Irish Literature - House of Mourning and Other Stories

and it was mainly footballers he photographed.
    Very occasionally there were Falstaffian interlopers from Garryowen and St Mary’s rugby teams in Limerick.
    A man who teaches in the Gothic St Flannan’s College in Ennis still has a photograph taken by the garda sergeant.
    Boy with pompadour quiff, in belted scoutmaster shorts, standing against the rocks where frogs live in abundance, hands on the rocks, his chest thrown forward, Lana Turner-style.
    It was not forgotten in County Clare that during the War of Independence, in Dublin, some boys shot British agents in their beds, some beside their wives.
    Then, as they were being searched for in the city, they played a football match. A few of those boys later went mad and ended up in mental homes.
    Michael Cusack himself, who’d founded the Gaelic Athletic Association in 1884, was from Carron in County Clare.
    It had never been forgotten that shortly after the Irish defeat at the Battle of the Boyne in County Meath, where Gaelic football was particularly popular and used to be followed by wrestling, some Wexford men crossed to Cornwall, tied yellow ribbons around their waists to distinguish themselves, and trounced the Cornish men at hurling.
    Nor was it forgotten that after the Battle of the Boyne the victors had sung ‘The Protestant Boys,’ composed by the Marquis of Wharton, frequently sung by Lord Byron’s friend, the County Clare poet Thomas Dermody, as ‘Lillibulero.’
    The Gaelic Athletic Association spread like prairie fire in the years just after its foundation, Michael Cusack said.
    One of the first football teams used flour bags as jerseys.
    The Gaelic Athletic Association turned up en masse to Parnell’s funeral in 1891, to which his widow in Brighton, Kitty O’Shea, was afraid to go.
    On the day the Second World War broke out Kilkenny was playing Cork in hurling in Dublin, a day of thunder and lightning and rain, Kilkenny winning with a decisive point from a man from Castleshock.
    Roscommon won the All-Ireland football final that month.
    Often the Clare boys went to Ballinasloe to play games, where the football star Michael Knacker Walsh was from, staying in the workhouse, singing ‘The West Clare Express’ in the showers: ‘It spends most of its time off the track.’
    Connaught finals were played in St Coman’s Park in Roscommon and these were a treat because the people of Roscommon town opened their houses as guesthouses for the occasions and served spice cake and butterfly buns at their hall doors.
    People converged on the town in thousands on bicycles for these occasions.
    At the end of September some of the Clare boys journeyed to Dublin, staying in the Grand Hotel, Malahide, to see the All-Ireland football final for a cup modelled on the Ardagh Chalice.
    On these visits to Dublin it was mandatory, in suits with long jackets and padded chests, to call in on the all-day cartoon show in the rich-crimson, basement Grafton Cinema, which sold claret, port, rum and champagne gums in the foyer, and to admire the interlaced roundels and the floriated scrollwork of the Book of Kells in Trinity College.
    A few of them went to a production of The Duchess of Malfi at the Gate Theatre in which all the actors wore hearse-cloth costumes.
O, this gloomy world.
In what a shadow, or deep pit of darkness,
Doth womanish and fearful mankind live!

    The garda sergeant was a great fan of John McCormack and in the barracks at night on a gramophone he’d play John McCormack singing Don Ottavio in Don Giovanni , Rachmaninoff’s ‘When Night Descends,’ Handel’s ‘Tell Fair Irene,’ Earl Bristol’s ‘Farewell,’ ‘The Short Cut to the Rosses,’ ‘The Snowy Breasted Pearl,’ ‘Green Grows the Laurel,’ Villiers Stanford’s ‘Lament for Owen Roe O’Neill.’
    He himself was known to sing the renowned ballad, ‘The Peeler and the Goat,’ about a drunken goat who was impounded by an Irish Constabulary officer in County Tipperary.
    In the nineteen-thirties and -forties, while the rest of Ireland suffered, it was common to have garda sergeants who were libertine or even bohemian.
    Garda Sergeant Clohessy was from Galway city and, in the extreme viridian of Galway before it changed to maroon and white and in snowflake-white calf stockings, used to play football with the Kilconierin team.
    In the years just after independence, his hair Rudolph Valentino-style, he went to train as a guard in the Phoenix Park Depot, where sick members of the Royal