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Irish Times
16 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Poor Mouth, Rich Reputation – Frank McNally on fellow Flannorak and pioneering publican, Mick Gleeson
Among the Flannoraks gathered in Strabane for this week's International Flann O'Brien Conference is Mick Gleeson, a man who was behind one of the finest tributes ever paid to the writer. For about 20 years from the mid-1970s, Mick ran the late and still lamented An Béal Bocht in Dublin's Charlemont Street, a pub that doubled as a theatre. Mind you, as he tells it, the premises was not named primarily for the 1941 novel (written by the real-life Flann, Brian O'Nolan, under his Irish Times pseudonym Myles na gCopaleen). Although a committed Mylesian even then, Mick was also paying back-handed tribute to some of his customers, whose hard-luck stories would have given the novel's Bonaparte Ó Coonasa a run for his lack of money. READ MORE Gleeson came to own the venue only after being outbid for a series of other bars, most notably O'Donoghue's of Merrion Row, spiritual home of The Dubliners. When that was up for auction in 1977, his bank gave him a green light to go all in. But having started at £88,000, the price rose to nearly twice that, long before which he gave up: outbid not for the first time by the late Dessie Hynes. So instead, he turned to Charlemont Street, a tough locality then on the southern edge of the inner city, and picked what became An Béal Bocht for a mere £58,000. It was a trail-blazing pub in several ways. 'We had a lot of women on the staff, for one thing,' Mick recalls. This was controversial with some older male customers, who were sceptical as to whether female bar tenders could be trusted with the holy sacrament of pouring a pint properly: 'They'd be asking: will you get Pat or Mick to do that?' he says. 'For Jayzus sake, it's only liquid in a glass.' It was also an Irish-friendly bar. Customers were encouraged to speak the native language, if they could. And then there was the theatre, born from a genuine interest in the form: 'I wanted a place where you could have a drink while watching a play, not just where you watched a play while drinking.' It was a logical step, eventually, that An Béal Bocht the venue would host a stage adaptation of An Béal Bocht the book. Directed by Ronan Smith, this was done first in English, as The Poor Mouth, and became a huge success. The show ran for about five years, Mick thinks: 'It was like a Dublin version of The Mousetrap.' Then in 1991, when the novel's 50th anniversary and the 25th of O'Nolan's death combined, Gleeson decided to stage the play in Irish. His regular producer thought him mad. 'Irish?' he said: 'Nobody will come.' But central to the plan was to get Mick Lally, gaeilgeoir and national treasure, involved. When they visited his house in nearby Portobello for talks, the host produced a bottle of 'fíon bán' (which means 'white wine' literally, but in Lally's Mayo dialect signified poitín). The visitors 'fell out of the house' next morning with a deal. At first, they thought the play as gaeilge would be lucky to last a week. It ran for almost two months, which must be another record. Like Myles, Mick used to have a link to The Irish Times. His wife Eileen Lynam was secretary to the great Douglas Gageby, whose many editorial reforms included ensuring that the late-era O'Nolan, by then a sick man, was paid for his work even when it wasn't used. Eileen's jobs include proof-reading advance copies of the cryptic crossword and raising queries with its creator Derek Crozier. Mick passively inhaled her expertise, to the extent that he became an embodiment of a character from one of Myles's classic sketches. That's the one about a man who buys a first edition of the paper, hot off the presses, and spends all night grimly working out the crossword just so that he can go to the golf club next day, feigning not to have seen it yet, and help his neighbour with the hard ones in return for the glory of hearing: 'Begob you're quick!' Mick's contribution wasn't as calculated as that. Still, like a good barman, he had the answers when needed. After conferences in Vienna, Rome, Prague, Salzburg, Dublin, Boston, and Cluj-Napoca, the International Flann O'Brien Society has brought its biennial symposium back home this year, to O'Nolan's Tyrone birthplace. But of course Strabane is also international, being just across the river and an EU frontier from Lifford. I was reminded of this on Thursday night in The Farmer's Home - a former dwelling house, now a lovely pub of many rooms – when asking a group of presumed Tyrone supporters how they expected to do against Dublin in Saturday's All-Ireland Football Quarter final. On closer inspection, they were all from Donegal and looking forward to thrashing the Diarist's native Monaghan in the curtain-raiser. Tensions remained high along the interface well into the night. But at time of writing, there have been no major incidents.
Irish Times
14-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Bloomsday was a sporadic, boozy and ill-mannered affair before becoming an annual event in 1994
I thought Bloomsday was last bank holiday weekend in Phoenix Park? No, that was Bloom, Ireland's largest gardening festival. Bloomsday is a celebration of James Joyce 's literary masterpiece, Ulysses, named after its anti-hero, Leopold Bloom, and based on his all-day peregrinations around Dublin on June 16th, 1904. So it's been celebrated annually since 1904? Not quite. The novel is set then but was first published in Paris in 1922. The first mention of a celebration is in a letter from Joyce received by his patron Harriet Shaw Weaver on June 27th, 1924, which refers to 'a group of people who observe what they call Bloom's day – 16 June'. Adrienne Monnier, the partner of Ulysses' publisher Sylvia Beach, celebrated the 25th anniversary of the first Bloomsday in 1929 with a Déjeuner Ulysse at the Hôtel Léopold near Versailles. So it's been celebrated annually since the 1920s? Again, not quite. Joyce may be a national treasure today but he spent most of his life in exile and Ulysses, although not banned, was not available in Irish bookshops or libraries until the 1970s. When Joyce died in Zurich in 1941, Joseph P Walshe, the secretary of the Department of External Affairs in Dublin, asked the Irish envoy, 'Did he die a Catholic?' and instructed him not to attend the funeral. In 1954, however, the writers Flann O'Brien, late of this parish, Patrick Kavanagh, Anthony Cronin, together with publisher and publican John Ryan, Joyce's cousin Tom Joyce and AJ Leventhal, a lecturer in French at Trinity College, set out on an all-day pilgrimage in two horse-drawn cabs, starting at the Martello tower in Sandycove and continuing in Davy Byrnes pub on Duke Street (where Bloom eats a Gorgonzola sandwich with a glass of burgundy). But the inebriated party got no farther than the Bailey pub, which Ryan owned. The drunken spectacle is immortalised in video, including some public urination on Sandymount Strand. READ MORE So it's been celebrated annually since 1954? Er, not quite. On Bloomsday in 1967, Kavanagh, O'Brien and Ryan 'rescued' the door from 7 Eccles Street, the home of Leopold and Molly Bloom, which was being demolished to make way for the Mater Private Hospital, and placed it in the Bailey Pub. 'I declare this door shut,' Kavanagh reportedly said. The door was later donated to the James Joyce Centre, which in 1994 organised the first weeklong Bloomsday Festival. Right. So it's been celebrated annually since 1994? Yes! It's an ideal opportunity to dress up in your Edwardian finery, eat offal and listen to reams of rich and ribald prose. This year's highlights include a two-hour walking tour leaving James Joyce Centre, 35 Great George's Street North, at 11am daily until the 16th and Jim Norton reading from Ulysses on June 16th at 11am at the James Joyce Tower & Museum. Bloomsday Festival
Irish Times
07-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Burning Issues: Frank McNally on an unfortunate metaphor, and the continuing mysteries of the ‘Flannagram'
Listening to a BBC Radio documentary on books the other night, I was struck (on the elbow, near the funny bone) by a comment made about Flann O'Brien 's debut novel At Swim-Two-Birds (1939). Reflecting on which, in conversation with one of her guests, presenter Emma Smith suggested the title must have been 'a slow burn' at the time and added: 'It doesn't fly off the shelves like certain other books of the wartime period.' Her choice of metaphor was unfortunate in the circumstances, because the documentary's wider subject was the German firebombing of the City of London in December 1940. That included the obliteration of Paternoster Row, which had been the centre of British publishing for centuries. Five million books went up in flames. And At Swim-Two-Birds, most of the print run of which was stored in Longman's warehouse, in the middle of ground zero, burned as quickly as any. It flew off the shelves all right, but in the form of smoke. READ MORE The four-and-a-half-hour bombardment on the night of December 29th was likened to a 'second great fire of London'. A measure of the destruction was a story reported by the Scotsman newspaper of a war tourist who wanted to see the damage and asked a policeman for directions to Paternoster Row. 'There ain't no Paternoster Row,' replied the policeman. Despite good reviews and strong support from Longman's in 1939, At Swim-Two-Birds had not sold well. The promotion included a 247-word eulogy from Graham Greene, printed on the dust-jacket. But poignantly, sales did not quite match Greene's word count, coming in at a paltry 244 before the Germans bombed the rest. On the upside, the novel survived to be considered a classic eventually. And the 1940 fire was good news for the few who had bought a first edition. Blackwell's bookshop, a spokesman for which was interviewed on the documentary, has one for sale currently at a cool £20,140 (€23,643). Mind you, there are first editions and first editions. Sheet stock of the original did survive somewhere, and this was reprinted, with a slightly different cover and reduced price, in 1941 or 1942. If I understand correctly, those are still considered the first edition but in a 'second state'. A fuller excavation of the detail is contained in Pádraig Ó Méalóid's 2024 essay on the subject for The Parish Review (not to be confused with the Paris one): the Journal of Flann O'Brien studies. *** In a separate but not unrelated development, meanwhile, my attention has been drawn to a recent letter in the Financial Times from a person identified as 'Blair Noonan, Dublin'. Short and amusing, it was about the number of English and Welsh people applying for Irish passports since Brexit (160,000 so far), and the possibility that this could be leveraged into more high-quality football players playing for Ireland. Noonan noted that 6.7 million UK residents (Northern Ireland included) are potentially entitled to Irish passports, comfortably more than the Republic's entire population. His optimism unbound, he concluded: 'The World Cup beckons.' But of less interest than the letter, perhaps, is the name of the writer. For, as has also been drawn to my attention, Blair Noonan is an anagram of 'Brian O'Nolan' (the real-life Flann, who was himself famous for writing pseudonymous letters to newspapers, most notably The Irish Times). This might well be mere coincidence, except that the person who did the attention-drawing here is a long-time (if only occasional) correspondent of mine, Walter Götz, a man with proven expertise in the area. I've never met Walter and don't know where he's from. But his latest email chides me in what sounds like a German accent. Despite my interest in fake Flann letters, it accuses, 'for many years you are not paying attention already'. Sure enough, I now find that Blair Noonan has been a regular writer to this newspaper too over the past decade, including occasions when he was responding to the Irishman's Diary. And it was, after all, the same Walter who previously alerted me to the preposterous Manny Aspe-College (an anagram of Myles na gCopaleen), the slightly less preposterous Angela Polsen-Emy (ditto Myles na Gopaleen, minus the ecclipsis), and a Swedish gentleman named Alfe Ninbörn (formed from the letters Flann O'Brien), all of whom have been serial writers to newspapers, British and Irish. It's said that part of the reason Brian O'Nolan was hired as an Irish Times columnist in 1940 was to rescue the letters page from his pseudonymous antics. Editor Bertie Smyllie had been in on the joke at the start but then found himself sensing the 'fine Italianate hand' of O'Nolan even on letters that might have been genuine. The cautionary tale about such paranoia is Oscar Love, a regular writer to the editor once who was widely assumed to be an invention of O'Nolan's but turned out to be real. If Blair Noonan turns out not to be a pseudonym, I apologise for doubting him. In the meantime, another question arises. Who is this mysterious international Flannagram expert, Walter Götz?
