seamus dubhghaill

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

Tag Archives: The Auld Triangle


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Birth of “Alphie” McCourt, Irish American Writer

Alphonsus Joseph “Alphie” McCourt, Irish American writer and memoirist, is born in Limerick, County Limerick, on July 29, 1940. He is the youngest son of Malachy Gerard McCourt, Sr. (1901–1985) and Angela Sheehan (1908–1981), and brother of Michael McCourt, Frank McCourt, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Angela’s Ashes, and Malachy McCourt, the writer and actor.

McCourt comes to New York as a young man to live for a time with Frank, ten years his elder. He finds work wherever he can and eventually owns two restaurants in Manhattan. In 1975, he marries Lynn Rockman, with whom he has a daughter, Allison.

For twenty years, from 1993 until he retires in 2013, McCourt works for the Penn South Co-op in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, in charge of apartment restorations in the 2,800-unit residential complex.

Brendan Keany, general manager of Penn South, recalls meeting McCourt in the late 1980s at Allison’s, a restaurant named for his daughter. The restaurant on Eighth Avenue near Penn South closes after a time, but McCourt goes on to run Los Panchos on Columbus Avenue near 71st Street. However, as a man with a family, running bars and restaurants is not ideal, so he finds the job at Penn South, inspecting apartments and directing their restoration.

The author of short stories, newspaper essays, songs, and verse, McCourt, in 2008, publishes a memoir, A Long Stone’s Throw. Surveying the range of jobs he had taken on in a review of that memoir in Manhattan Express’ sister publication The Villager, the late Jerry Tallmer writes, “Working on a great glop-a-da-glop mainframe computer on Wall Street; issuing tickets for British and Irish Railways; a one-day job as bellhop in a Montreal hotel; a bank teller in Montreal; an encyclopedia salesman — for a month; working at the Army and Air Force Exchange Service on 14th Street as a buyer of luggage and musical instruments, knowing nothing about luggage and less about musical instruments; filing clerk; and, oh yes, teacher.”

Lynn McCourt recalls first meeting her future husband. “We were friends for a long time before we were married,” she says. “He was working as a bartender at the White Horse Tavern when I came in with a writer friend. He told me that he ‘saw the light behind’ me when I came in. He could twist words and turn something ordinary into something poignant. Just before he went to California around 1970, we spent a whole night walking and talking. He came back from California in 1974 and we got married in 1975.”

Then, recalling the devoted relationship McCourt has with Allison, Lynn continues, “Our daughter has special needs and has learning and speech problems. Alphie sang to her every night as a baby and eventually she sang back to him. They were inseparable. He’d have breakfast with her every morning. He was a great father — he, who hadn’t seen his own father very much. When we went to Ireland in 1980, he went north to find his father, and he did find him. I’m a Jewish girl from the Bronx who wanted to marry an Irishman with a brogue, and I did.”

Joe Hurley, of Joe Hurley’s Allstar Irish Rock Review, says McCourt, in his later years, had gotten into singing with the group, performing tunes from “The Great Irish Songbook,” like “The Auld Triangle.” He recalls, “He just performed with us at the Highline Ballroom in March. He loved being around young people. The place was full of young people and rock and roll, and then Alphie comes out — you could hear a pin drop. He would talk about how he had these incredible older brothers… fantastic storyteller. He never tooted his own horn.”

McCourt dies suddenly on July 2, 2016, at his home on the Upper West Side while taking an afternoon nap, just 27 days before his 76th birthday. His brother Michael dies the previous September, nine months earlier. He is survived by his brother Malachy.


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Birth of Ciarán Bourke, Founding Member of The Dubliners

Ciarán Bourke, Irish musician and one of the founding members of the Irish folk band The Dubliners, is born in Dublin on February 18, 1935.

Although born in Dublin, Bourke lives most of his life in Tibradden, County Dublin. His father, a doctor, is in practice in the city. The children have an Irish-speaking nanny. His early exposure to Irish continues throughout his education, attending Colaiste Mhuire, Parnell Square, Dublin. He later attends University College Dublin for a course in Agricultural Science. He does not take his degree but always retains an interest in farming.

After leaving university Bourke meets two of his future bandmates in The Dubliners, Ronnie Drew and Barney McKenna, who invite him to join their sessions in O’Donoghue’s Pub where he plays tin whistle, mouth organ and guitar, and sings. Luke Kelly, who had been singing around the clubs in England, returns to Dublin and joins them, with the four gaining local popularity. Taking the name The Dubliners, the group puts together the first folk concert of its kind in Dublin. The concert is a success, then a theatrical production called “A Ballad Tour of Ireland” is staged at the Gate Theatre shortly afterwards. In 1964 fiddle player John Sheahan joins the band and this becomes known as the original Dubliners line-up.

Bourke is responsible for bringing a Gaelic element to The Dubliners’ music with songs such as “Peggy Lettermore” and “Sé Fáth Mo Bhuartha” being performed in the Irish language. He also sings a number of the group’s more lighthearted and humorous numbers such as “Jar of Porter,” “The Dublin Fusiliers,” “The Limerick Rake,” “Mrs. McGrath,” “Darby O’Leary,” “All For Me Grog” and “The Ballad of Ronnie’s Mare,” as well as patriotic songs such as “Roddy McCorley,” “The Enniskillen Dragoons,” “Take It Down From The Mast” and “Henry Joy.”

On April 5, 1974 The Dubliners travel to Eastbourne where they are to appear in concert. Kelly is worried by the way Bourke keeps moving his head about, as if trying to alleviate increasing pain. Four minutes into the second half, it is decided he cannot continue with the show. Kelly insists that a doctor should be phoned and instructs to await their return to the Irish Club at Eaton Square. The roadie for the trip, John Corry, thinks that it is better to drive straight to St. George’s Hospital in London, where the doctors diagnose a brain aneurysm. He is transferred to the Atkinson Morley Hospital in Wimbledon, while doctors wait for his wife to return from a trip to Ghana, to get her signature before operating. She is told that there is danger of further haemorrhaging. He is operated on at the earliest opportunity. The bleeding begins again while he is on the table which means that they cannot repair the damage, only staunch the bleeding. This leaves him paralysed down his left side and confused as to where he is and what has happened.

Bourke receives intensive therapy, attending a clinic in Dún Laoghaire, County Dublin. He is heartened by his progress and insists on rejoining The Dubliners on their next tour of the Continent in November that year.

Bourke’s continued insistence that he is fit enough to join them on the forthcoming German tour causes them considerable disquiet. They prefer he ease himself back to work, with a few small shows in Ireland. The tour gradually begins to take its toll on him, and it is decided that for the sake of his health he should return home. He flies from Brussels to Dublin.

Bourke makes his last public appearance on Ireland’s RTÉ One during The Late Late Show‘s tribute to The Dubliners in 1987. Despite his lingering paralysis he recites “The Lament for Brendan Behan” after which everyone in the studio, led by Ronnie Drew, sing “The Auld Triangle.”

Bourke dies on May 10, 1988, after a long illness. From 1974 until his death, he is continued to be paid by the band. A fifth member of the group is not recruited until after his death.


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Premiere of “The Quare Fellow”

Brendan Behan’s first play, The Quare Fellow, premieres at the Pike Theatre in Dublin on November 19, 1954, to critical success. The title is taken from a Hiberno-English pronunciation of queer.

The Quare Fellow is initially offered to Dublin’s Abbey Theatre but is turned down. The play has its London première in May 1956 at Joan Littlewood‘s Theatre Workshop at the Theatre Royal Stratford East. On July 24, 1956, it transfers to the Comedy Theatre, London. In September 1956 the Abbey Theatre finally performs The Quare Fellow. It has such success that the Abbey’s artistic director, Ria Mooney, pushes the next play back to allow The Quare Fellow to run for six weeks. Its first New York performance is on November 27, 1958, at the Circle in the Square Theatre.

The play is set in Mountjoy Prison, Dublin. The antihero of the play, the Quare Fellow, is never seen or heard but rather functions as the play’s central conceit. He is a man condemned to die on the following day, for an unmentioned crime. Whatever it is, it revolts his fellow inmates far less than that of the Other Fellow, a very camp, almost Wildean, gay man.

There are three generations of prisoners in Mountjoy including boisterous youngsters who can irritate both other inmates and the audience and the weary old lags Neighbour and “methylated martyr” Dunlavin.

The first act is played out in the cramped area outside five cells and is comedic, sometimes rather like an Irish episode of Porridge. After the interval, the pace slows considerably and the play becomes much darker, as the time for the execution approaches. The focus moves to the exercise yard and to the workers who are digging the grave for the soon-to-be-executed Quare Fellow.

The play is a grimly realistic portrait of prison life in Ireland in the 1950s, and a reminder of the days in which homosexuality was illegal and the death penalty relatively common. The play is based on Behan’s own prison experiences, and highlights the perceived barbarity of capital punishment, then in use in Ireland. The play also attacks the false piety in attitudes to sex, politics and religion.

“The Auld Triangle“, a song from the opening of the play, has become an Irish music standard and is known by many who are unaware of its link to The Quare Fellow.

In 1962 the play is adapted for the screen by Arthur Dreifuss and stars Patrick McGoohan, Sylvia Syms and Walter Macken. Although the film receives some favourable reviews, it is not regarded as a faithful adaptation of the play.