I’ve been housebound recently with ailments common in my age-group and yesterday
saw parts of two films which got me thinking.
Totally by accident I turned on the box to see Maureen O’Hara as Mary Kate Danaher
distracting Father Lonergan as he was about to land a salmon. It must be among the
greatest scenes in the history of cinema, and, incidentally, echoes an event described
by Padraic Colum in his biography of Arthur Griffith. When members of Dail Eireann,
(excluding those elected for constituencies in the “Six Counties”) met in Dublin masquerading as “Parliament of Southern Ireland” and on 14th January 1922 took
an oath dictated by Britain’s Lord Lieutenant established “The Provisional Government
of the Irish Free State” more Irish was spoken than at any meeting of the authentic
Dail Eireann. Mary Kate Danaher’s confession to Father Lonergan in the less widely
known Irish language arose from shame. Her bridegroom, Sean Thornton, was not getting his whole entitlement.
Neither was poor Ireland “Mala Codlata” might just as well be Saorstat Eireann.
The Quiet Man, is of course a translation of Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew
from Venice and its environs to Mayo and a really marvellous one. It is not an
documentary in social realism. It does though portray the Irish in the 1950s as
happy and tolerant people and is nearer to reality than the pictures painted by
Fintan O’Toole.
An interesting thing. Arthur Shields, who played the Protestant rector, was indeed
a Protestant. On Easter Monday, he took the rifle he secreted under the stage
of the Abbey Theatre to the GPO where he fought as an Insurgent. His brother,
William Joseph Shields, went by the stage name “Barry Fitzgerald.”
A few weeks ago, as I related here, I saw an equally good adaptation of the Taming
of the Shrew “Kiss Me Kate” on the stage at London’s Barbican, starring Adrian Dunbar,
a good republican.
On the Hill of Howth, on Balkill Rd, beside the house I was brought up in, Padraig Colum
lived in 1914. In that year he set out for New York and was unable to return when war
broke out. He took lodgings in New York, where his Russian landlady introduced him
to Lev Davidovich Bronstein, who engaged him in interesting conversation
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