In memory of the children who lost their lives in Newtown at Sandy Hook Elementary

Even after all these years together the Dutch Nation still constantly amazes and surprises me.

We were watching the unbearably sad and senseless classroom slaughter on the TV news together the other evening, the unbearably horrific massacre of beautiful innocent babies and their teachers and, because I am still hobbling around on my afflicted ankle, she drove off to bring home the cottage Christmas tree.

Shannon town is only five minutes away, and you can buy neatly cut and trimmed trees there for about €15. She should have been back in about a half-hour, but she phoned to say she would be delayed.

It was more than an hour before she arrived home with the Christmas tree.  She had driven all the way to the special Seedsavers project in Scarriff to purchase a living Christmas tree growing out of its own pot! It  looked vital and young and bright as she brought it into Maisie's front room.

There is enough killing in the world these days, she said, without us adding to it. After Christmas, she said, we will plant it out in the garden in memory of those little lost ones in Newtown.

There were tears in my old eyes.  I was touched to the quick.

I'm looking at the little tree now as I write, and surely it is some kind of symbolic thing rather than a mere seasonal decoration. She has an angel atop with golden wings and a face exactly like any one of the lost little girleens of another world.  There’s some kind of consolation in that.

An hour ago my friend and neighbor Paddy and I shared a whiskey and a conversation in front of the little live tree. We were talking about the local news and your horrific news and the death the previous day of the fabled Clare balladeer Robbie McMahon from Spancilhill.

Robbie was an old friend of mine, a great talent in his field, the man who made the ballad about his home parish internationally famous. Robbie sang away to the end, often in his local pub Duggan’s, and, unlike the little innocents of Newtown, he made a good age.

Paddy told me he was 86 or 87 years old. He neither looked it or sang like it. The voice held up intact until the last ballad.

My Christmas peace song is played again on the national airwaves, and that cheers me up after Paddy leaves. It is a song about the miraculous soldiers' truce on the front line in the first World War when the troops fraternized in No Man's Land on Christmas Eve after a German tenor sang "Silent Night" in his own tongue and all  joined in:

"O Silent Night, no cannons roar,
A king is born of peace for evermore,
All is calm, all is bright, all brothers hand in hand,
Midst gas and rusty wire in No Man’s Land..."

It gets played a lot over here during the Christmas season and, frankly, I'm very proud of it, especially the original golden-voiced version by Jerry Lynch from Kilfenora.

I join in the chorus in front of the little live tree whose transplant site has already been selected close to the apple tree in the front garden.

"In the morning all the guns boomed in the rain
And they killed us and we killed them again,
With bayonet, bomb, bullet, gas and flame,
And neither we nor they at all to blame,
There was cruel fighting right throughout that day,
For one night's peace we bloodily did pay,
At night they charged, we fought them hand to hand,
And I killed the boy that sang in No Man’s Land...”

Enough of that. I'm invited out to The Honk for a few libations tonight, and the lovely Dutch Nation has promised to drop me down there and bring me home too when the night is over.

When we get back home the only lights in the front room will come from the flaring black stove and the wee live Christmas tree in the corner with the golden angel on top. A small symbolic thing.

A peaceful Christmas wish to all of you. And a better New Year than the one ye have just survived. God bless.

How an illegitimate child was shunned during Christmas in rural Ireland

Everybody could see, even before she was 10 years old, that Sheila was far and away the most beautiful girl child in the parish, maybe even in the whole county. Strangers seeing her for the first time often smiled and stopped in their tracks.

Everybody could admire the blue-black sheen of her lustrous black curls, the amazing green eyes, the quick, shy smile, the cheek dimples, the enchanting way in which her shapely head was set atop her lissom body. Angelic is what they often said.

Everybody in the parish also knew  that Sheila would never be cast as the Virgin Mother in her primary school's annual Nativity play.
That is the school's big day of the year. The kids would be in final rehearsals for the event from the beginning of December.

It is the day the priest and the parents come to the classrooms for the celebration. It is still a major social occasion. Back when Sheila was 10 years old it was infinitely more major still.

The prettiest girl in the class always  plays the role of the Blessed Virgin, and the biggest boy is Saint Joseph.
There are others cast as shepherds and the Magi and the rest  of the pupils, except the low infants, form the Christmas choir around the crib.

Everybody knew, even when Sheila  was 10 or 11, that she had a silver bell of a singing voice.
Everybody also knew she would never play the role of the Virgin Mary. 
This is a small two-teacher school in a remote, rural area. It is a Catholic school.
Almost all of the parents  are  farmers or farm laborers. There are just five or six tradesmen such as carpenters, plumbers  and electricians.

This is a traditional western community, closely knit and bonded back then in Sheila's childhood and today. These are God-fearing, good  people, mutually warm and compassionate and supportive. Their mores would  have changed very little over the past century and longer.

One could scarcely meet a kinder lot
than those who always knew that Sheila would never play the role of the  Virgin Mother. 
The community has always heavily supported their school.  It is the way it has always been.

The farmers take it in turns to supply timber and turf, free of charge, for the two black stoves that warm the building. The tradesmen equally, free of charge, carry out any necessary  repairs or renovations.

There is a parish bazaar every winter to raise funds directly for the school. It is always magnificently supported by those who always knew that Sheila would never play the role of the Blessed Mother in the annual Nativity  play. 
Of all the supportive farmers in the parish, the Kinahans own the biggest farm. They have 18 milk cows always  and close to 80 acres of good land for tillage. Decent, hardworking people.

The men and boys of the clan are big and awkward and rawboned. The girls are the female equivalent and, frankly, wear homely faces.

The Kinahans have always had big Catholic families for the desks in the classrooms. In Sheila's primary school years there were two Kinahan girls and several low infants. 
All of them were quietly well-behaved. Not one of them, in singing terms, had a note in their head.

Kinahans work hard and don't sing. And the men don't drink. They are all Pioneers.

The solid backbone of the parish. The salt of the earth. 
Sheila was born out of wedlock at a time when illegitimacy in Ireland was heavily stigmatized and scandalous. Her birth was the talk of the parish for at least six months.

Her mother was the quiet daughter of a farm laborer. Nobody but her knows who the father was. One story is that he worked in a circus that passed through the parish that summer.

It was amazing that Sheila's mother kept her daughter at the time. That took great courage. It took family courage and support as well.
Back then pregnant girls usually fled to England and never came home again.  Or else they went quietly "into service" to remote convents and gave over their newborns for adoption.

Many pregnant girls of the time were driven out of their homes by their own scandalized families.  Everybody knew that was the way it was. 
Everybody knew before they went to the school for the Nativity play the Christmas that Sheila was 10 years old that one of the Kinahan daughters would play the coveted role of the Blessed Mother.

The principal teacher, Miss Nugent, selected Mary Kinahan, the eldest of them.  Mary was never going to be beautiful or even pretty. She was so shy she kept her head lowered over  the doll she held as the Child for the entire show.

Noel Keane played St. Joseph because he was the tallest of the boys and had a good, strong singing voice. Mary seemed to move her lips to the words of the carols but  made no sound.

Farmers' sons played the parts of the
 shepherds and the kings. They sang lustily and well, and one silvery voice embellished the entire singing during the evening. 
If you looked very carefully and closely you could see that it came from one of the children playing the parts of the villagers that came to the Crib. They were clustered around the back, wearing sacks as cloaks. Their faces  were browned with make up and their heads were veiled.

It was very difficult to spot Sheila on the very edge of the crowd at the very back. The clue was the soaring silvery, angelic voice.
 Everybody there knew who owned that voice.


Will 2012 roar or whimper?

I hope ye are all having a serene season to date as we venture into that surreal limboland between the dying of an old year and the incoming of its  successor.

These are indeed  strange and surreal days, hours, minutes and seconds. Some of them seem to last for a month, others are quicksilver.

Living in the countryside as I do, and have almost always done, I tend to visualize the New Year as akin to a newborn calf, still slick from the birthing, standing shakily on spindle legs in the tracks of the first steps yet to be taken.

The eyes are huge and innocent and very vulnerable. From where they are set the wide world must look so very big and frightening, especially if the mother is not in actual physical contact.

In even a week it will be different, and there will be the sprightly beginnings of independence, but the first hour and hours are different altogether. If you were born on a farm or ever saw a newborn calf you will know what I mean.

I've always been hugely impressed at the acuity of the farmers who bred the calves to observe them in those very first moments after birth and accurately foretell their later quality.

The gender is important, of course, because the dairy farmers always love to welcome new heifers as potential replacements for their cows. The bullocks will certainly be sold on.

But above and beyond that, the wise farmers can look at the newborn and somehow know if they will be healthy and thriving animals, potentially great milkers in the future, a real gift to the flock.
Breeding, they often say, is what counts.

On that basis, extending the focus further, I'm very much afraid that our incoming heifer will be much more of a burden than a gift.

I'm afraid that she will not thrive quickly, as good calves do, and it will cost a small fortune in veterinary fees just to keep her alive.

I fear for her long-term future, and accordingly for all our futures here in the Emerald Isle, once the home of a healthy Tiger cub, now beset by doom and gloom on all sides.

To go back to the farmers' views on the importance of good breeding, this animal is afflicted by bad breeding through the last three or four generations of her ancestors.

Both her mother and grandmother have been difficult bitches in the extreme, moving us further and further away from the land of milk and honey.

We have no control over these things, but if we had they  should all have been dispatched to the knacker's yard at birth. Any replacement stock would have served us better. And that's the truth.

It is ironic that one of our most worthwhile voluntary organizations serving the Third World is called
Bothar. It is strongly supported by the farming organizations and has a lovely and novel approach to giving aid to those nations that are still worse off than we are.

Bothar sends hundreds of calves and goats and beehives and other animals directly to the Third World.

They are donated to families for whom a heifer is worth a fortune, both for milk and for the calves which are donated to other village families. 

Likewise with the young goats. Bothar does great work and has been doing so for years now.

Bothar's program is assisted by veterinary experts who assess the donated animals here at home to ensure they are of sufficiently high quality for export to the Third World.

I have a feeling that these experts would reject out of hand   the real-life equivalent of the spindly poor calf of a thing I visualize the incoming New Year to be.

Nevertheless, being forewarned is being forearmed. I could be totally wrong as I've been so often before.

Maybe we'll get a lusty bull calf of a New Year that will energize the whole economy and do a Pamplona job on the Brits before these surreal days come again.

We'll just have to wait and see.

In the meantime, peace to you all.

Gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh - Jesus was a wealthy child at Christmas

Image by Caty Bartholomew 

These are beautifully gentle days and nights. This is the season, whatever the weather, which brings out the best of us, which gentles us, which writes smiles on our faces far more often than normal, which warms our handshakes and greetings.

I love these days leading into Christmas even more than I savor Christmas itself.  Are you like that?

But there is always a fly in the ointment, is there not?

And even as I wish one and all of you the merriest of Christmas seasons, peace and goodwill, that fly is buzzing around my head again. It happens every Christmas, and though I've asked the question many times I've never yet been given an answer that satisfies me.

It's about the gold and the frankincense and myrrh. Those are the gifts we are told were brought to the stable in Bethlehem by the Three Wise Kings from the east only a few hours after the Child was born and placed in the manger.

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In Irish terms that was a cattle shed occupied only by a bullock and an ass. There was poverty and hardship and deprivation for you in spades. Things could hardly be worse.

And there was no welfare back then of any kind. We know that.

So the next morning the kings arrive with their camels and tents and retinues of servants. They had followed the star.

And there were shepherds there, the angels had largely departed by then I suppose. 

And by that evening, when the kings made their encampments in Bethlehem and settled down for the night, I assume they had already given their gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. They would have been presented to Joseph.

Now there is no mention in the literature of the precise amounts of gold, frankincense and myrrh which composed the gift but these were extremely wealthy kings, so it is reasonable to assume that they did not stint the measure. They would have been very generous given the circumstances for sure.

Some of the illustrations from early artists, for example, depict the gifts being handed over in wooden chests of considerable size.

And that's where my zany head gets all confused every Christmas.  Because the result of those three gifts meant that St. Joseph was a very wealthy man indeed when heading back home to Nazareth a couple of days after the birth and the completion of the census which brought him to Bethlehem in the first place.

By my reckoning he could have easily bought the inn which had refused the family B&B earlier in the week, for example, and the inn next door as well! And the rest of the village if he so wished. 

We can assume that, as a solid tradesman, he would have been a good provider at all times for his family, but he would never have been a wealthy man until he was presented with the gold, frankincense and myrrh.

I've done a little research on the subject down the years of my interest in this matter and the findings are quite amazing.  Gold is gold, of course, and always precious.

Look at the market price of it nowadays.  But back then in Joseph's time gold was only trotting after the spices in real value. A gram of myrrh would cost you an ingot, an arm and a leg.

That is if you get it at all. Frankincense was only a small fraction less expensive. The gold was the least of the three gifts in real terms at the time!

At the time of Christ's birth, for whatever reason, myrrh was scarce and hugely expensive. It is obtained from small shrubs and, apparently, has a wide range of uses, including medicinal purposes especially in Chinese medicine to this day.

The astronomical price for the spice in that era made it equivalent to the price spike for Black Tulips on the Dutch bulb markets many centuries later. A carpenter in Nazareth with gold frankincense and myrrh had to have been a wealthy man indeed.

Given such a difficult start to his mortal existence, and such a cruel ending, is it not pleasant to reflect that the childhood years of the Babe born in Bethlehem in a stable are quite likely to have been extremely comfortable and pleasant indeed.

They call those the Hidden Years and we know nothing about them, but Joseph was a tradesman and tradesmen internationally are canny folk.

That gold frankincense and myrrh was not wasted. You can be sure and certain of that.

Happy Christmas all.

Silent Night (Christmas 1915) - my song is a gift from above - VIDEO

Image by Caty Bartholomew

It is a fact, however, that in a Christmas season about 20 years ago I got a rush of creative blood to the head above in Connemara and wrote one of the most popular Irish Christmas songs in less than an hour.

It came to me, air and all, after I'd watched a poignant TV documentary about the spontaneous soldiers' truce in the trenches during World War I. Deeply moved and somehow inspired, I was walking through the living room singing it, tears streaming down into my beard, before that strange hour was over.

I first sang it in public in Griffin's pub in Ennistymon that Christmas and was amazed to see tears in many of the listeners' eyes too. So I knew I had a song to sing.

If you are at all a creative person you know the limits inside which you normally operate. I have always been aware that I am a good competent hack with a relatively low ceiling of achievement and no ambition at all.

But this song, which is entitled "Silent Night -- Christmas in the Trenches 1915" came from a place away above my creative ceiling. It was some kind of gift from Above.
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I've tried to get there again many times since that evening but have never come anywhere close. I've written other songs, some of them mediocre, but most are maudlin yokes of which I'm not proud.

It was years later before the song was recorded by the great Kilfenora tenor Gerry Lynch, with an arrangement by his talented uncle PJ Curtis, and it has been increasingly popular every Christmas since.

Many other artists have now recorded it, including Celtic Thunder and even Daniel O'Donnell but, to
my mind, Lynch's version is the classic.

The real joy for me comes at this time of year when men and women in pub sessions, most not knowing I'm the writer of the thing, deliver their versions from stools and corners. That's very special when you are sitting there quietly listening in the shadows.

I now know exactly how my brother Mickey feels when he hears somebody delivering "Only Our Rivers Run Free.”

There was one Christmas when Lynch's version of "Trenches" got into the Irish Top 20, and I occasionally rib my younger brother that this was higher than "Rivers" ever climbed, even with the assistance of Christy Moore. A bit of sibling rivalry is a healthy thing!

Last weekend there was a big concert in the arrivals hall of Shannon Airport. My former colleagues in Clare FM, who were recording the event, prevailed upon me to come up and sing my Christmas song on the night. I did so with the greatest of pleasure and no pressure at all, aided by a splendid Shannon folk choir singing "Stille Nacht" and a mighty warpiper from Tulla skirling away at the end. My head was quite large leaving the stage!

Not large enough, however, to stop me telling ye that the Tulla Pipe Band and the Tulla Ceili Band are still as thrillingly good as ever they were. They pumped more life into the threatened airport than it has experienced in a long time.

And would you all please remember that I was the first to tell ye about a Shannon teenager called Aoife Casey? Aoife, who is about 16, and who has a voice to die for, a soaringly beautiful voice on either Irish or English songs, was beyond doubt the star of the show, and I predict she will be internationally known and famed before she reaches 20. Remember that.

And when she is at the height of her fame maybe she will sing my song some Christmas. And I will sit in the shadows listening with a smile on my face as wide as the Atlantic Ocean.

And even Mickey will be a small bit jealous!

Here, listen to 'A Silent Night [Christmas 1915]'

Santa Claus’ double is still raring to go this Christmas

Illustration by Cathy Bartholomew 

It was cold last weekend in rural Holland. I was visiting the warm-hearted family of the Dutch Nation in the eastern Gelderland region up against the German border.

There are dozens of picturesque little villages here. They are all crowned by a windmill which does not work any more but hallmarks the geography.

To combat the cold I wore an extra vest and donned a thick red hoodie when I wandered abroad through the streets. And it happened again and again.

Santa Claus or St. Nicholas comes to Holland long before he comes to Ireland.  He was arriving with his ebony troop of elves in one of the villages which we visited to meet the Dutch Nation's godmother.

I'm a little bit confused exactly how it works, but this Claus comes from Spain with his elves, is warmly welcomed by all the villagers and their brass bands, and it is a major occasion.

It is also true that he does not distribute his gifts to the small citizens until the fifth of December and that December 25 is a relatively low key day in Holland. But that is by the way.
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The important thing is that it happened again and again during my stay that the small ones looked at me with rounded eyes on the village streets and palpably  wondered if I was connected to Santa Claus.

Especially when clad in a red hoodie, there is today more than a passing resemblance. It is a pleasant and heartwarming experience.

I've told ye about this before. It has happened with increasing frequency over the past decade of my silvering and aging.

In Ireland, where there is no language barrier, I normally inform the children that no, I'm not Santa, but rather his younger brother, and I will pass on to him any messages they have.

I used to hunker down and take some of them on my knee as they whispered their wishes but, sadly, you cannot put even the tip of a little finger on the head of a strange small child in Ireland any more because of the bitter legacy of the pedophiliacs, so I now keep a safe distance away from the small trusting hands. Is that not so sad?

In Holland I simply put my fingers to my lips in a plea for secrecy and that did the trick well enough.

It is no problem to be mistaken for a member of the Claus family. I can recall a tailor called Gilleece at home in my forties childhood.

He was a neat, small, quick man, a very decent fellow, but I never knew his proper Christian name because he had a black pencil moustache and he was always called Hitler because he was the living image of Adolf!  I don't know if they said that to his face but certainly it was the only name I knew him by as a boy.

Santa is much easier to carry for the few weeks between the beginning of November and Christmas. I will not suffer at all.

Back home on the Tuesday evening after the long Dutch weekend, it was slightly depressing to have to pick up the car from the long term at Cork Airport for the two hour drive home to the cottage.

That's because we only live eight minutes away from Shannon Airport, but there is no service between Shannon and Amsterdam any more, even though the Aer Lingus flights from Cork were packed in both directions. And so were the planes we used be able to catch from Shannon to Dusseldorf.

There is some sort of bureaucratic dark hand hanging over Shannon for sure. It goes downhill every year.

There's a lot of supportive talk but no real action so far.  So now you close your mouth and drive to either  Cork or Kerry for the flight.

I was barely back home before it was time to head for Listowel where brother Mickey the songwriter was launching his latest CD in the hallowed surrounds of John B. Keane's pub.

The former great footballer Jimmy Deenihan, now the arts minister, was present and vocal, but the launch  was conducted by Mary Keane, widow of the playwright, a mighty woman and a great friend of my brother.

The entire clan assembled for the occasion, and there was no recession at all in sight for the next 48 hours. In eras like this you need lively nights and days like that. It was great craic.

Brother Sean was there and in good voice. He told us  that he is retiring from The Irish Times before the end of the year, and that is forewarning of another good weekend before the year is over!

When I eventually got back home to Maisie's Cottage  I got a call from a colleague to invite me to a retirement lunch, again before the end of the month, for the great RTE western correspondent Jim Fahy of Galway who is also closing down his mike before the New Year.  Jim, an old friend, has consistently emphasized the special qualities of the west of Ireland on the national airwaves for decades as well as covering all the hard news stories.

I reflected ruefully before beginning this piece that I'm older than both of the retirees by several years, and is the writing finally on the wall?

No, I decided, neither of them have the pleasure  of being mistaken for Santa Claus, and there's too much craic writing about things like that, and life generally, to stop for a while yet.