Monday 4 November 2019

The Dead, Love, Loss and Licence.

Michael Furey's burial place is immortalised in the last lines of James Joyce's short story, 'The Dead'. Michael was Greta Conroy's first love and was the foil for her husband, Gabriel Conroy's jealousy in Joyce's beautifully poignant short story, which was the final story in his first published book of short stories, 'Dubliners'.
Later in her own autobiography, Nora Barnacle (James Joyce's wife), who lived at 4 Bowling Green, opposite St. Nicholas Church, mentioned her first teenage crush on a young Galway boy, Michael Bodkin, who died on the 11th February 1900 of 'consumption' or 'TB' in the Galway Fever Hospital, in what later became 'The Men's Club' in NUIG and is now the 'Centre for Global Women's Studies'.
Michael Bodkin is buried in the family vault Rahoon Cemetery and there is a plaque to this connection there, and Joyce's poem, 'She Weeps over Rahoon'. There was a plaque at Richardson's Pub on Eyre Square, beside which, in a small sweet shop on Prospect Hill, he had lived and where Nora visited him. He was older than her and probably blissfully aware of her interest in him, but nonetheless, Joyce personified this young love between Nora and Michael Bodkin in the strained relationship he so perfectly described in 'The Dead', between the fictionalised, but easily recognisable, Greta Conroy and Michael Joyce.
These final lines refer to a grave in Oughterard, where Nora's father was buried, having long been estranged from her mother in Bowling Green. Joyce loved the song 'The Lass of Aughrim', having heard Nora Barnacle's mum sing it in the little house on Bowling Greet in 1909, and that song, tellingly also appears in 'The Dead', so typical of Joyce to turn the knife, again and again. Have a listen to these last lines from 'The Dead', it's very short and very beautiful and James Joyce and Nora Barnacle's own relationship, and their relationship with Dublin, Galway and Ireland are resonated in every line.


The last Lines of 'The Dead' .... see https://youtu.be/A_-KlGCSCJE

Friday 1 November 2019

The ghost 'lady' of Long Walk, Galway

The ghost 'lady' of Long Walk. 
In October 2012, the Galway Independent (another Galway ghost newspaper) reported that photographer Jonathan Curran was “freaked” when he noticed he'd captured the image of a lady in a cloak when taking photographs of the end of Long Walk (beside where the mud-dock is). He took 12 other pictures and the ghost 'nun' did not appear in any of them, just in the one photo. The long Walk, he decides, was 'haunted'!

Since then the 'paranormalists' in the city have debunked the photo, rounding on the photographer for his ghostly photo-shop stunt. But was he trying to pull the wool over our eyes, or did he actually inadvertently capture the spectral image of a woman from another ear. 

That is what our ancestors believe that 'Samhain' was all about, where spirits could slip through the crack between the fabric joint at the end of the old year, where it met the beginning of the new year. Could the spirit have been seen through this ethereal tear between the two years, just for one split second, becoming visible to us humans, and the photographer, a glimpse of the otherworld, that parallels ours, a continuous, perpetual reliving of our world, and theirs, with occasional glimpses of one from the other? Who knows, maybe that is what ghosts are, faint and random glimpses from their timezone to ours, from another life, a parallel, and previous one, where the cracks have appeared in their zone, and through the cracks we catch a glimpse, the ghostly images we see sometimes reported,especially at Halloween. 

Whatever this photo is, the garb she is wearing is unmistakably a Kinsale or Kerry or Galway cloak, which were worn by Irish women, to cover their indoor clothes, protecting them from the dust and dirt of 19th century Ireland, and providing them with shelter from the weather and perhaps a bit of anonymity too, especially if she'd prefer to remain out of sight, unrecognised, given the male-dominated nature of our society two hundred years ago, much as a burqa or hijab provides to women in the more closed muslim society today. 

Was this a ghost, or a fake? If it was a ghost was she a victim, or just a phantom? Was she drowned, murdered, a suicide, an accident, or was she simply slipping out of her 19th century cottage to enjoy the tidal effect on the constant in our world and her's, in Galway, the river Corrib? 

I guess we will never know. 







With thanks to Alan Micheal Fahy and Galway Memories for prompting this story. Galway Walks, Walking Tours of Galway. Haunted Tours. Ghost Tours. Horrible History Tours.