John MacKenna
speaker
119 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 6 Sep
John MacKenna’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
Appearances
I had missed my lift and dawn was breaking.
The soft mist rising slowly from the fields, hanging like the remnants of ghosts around gateways beyond which the crops were slowly ripening.
On a long straight stretch of roadway I saw a cyclist in the distance pedalling slowly towards me.
As we passed we bade each other a good morning.
It was only then that I noticed the spade tied along the bar of his bike and the small cardboard box bound securely to the carrier.
It was my father who gave the explanation later that day, telling me that the man was taking a stillborn child to be buried in a rath not far from the road where we'd met.
It's what some people do, he said.
on account of their not being allowed to bury the unbaptised child in consecrated ground, and some people buried the children in the ruins of old churches.
What he didn't say, and what I wouldn't know for a further seven years, was that he had buried our stillborn siblings in the wild patch at the end of our garden.
It was something he would talk about only once, and then with the proviso that it never be spoken of again.
Decades later, my sister Dolores would tell me of how our mother had cried bitterly when we left that house in 1958 and moved one field away to a newer and bigger house.
She was leaving more than a house and a garden behind.
And now, when I pass the Rath near our home in South Carlow, I think of the other little people.
Not the musical dancing fairy folk, but the countless dead children whose only music is the sighing of the wind in the thorn bushes, and whose only recognition is in the small rises within the larger, deeper mounds of clay and grass.
And I raise my hand in greeting.
and in memory of my own siblings, buried forever in memory.
And I think of my mother shedding those tears on that bright July afternoon more than 60 years ago.
And I think of my father explaining the reason why that early morning cyclist was going about his sad task.
And I appreciate his silence about his own children lying quietly at the bottom of our garden.
Showing 101–119 of 119 · page 6 of 6
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