Declangorman booklet web by Padraig Cunningham

HARBOUR DECLAN GORMAN

HARBOUR DECLAN GORMAN Resident Artist Loughshinny Boathouse Feb â&#x20AC;&#x201C; April 2015

H A R

HARBOUR

D E

September 2017

U R

I moved to Loughshinny in 1996. That makes me a blow-in. My story is not quite as dramatic, mind you as that of John Daly who blew in from the Irish Sea in 1986, when his father’s stricken fishing vessel began to take in water, sailing beam on to Balbriggan, and had to be beached. John was one of the people I interviewed during my residency at Loughshinny Boathouse in 2015 and a few lines of his bewitching tales are printed elsewhere in this document.

to Loughshinny. Seven very diverse people agreed to talk to me on tape about what the harbour has meant to them. As the weather began to warm, I approached Niall Mulvey, principal of St. Brendan’s National School, Loughshinny, and he agreed to allow a group of fifth class children form a writer’s group and come with their teachers Ms Lundy and Ms Cunnane for a few sessions to work actively with me, exploring the beach and pier area for any hidden literary potential it might have.

I was not the very first artist to spend time in the boathouse. A pair of visual artists had been in before me. I was the first writer, however. My plan was to transition once and for all from the public life of the theatre writer, or more accurately, the writer/director, to a more solo practice, writing poems, novels and stories. I discovered very quickly, however, that once a public artist, perhaps always a public artist. I had been working over the previous few years sporadically on a long novel set in a fictionalised or reimagined Fingal, and a rough first draft of that was more or less done. I did not care to sit alone rewriting my novel endlessly and I had no Big Idea for another one. I am not naturally a poet and anyway, a poem, as even a true poet will attest, comes dropping from the sky only now and again. I needed a Plan B.

I understood clearly that the boathouse was an artist’s retreat, a place to be alone, undisturbed and away from people, as artists sometimes need to be if they are to flourish. It was not a community centre: we already have one of those. But I had alternated between so-called ‘community art’ and ‘straight theatre’ (whatever those impoverished terms might mean) for all of my 30 years in the professional arts. That’s the kind of hybrid artist I am, and this situation called for a community-engaged approach.

So I walked across the beach one day, knocked on a few doors and introduced myself to some neighbours that I knew only to see. I set up a Facebook page and announced I was working on a book of some sort that would be based on live conversations with residents and visitors

I never did finish the book of interviews. My residency time ran out, I was broke and needed to go back to my other life foraging for theatre work. This was briefly a source of minor embarrassment to me. I meet people occasionally still who ask me, “How is your book coming along?” One day I may well return to it, just as I might return to the novel I had begun five years earlier in 2010 and which is likewise not yet complete.

I have learned I am not a bookman. I am a playwright which is a slightly G different animal. I accepted the gift of O the boathouse residency, at a time when R I wanted to run away from the theatre M and become some other genus of writer: A a soloist, a writer in private practice. N The theatre had been an unhappy place for me for a few years. Everything I had built up and contributed to nationally by way of an independent production sector and a community-engaged network of practice had been decimated by funding cuts and poor policy decisions at national level when the economy crashed. I was disillusioned. But after the boathouse, the theatre called me back and I am happily re-settled there, albeit precariously and still without any kind of coherent state investment. For now, the snippets and images in this publication, are as close as I have got so far to my famous Loughshinny book or my great North Dublin novel, and perhaps as far as I shall ever get. The artist’s journey is one of constant learning, discarding, and reinvention. Failure does not come into it. Everything comes back around and is helpful somewhere else down the line. Prior to my residency, I kept myself to myself around here: my work as an artist was my own business, something I did on tour or away off somewhere else, in Drogheda or Monaghan or Dublin. Now I am proudly out as a Fingal artist, and my sense of place – something fundamental to my practice over the years – has evolved in a wonderful way. For this I am thankful. Declan Gorman Resident Artist at Loughshinny Boathouse, Feb – April 2015.

A NOTE ON THE CONTENTS OF THIS BOOKLET

D E

I spoke to many great people during my residency, some from old Fingal families

with ancient roots in Loughshinny, others visiting for a day. Only a handful of these

conversations ended up on tape, and of those, most went on for up to an hour, so the

few lines attributed to each of the interviewees here are just samples, fragments of

their rich insights. I did not want to write a local history. There already exists a very fine historical society in the community who do that kind of deep research and oral recording

much better. I wanted only to capture what the beach and harbour mean to people

personally – what Vera Stone refers to as ‘a safe little harbour’, hidden away on the

east coast of a fast-changing and complex modern island. I am grateful, nonetheless, to

Cepta Butler who lent me essays, talked to me at length, gave me photostat documents

and many insights into the ancient and recent history of the village. Her generous

assistance helped to anchor my researches and enlarge my appreciation of this place. I also valued my chats with Mona Hurley, Billy Ryan, Mick Kenny, Johnny Fanning, Christie Fanning, James English and several others who stopped by the boathouse or invited me into their homes for tea as I was passing along the road. I am not an anthropologist. As an artist I am fascinated by place and its impact on individuals and communities, and my plays and more recent attempts at fiction are mainly driven by that curiosity. This is no more and no less than a flavour of that, using a different narrative medium, a tiny piece of research about the strange calming effect upon people, of an inlet of the sea.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS As well as those named above, I am grateful to Rory O’Byrne, Sarah O’Neill and Denise Reddy from Fingal County Council Arts Office for their support. My own personal memories of Loughshinny are not included in this short volume, but if they were, they would revolve a lot around Sharon Cromwell, my life partner, and my children Mona (who was part of the Boathouse Writers Group) and Maisie (who once filmed me delivering a James Joyce monologue to the winds on Drumanagh). Their support during the residency period was vital. Finally I would like to thank Alan Sheeran for his kind permission to print a short extract from my interview with his father Edmond who sadly died earlier this year. The members of the Boathouse Writer’s Group were drawn from fifth class in St. Brendan’s National School, although by now they have all scattered to various secondary schools in Fingal and beyond. They are: Jamie Wong, Amy Dooley, SarahJane McNally, Darragh Clarke, Caoimhe Daly, Ben Cohen, Mona Gorman, Jodie Scott, Grace Saunders, Ailbhe Beggs, Abby Rikard and Kayleigh Leonard. I wish to dedicate the booklet to the memory of Loughshinny’s lost fishermen and to their surviving families.

B O U R

TOUCH A selection of impressions Boathouse Writersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Group

L A N G O R M A N

H A R B O U R

GRASS

SAND

Jamie Wong

Jodie Scott

I put my hand on the grass. It was damp from the morning dew. Each blade was a different shade of green. I could smell the freshly cut grass and it reminded me of summer. There were daisies and dandelions dotted across the field. If I looked close enough, I could see ladybugs crawling on the grass and spiders busily spinning their webs.

I put my hand in the soft wet sand. I picked some up in my hand. It felt crumbly and damp. I made a little hill of sand, It was cold when I touched it. I moulded the hill of sand into a castle My castle was a wet, squishy castle, I was proud of it.

D E C L A N G O R M A N

SEAWEED

ROCKS

SarahJane McNally

Caoimhe Davey

I put my hand on the slimy seaweed. And felt the squishy circle and wondered why it was there. Beside me there was more but in a red and purple type of colour. It was very slimy and wet and I could smell the seawater off it. There was more in front of the sea. It felt squishy and made a weird noise when I walked on it. I picked up a small bit and it was still slimy seaweed.

I put my hand on a rock It felt rough There were periwinkles stuck to the sides I turned it over I ran my fingers along the bottom It was wet and slimy. I turned it back over And brushed some hard sand off the top. It was smooth. It shone blue in the sunlight.

B O U R

HARBOUR STORIES

L A N G O R M A N

H A R

JOHNNY FANNING Fisherman

CATHAL DOWD SMITH Student at Skerries Community College (now studying history at TCD and official archivist at Newbridge House, Donabate)

B O U R

D E C L A

I’ve lived by the harbour all my life and I’ve always fished. I went to school in Loughshinny. As a kid I played all around here. Francie Rogan had the boathouse then. He used to let us come in. It was full of stuff – stuff he found at sea and stuff he collected. He loved television and he kept an old TV set in there. He was a big fan of James Bond and he had James Bond posters on the walls of the boathouse, and baskets and crates and there was a Nazi flag that he said got caught up in his nets one time. I remember watching Gay Byrne and Bunny Carr. He was on Bunny Carr himself one time, I’m sure somebody has a recording of it somewhere. He hadn’t much time for Gay Byrne. He’d shout at the telly when he came on. “Ah turn him off,” he’d say. Ah, the craic was good then! Most of the old fishermen are gone now. Pity someone didn’t gather their stories before they died. That way of life is all gone now.

I’ve lived all my life in Rush, just along the N coast, but I went to St. Brendan’s primary school in Loughshinny. I know lots of people in G Loughshinny. It’s that kind of place. I’ve never O lived anywhere else, always near the sea and R even when we go on holidays we go to Wexford, M beside the sea. I became aware of how the A sea connects people and places when I was on N holidays at Kilmore Quay and came upon fishing crates with Loughshinny markings. Sometimes you see the Kilmore Quay crates here on Loughshinny pier. At school they would sometimes bring us to the beach for lessons. It was great to get out of the classroom and down to the beach, and yet we took it for granted. You wouldn’t appreciate it as much as you would if you weren’t from near the sea. We just presumed, “Oh it’s a sunny day, we’ll go down to the beach, get ice cream.” When we were a little older we were allowed to come here on our own. We’d cycle up from Rush and call for all our friends in Loughshinny. We’d all have our pocket money to buy sweets off Liz in the shop. And ice cream. We’d have to plan carefully in case it wasn’t open. And we’d spend the whole day. We had our bikes and we felt we could go anywhere, we had the freedom, we could just call for anybody and chill out on the beach with all our sweets. Some days we’d go swimming or walking up the rocks behind the pier. Sometimes we would walk along the cliffs from Rush. When I was in fourth class the Rush and Loughshinny Historical Society came and took us down around the pier and they were telling us all about who used to live here, and all the famous people like Rev. Tanner who was murdered on the Four Roads. That would have been part of leading me towards the history, all those connections.

H A R

DEREK MCGARRY

Head of Innovation and Engagement National College of Art and Design

U R

My wife and I moved here in 1997. We used to run Pepper our Gordon Setter on the beach to exhaust her. One day I came down with Pepper to find German World War II armoured cars and motorcycles on the beach and harbour wall. There was a sentry post close to the boathouse with German soldiers manning it. A guy with a walkie-talkie came up to tell me they were shooting a movie. I had inadvertently walked onto a film set. I asked him who was in it and what was it called? He said Mia Farrow, and the working title was ‘Miracle at Midnight’. It was a Disney made for TV movie. As we were talking gunshots rang out and there were a series of mini explosions all along the harbour wall. Soldiers started running around after civilians. These are the hazards of living in a location that is an idyllic backdrop for movies, but mainly Loughshinny is quiet and tranquil and you could not live in a better place.

Complementing these big movies where Loughshinny was ‘borrowed’ for its natural attractiveness, Youtube is dotted with visitor’s personal and family videos of varying quality.

G O R

Local resident Máirtín De Barra made a short documentary that elegantly captures the Harry Hawker Centenary event in 2012. Watch this on: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DYenpGkl64.

M A N

Also worth viewing is the Geocast video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBN0Bk6_I10 in which Dr. David Chew of Trinity College introduces the fascinating folding rock formations.

Directed by Ken Cameron, ‘Miracle at Midnight’ is a Disney movie, made for television. It premiered on ABC in May of 1997. Although shot partly in Ireland, it is set in Denmark and tells the story of a family’s attempts to save the lives of thousands of Jewish Danes during the Nazi occupation. Several Irish actors are listed among the cast, including Barry McGovern and a very youthful Andrew Scott. Ever since film as an entertainment became popular, Loughshinny has been used as a location in Irish and international movies and TV dramas, most notably in more recent years for ‘Some Mother’s Son’ and ‘The Irish RM’ as well as ‘Eastenders’ and ‘Murphy’s Law’ featuring James Nesbitt. 16

H A R B

MARGARET & PETER PURDY

Brother & Sister Summer Visitors

E L

O U R

We’ve been coming to Loughshinny since around 1977, when Peter was four, that’s thirty eight years, every year without fail. There were eight children in the family but by the time we started coming the two older ones had stopped; they were already working. This is the same patch we’ve been on since we started coming. Our mother and father had a small caravan here. Did you ever see the Keystone Cops with all the people coming out of the car? That’s what the caravan was like! We were all on the floor, on the beds, on the window sills, everywhere.

N G O R M A N

... We would come for the whole summer, for two months. School would be over Friday and Mam and Dad would have us down Monday. Dad would still be working. So every morning he would cycle from here to Rush station, get off in town and cycle to Dunlops where he worked. ... We came on the train from Raheny station, with black plastic bags. Da would have his bike and he’d put one child on the front of the bike and a plastic bag on the back. He’d take one down to the station and then go back up to the house for the next till we were all down at the station with our black plastic bags. We’d take the train to Rush and then he’d do the bicycle journey from Rush to Loughshinny with a child and a black plastic bag. The rest of us would start walking and he’d come back for us one by one. ... Mam and Dad kept coming until eventually it got too cold in the old caravan. They weren’t so much into it then, it had really been to keep us occupied. Mam could relax here, she had no fear, no worries. So then they stopped coming, but Peter never left! ... ... That’s true, I took over the old van for maybe two years, but it was really, really old. It must have been sixty or seventy years old. It had grass growing in it. So I said to my girlfriend at the time, we need to get something new. Around that time I had my first child so we bought a mobile that was about twenty five years old and I kept on coming down. Then Margaret started coming back and staying with us...

... I had kids of my own and we would avail of Peter’s invitations until eventually an opportunity came up and the people in the next one were giving theirs up and that’s how I got my own mobile home. When I get here, I walk down the steps and I say “I just love it, it’s like coming home’: you see the beach, you smell the water, you smell the seaweed. When our kids are off playing we just relax, read, talk, go for walks.

H A R B O U R

FINGAL (EAST)

EMBARR

A poem by Declan Gorman

A N G O R M A

Swords, Balbriggan and The Naul, The ruins at Baldongan and graveyards, And houses that look like hotels And miles of sands and folding rocks, Calling seagulls and brent geese, And out there, Lambay Island Changing like a chameleon with every Shifting cloud and piers that once were busy Quiet now; and ice cream kiosks.

The old families still know who’s who And who owns what: like a secret society: The rest of us mere settlers, visitors.

E C L

Abundance of sea and land And potatoes. And airport workers Stripped of their pensions, And fishermen and African families And Latvian workers who stayed on After the labouring was done and All the money was gone.

This was once the Benidorm of Ireland Before Budget Travel and JWT: Red Island, jiving with showbands and lovers, The chalets at Rush where refugees From rain-worn Dublin migrated For long Aegean summers, And the Fair Maid of Fingal, a carnival Of pretty girls and burly men At tug’o’war, when everybody knew Everybody.

Stock still in the ice-foam Sea-swell lapping her flanks, Hock and stifle taut, High-tensile subaquatic cables And cogs. Locked. Compressed like springs. Time and everything stops, except The low drift of tide. The girl rider poised, proud, A photo in the doorframe, arches, then Leans forward slowly, releasing The nervous motors.

Unhurried, the great amphibian Wades to shore, Niamh tosses back her mane.

H A R B O U R

NINE DAYS

VERA STONE

Extract from novel in progress Declan Gorman

Long time resident of Loughshinny

They walked the shoreline south towards Rosscrann. A large buoy bobbed a few hundred metres off. The bay was otherwise still and deserted as an inland lake. The main beach led directly around a promontory of rocks to another shorter strand, inaccessible at full tide and out of view of the houses. They crossed the low-lying rocks to the hidden cove and were utterly secluded. “I used to come out here when I was a kid,” Lucius said suddenly. “My mother would bring me and Marcus and we would play over there in the caves.” He pointed to the dark opening at the foot of the black cliff face. “And she would sit on a rug just here and stare out at the sea for hours. The secret beach.” He felt a swell of emotion, an unexpected heave of sorrow. He had not related this memory to a stranger before. She sensed there was more. “Yes?” “Yes. She... eh, she lost a child when I was twelve. Miscarried. ‘The Afterthought’, she used to call it, the baby. A girl. A baby girl, we found out after. She was horrified to be pregnant again, didn’t want that at all. She miscarried late and on the day she got out of hospital she went missing. It was my first week in secondary school. I rode out here as soon as I got home, soon as my father told me. But the tide was in so I couldn’t get to the secret beach. I went up there onto the cliff path instead,” he glanced upwards, adrift in the memory. “I looked and she was sitting down here staring at the waves coming in around her.” He fell silent. “Was she OK?” “Yes. I didn’t call to her. I ran for help and they sent a rowboat around for her. I don’t remember much about her coming home or the days that followed, funny. We never really got on afterwards.” “Oh?” “Ah, I was a difficult teenager and she just... became harsh and aloof. The matter was never spoken of again. The pregnancy, the beach. Like never! Any bit of softness she had when we were kids seemed to get lost. Maybe that would have happened anyway.”

D E C L A N G O R M A N

I was relating a story just recently at the wake of Mary Ferguson, God be good to her, the lady from the shop. We were staying in my sisterin-law’s house at the time and we were going back home to Dublin the following day. I went down to the beach with the kids and I had just brought barely enough money for ice creams. It was such a nice day, I said, ‘Ah, I won’t go back up at lunchtime to start packing up and cleaning the house and all the rest’ and I went instead to the shop. I remember I got a sliced pan and she loaned me a plate and a knife and I got butter and crisps for the crisp sandwiches - the sandwiches were always interlaced with sand when you were sitting on the beach - and bananas and minerals. But then I remembered I only had the money for the ice cream with me. “Ah sure not to worry!” she said. “But we’re going home in the morning and I won’t be down here tomorrow.” “Ah, she said you’ll be down again next month, or whenever you’re down again pay me then.” I always remembered that to her, how kind she was. I was just a visitor, a holiday maker. But you were made so welcome. It was lovely, that atmosphere. It was homely – an old world village. ... When we moved down here it wasn’t a complete change, as I used to come here on holidays. The weather was always good, so it seemed: the odd shower only. I made friends sitting down at the harbour. There used to be a line of us, sitting knitting along the wall over at the top of the steps where you get more sun and the kids played ón the beach. It’s great to see people still using the beach so much, local people, kids playing. It’s such a safe little harbour. Vera first came as a visitor to Loughshinny in 1955, eventually moving and settling permanently with her family here in 1973. She has always been active in the community, involved in early initiatives such as the 65s Club, the Residents’ Association and more recently in the Town Twinning with Quistinic in Morbihan, Southern Brittany and Rush and Loughshinny Historical Society.

H A R B

JOHN DALY Fisherman

L A When we came in, the locals were a bit surprised to see a 60ft. French N trawler coming in until my father opened up the wheelhouse window and the lads on the harbour recognised him. They called out, “What G are you doing in here Sean?” “I’m leaking water.” he says “What’s up there on the beach, is there any rocks?” and the lads said no, it was all O R sand, so we beached the boat on the sand. The tide went out and we M assessed the damage and we stopped the leak and it just dawned on us then that we had come in at high water and the tide neaped which A means it doesn’t come in as far the next day. So we were stranded here N for two weeks.

U R

John Daly, a fisherman with rare insights into history, came to see me in the boathouse. I spent a memorable hour listening to his tales, of trawling up a cluster of gunpowder-filled cannonballs and a pair of eighteenth century bottles of port from the seabed, to his detective work into ancient history linking Dromanagh with the Hill of Tara and his personal story of his own most unusual arrival into Loughshinny in 1986, which is transcribed verbatim here.

E C

I am officially a blow-in. I was on a sixty foot trawler from Balbriggan. We were fishing out in the deep water in the Irish Sea and we felt a leak on the boat. I was fourteen years old, fresh out of school and I had decided I want to become a fisherman. I was an apprentice mechanic on the boat and it was up to me to tell skipper, who was my father, what was going on with the engine and making sure we could get from A to B safely, when we developed the leak. We seemed to be taking in about a barrel of water every half hour and the pump was struggling to cope. When the water got up over the gearbox, I decided we were in trouble and I reported to my father that we were sinking. We were beam on for Balbriggan. The wind was north-easterly and while we were rocking and rolling we seemed to be taking on more and more water til we were taking on a barrel every ten minutes. I said we have to stop the boat from rocking and get to the nearest shore. He said the nearest shore was Loughshinny. I hadn’t a clue where Loughshinny even was and he pointed out it was halfway between Skerries and Rush and the furthest point out to sea.

There was nothing to do here for a fourteen year old. I was baffled by where I was. The first night I stayed, my father drove home to Balbriggan. He came back up that evening with my brother who was a year younger than me and he headed across the beach with a big huge pot of stew to do me for three days while I was on the boat keeping an eye on it. The boat was actually listed at a forty five degree angle and it was very hard to put the pot of stew on the cooker. I had shackles and everything built up under it to hold the cooker level. I survived the two weeks. We decided to do as much to the boat as we could. We repaired all the water damage to the starting motor and the alternator and replaced the batteries. We painted up the boat and fixed the leak, so were ready to get off the sand when the time would come. I walked up and down and around the Four Roads, I don’t know how often. I was too young to go in for a pint. And I hadn’t any money anyway. But I kinda liked Loughshinny. It was a lovely place to be stuck. All the people were real nice to us. The only thing they were worried about was that we might spill diesel from our bilges onto the beach. They had their lobsters in the bay there where they keep them in stores and they were afraid that we would leak oil and ruin their lobsters. We didn’t leak any oil anyway. The boat had two names, its French name which was “Quitter ou Double” and we used to call it “The Doubles or Quits”. She was my training ship. I spent four years aboard that boat. Everything was all old school. There were no GPS’s. But I got very fond of Loughshinny and I moved here with my wife twenty one years ago. 25

H A R

INGRID DUNNE

D E

Artist

R G O R M A N

We are here eleven years in Loughshinny. Before that we had a mobile home in Rush, at the North Beach caravan park, but before all that I used to come on holidays to Rogerstown and my Dad would bring us down to Loughshinny beach. We were from the southside so coming here was a journey across to the other side of the city, it was really like going away on holidays – out in the middle of nowhere. So this part of the world was always huge in my life. When I met my husband we lived in town in a lot of places but we had the mobile home in Rush and we’d walk along the cliffs over to this side. I used to climb up into the Martello Tower and look this way, down into this little inlet and go, “What an amazing place to live, imagine living somewhere like that!”

The time eventually came to settle down and we started looking about for houses, in Swords and other places. We thought we could never afford to live by the sea, it wasn’t going to happen. But then a house came in the Park. It needed a lot of work. It had no kitchen. The back garden was concrete and everything. But we thought, “It’s LOUGHSHINNY!!! We have to go and see it!” And the two of us fell in love with it. It was a blank canvas. It was real funny because the girl selling the house was quite apologetic... it had no kitchen. But I kept thinking ‘It’s Loughshinny...’. And I remember the first night we moved in. We had nothing: a cooker and a bed, that was it. We came down here to the beach with a bottle of wine and we sat for

hours, thinking, we live here now. It was one of those moments where I thought, is this really happening? We had looked down here from up there, from afar, it seemed unattainable - now it was real, we could sit here all night. It’s a really special place. We have a dog now and we come down here every other day for a walk or a run. The beach is our go-to place. You wouldn’t recognise the house now – a ten year project but now it’s done. And we know everybody now. We have always felt included. I got involved with the Rush Musical Society, a lovely bunch of people. One night we had a party afterwards back at our house until about four in the morning and we went down with a group of about six of the younger ones to watch the sun come up. It was a particularly cold morning but the light was incredible. And then a few of them, the boys just stripped down to their boxers and got in for a swim and the girls rolled up their party dresses, tucked them into their knickers, giggling and screaming and ran in and we thought, were we ever that young? It was a lovely moment, totally spontaneous. It could have been any time, any moment in history. And then the girls were shivering, freezing so it was back up to the house for hot showers... these girls could die of pneumonia...! But such a special moment, the sky, the colours, it was almost sacred, as if they all just had to get into the water to be fully part of it! 27

H A R B

EDMOND SHEERAN Retired Insurance Broker and Former Professional Footballer

D E C L

U R

I was first taken to Loughshinny ninety two, maybe ninety three, years ago. My Dad contributed to a savings fund in his workplace and he could afford to rent a house or part of a house at Loughshinny in the summers. When I became about eight years of age, I was friendly with all the boys and girls in Loughshinny. They were still at school: they didn’t get their holidays until harvest time. So I would be sent to school with them! I was taught by Jack McGuinness’ wife.

G O R M A N

I remember as a child how magnetic it was, going on holidays to Loughshinny; it was magic. We went by taxi for five quid from Harolds Cross. My Dad would put a big portmanteau box on top of the taxi, boots and shoes and socks and everything. We played football on the beach. We’d paint a goalpost on the harbour wall and there’d be more arguments – “That was in!” “It wasn’t in!” Christy Plunkett, I remember, was a good player. I was in a family of nine children. I was the baby. We stayed in different houses. Most people in Loughshinny would move out and rent their cottages in the summer. We spent a number of summers in the house of Maggie Larkin, the first house on Moyne Road. Another was a long thatched cottage, beside Mary Ferguson’s shop, opposite the home of a man called Jim Ryan. Jim would send his dog across the road in the morning to collect his paper. The dog would come back with the paper in his mouth. When I got married in 1948, even though my wife and I travelled all over the world, we always wanted to return to Loughshinny and so I bought a cottage, owned by Pete Wilde, a fisherman-cum-lorry driver. He collected the fish from the harbour and drove to the fish market. There was a slip down the side of the house, a right of way for horses and carts to go down onto the beach and when the tide was out they would go across to collect seaweed from the caves. It had to be done quickly – in an hour before the tide came back in. The cottage had been a fishbox store. I extended it a bit and put a balcony on it. We would watch our children playing on the beach, in the pools, under the balcony. And I took pictures. Loughshinny, a wonderful place!

DECLAN GORMAN

Declan Gorman has worked professionally in Irish theatre as a writer, director,

performer, producer and policy specialist for over thirty years. He was co-founder

in 1985 of Co-Motion Theatre Company, Dublin, (recently re-formed as Co-Motion

Media). From 1990 to ‘95 he was Theatre Programme Director at City Arts Centre,

Dublin. In 1995-96 he worked for The Arts Council as Coordinator of the ‘Review of Theatre in Ireland’, a national policy programme. He then established Upstate

Theatre Project, Drogheda and was Artistic Director there from 1997 to 2010,

during which time he wrote and directed several plays including his own ‘Border

Chronicles Trilogy’. Along with Upstate colleague Declan Mallon he pioneered

methods and led many local and cross-border projects in Community-Engaged

Theatre. In 2010, he left to take up a two year post at NUI Galway as Creative

Director of the BA CONNECT Applied Writing, Film and Performance programme. Since 2012 he has worked freelance as a playwright, director, public artist and performer. His one man show ‘The Dubliners Dilemma’ (based on Joyce) has toured widely internationally and will be performed this October in Dallas and San Francisco, and then travel in a double bill with his most recent play ‘The Big Fellow’ on a three cities tour of India. He teaches and directs on the (biennial) New York University - Steinhardt School, Dublin Study Abroad Program; has sat on several boards and working groups including Abbey Theatre Outreach/Education (chair) and City Arts. He holds an M.Phil. in Creative Writing from TCD, is a former winner of a Stewart Parker/BBC new writing award and has contributed at arts conferences in Dublin, Belfast, Glasgow, London, New York, Varna (Bulgaria), Moscow, Oslo and Bremen among others. Since 2014, he has been a member of the Board of Directors of Draíocht Arts Centre, Blanchardstown.

HARBOUR DECLAN GORMAN