Paddy Kavanagh is
the benchmark of our story BY LLOYD AND IMELDA GORMAN “What are we going to call ourselves?”. That was one of the questions we had to think about when we took over Irish Scene magazine exactly one year ago. The name Irish Scene was never in doubt. The magazine had that moniker for twenty years and everyone in the Irish community knows it by that name. We’d have been fools to change it, and six editions - and one global pandemic - later, we know we did the right thing from the feedback we have had from the community. But we did have to come up with a name for the company through which we would publish it. Our predecessors and friends Fred and Lily printed under Gael Force. We wanted to pick a name that would somehow represent our story. After some brainstorming we came up with a working title: Canal Bank Walk Media. The authorities knocked that one back because you need a special permission to register a company with the word bank in it perhaps to prevent dodgy operators from setting up businesses pretending to be banks. So in the end we went with the shortened Canal Walk Media. The canal in question is the Grand Canal in Dublin, and the walk bit specifically the section of it between Portobello bridge and Baggot Street bridge. It was along that tree lined stretch of Swan populated canal water that we first walked together when we first met back in the early 1990’s. We stopped and sat at
the sculpture and seat of Patrick Kavanagh where we talked about his poetry and other things. The seeds of love were sown on that day, but would take another fourteen years to harvest. At that stage I had a job with IDA Ireland, located in a nearby outdated office block - that was also the previous base for the Australian embassy - from where you could look out the window and see the outline of Paddy Kavanagh pondering away on his seat bench. It was from those offices (which are slated for demolition) that Imelda would walk with our first baby in a pram and pick me up from work and we would walk back to our place in Rathmines. Today we have three fabulous children and a home in Perth and are lucky enough to have started a new life in a great country, including now as the publishers of Irish Scene on behalf of Fred and Lily and all those who have over the years helped make and keep the magazine what it is today, our advertisers and readers. That statue of Kavanagh and the leafy waterside spot it occupies is sacred to us as a couple, a special place that gets visited every time we are ‘home’ in Ireland. As it happens, Kavanagh’s seat sculpture only appeared a short time before our romance began. It was erected in 1991 as part of the Dublin: European City of Culture and unveiled by then President Mary Robinson in front of a large crowd. A student at UCD
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