Mary O'Malley
speaker
44 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 13 Jul
Mary O'Malley’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 — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Welcome to the podcast version of Sunday Masalini, which differs from the radio version for rights reasons.
We hope you enjoy the program.
There is a wildness about the West, I read on a website advertising Galway, of the Gaeltacht we are told that people are warm, friendly and extend a hospitality that is the essence of Ireland.
It is clear the writer has never read Créna Cillia, Morchino Cain's novel of neighbourly love and spite, nor has masterly short stories about the inhabitants of this unlikely wilderness.
When I was ten, our family moved a mile or so down the road.
The strand below that house is a white powdery crescent.
A pier marks its right limit and the whale shape of Dune Hill, with a gazebo lookout perched like a boil on the top, marks its left.
Just under the butt of the hill lies a small stony beach, and above it a field, which every year bloomed with red and black butterflies, thousands of them, and only when disturbed do they stir themselves and rise.
swinging lazily into the air with a slow swing, rising and falling like a great poplin skirt.
That they would turn out not to be butterflies at all, but a daylight-hugging moth called Burnett, made no difference either to them or to the child who watched.
nor to her certainty that every year they would be there again in their thousands, ready for liftoff at some silent signal only they could decipher, a certainty no longer there.
The sand does not extend the whole way.
There are rocks to be negotiated on the way to the hill, and a small beach with its confetti of yellow shells lies just after the pools where the children caught shrimp in pink and powder blue nets, bought for a few shillings in a shop in the main street in Clifton.
The sand shelves steeply there at high tide, and above the high-water mark, barely noticeable, is the ruin of an old house.
It was built against the direction of Cailleach na Luibhe, the wise woman.
She was, my brother Martin remarked years later, the planning officer of the day, and her decision was final.
The bad luck that followed was terrible.
Several sons of the house drowned in a pucon within sight of the shore.
We knew nothing but her name as children, though we knew that houses had to be built to certain prescriptions, or those in them would have no luck,
or even worse, bad luck.
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