Latest news with #MylesnaGCopaleen
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
19-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Voice from the Grave – Frank McNally on a debut poetry collection from Niall Montgomery, 38 years after his death.
When Niall Montgomery died in 1987, an appreciation in this newspaper mentioned the imminent, posthumous publication of his first ever collection of poetry, 'ominously entitled Terminal '. The appreciator, 'M.S.' (his friend and occasional publisher in magazines, Michael Smith), added: 'I cannot express the bitterness of my disappointment that he will not be alive to see it.' But Smith needn't have worried because, for whatever reason, the thing Montgomery wasn't alive to see didn't appear then either. Instead, nearly 40 years later, a collection of the poems has only now finally seen the light, this time under the title Terminal 1 . While even more posthumous, it sounds less ominous than the 1987 version. If anything, it has taken on an ironic quality, thanks to the subtitle: 'Arrivals'. As it finally touches down, despite the four-decade delay, a Ryanair-style fanfare may be justified. READ MORE The recurrent aviation terminology is explained in part by Montgomery's day job as an architect, in which role he worked under Desmond Fitzgerald on the masterpiece that is the original Dublin Airport terminal. But Montgomery (1915 – 1987) was a man of many talents. A painter, sculptor, and influential literary critic, he was also an Irish Times columnist, doubly disguised, for many years. First, on an unknown but substantial number of occasions, he stood in for his friend Brian O'Nolan, aka Myles na gCopaleen. The possibility that any given edition of Cruiskeen Lawn could have been written by Montgomery or a third party has been credited with preserving O'Nolan's day job as a senior civil servant, at least until one too many attacks on his boss, the Minister for 'Yokel Government', precipitated his early retirement in 1953 Later, in the mid-1960s, Montgomery acquired his own Irish Times column, entitled The Liberties. For this he used the pseudonym Rosemary Lane, resulting in some indignant letters to the editor about 'Miss Lane's' opinions. In fact, Rosemary Lane was a defunct Dublin address, once the site of a tavern in which furtive masses were said during penal times, and today occupied by the Church of the Immaculate Conception, better known to Dubliners (and those who've read the opening line of Joyce's Finnegans Wake) as 'Adam and Eve's'. Alas, the short-lived column had obvious similarities in style to Cruiskeen Lawn – and why wouldn't it, since the author had so often deputised on that? And when sub-editors place them side-by-side one day, it provoked a fit of angry paranoia in O'Nolan – not a well man by then anyway. Montgomery promptly relinquished the job and so the literary Rosemary Lane disappeared from the map too. But Montgomery was also a reluctant poet: reluctant in the sense that he so revered the form, his own contributions had to be dragged out of him, by Smith and others. As the editor of the belated collection, Joseph LaBine, notes, the obscurity of Montgomery's early work drew a backhanded compliment once from a young Samuel Beckett. Criticising some better-known Irish poets of the time, Beckett named a few others of whom he knew 'nothing'. Then he singled out Montgomery's poetry, of which he knew 'nothing at all'. For Beckett, as LaBine jokes, there were degrees of nothingness: the kind applying to Montgomery was more absolute than the others. That didn't last. As he had with Joyce, Montgomery became one of Ireland's most respected authorities on Beckett's work, and in the process a good friend of the writer. Not only did Beckett come to know the architect well, he knew himself better in the process. After one epic essay ('a three-month job'), which Montgomery had sent to Paris for the subject's approval, Beckett responded: 'I learned a lot about myself I didn't know and hadn't suspected'. By 1955, in a warm letter, Beckett looked forward to their meeting on a possible return to Dublin the following year, and lapsed into Hiberno-English: 'If I do, and the family dying dead, it's the quare times we'll be having.' Montgomery wrote poems in both of Ireland's official languages and is not easy to read in either. He was a great admirer of jazz, drawing inspiration from it for his free, unconventional verse. He 'pays homage to Dublin and Joyce' (with a bit of Flann O'Brien too) LaBine notes, 'but his characteristic style, with its odd enjambment and capitalisation, anticipates beat poetry, particularly Allen Ginsberg's Howl (1956)'. Less happily, his early poems feature occasional outbursts of apparent ant-Semitism and misogyny. This may have resulted in part of Montgomery's urge to challenge the strict censorship of his era, with which he had an unusually personal relationship: his father was appointed the Free State's first film censor in 1923. Retaining certain offensive phrases 'for the sake of context', LaBine says: 'They should not be excused away but, in certain cases, are clearly the mistakes of a young poet.' Like a jazz lyricist of more recent vintage, the late Paul Durcan, Montgomery was an entertainingly eccentric reader of his own work. Luckily, we still have recordings. Among those speaking at the very belated launch of his debut collection, in the Irish Architectural Archive on Friday evening, will be the man himself.
