Irish Literature - House of Mourning and Other Stories

azure skinny jeans.
    A blue-and-white long-distance coach having taken Dean from Chicago Greyhound Bus Station to southern California where he gained the confidence to shed his gawky Hoosier Indiana adolescence and emerge like this.
    Fergal’s coffin was taken off the hearse outside St Louis Convent, where exchanging manicure sets was then in vogue, and borne through Monaghan town by youths with shellacked cockscombs, farmhands’ cockscombs, slicked-back hair like James Dean, or the Levee (the Panama)—back-sweep and crest, greased side-boards.
    They’d all seen the colour-drenched chickie run in Rebel Without a Cause —car race towards cliff edge, jumping out at the last moment.
    Bearers of the coffin halted in front of the O’Hanlon home in Park Street—his mother’s name, Darby, linked her by a marriage to Tommy Donnelly, commandant of Fifth Northern Division, Old IRA—while a tricolour flew from a window.
    Seán South, a clerk at MacMahon’s timber firm in Limerick city—hair the ginger of the ginger daub at the top of a mushroom, with sidecombed crest and back-swept sides, eyes low-tide blue, earnest glasses.
    He’d been compared for his very serious expression to Stewart Granger in King Solomon’s Mines , based on Henry Rider Haggard’s novel.
    The hearse followed on O’Connell Street, Dublin, under Player’s Please and Jacob’s Chocolates advertisements, by Fianna Éireann—olive-green uniforms and cocked hats like the Ancient Order of Foresters who used to sing patriotic songs in nineteenth-century Dublin music halls.
    It was raining heavily as the hearse arrived at the Old County Hospital, Dublin Road, Portlaoise, as part of its nine-and-a-half-hour journey from Dublin to Limerick city.
    His widowed mother met the hearse in Roscrea.
    Eleven thousand marched and eleven thousand lined the streets in Limerick city.
    Twenty prominent religious leaders, city and county councillors, senators, a member of parliament, the Forty-Ninth Battalion of the FCA—Local Defence Force—bus-and garage-men, Gaelic football and hurling teams, Gaelic League, Old Irish Volunteers, Nationalist Women’s Society, followed the hearse past Spillane’s who made Garryowen Plug tobacco.
    Curragower Falls on Shannon in torrent.
    A busker heard to play ‘Father Murphy of Old Kilcormac’ and ‘Don’t Forget Your Dear Old Mother’ on mouth organ.
    Never known to sing or play a violin in Limerick city, Seán South had played a violin as a lady played on piano, and afterwards sang ‘Eibhlín A Rún’—Eileen So Coy—in Monaghan town a few days prior to the attack on Brookeborough police station.
    The IRA of the 1950s consisted of mavericks—carpenters or plumbers with artistic inclinations who’d launch into a ballad in the box snug of a pub with cartoons outside of an ostrich snatching a glass of Guinness from a Royal Irish Constabulary man in his rifle green, or Royal Irish Constabulary men in the same rifle green with their caps popping in the air as a pelican makes off with their Guinness bottles in his beak, or a tortoise transporting a pint of Guinness.
    Dearg - ghráin —intense hatred—was the attitude to England.
    Because of this dearg - ghráin , the brother of novelist Edith Somerville—white lisle dresses, bow ties, who’d seen the Titanic pass west Cork and the corpses washed in from the Lusitania as her gingham umbrella was raised—was murdered when he answered the door at The Point, Castletownsend, west Cork, on the evening of 24 March 1936, for writing references for farmers’ sons with marigold and buttercup hair who wished to join the Royal Navy.
    These IRA men—some of whom were known to dress in apricot jackets with triple wooden buttons at cuffs, ultramarine shirts, lizard-skin pumps—could recite the poem by north Leinster Séamus Dall Mac Cuarta about the King-Badger who loved not pleasure, or the poem by County Fermanagh Cathal Buí Mac Giolla Ghunna about the yellow bittern who, for all the vanity of its powder-down feather, died of thirst, laid out like the ruin of Troy, water voles at its wake, clearly showing the importance of being frequently drunk because there wouldn’t be drink when you’re dead!
    The Irish language is an encyclopaedia of oppression.
    Seán South, who grew a beard in his last month and swore he wouldn’t shave it until the Six Counties were free, was forever quoting a line by Angus Mac Daighre Ó Dálaigh:
Ag seilg troda ar fhéinn eachtrann
Gá bhuil