Someone ought to fire off a pistol.

Someone ought to fire off a pistol.

   Seems to me all of you think I’m just going to accept my mud-pile under all those flowers and a work-a-day headstone, far off any trouble in the old family dump of remembrance looking out over the bay.  Well that isn’t to be.

   I demand a tomb all to myself.

   I won’t be hidden away someplace tranquil. I want to be right at the action, yes even after death.  I will take my rightful place inside the city limits. Bang at the centre. Claim me the best possible spot. Obstructing traffic, disturbing locals and interfering with the property market. A place everyone sees me daily. One safe from the drunks, the cats, the weather, tourism and new architecture.  Someplace Northside. Big ugly and gold and it needs to be an eyesore. I’ll have pillars in the Corinthian style, thank you kindly. Carvings of inconsolably bereaved angels, frantic in their grief, to attend the sacrilege of a world getting on without me. We’ll have a sculpture of me right at the top. Herculean, a cosmic beauty and wild with passion. I picture me glaring down in gold with fire and majesty at the people below buying their carrots and fish cakes. Yes, two three weeks the same people cried out dry at the wake will skip past the thing mindlessly on the way to Aldi. We know that. Worse if it grew into some God awful annual family ritual. Torturing generations on a wet Sunday.

   All my possessions you can wrap for the poor. That or burn them. Now I think about it a pyre sounds apt. Include all my clothes, my favourite music and unflattering photos. Put in my clarinet and my correspondence case and my recipes. Then throw in my paintings, cushions and any gifts anyone ever gave me. In go my love letters, given and received. Include the Jack B Yeats for it is a damned fake anyhow. Burn it all up on the front lawn some hour most poor folks are already at work and ensure the smoke blows toward wealthy districts. Leave it respectfully burn out long as it naturally takes. Days if need be. And if the thing rages out of control then guide it towards the homes of the neighbours I liked the least. Maybe that’s a little harsh. Just their flowerbeds.  

   The funeral isn’t going off in St. Patrick’s, but St. Michaels, central Dun Laoghaire. Set out from there on an extended procession, kilometres long. I will be brought to my final rest inDublin at hellish inconvenience to everyone. Procession to be numbingly slow and accompanied by one of those New Orleans brass bands I saw go off well once in a black and white movie. Sickly quantities of incense, clouds of the stuff, hanging thick everywhere and bewitching the sinuses. Forests of tropical flowers spewing pollen into the hot air. Long, indecipherable bursts of Latin right out of the book of Revelation, ferociously declaimed. Try and find some priest blessed with old world panache when it comes to labelling the wicked.

   At mass: The very best wine. No less than four eulogies but there is no upper limit. Cash is ready for hiring a young and beautiful whore to throw herself in hysterics onto the coffin right at the climax. You don’t have to go through with that one. Test how it feels on the day. I just liked the idea is all. Put pennies on my eyes just in case there happens to be something to that old ferryman story. No time to take chances. Go right ahead and laugh at this sentiment till it’s your own turn. Then after they sink me into the mud someone ought to fire off a pistol. At this sound everyone has to scatter. Fill in the earth double time and be done with the whole affair. Any lingerers: jail them for loitering. Keep one cop on hand for that.

   Distribute anything surviving the pyre in order of seniority based on who loved me the most. Measure this by whoever it is works hardest seeing out all of these last requests. It can’t cost too much to have someone keep score of that.

   On to the Obituary. Don’t imagine this is going on your regular style page along with all of the regular guys who couldn’t think of anything better than the regular. I demand a half a page minimum. One in each major broadsheet and two in any pair of tabloids you want. Make that full page in the tabloids and right at the front. Full colour photograph, doctored devilishly, of myself partying with Peter O’Toole, Behan, Francis Bacon, the Archbishop of Dublin, throw in a couple more like that, then maybe a group of exotic looking women and indistinct further characters on behind us. Alongside this in fat, Arial black, emboldened type:  NATION MOURNS HER FAVOURITE SON. Or maybe:  IRELAND LOSES A RARE GEM.

Then start out on the written part:

   Michael ‘Bolivar’ Coughlin. A simple man. A beautiful man, (this is to run verbatim, otherwise I will haunt the very last of you right into madness ) passed from this world still raging against the forces that conspire to suck us all down.  And he did it all with the grace and dignity fitting the more handsome examples of our wildlife, like the swan in low flight or wild hare on the bounce. His art, tragically burned by his grief torn family, is lost to us forever. All we do know was the sight of it caused Beckett to cease writing and Tarkovsky to begin making films. A known hellraiser in the capital’s bars, he loved nothing more than retiring to a distant spot on Inis Mór to contemplate the great matters among the buttercups.

   He spent his final days exiled to his garden flower-beds, something people seem to think the elderly ought to have foisted on them. Why people think nurturing delicate things to life is a task for those drawing to an end mystified the great man. Maybe there was a poetry to it but if so he was too exhausted digging to ponder it. The beauty of flowers never mattered a damn to him. Far as he could tell the same colours were now available on food-packaging and tracksuits. You never heard of plants or flowers in those same colours called garish.

   And here you have the front page article in the Times the following day. Somebody knows a copy editor in there who can swing it, I forget the name.

   “They finally dropped the rain-wet flag over the Dail on a drizzling Tuesday which turned out to be his last. Three bright green stripes over the silhouette of a dove. The flag Coughlin had designed himself after liberating the nation. It flapped with splendour and poetry above the vast cascading banners flanking the imposing yet simple hearted likeness of Michael ‘Bolivar’ Coughlin commemorated on the front of the building. So named because he had rid the island finally and completely of the hated oppressor: its own political class, using only charm, guile, art, rhetoric, romance  and bravado.

   Beneath the banners gathered many exotic looking women, visibly bereft. Behind them, fully military guard of honour flanking the President. Between these and the main gates; gardai, international dignitaries, the press, great thinkers, one or two foreign kings and a retinue of archbishops, prime ministers, artists and bards. Stood to attention with the rest of the country as the national anthem came through over the courtyard tannoy the same as the nation’s airwaves. Two city centre parades, book-ending a week of national mourning.

   How they contained a wild spirit like that to the garden is a wonder to itself. Some kind of family coup. Gentlest one you ever could think up. Small matters like the answering of his fan letters or when some visiting Nobel laureate arrived, from the few that still even remembered him, that he had to have someone there to help on his robes. The blood red Jaguar remained his, for a time. Then they let him know he was unroadworthy. Not even the car.  Nobody paid him any heed any longer. He went unrecognised out among people. He took a walk down a main street. Not even a hello. He could simply go to the town and visit shops. He went and bought the food it damn well pleased him to. Like maybe Swiss Roll instead of the carrots he set out for, or soap, or motor oil. Then he would place it on the kitchen table where everyone expected carrots and it wasn’t ever the case he just forgot the things he had been sent for.  They took away his whiskey. They replaced his cigarettes with medicines.

   Finally they holed him up. They jailed him, called it a hospice. He expected that. Claim was it would keep him comfortable. His jailers were gracious Asian women in white and blue. They kept him drugged and helped him into and out of the regulation clothing. He got shown a whole lot of television intended to keep him in a vegetative state. Quiz shows and the horses. But on he raged. He was wildfire. The nurses loved him. They fought to bring him is tea, serve him his pills. They snuck him toffees and cigarillos from the outside world. He came to miss those visiting Nobel laureates. The jaguar too. He even missed the gardens. Turned out flowers weren’t worse than garish clothes people had on.

   Leave it there. Pull any of that off and I'll try and get you those lottery numbers from the beyond. Don't bother checking any accounts, there isn't a cent. Just try and have history record me how I like. Only add that he is survived by his wife, Brida, whom he loved each day sweeter than any sensation he ever knew, his daughter Annette and his son Colm, who visited his bed each night until the end in the high dependency unit, St. Vincent’s hospital, and looked right into his father’s fading eyes though it agonised the both of them.

Alan Walsh

This piece was originally published in The Moth magazine in 2013

Glasnevin Cemetery image courtesy William Murphy

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Why Ireland's most famous female character is also a feminist icon.

That Deirdre of the Sorrows is still one of the most famous of the old stories in Irish folklore speaks volumes, I think, for how we see the downtrodden, the innocent and, in particular, women in Irish culture. That might come off a glib and sweeping statement but you have to wonder has all that much changed since the story was first told in Pre-Christian Ireland.

Setting the scene
The story goes that Deirdre was trouble before she was even born. The mystic druid, Cathbad, on hearing shrieking from within her mother's womb, advised the baby be killed, predicting it would be too beautiful and bring war and mayhem to the men of Ireland. Conchobar Mac Nessa, the king of Ulster, at this point steps in and takes the child as his own, as I guess  kings were able to do then, promising to keep her safe from causing any trouble.

The tables turn
Conchobar brings Deirdre up in seclusion, with only an old maid for company, with the intention of marrying her himself when she's old enough. Now, so far this is all tapping into some pretty on-the-nose themes of women as property, women as the downfall of men, women as helpless to decide their own destiny and also as a gateway to some kind of chaos if left unchecked, which rings true with a lot of older myth, only even going back to as far as apples in gardens. What's interesting next is the turn the story takes. The scene is set, Chekov's pistols are mounted securely on the mantelpiece, but now we start seeing things from Deirdre's perspective.

Deirdre takes control
She tells the old maid that she dreams of meeting a young man with hair as black as a raven, skin as white as snow and lips as red as blood. Fair enough, this could be seen as her only character motivation being defined by men, which doesn't help us as far as the Bechdel test goes, but I guess these were different times. The old maid, Leabharcham, says she might be able  to help out here and introduces Deirdre to a young warrior called Naoise, from the Uisneach family. Well, right off the bat, Naoise wants no part of this, knowing she's promised to the king, but it's not like he doesn't have eyes and can't see how outrageously beautiful the girl is. She finally convinces him to run away with her by jumping on his back and shaming him into doing it. What I find interesting about this is it shows her taking control. There are strong, powerful female characters in Irish mythology, Queen Medb being the foremost example, but here we see a young woman, controlled and dominated by men, breaking free of her own will and bending that of a young man to do what she wants. Sadly, this doesn't work out that well.

The action part
Conchobar learns of the escape and rallies troops to chase Naoise and Deirdre down. Meanwhile, Naoise has called in his brothers, some of the best warriors in the country, and the gang of them cavort from county to county trying to hide from Conchobor's soldiers, finally straying to as far as Scotland. Knowing this could go on forever, Conchobar offers a truce, saying Deirdre and Naoise and all his brothers can come back to Ireland and even back to his castle, without threat of retaliation, to work things out. Unfortunately,  when they arrive, Conchobar has his chief warrior, Fergus, kill Naoise and all his brothers and immediately marries Deirdre against her will. 

Things get worse. They won't get better. 
The story finishes up with Deirdre in a chariot, riding along between both King Conchobar and the warrior Fergus. She's defeated, she's broken, she's owned again. She took her shot and it couldn't have gone worse. The king turns to Deirdre and asks her, "Is there anyone in all of Ireland you could possibly hate more than me?"
"Yes." She replies, "Fergus, who killed Naoise and his brothers."
"Then," says Conchobar, "I will share you with him, as a punishment."  Here's where it ends. Deirdre, on hearing this, can't bear to be owned and shared and passed around. It's been said Deirdre represents a woman's need for independence, she expresses that here in the most powerful way imaginable. As the chariot is pulled along, it approaches a low hanging rock, just as it moves beneath, Deirdre raises her head, catches  the rock and is decapitated. The tale ends here.  Tragically, Deirdre has finally asserted her will in the ultimate way. She won't be owned. She won't be made queen against her will. Nor will she be shared. 

Women in Ireland.
Interestingly enough, at the time the story first emerged, women in Ireland enjoyed a position which would have been the envy of those in Greece or Rome or the East. They could own and breed livestock and, thus, make  a living for themselves. They weren't completely subjected to the man and his family on marriage either. Yet they were still unable, as were men, to own property, it being owned by the king, and were still trapped within the conventions of a society still totally governed and operated by men. Deirdre's attempt to break free of that and her final, devastating act, represent a struggle for independence still manifested today across the world and here at home in a multitude of  unresolved issues. 


If you're interested in Deirdre, maybe you'll like my novel, which retells her story as a modern murder story:



Image courtesy of Druid Synge

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Cuchulainn Reinvented: Guardians of the Galaxy, Manga and 5 more bizarre appearances.

Most people know Cuchulain as Ireland's most famous mythological hero, defender of Ulster, warrior against armies and international lover ( he had a thing going on the side with a Scottish girl - worth looking up) but what most people don't realise is how Cuchullain has been re-imagined in modern pop culture. I've just written a novel re-imagining the different 
cycles of Irish mythology into one small modern Irish town, so I thought I'd look this up and I wasn't disappointed.

1) Guardians of the Galaxy.
In the original comics on which the movie was based, Cuchulainn ( pictured above), The Irish Wolfhoud, is resurrected in the 31st century ( thanks to magic from the Book of Kells no less) to  fight alongside the Guardians and protect the earth into infinity. 

First appearing in Guardians of the Galaxy Annual #3, he's a "master of all forms of archaic combat" and on at least one occasion has to actually defeat the Guardians themselves in combat. His weapons appear to be what he calls his "throwing stick" ( the Gae Bolg ) and his ignorance of 31st century culture seems to be his only weakness.

Photo courtesy of Marvel Comics.




2) Slaine.

Photo Courtesy of 2000 AD

Slaine is an impossibly muscular and singularly brutal warrior from the pages of 2000 AD in Britain. In truth, Slaine is a mixture of both Conan the Barbarian and Cuchulainn, but the entire strip is set against a backdrop of Celtic mythology and in moments of particular trouble, Slaine descends into what he calls his 'warp spasm' which is unmistakably the ríastrad of Cúchulainn ( down to the one protruding eye ), as well as carring his barbed spear the Gae Bolg.

Slaine has been hand painted by a slew of impressive comic-book illustrators, none as famous as Simon Bisley, who imagined Cuchulainn as a monstrous landscape of blood flecked muscles and unkempt hair.


3) Final Fantasy.

Image Courtesy of  Square Enix

Cuchulainn makes a pretty bizarre appearance in Final Fantasy XII as a bloated green monster, though his profile does say he was once fair and beautiful. He's the first demon players have to defeat. Despite his nickname being 'the impure' he actually becomes an ally if you defeat him. 

You kinda get the impression the game developers randomly looked up International mythological hero names and went at re-purposing them without even a glance at who they actually were ( Shiva seems to have been done a particular injustice ). 



4) Gargoyles.

Image Courtesy of Disney

This is the Disney version of the Hound of Ulster. In the second season of the Disney cartoon, the characters encounter a young Irishman who turns out to be Cuchulainn reincarnated. There's a bit of weirdness then with a Banshee and a giant worm and defending something that seems to follow the kind of lines only children are sophisticated enough to grasp. 

Pretty dull rendition when compared to the previous though. 





5) Political Murals. 

Photo courtesy of Norman Craig ( Flickr) 

It's perhaps not surprising for a hero credited with defending Ulster against all the other armies of Ireland ( often single-handedly) that he'd eventually be claimed by the politics of his home province. Often used in some pretty spectacular looking loyalist murals, Cuchulainn takes on an almost martyr like appearance but one of pretty big, if divisive, cultural significance. 



6) Megami Tensei 

Photo Courtesy of Atlus, Cave 

Another pretty bizarre Japanese video game, Cuchulainn is a demon who can be summoned to defeat other enemies. He actually appears in many, many versions of this game ( even once as Setanta, his boyhood name ). You'd really have to wonder at the thinking behind leveraging the character for this kind of thing. 



7) Tir Na Nog

Photo courtesy of Gargoyle games. 

Yet another weird video game, this one for the Commodore 64 all the way back in 1985 ( before that for the Spectrum and Amstrad). Cuchulainn essentially has to wander Tir na Nog collecting items and solving puzzles. Dun Darach is another game released in 1985 for the Spectrum which was essentially a prequel to this. 



To be honest, I'd imagine there are even more out there. In my own novel, Cuchulainn is reinvented as a traveller, Cuckoo, living peaceably with his wife after a lifetime of incredible fighting feats, which I thought was odd enough before discovering Final Fantasy. This has all prompted me to check out how other Irish Mythological characters have fared across popular media. I'll be posting more soon hopefully. Has anyone else seen anything out there? 
  








If you're interested in this, maybe you'll like my own novel, Sour, which retells an old Irish myth as a modern murder mystery:

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How modern mythology connects people from different cultures

I was living in London when I started reading the old Irish stories again. I had gone there for work and had started missing home pretty hard. It’s a common thing for expats to try to reclaim a little of their identity by tuning into the radio for familiar accents, or listening to the bands making their name back in Whelan’s. I did both anyhow.

When I mentioned I was reading the old stories again, people would invariably ask me to tell one. This could be in a pub, in a friend’s flat late at night, on a park bench. I was working at a small design company at the edge of Soho. I was working mainly on code, which I hated, being a designer, and was finding myself a little out of place in the city.

The work was pretty intensive but the people were unusually friendly and at lunchtimes some of us might venture down to a pretty little park just off Tottenham Court Road and take our sandwich in the sunshine. They were from all over, South Africa, New Zealand, Pakistan, Slovenia, and they all took a particular interest in my book of stories. They all missed their homes the same way.

The story which came to me the easiest and I told the best each time was Deirdre of the Sorrows. Probably because it’s so evocative of so many other tales: Rapunzel, Sleeping Beauty, practically any story where there’s a damsel rescused by a young prince, only in the Irish version Deirdre is no mere damsel, she’s not rescued by any prince and it certainly doesn’t end happily.

Maybe it was the finale that made me enjoy the telling of it. How people would recoil, shocked. How they’d comment on the bleak Irish outlook.

There was that moment of silence after the end of it, in the sunshine, with the bees hovering by our half-eaten salad rolls. People were waiting to be told everything was going to work out. Perhaps it was this which inspired me to take the story and place it in today’s Ireland, which hasn’t seemed quite as bleak in quite a time.

I wanted to write a thriller, I wanted it to talk about the country today, the issues at hand, but I wanted it to remain faithful to the strangeness and shock of the original. For this reason I had the story told by a Puca, a supernatural creature from mythic tales, who speaks coarsely but objectively.

The story of Deirdre tells of a very young girl promised to the high king, Conchobor, who raises her from infancy to be his wife. Deirdre runs away from the king having met a young man and the king chases the couple, along with his brothers, as far as Scotland. He promises them safe passage home only to murder all the young men when they get there. The king then asks of Deirdre who it is she hates most in the world and she answers Fergus, the man who killed her beloved. He tells her that the punishment for her flight will be that he will share her with Fergus. Her reaction to this, and the end of the tale, comes when she’s riding in a chariot with both men and raises her head in sight of a low hanging rock , so that she’s decapitated.

The story deals with youth, in particular the mistreatment of the young, power, property and oppression. These are ordinary enough themes, but seem especially relevant in the Ireland of 2014. It’s relevant enough that another writer, Eamon Carr, was publishing another modern retelling of it, Deirdre Unforgiven, with the Doire Press at the same time I was with Creativia. His version is in verse and uses Deirdre to convey his outlook on the Troubles.

More interesting again is how these two reinventions are actually just the tip of the iceberg. People are retelling the old stories over and over in newer and more diverse ways. Last year Will Sliney wrote and illustrated Celtic Warrior: The Legend of Cú Chulainn, a graphic novel telling the story of the Táin Bó Cúailnge for a young generation. This followed on the heels of previous publications like Brian Boru: Ireland’s Warrior King by Damien Goodfellow and Tomm Moore’s Oscar-nominatedSecret of Kells, An Táin by Colmán Ó Raghallaigh and Róisín Dubh by Rob Curley and Maura McHugh.

There’s a sense that this isn’t simply a rehash of the leprechaun museum or twee Temple Bar bodhráns reeling in the tourist pennies, but that people are telling the stories as a part of who they are, the same way I was in the park, or when a few visiting friends from home in Greystones and I tried patching together the story of Oisin and Tir na nOg on the last Tube home to Bayswater to the bemusement of an otherwise sober carriage.

These stories were crafted over centuries by master storytellers. They come laden with historical and cultural significance and work as a touchstone for something real, a foundation speaking to us about ourselves whereas so much of modern storytelling, in whichever form, comes over as purely commercially driven or as a mere lightweight escape.

After I had finished in the park that day, Amir, who was from Pakistan, told a tale from his own culture. I don’t want to give the impression here that we habitually sat in circles on the grass, singing one another the songs of our people. These were guys who spent hours arguing over why Aaron Lennon wouldn’t ever make it into the Spurs first team or rating girls in the park out of 10 (I know).

We were by no means cultural attachés, but that particular lunchtime something struck which left us feeling a little closer to one another and nourished for the experience. Amir told the story of Heer and Ranjha. It’s a Punjabi tale, from his district, and is one of the world’s most famous and tragic love stories. Naturally I was too ignorant to ever have heard of it. In fact, none of us had. He told it fantastically. It’s about young lovers kept apart by a powerful, jealous rival, and it ends just as tragically as Deirdre. It’s well worth looking up online. Heer and Ranjha was remade as a film called Rockstar a couple of years ago in Bollywood.

Mythology and folklore are enjoying a resurgance internationally also. Guy Ritchie has just been taken on to direct a series of King Arthur movies. Television shows like Once Upon a Time and Grimm are reimagining the familiar fairytales of Europe in modern, urban settings. The latest series of Percy Jackson books from Rick Riordan tell tales from Greek mythology from the point of view of Percy. Zeus Grants Stupid Wishes by Cory O’Brien, which retells myths in casual online IM speak, became an Amazon bestseller (his website is well worth checking out incidentally: bettermyths.com – even though he doesn’t have any Irish ones on there). I watched an episode of Supernaturalrecently which featured changelings, a staple of old Irish fairy stories, as wicked mother-eating monsters. I won’t even talk about Thor and Loki.

There might be a strong smack of fan-fiction to all of this. Tapping a cultural heritage already very familiar feels quite like standing on the shoulders of giants. It certainly felt that way to me when I wrote It’s The Stars Will Be Our Lamps. At the same time I don’t happen to think it’s all that far from people sat around fires listening to the storyteller down the centuries. The good stories stick around and they always will in some or other form. It’s up to us to find new ways to tell them.

This article was originally published in The Irish Times website

If you're interested in Irish mythology, maybe you'll like my novel, Sour, which retells an old Irish myth as a modern murder story:

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