Chapter 1: What personal experiences shaped the speaker's love for Clannad?
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Camp on Anogh wasn't really the Gaeltacht. It was a summer Irish college in O'Meath, so too close to home in Newry to represent true freedom and independence. But when you're 10 or 11, beginning of the 1980s, it was like Gaeltacht for beginners. And if you behaved yourself, you might get to the real thing next year.
It was in Campanenog that somebody casually introduced me to a band whose music would become a soundtrack to my life. The band was Clannad and the album was a live recording of a concert in Switzerland in 1978. The artwork on the cover was extraordinary. All white with Clannad spelt out in red Celtic lettering. And then I heard the sound.
Their version of the song Nílse na Lá lasted a whopping ten minutes and it featured these mad solos on flute and double bass before it all came back together again for the last verse. I didn't really know what jazz was. I had no musical reference point for whatever they were doing but I was in.
After we came home from camping in Ogh that year, I got a copy of the LP, a sheet of paper, and traced the beautiful logo and copied it straight onto my school bag. And while other bags in the class celebrated Led Zeppelin and U2 and Joy Division, my blue canvas school rucksack proudly read, Clannad. This love of Clannad bubbled along quietly in those pre-social media days.
There was a fan club whose address I remember was Sir John Rogerson's Quay in Dublin. But I mean, I never wrote to them. I didn't know anybody else who shared my obsession. I never dreamt I'd one day go to hear them in concert. I just listened to the album, learned all the songs and then saved up and bought another cassette or another LP as I could.
My intense fascination with cars was maybe less of a secret. Our car at the time, red Toyota Corolla OIJ 1763, if you need to know, was in the garage for a couple of weeks and we got the lend of this silver blue Renault 9. Now, in the annals of motoring history, the Renault 9 merits hardly a mention. It was an unremarkably boxy French four-door saloon with skinny tyres.
But in the two weeks we had it, it became a wonderland because it had two very important features. One was the novel monotrace seats. See, I told you I was a car nerd. The front seat was mounted on a single rail that ran down the middle, rather than the traditional two rails on each side of the seat, so passengers in the back had more room to put their feet.
A brilliant idea, if you've a clown in the back seat. But the other feature, the one that really lit up my life, was the built-in cassette player. In our Corolla, you had an AM-FM radio with six preset buttons that physically shifted the little dial to the station you wanted.
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Chapter 2: How did Clannad influence the speaker's teenage years?
No wonder the cow is a sacred creature in many traditions, associated with the goddess Hathor, who, according to Greek myth, had the form of a cow. In Egyptian mythology, Hisat was the manifestation of Hathor, the divine sky cow in earthly form. And the Buddha is reputed to have said that cows are our kin most excellent, from whom come many remedies.
In Celtic mythology, the cattle goddess was known as Dimona in Gaul and Boanne in Celtic Ireland. Gandhi venerated cows. He said, I worship it and I shall defend its worship against the whole world and stated that the central fact of Hinduism is cow protection.
For the Hindu peoples in India and Nepal, bovine milk holds a key part of religious rituals, sometimes to boil milk on a stove or lead a cow through the house as part of a housewarming ceremony. And because of their exalted status, cows roam free, even along busy streets in major cities like Delhi.
But in the Western world, increasing numbers of cattle will spend the majority, if not all, of their lives housed in sheds. Megadairies were first established in America, where the largest house as many as 36,000 cows.
Unlike those poor creatures being treated like machines, the cows in Unshannafubble wander through fields, scratching their big heads on gateposts, licking their companions' necks, nuzzling into each other, and sometimes galloping, powerful as wild buffalo across the prairie. This has always been their home.
When the calves are taken from them, they cry, groan and bellow for three nights so that eventually their milk will make its way into cereal, milkshakes, cappuccinos, lattes and flat whites. The goodness still there. But that pasteurised milk does not smell and taste like milk straight from the cow, straight from her body.
Your toes and fingers will not curl like a baby at the breast in ecstasy when you drink it. All summer, our days are punctuated by their comings and goings. Their hoofs send vibrations down through the ground and up through me.
Their deep vibrates the air, along with the steady rip and tear of grass and wildflowers being pulled from the earth as a sacred and ancient metamorphosis takes place in their great bellies. Green into white, pink, purple and yellow into white. Did you feed my cow? Yes, ma'am. Could you tell me how? Yes, ma'am. Oh, what did you feed her?
Corn and hay.
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Chapter 3: What was the significance of Clannad's performance on Top of the Pops?
I could see that legends and myths were more than mere classroom distractions. They had a relationship with truth and possibility. Thus began the journey of seeking to look beyond dismissive comments and throw away opinion, of holding thoughts in a deeper place. St. Brendan's feast day falls in May and most years I make the journey up Brendan's Mountain on the Dingle Peninsula.
On the top of that mountain where Brendan reputedly prayed, sometimes I can see forever. Other times, no further than my hand held up in front of me. Some years the wind can blow me over. Other years I see ice weigh heavily on the cross at the summit. Sometimes there's nothing but a gentle breath as the sun warms all of us who reach the 953 metre summit.
Brendan navigates me through all the crises of everyday life. where often I bob like his boat on an open, turbulent and heaving ocean of uncertainty and have to believe and trust that there is a newfound land waiting for me. I imagine sitting with Brendan in his vessel of pitch, wattle and leather.
I'm helped in this meditation with the deep, varied chords and notes of Sean Davies' Brendan Voyage. The tune lifts me from the belly of a wave to a crest of another, where I can glimpse a welcome shore beyond. I think of how the arrogant hull of the Titanic was cracked open by ice mountains. And yet the little wattle boat withstood it all.
Indeed, it was this humble vulnerability that was key to Brendan's successful accomplishment. Severin discovered this truth. When ice pierced the wattle boat, the crew could reach into the water and patch the hole. Had the boat been made of wood or steel, the vessel would have had no choice but to sink.
Some words of Brendan have more relevance than ever for this Dublin man who looks to his Kerry hero for inspiration. Christ of the mysteries, can I trust you to be stronger than each storm in me? Help me to journey beyond the familiar and into the unknown. Give me faith to leave old ways and break fresh ground with you. These words of a Kerry man helped this Dublin boy become a man.
MUSIC PLAYS Thank you.
When I was studying for my Leaving Cert in North Donegal, we had one of Jane Austen's novels, Persuasion, as a set text. And her world seemed very formal, staid and distant. So I was astonished to learn recently that three of Jane Austen's nieces had actually lived nearby in the village of Vermelten. So I wrote this poem in response to that. Jane's World for Sophia Hillen
It was so far from 70s Donegal, the imagined world of Anne Elliot in her genteel drawing room or in a jaunt to Lyme Regis. 15 or 16 year old romantics studying for the Leaving Cert, too young by far to grasp Jane's delicious ironies. We nevertheless rejoiced for the not so young Anne when her not so young man declared himself at last.
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