Section V
2022
A Man You Don’t Meet Every Day s t e p h e n o ’c o n n o r
“I never heard a singer as good as Liam, ever. He was the best ballad singer I ever heard in my life, and still is.” —Bob Dylan, 1986
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omewhere around 1982, not long after the noon hour on a Saturday, I stopped into a nearly empty Irish pub in Boston called The Black Rose. You may know it. I took a seat at the bar and ordered a Guinness. The bartender brought it, and as I began to drink, a man sauntered in wearing a corduroy cap and carrying a guitar case. I recognized him immediately. Liam Clancy took a stool a few feet away from mine. I could not have been more awed if Paul McCartney had come in and taken that barstool. Let me explain. In 1966, I was eleven years old. My father, the son of Irish immigrants, came home with a three-record box set entitled The Irish Uprising 1916-1922, narrated by Charles Kuralt. Perhaps more than anything else in my life, I look back to that simple event as the impetus for a lifelong interest in Irish history, music and literature, and by extension an interest in music, history and literature in general. Once you realize the power of poetry, you are interested in all kinds of poetry. Obsession has a negative connotation, so I’ll say that I became intensely intrigued with those recordings, which I played over and over on my parents’ stereo in the living room. There were songs performed by Liam Clancy, the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem, Brendan O’Duill, Anne Byrne and others. There were interviews with participants in the uprising such as Rory Brugha, Sean Harling, Joseph Clarke and Sean T. O’Kelly and a heartbreaking interview with Mrs. Eileen O’Hanrahan Reilly, whose husband, Michael O’Hanrahan had been second in command of a Dublin battalion under Thomas McDonough. She spoke of visiting him in Kilmainham Jail after the failed insurrection. I can still her the old woman’s voice: “‘Surely,’ Mícheál said, ‘you don’t think you’ll not see me again.’ Well, I did see him again, but if I did ‘twas for his execution.” There were recitations of the poetry of Yeats, the words of O’Casey, and Pearse’s famous oration at the grave of O’Donovan Rossa: “They think that they’ve purchased half of us and intimidated the other half. But the fools, the fools, the fools! They have left us our Fenian dead, and while Ireland holds these graves, Ireland, unfree, shall never be at peace.” The events of 1916, the poets and martyrs, and many of the participants were both, filled my imagination. When my fifth-grade teacher asked us to name a president, I wrote Eamon DeValera. It was marked wrong. The records in that box awakened me to my heritage in a profound way. I began to see my grandparents on the O’Connor and Leahy sides as expatriates from a land where, in the words of Patrick Pearse, recited by Tommy Makem, they’d had, “no treasure but hope/ No The Lowell Review
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