after her death. It begins as a two-room school with 35 children and has grown to a 16 room new building serving 345 children as of 2023.

Maude is also a distinguished sean-nós singer. She makes one album in this genre, Caitlín, released in 1975 on Gael Linn Records and now available as a CD. It contains both traditional songs and a selection of readings of her poetry.

Maude marries Cathal Ó Luain in 1969. They have one child Caomhán, their son.

Maude dies of complications from cancer on June 6, 1982, at the age of 41. She is buried in Bohernabreena graveyard, which overlooks the city from the Wicklow Mountains.

In 2001, a new writers’ centre in Galway is named after her: Ionad Scríbhneoirí Chaitlín Maude, Gaillimh.

Since Maude’s death, critics in several languages have continued to study her literary works. Irish writer and The Irish Times columnist Michael Harding cites her as one of a few examples of groundbreaking women to “spin the hurt and wound of their oppression, and weave new loves songs and laments.” Irish Studies professor Sarah McKibben notes that Maude’s innovation in the poem represents an instance of recent Irish writers transgressing “literary, nationalistic, sociolinguistic and gender norms to craft new ways of writing in Irish.”

According to Louis de Paor, “Although no collection of her work was published during her lifetime, Caitlín Maude had a considerable influence on Irish language poetry and poets, including Máirtín Ó Direáin, Micheál Ó hAirtnéide, Tomás Mac Síomóin, and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill. That influence is a measure of the dramatic force of her personality, her exemplary ingenuity and commitment to the language, and her ability as a singer to embody the emotional disturbance at the heart of a song. Her collected poems are relatively slight, including incomplete drafts and fragments, but reveal a poetic voice confident of its own authority, drawing on the spoken language of the Connemara Gaeltacht but rarely on its conventions of oral composition or, indeed, on precedents in Irish poetry in either language. The best of her work is closer to the American poetry of the 1960s in its use of looser forms that follow the rhythms of the spoken word and the sense of the poem as direct utterance without artifice, a technique requiring a high degree of linguistic precision and formal control.”

Maude’s work has also been translated into English and Spanish. Spanish language critic Pura Coloma notes that Maude’s work played a role in preserving Connemaran culture, as she “utilizes her own style to replicate the deep rhythms and tonalities of the regional voice.”


by Leave a comment

Birth of Roddy Doyle, Novelist, Dramatist & Screenwriter

Roddy Doyle, novelist, dramatist and screenwriter known for his unvarnished depiction of the working class in Ireland, is born in Dublin on May 8, 1958. His distinctively Irish settings, style, mood, and phrasing make him a favourite fiction writer in his own country as well as overseas.

Doyle grows up in a middle-class family in Kilbarrack. His mother, Ita Bolger Doyle, is a first cousin of the short story writer Maeve Brennan. After majoring in English and geography at University College Dublin, he teaches those subjects for fourteen years at Greendale Community School, a Dublin grade school. During the summer break of his third year of teaching, he begins writing seriously. In the early 1980s he writes a heavily political satire, Your Granny’s a Hunger Striker, but it is never published.

Doyle publishes the first editions of his comedy The Commitments (1987; film 1991) through his own company, King Farouk, until a London-based publisher takes over. The work is the first installment of his internationally acclaimed The Barrytown Trilogy novels, which also include The Snapper (1990; film 1993), and The Van (1991; film 1996). The series centres on the ups and downs of the never-say-die Rabbitte family, who temper the bleakness of life in an Irish slum with familial love and understanding.

Doyle’s fourth novel, Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha (1993), wins the 1993 Booker Prize. Set in the 1960s in a fictional working-class area of northern Dublin, the book examines the cruelty inflicted upon children by other children. The protagonist, 10-year-old Paddy Clarke, fears his classmates’ ostracism, especially after the breakup of his parents’ marriage. In 1994 he writes the BBC miniseries Family, which generates heated controversy throughout conservative Ireland. The program sheds harsh light on a family’s struggle with domestic violence and alcoholism and portrays the bleaker side of life in a housing project, the same venue he had used in the more comedic Barrytown novels. The Woman Who Walked into Doors (1996) and its sequel, Paula Spencer (2006), concern the ramifications of domestic abuse and alcoholism.

A Star Called Henry (1999) centres on an Irish Republican Army (IRA) soldier named Henry Smart and his adventures during the Easter Rising. Smart’s further adventures are detailed in Oh, Play That Thing (2004), which follows him as he journeys through the United States, and The Dead Republic (2010), which chronicles his return to Ireland. In Smile (2017) a lonely middle-aged man looks back on his life, especially his troubled childhood. His next novel, Love (2020), follows two old friends as they spend a night drinking and looking back at their lives. The Deportees and Other Stories (2007), Bullfighting (2011), and Life Without Children (2021) are short-story collections. He also writes a number of books for children, including Wilderness (2007) and A Greyhound of a Girl (2011).

In 1987 Doyle marries Belinda Moller, granddaughter of former Irish President Erskine Childers. They have three children – Rory, Jack and Kate.

In the television series Father Ted, the character Father Dougal Maguire‘s unusual sudden use of (mild) profanities, such as saying “I wouldn’t know, Ted, you big bollocks!,” is blamed on his having “been reading those Roddy Doyle books again.”


by Leave a comment

Birth of William Trevor, Novelist, Playwright & Short Story Writer

William Trevor KBE, Irish novelist, playwright and short story writer, is born William Trevor Cox in Mitchelstown, County Cork, on May 24, 1928. One of the elder statesmen of the Irish literary world, he is widely regarded as one of the greatest contemporary writers of short stories in the English language.

Trevor is born to a middle-class, Anglo-Irish Protestant family. They move several times to other provincial towns, including Skibbereen, Tipperary, Youghal and Enniscorthy, as a result of his father’s work as a bank official. He is educated at St. Columba’s College, Dublin, and at Trinity College, Dublin, from which he receives a degree in history. He works as a sculptor under the name Trevor Cox after his graduation from Trinity College, supplementing his income by teaching. He marries Jane Ryan in 1952 and emigrates to Great Britain two years later, working as a copywriter for an advertising agency. It is during this time that he and his wife have their first son.

Trevor’s first novel, A Standard of Behaviour, is published in 1958 by Hutchinson of London, but has little critical success. He later disowns this work and, according to his obituary in The Irish Times, “refused to have it republished.” It was, in fact, republished in 1982 and in 1989.

In 1964, at the age of 36, Trevor wins the Hawthornden Prize for Literature for The Old Boys. The win encourages him to become a full-time writer. He and his family then move to Devon in South West England, where he resides until his death. In 2002, he makes honorary KBE for services to literature. Despite having spent most of his life in England, he considers himself to be “Irish in every vein.”

Trevor writes several collections of short stories that are well received. His short stories often follow a Chekhovian pattern. The characters in his work are typically marginalised members of society. The works of James Joyce influence his short-story writing, and “the odour of ashpits and old weeds and offal” can be detected in his work, but the overall impression is not of gloominess since, particularly in his early work, his wry humour offers the reader a tragicomic version of the world. He adapts much of his work for stage, television and radio. In 1990, Fools of Fortune is made into a film directed by Pat O’Connor, along with a 1999 film adaptation of Felicia’s Journey, which is directed by Atom Egoyan.

Trevor’s stories are set in both England and Ireland. They range from black comedies to tales based on Irish history and politics. His early books are peopled by eccentrics who speak in a pedantically formal manner and engage in hilariously comic activities that are recounted by a detached narrative voice. Instead of one central figure, the novels feature several protagonists of equal importance, drawn together by an institutional setting, which acts as a convergence point for their individual stories. The later novels are thematically and technically more complex. The operation of grace in the world is explored, and several narrative voices are used to view the same events from different angles.

Trevor wins the Whitbread Prize three times and is nominated five times for the Booker Prize, the last for his novel Love and Summer (2009), which is also shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award in 2011. His name is also mentioned in relation to the Nobel Prize in Literature. In 2014, he is bestowed Saoi by the Aosdána.

William Trevor dies peacefully in his sleep at the age of 88 on November 20, 2016, in Somerset, England.


by Leave a comment

Birth of Raymond Thornton Chandler, Novelist & Screenwriter

Raymond Thornton Chandler, American novelist and screenwriter, is born to Irish Quaker and Irish Catholic parents in Chicago, Illinois on July 23, 1888.

Chandler spends his early years in Plattsmouth, Nebraska, living with his mother and father near his cousins and his aunt and uncle. His father, an alcoholic civil engineer who works for the railway, abandons the family. To obtain the best possible education for Ray, his mother, originally from Ireland, moves them to the area of Upper Norwood in the London Borough of Croydon, England in 1900. In 1912, he borrows money from his Waterford uncle, who expects it to be repaid with interest, and returns to America, visiting his aunt and uncle before settling in San Francisco. The following year he moves to Los Angeles.

In 1932, at the age of forty-four, Chandler becomes a detective fiction writer after losing his job as an oil company executive during the Great Depression. His first short story, “Blackmailers Don’t Shoot,” is published in 1933 in Black Mask, a popular pulp magazine. His first novel, The Big Sleep, is published in 1939. In addition to his short stories, Chandler publishes seven novels during his lifetime. An eighth novel is in progress at the time of his death and is completed by Robert B. Parker. All but Playback have been made into motion pictures, some more than once.

Chandler has an immense stylistic influence on American popular literature. He is considered to be a founder of the hardboiled school of detective fiction, along with Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain and other Black Mask writers. The protagonist of his novels, Philip Marlowe, like Hammett’s Sam Spade, is considered by some to be synonymous with “private detective.” Both are played in films by Humphrey Bogart, whom many consider to be the quintessential Marlowe.

Some of Chandler’s novels are important literary works, and three have been regarded as masterpieces: Farewell, My Lovely (1940), The Little Sister (1949), and The Long Goodbye (1953). The Long Goodbye is praised in an anthology of American crime stories as “arguably the first book since Hammett’s The Glass Key, published more than twenty years earlier, to qualify as a serious and significant mainstream novel that just happened to possess elements of mystery.”

In the year before his death, he is elected president of the Mystery Writers of America. He dies on March 26, 1959, in La Jolla, California. He is buried in Mount Hope Cemetery in San Diego, California.